Adapt or Get Left Behind: The New Rules of AI & Business

If you really want to become a leader in the space, you have to know the tools and you need to understand, you know, where we're at today, where they're going, and how do you realize them? Right now, the biggest thing that everyone's talking about is AI and where it's going. It's the best tool that's ever existed. There's so much that's coming from it, from building agentic environment, that's a whole new world of its own, and mind of its own. If you're not going to be a builder in AI and be a problem-solver in AI, then AI will disintermediate you. This new iteration of language models is, if we go from sub-average to better than humans, add a lot of things, or capable of being better than humans, if you know how to work with it. It's not just a big shift in the way in which we do business, but it's also a speed of change. Even the PC took about 20 years to reach mass adoption. When you combine the two of them, it just makes it compelling for everybody to get on the bandwagon as possible. People think too much about AI being only an automation tool, and I think it's so much more. Maybe we'll tap that. We do as well, but we see, even though we say AI coaching, it's so much more than just coaching. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet, with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to right about now. We're always talking about how you need to stay ahead of business, tech, AI. Anything and everything that is happening in the business and marketing world, we're here to tell you thank you for making us number one. I am Ryan Alford your host. I have friends that in high places, sometimes that introduce me to friends in higher places and cooler places and all those things. This is one of those instances where it's both a pleasure and insightful for you because we've got Thorin. He is the CEO and founder of Brain One. Talk to me, Thorin. Why Brain? What got you into this longevity space and the brain space? What kind of was the fundamental thing that started you down this path? I've always been very fascinated by just the idea of biological optimization. I began doing triathlons in my 20s and that went all the way to full Iron Man's. And what I saw is that when I was wearing a wearable and so in that sense we had the big chunky garments back then. But through the use of data, I could ultimately optimize my biology period. And then the devices have only gotten better and right now I'm wearing three, I'm wearing a wolf, I'm wearing an aura, I have a garment. But that concept of again using data to optimize your biology. And so as I was going down that road, what I saw relative to my training and my racing is that I could attenuate my lack of threshold by doing X or Y and ultimately to get faster and stronger in all of these things. And that was through the use of a structured framework or a protocol. And so I think it's important to kind of start there. What is a protocol? A protocol is just your daily routine at the end of the day. When you get up in the morning, what are the things that you do on a regular basis period? And if you take a quick step back and you look at all of the protocols that are out there around things like longevity, it kind of comes back to really key areas. It's nutrition, it's exercise, it's stress, and it's sleep, fundamentally. And at Brain 1, we've fed every protocol from cuberman to peterotia, to Brian Johnson, to Kayla Barnes, you know, into our AI. And ultimately it's kind of in those four major categories. And then the protocols are comprised of microhabit. What's a microhabit? A microhabit is a small incremental change that ultimately you can measure, theoretically, ideally. So it's an example, cold plunging. Again, being a triathlete, we've been doing red light, cold plunging, I mean, for like decades. And it's cool. Now, like these are all the rage, it's a great mechanism to help, you know, manage your autonomic nervous system. So cold plunging, though, you look at that as a microhabit as part of a protocol, you're looking at temperature of the water, you're looking at duration in the water, you're looking at frequency per week, when so forth. And so those are all essentially the variables within that microhabit as part of the protocol that you're optimizing. And so what I saw on the triathlon side is that following the structure framework, you can really optimize your biology. And about two years ago, I was doing some work with a group out of Columbia University focused in the protection of neurological data. And that's actually a very important area for me personally. We were the generation that gave away all of our behavioral data, especially you talk about marketing. And I remember back in the day when the Facebook API, you could download every thing, same with Twitter. You could literally fire hose around the data. Now it's a wild garden, of course, all the stuff quite well. But, you know, that said, that concept, we gave away all of our behavioral data under the guys that were connecting with our friends from junior high in high school. But really, what we were doing, we're training models for these large technology companies. And so we're also on the cusp for neurological data. And so I was doing some work with this group called the NeuroRide Foundation and focusing on the protection of neurological data. And what does that mean on a state, federal, international level? And what I saw was that there was just such a lack of resources around brain, a lack of resources for education and ultimately lack resources for, you know, for protocols. And