Martin 

Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben 

Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to be here.

Martin 

Yeah, me too. Really excited to get into it. And today, we’re going to talk a lot about neuroplasticity and how that sort of led you to, to creating re-origin. But yeah, take us back and tell us about your journey before re-origin and sort of what led you to this point.

Ben 

Yeah, so it’s interesting how things kind of come about to, oftentimes in life there’s things that happen that seem really disparate and disconnected. And then every once in a while, I’m sure everyone can relate on some level, there are kind of moments that you have where it seems like everything kind of led together and kind of makes sense. And for me in neuroplasticity, I’ll just briefly define it first.

It’s basically the brain’s ability to continuously adapt and change to new inputs throughout a person’s life. Um, and for me, that concept is really the culmination of like everything that I’ve ever been interested in, in my life, um, everything that I’ve, you know, practiced. And, um, starting from a really young age, just being into learning, learning how to do things with my body and kind of ironically, I had difficulty learning in school. Um,

I had trouble reading and writing and this was going back. This was prior to a lot of common ADD type of diagnoses, but I later learned that I actually had just a simple problem with the muscles in my eye that would make it difficult to focus. As a result of all of the extra effort that it took me to focus, it detracted from things like comprehension and…

communication and things like that. And so it was interesting that I didn’t actually fix that issue until I was in my late 20s where I just did some simple eye exercises called pencil pushups where you stare at objects at different distances and move them closer. And by strengthening that muscle in my eye, all of a sudden reading for the first time in my life became incredibly easy. That then changed my whole mentality and mindset that actually, when I previously thought of myself as a

slow student and inadequate in many ways. I realized that it was just this little muscular problem. And once that fixed, it was interesting how a lot of those even core beliefs started to shift. But, you know, going back to that time, as that slow student, I really poured myself into other things that gave me just a great sense of joy and positive feeling. For me, it was physical movement, it was athleticism.

It was things like juggling and circus performing. I was just fascinated by what a person could teach their body to do, you know, teach it these different skills. And that progressed later on through college. I studied exercise physiology and became a personal trainer and was just even further fascinated with this notion that someone could go from having a simple idea in their head, like I wanna change my physical.

appearance or change my physical capabilities. And then from that idea, they could actually learn a series of things, in this case, exercises, such that when they do those things consistently, it results in the actual change, the change that their body looks, feels, and functions. I’m still blown away by that concept. And then in my mid-20s, I was kind of going along that journey.

running a surf camp, working as an exercise physiologist, helping people with corrective exercise. And then I got really sick with something that came up seemingly out of the blue. It turned out to be Lyme disease, which is really common in the Northeast where I’m from in Long Island, New York. It’s an infection that comes from a tick bite. And for most people, about 98 plus percent of people, it doesn’t…

really cause big problems. Maybe they won’t feel any symptoms or maybe they’ll feel like flu-like symptoms for a week or so and then it will pass. But in some cases, and it was the case for me, this can actually lead to this kind of over-activation of the immune system, which leads to ongoing inflammation, worsening of symptoms, and essentially degeneration.

And in my case, it got to the point where this infection was able to make its way into the central nervous system, cause a host of issues. And long story short, I basically wound up bed bound for about three years from age 25 until 28. And during that time, I had a lot of time to think. I had a lot of brain fog, so often many days I wasn’t able to really think.

you know, figure out what had happened, asking those questions, not from a why me perspective, I’ll say not only from a why me perspective, there was some of those feelings, but also from a, you know, what is it that, how is it that a person like myself, so healthy, so active, taken so much care around that has become so ill and degenerated? And just to…

to give an example, I’d lost about 60 pounds of body weight. I had lost the ability to walk, lost the ability to read. I had really bad cognitive, like brain fog issues, heart palpitations, pain, migraines, chronic fatigue, all of these issues had been to many, many doctors and they didn’t really know what the problem was and received a lot of different diagnoses.