so that was kind of the initial impetus. And so we went down the road of focusing on unbrained and building essentially the NUM for neuroscience is how we would frame it. What does that mean? If you're familiar with NUM, so this is a behavioral weight loss essentially platform using CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapies. And they've been incredibly successful because what they do is they focus, again, on that concept of Q rewards and micro habits optimizing your behaviors as opposed to just calorie counting. And it's interesting because NUM is now valued at $4 billion, whereas like two weeks ago, Weight Watchers just filed for bankruptcy. Why? Well, Weight Watchers is falling, you know, these older methodologies, your calorie counting, you got the colors. And honestly, it's just obviously mismanaged as well. But it's just an outdated mechanism and something like NUM for neuroscience, that's really where we have been focused. And so the idea of, again, these small incremental changes that ultimately impact the whole human. And with ultimately essentially habits that they can learn and integrate and it's not like a fad, so that's really what we've been focused on in a relative to that kind of approach, ultimately to brain, which has never been done before. We have the lovely Veronica Shelton. She is the co-founder of Oak theory. What's up Veronica? What's up Ryan? Hi, are you? I imagine you're on the forefront of seeing different technologies, platform, software. Is there anything you're seeing that you're excited about that is going to make the things you do better for accessibility and diversity and things like that? Are you seeing stuff that would blow people's minds or is it more practical than you think? Right now, the biggest thing that everyone's talking about is AI and where it's going. It's the best tool that's ever existed. There's so much that's coming from it from building agentic environments. That's a whole new world of its own and mind of its own. My excitement honestly goes into something that we're not going to get to for a while, but it's AR. It's quiet right now on purpose, but AR is probably where I'm definitely focusing a lot of attention to know about because that's going to be the future. We're going through this evolution and that's probably going to be the big one that's going to be the cell phone of just having augmented elements and reality in our rural world. That's probably what's making me excited. We can go down the deepest tunnel with accessibility features and why that's great. It gets going to change the game for a lot of people whose brains and skill sets we haven't been able to experience. AI in general is doing that. I have an amazing team. I have a team of brilliant people. We started Oak theory five years ago. We had designated spaces for them. Designers were designers, engineers or engineers, developers or developers, sales or sales. Now that we're in this new place for the past year, this is where we're seeing this huge shift in Dops and what people are capable of. Designers are now able to develop a lot easier. We've got a lot of tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools and tools to say I have a team that does a lot because it doesn't feel like they're carrying as much anymore. In fact, they're like learning and having fun with it. That is a place where I think is really fun. And having them work with agents is really interesting. Watching them work with the agents that were built, hybrid environment is stoping as hell. That's the right word on that. It's wild. I own multiple companies. I worked in New York and I had a team of a hundred people work to the add agency world. This is way before AI. And it will build exactly the thing you're talking about. I was always sort of a jack of all trades in the add agency world. And it was not the most popular thing. Because the add agency world especially likes putting people in boxes. You're the creative person, you're the writer, you're the account person, you're the strategy person, the media person. And how there are the account person ever be creative process over. I was the strategic creative account guy that made the agency a lot of money but wasn't always the most popular. And I started my agency radical with the intent to create sort of a flat environment way before AI and agents. Because I knew you're not extracting the best out of people. Yes, you need specialization and you need to know what your job is and what your functions are. But I always believed you weren't always extracting the best out of your team when you limited them to only one function. Yes, just very. No one's the whole that proved to be successful. And then a eyes come around and I had the exact discussion with my team. I had close to 20 employees four years ago. We have less than a quarter of that now. I'm only fired one person. It's just been natural evolution of leaving and going other places and me not replacing as some of these technologies have come along. And now we're as lean as ever. But I had that exact discussion that you did and I think a lot of business owners are having to have this discussion with their teams to go. This can do a lot of what your job was. I believe in you and you are talented. And I need you to embrace this. And I'm not going to fire you. But yes, you need to understand that you need to be doing not just more. We just got to work more. No, you don't have to work more work the same hours. But the output should be 10x. But because of what these agents are doing and you're no longer just this, you can be the writer and the designer