And I started to go down the rabbit hole of learning, you know, different things by listening to podcasts mostly, which were just coming, this was like going back 10, 12 years. So podcasts weren’t even really a thing, but universities like UCSF and Berkeley were starting to put some of their one and 200 level courses on online as free podcasts. And so I was effectively, you know, listening to these classes about the brain. And

One of the things that I learned is that there’s something called the allostatic load, which is a total level of stress that can build up in a person’s nervous system. And we’re really seeing this a lot in this day and age where we’re bombarded by a lot of information and the brain doesn’t really make the distinction between like psychological stress, emotional stress, and even environmental issues. Our bodies and our brains are designed to be really, really resilient.

meaning we can handle like a ton of stuff. And for anyone who’s listening to this, you’ve probably endured a lot of stuff in your life, a lot of physical challenges and mental and emotional challenges and pathogens and even things from the environment that challenge the system. And it’s really amazing how resilient the body is, but like any biological system, there comes a point at which the system can be overwhelmed, it can be too much. And so in my case,

what I had learned was that this Lyme bacteria kind of acted as the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the camel’s back probably might not have broken if it wasn’t already carrying this heavy load. And so that really prompted me to go deep into, you know, my sources of stress and, you know, things that had built up over the years, ways that I was managing or mismanaging my energy.

I’m thinking I was doing the right thing and that, you know, by exercising and over-exercising, but in fact, over years of working so hard mentally and physically and being an athlete, I was kind of running myself into the ground such that this little, you know, tiny infection, this little pathogen could come along and sort of short circuit the entire system. And so that sort of began the journey of learning the next rung of exercises. I thought back to my days.

as a teenager when I first started learning exercise, physical exercise that is, and thinking, okay, I wonder if there’s certain things that I can do to, certain exercises I can do for my brain so that it can kind of relearn how to direct my body. It turns out that there is, and there’s research dating back to the 1960s that talks about some of this and papers that were coming out more recently, like one in 2011 called Rewiring the Stress Response.

And I started to just follow these cues and learn that very much like physical exercise, you can actually change, you can train your brain to start to change how it directs your body and your body’s resources. And over time, it took a while, it took about 18 months of doing this, and we can get into some of the nuances of the brain retraining. But ultimately, it led to a sort of reconditioning of the stress response.

and the ability of my body to regain its self-healing mechanisms. So slowly but surely, and it wasn’t a linear process, the brain fog started to subside, my energy levels started to come back, my enthusiasm for training and conditioning and what it can actually do started to go way back up to this next thing.

And that led to the eventual creation of what now is the re-origin program and company, which is a global company that helps people to effectively reclaim their health from a wide range of chronic inflammatory conditions by retraining their brain in the same way that I did.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. And I’m glad you mentioned sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back because I think that’s a really good point is sort of it seems to be that a lot of us, you know, without even sort of knowing it can unknowingly build up Yeah, this sort of ongoing stress. You mentioned over training there as well. You know, I played soccer in college as well. And for sure, there was a there was a period of time where I

was burnt out, I hit a wall from over training, over college lifestyle, studying all the time, lots of classes, taking on extracurricular stuff, intensive training, and yeah, it can creep up on, I guess, anyone in different ways, and then all it takes is something like, yeah, for example, Lyme to come along and…

Yeah, as you said, sort of create that cascade of problems. And there’s one thing I really wanted to jump in there. You said talking about rewiring the stress response. I’d love to hear more about that and the nuances of that.

Ben 

Yeah, so basically, you know, the brain is kind of our central processing unit. I like to think of it as like the CEO of the company. That is the, you know, the organization that is the body, which is made up of different organs, cells, and systems. And, um, the brain really has two. Well, it has many, many functions, but two priorities, the two top priorities. Number one is, uh, is survival. It’s safety. It’s to keep us safe at all costs. Um,

And so oftentimes it will err on the side of caution when it, especially when it’s already under a higher stress load and, you know, anyone can probably recognize this in themselves. You know, if you’ve gone several nights with poor sleep and you’ve been maybe traveling a lot and you’ve been under a lot of stress, you know that you feel more irritable. You know, little things get to you in a bigger way. Whereas if you’ve slept really well and you’re well,

resourced and nourished, it’s sort of like things slide off you, like water off a duck’s back. The reason is that when that total stress load builds up, the brain has a higher propensity to start to classify incoming information from the environment as threatening or potentially threatening. Then it responds with what’s known as the threat response or the stress response, which is…

hormones and chemicals like cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine that effectively mobilize us for action, but also make us feel agitated. They also have these sort of deleterious effects where they’re chemicals that are important. There’s a lot of talk these days about kind of just self-regulating the nervous system and staying out of fight or flight. It’s true that we want to.

be able to not spend most of our time in fight or flight, that stress response is really important. We wouldn’t survive if we didn’t have it. The key is that what we really want, a healthy system, a healthy brain, and a healthy nervous system, is one that can go to those places when needed to those fight or flight responses, but also quickly come back down to baseline, or to this what’s known as the parasympathetic rest and digest phase. And what happens is when we are,

perpetually exposed to high levels of stress. And then we have some insult to injury. We have some acute infection or illness or traumatic event. The brain can effectively get stuck in that fight or flight response. And that’s where a lot of the body’s resources that would normally be reserved for healing and procreation and digestion and absorbing nutrients, they get reallocated.

toward just mobilizing these stress hormones. And so a large part of the brain, well, first of all, I mentioned, the brain’s first order of business is survival. So that’s the survival portion. It has this, what’s called negativity bias or this strong bias to like protect and sometimes overprotect us. The second order of business is efficiency. It doesn’t wanna learn every time that something is dangerous or potentially dangerous.

It wants to be efficient with its energy. And so it learns from the past to protect us in the future. And so, for example, if when you’re in that very stressed out state, you encounter something that adds a little bit more stress or that your brain says, this is something that we need to look at more deeply, then in the future, even if you’re in a calm state,

because your brain has made that association, this is what they call the dark side of neuroplasticity, when you encounter that thing again in the future, it will catapult your brain and body back into that previously learned state. So just a good example of this is like, you know, a post-traumatic stress disorder, where let’s say, you know, you have two people side by side, someone who just came back from a war and someone who’s a construction worker.

and both of them hear a loud noise. Let’s say like a car backfires down the street and they hear this loud bang. The person that just came back from the war all of a sudden might find that their whole nervous system goes crazy. Their heart rate elevates, their palms start sweating, their pupils dilate, they find themselves in this fight, flight or freeze response. Whereas the person right next to them who just experienced the same exact event, the loud noise, the construction worker in this case,

he had the same event, but his experience of it was completely different because his brain didn’t learn to associate that sound with a potential threat. And so a large part of when it comes to brain retraining, it requires some initial learning on the part of the brain retrain, but it really comes down to a process of unlearning, of disentangling that response that the brain learned at one point when it was in the high state of stress.

and sort of erasing the score that the body’s been keeping.

Martin 

And is that a lot of, I mean, just getting a little bit into the program that you guys have is, is it a lot of that happening through meditation? Is it, you know, re-exposing yourself in some ways to that stimulus that was, you know, triggering you in the past? Yeah, how do you sort of untangle and desensitize yourself a little bit on it in a practical way, from what you can share in a small, in a small few minutes today?

Ben 

Yeah, yeah. So you’re exactly right in thinking along those lines that there’s really two aims of the re-origin brain retraining program. And one of them is reduction of that allostatic load. So it’s just helpful. It adds more resilience, adds a little bit of buffer into the system when you can reduce that total stress load. And for that, there are practices of calming the nervous system. Like meditation would be one example, breath work, somatics are great at just.

things like progressive muscle relaxation are great. It’s just helping to calm the system. But there’s a big difference and an important difference between just calming the system and actually retraining the brain. Ultimately, the goal of re-origin is to rewire the brain’s neural pathways in such a way where they no longer become overactive in the first place. So, the goal is to be able to go out into the world and experience the

inevitable stressors of life, the loud noises, the difficult conversations, the whatever it might be, and to train the brain to not over respond to them. And so for that, we use a process of sort of gradual exposure or what we call systematic desensitization in conjunction with some of those tools that help to calm the nervous system. And so at re-origin, we basically have a four step protocol.

which is something that people learn and practice about 30 minutes a day that involves identifying the things that are kind of triggering you, or we say, you know, throwing you for a loop, interrupting those, and then replacing them and ultimately reinforcing a new habit, a new response.

Martin 

Got you, got you. And speak to a little bit of the type of people that you’re helping on re-origin, and who is it for, and what are some of the conditions that you’re seeing this is helping people with. Yeah, I would love to hear more about that.

Ben 

Yeah, so when people come to a program like re-origin, they’re coming from either a place of chronic anxiety, which often goes hand in hand with depression, because when the brain is hyperactive, it depletes itself of these key metabolites and nutrients, and we find ourselves having a hard time accessing positive emotions. And then there are conditions like the ones that I experienced, like chronic Lyme. We have a lot of people with long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain.