and the developer and your agent can help you do these things with product task management and a litany of other things. If people aren't embracing that, they will be jobless. But if you embrace it, it will be just fine. We've got Matt Britain. He is the author of generation AI. There's nothing more right now than AI. The trade skill get more valuable. If you're not wanting to be a white collar guy that's tech forward, used in these things, they're really just a boardroom executive, whatever that is, but at a high level, then get really good at a skills trade, become the best builder, plumber, whatever it might be. We've had this knowledge economy for so long where people were compensated for possessing knowledge. And that could be knowledge in knowing how to code, knowing how to write a contract, knowing how to read next right, knowing how to do someone's taxes. But those are all things that AI is going to take the place of workers. AI arguably can already do your taxes better, write a contract better. In most use cases, then the professional services world can't. If you're not going to be a builder in AI and be a problem solver in AI, then AI will disintermediate you. At the same time, what you've aptly point out is if you're a problem solver in the physical world, then that becomes a skill set that becomes even more in demand. Yes, the trade skills, like we're going to have a boom and they already are. The issue is that many parents aspire to send their kids to these higher education institutions that are predicated on facilitating the knowledge economy. And they're teaching kids skills that I would argue are going to be no longer relevant once they get out. I spoke at the end of last year and from 700 college professors who kind of know this and are just mind boggled about what it means to be an educator in this world when they're using textbooks that were written long before chat GBT ever even came out. You just gave me either the greatest or worst analogy I've ever had. I'm going to go down this road, Matt. You could be pretty cool as you need or if it works, you can tell me it works. If you're like, I put this in the bag. We used to cook by rubbing flip together to get a fire. Yeah, the skill of starting that. And then in today's world, we have micro wave. The equivalent that I'm thinking, oh, I still know how to start this with flint. That's great. I'm using this marketplace for other things while it's going on. Is that a good analogy? That's a good analogy. The best analogy I use is photography. You used to need to know how to develop the film to be a photographer. You used to need to know how to operate these technical DSLR cameras and knowing stuff like ISO and F stop. And now 99.9% of all pictures are taken on the iPhone. And you just need to know where the point the thing to and pick a filter and how it looks. Are there still use cases, professional photographers for weddings for special events? Sure. Are they dwindling? Yes. What makes a great photographer right now is not known to technical skills. I've had a turn to knobs and bells. I had a develop film. It's actually having an eye on where to point the camera to. And AI is the ultimate analogy for that is where do you point AI? How do you unleash its power? You no longer need to know how to do the knob and bells because that's all beneath the surface. I think I took it one step. You could be nine more. Let's talk about agents. Agent to AI. You've got prompts and asking to do things now. They get to AI. We've got them actually. I would almost call it the implementation. The acting upon what it is doing. There's really three levels of AI that most people need to understand. The first the 101, if you will, is the call and response, which is you put in a prompt, you get the answer. And that's just like a better version of Google in a lot of ways. And it's obviously it's conversational and does a lot. But anything you need to know in any format, you could ask chat GPT or GROC or or Google's Gemini and you're going to get the answer back. So that's kind of the 101. 201 is automation where you can use a tool zappier for make.com or NAN. Where basically you can say, I want you to take this Google Sheet, extract these three lines from the Google Sheet, write a blog post about that and post it. And that's kind of an automation where basically you build the steps where AI is the blood, if you will, in between the organs of the individual applications that you're using. And I'm talking about any application, be Google Drive, Google Sheets, Instagram, it could even create content for you. And I've done a ton and built a ton of automations for my company using tools like that. Agents are the next level because of automations are deterministic. You're basically setting out what it should do. This is what you do step one, two, three, and four. Agents, you're giving AI autonomy where based upon the inputs, you're letting it decide what tools to use and how to accomplish things for you. That's one and the other things agents do is they actually can interact with the outside world. I want you to plan a trip with my four kids somewhere where it's at least 80 degrees and there's a 10% chance or less of rain. And here's my budget and here's a part of the world. And I want you to book the entire trip for me. And it will then take agency, if you will, based upon everything it knows about you to not only do the research for you, but actually book the entire trip for you. And if that actually involves it making a phone call and using an AI agent to speak to somebody at the Ritz Carlton, it's going to do that for you as well. And when you start to think about the implications of that and AI agent, you could also take over your computer for you. And it could start actually doing things under your computer. And it starts to really replicate a lot of what you and I do all day. It's both scary but incredibly fascinating. And if you used the right way, it could make us way more productive. We're about to talk about all breaking it down with our good guest Rob Lenin. The AI whisper startup guy will find out in a minute Rob get a heavy on the show, brother. Hey, thanks for having me. I get all your posts and everyone else's AI posts. I'm in the AI vortex now clearly. Let's just go right at it. Number one, you were using it early. You've been an early tester user of the technology. You've seen the evolutions that are happening. What do you see the average person should think and know and feel about where we're at right now? In terms of what was available to the general public, everything changed. We went from having useful tool in some places to do certain things that didn't always do a great job. A lot of below average results to a phenomenally capable tool. This new iteration of language models is if we go from sub-average to better than humans, add a lot of things or capable of being better than humans if you know how to work with it. And so I think we've crossed over this impossible barrier and it's impossible to turn back now. And it's actually been accelerating everything. It sounds like science fiction. It sounds like no, this can't possibly be true. All these things that they say that are going to happen. But these models, they have reasoning. They have memory. They can think through processes. It doesn't have a soul and it doesn't think in the same way that the human brain thinks exactly. But the technology has arrived basically. And even if it never progressed any further than we have today, that what we have even right now is enough to completely transform almost every sector of society. And really like some seismic changes are coming in terms of what can happen. Either you're going to be an early adopter and you're going to benefit from those or you're going to wait and see and you're going to ride the wave or you're going to get destroyed because you weren't paying enough attention and somebody else moved faster than you. We're going to see some really big companies fall in the next few years as a result of not being able to act quickly or act in the right way within the context of what AI could have done for them. One of the things that I teach is thinking through prompting in a progressive way. Let's say that was the end result that you wanted. You might first ask describe the Instagram algorithm and then you might follow up with breakdown each component of the Instagram algorithm and based on the impact to the overall visibility of a post. And then you might ask what search terms are related to all of the concepts that we've discussed so far. If you progressively build towards this end result and then eventually you ask the AI synthesize everything that we've talked about into an article. Even if it's the same exact sentence that other person typed in first by building up toward this sort of unique set of information in a specific way, you've now tuned it to talk differently to no specific concepts to have different details and the output is going to be completely transformed. So just by taking those few extra steps that normally you do in your brain, like you probably do them almost instantly so you don't even realize where you're like, I'm going to write about this. I'm going to think of these things and I'm going to think about that and I'm going to do the thing that's the most useful to my audience and blah blah blah. If you can just figure out what those brain processes that you would go through and have the AI walk through them first and then execute on your command your results are going to be much different than people who take the shortcut. It may be really shallow, it feels really deep. Is this an answer machine? Or does this help develop questions? Because when you think about life and the most successful people are the most curious people, they have the most questions and they meet answers or they develop answers. Is this an answer machine or a question machine? Do you understand where I'm going with this? Everybody's first impulse when met with a chat like a conversational interface is to ask a question and they get an answer. It's so obvious but it's also a superficial way to start. There's so much more that you can do than just ask a question and I actually suggest people think in terms of giving it a command or a directive rather than asking a question because it forces you to think about what do you actually want? What do you mean by that question? What are you really seeking here? So instead of saying what does an SEO optimized article look like? We can say make me an SEO optimized article that does these things and now we're being way more specific on what we want to get. It's actually a matter of the maturity of the person using the system. Certainly the AI can lead to many more questions and even early studies now with the current technology are showing that people are actually smarter. People who spend more time with AI seem to get smarter which is say the AI is inspiring their brain to make new connections that they weren't previously making to think about things in new ways. Use it enough and use it correctly. You're actually going to come up with more questions to ask questions you never thought of before and that will lead you down such interesting paths. It's almost like if you find yourself in that situation you're doing something right because you're not just getting answers. You're now unlocking new mysteries to uncover. I'm pumped to have two guests today. We're at the forefront, the CEO of Panditron, Dimas Ruckan, and Robert Newland, the Chief Money Officer, Chief DeNero Honto. The efficiencies that your competition can't have like 60% operational efficiency over you. Is that what it sort of comes down to and the promise of the money savings combined with human combined with right-sizing organizational structure? I mean, there's a lot of different things, but it seems like Robert being the money guy at the end of the day. I get somewhere grounded in that for a lot of organizations. They don't want to get left behind. Is that what it is? Yeah, but there's also a once in a generation opportunity, probably even Bill Gates said this is bigger than the PC, for example, because it's not just a big shift in the way in which we do business, but it's also a speed of change. Even the PC took about 20 years to reach mass adoption, charge it to 10 months. When you combine the two of them, it just makes it compelling for everybody to get on the band live and so this is possible. What's your perspective here? You guys go to all the conferences, is this right? Yeah, people think too much about AI being only an automation tool when I think it's so much more. Maybe we'll tap that we do as well, but we see even though we say AI coaching is so much more than just coaching. Makes suddenly it becomes completely different tool that we've never had before that can also guide all strategy because suddenly besides just coaching people, you can also collect data about what are the biggest topics that they're talking about. And what's behind those topics was the roof causes and then you can combine all that. I could get that and look at the patterns and it's something you would never do with human coaching. People oftentimes think too much of it as well have this process. I'm going to automate it and that's going to be the saving. That's going to be the first step that makes sense. It's going to go beyond that and we're not fully even comprehending what all those things can be. There is a quote from one of our uses in Australia, which is demonosis, my favorite, and she says, I know this is on a sound kind of weird because although I know I'm talking to an AI chatbot, somehow I'm more comfortable talking to my AI coach than a human because I do not feel judged. So what we're learning from this at least in AI within the realm of coaching is that in coaching, what people are looking for is empathy and then reflection and we can provide a high level of consistent empathy to air coaching. 24-7 availability and then deep reflection in meaningful ways and it really is one of the areas that I want to quote demon here that from an ethics standpoint, you know, AI coaching is one of the areas that is not really replacing humans. I think we help humans reflect better of themselves so they can interact better with one another. I think that's a beautiful thing. It is the biggest point people think about the judgment of others a lot and if you can remove that barrier, you unlock some potential authenticity and realness that never gets unlocked human to human. That's exactly what we're seeing and I've been in talent management. Okay, I'll say it as long as demon is being alive. Yeah, but in all these years, I have not seen something experiential that allows for this level of vulnerability for a human. I never thought it would be possible even when I first started seeing this comments. I thought, no, it's got to be an outlier. Then you see consistently getting this feedback of the experience. I don't think this is replacing a human. This is just helping me reflect better as a human so I can be better with other people. We better on my workplace. We better with my family. Just fascinating. I do not expect it, but it's mind-blowing, frankly. AI, there's a lot of different things with which sort of the principles, I guess, of artificial intelligence are being deployed in a million different ways. We're still comprehending what the impacts are going to be. For example, with what we do, even though we call it AI coaching, I almost feel like this can be to lead the organization in a completely new way because suddenly in comparison to like human coaches, you can actually align AI with your organizational objectives so it can kind of nudge people in that direction. You can collect all this data about what are the systemic issues that can again help you adjust your strategy. And at the same time, you can support people. It almost becomes less of an employee benefit tool and more of leadership as a service, if you will. All that leadership wasn't done maybe because of lack of skill, maybe because of lack of time, whatever the case may be. Since we're still figuring out what happens once we scale this thing, another example is that all the processes, right, like customer service, there was a Swedish syntax company that published these saved millions on kind of automating, I think 90% of their customer service. And saying, actually, a lot of it is not that difficult and it's pretty repetitive. Yes, we need to have like a little bit of a conversational touch there, and we now can have it with January. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. I really appreciate it. Hey guys, you're going to find us. Ryan is right.com. You'll find the highlight clips from today, the full episode and links. We'll see you next time on Right About Now.