Anything that mainstream medicine has a really hard time addressing and treating, those are often the types of conditions that we find brain retraining is really helpful for. It’s important to mention that when it comes to these conditions, they are not psychological conditions. They are neurological conditions. One paper back to, I think it’s 1971.

called conditioned immune suppression or behaviorally conditioned immune suppression talks about An experiment that was done where they gave rats injections of a virus combined with sugar water So dextrose solution with a virus and just as you’d expect every time they got this injection They would mount the immune response so body would mount cytokinect activity and inflammation and try and combat the virus the interesting thing happened was

after about five or six times of giving them that injection, then they started giving them an injection of just sugar water. And they found that alone was now sufficient to mount the same immune response. Right? And so it shows you that it’s not a psychological issue. This is something that just like our, we know that there’s a term called muscle memory. We have like reflexive memories. We also have cellular memory where even on a cellular level,

The cells can remember certain things and if you’re exposed to something, a stressor, in this case just the act of getting an injection that has a similar flavor of what you previously experienced as an invader or a viral pathogen, the brain and body will continue to act accordingly unless you give it an update, unless you tell it, hey, this thing is actually not dangerous. And so that’s the process of really deconditioning.

and helping in this case would look something like, giving those rats the injection, but maybe doing something to calm them at the same time so that their body on a systemic level doesn’t pour out that outpouring of inflammatory activity.

Martin 

Wow, super interesting. So is that, does that mean like a lot of the people perhaps that they come through re-origin, maybe there was an event, some, uh, something that happened potentially even years ago that sort of caused

some sort of major inflammatory response, whether that was just physical or emotional, anxiety, depression you mentioned there as well. Can it be that there was sort of a trigger a long time ago, but that, like what you said with the post-traumatic stress disorder, just sort of perpetuates itself for I guess a very long time before, as you said, there’s a reset, some form of reset there. Is that sort of a lot of what’s happening?

Ben 

Yeah, exactly right. At least 80% of our members can recall having some event like that. They referred to it as a perfect storm. They remember a time when maybe they were under a lot of stress going through a move or a relational challenge or something like that, and then they got a really bad cold or flu or something came along. That’s where the neurological conditioning, that coupling effect can happen, where the brain starts to associate.

regular life stress with inflammatory activity, because at that time, it was appropriate. You had these stressful things going on, and you had something coming into your system that required a defensive immune response. So now, the problem is, even once the pathogen has gone, the brain’s…

learning, the brain’s association is still there unless acted upon by an outside source. And so anytime someone becomes stressed out in the future or has anything that even vaguely reminds, and when I talk about memory and reminding, it’s not like a conscious thing that just reminds the nervous system of that same time, it will draw them back into that state of immune overactivity. And so there’s still some percentage of people that

can’t necessarily recall having that. And it is certainly possible also that stress can just build up and can be sort of like the, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts phenomenon. I think it doesn’t necessarily require one huge impact to come along, but more often than not, we see that is there.

Martin 

Yeah, super interesting. And I guess that’s sort of what you were mentioning there, a little bit of sort of that, that over, that over response from, from the body sort of over protection, as you sort of said earlier, um, the, the body just really, yeah, being quite cautious and if there was that big event, then I assume it’s, that’s its way of saying, let’s not go back to that. Don’t want to return to that, uh, return to that state. Super interesting. Um, I’d love to do a little bit more now about, you know, you’ve obviously worked

experts from, you know, obviously your own study and personal application as well. But also you’ve brought in a lot of different experts from different fields to create re-origin. Tell us about that. Tell us, you know, who you collaborated with to build your program. And how was that bringing everyone together and synthesizing all of that knowledge into the program you have today?

Ben 

Yeah, so the good news is that the same way that the brain can learn to overprotect, it can also relearn to return to normal. And there’s a lot of different types of therapies and interventions and practices aimed at that relearning that have been around for some time. And after I got better from my own condition, I really went.

seeking these out, what are these different ways? And I did everything under the sun from neuro feedback and biofeedback to tapping and emotional freedom technique and every type of nervous system calming type of exercise you can imagine. And I ended up just through that, my own interest and wanting to go deeper into that world, working for a company here in Manhattan for about eight years where I was coordinating medical seminars and bringing together

doctors and practitioners from all over the world and of all different types, MDs, NDs, DOs, acupuncturists, energy healers, like really diverse backgrounds, getting them all in the same room. And I was kind of there in the middle, soaking everything up like a sponge. And what I realized is that, despite everyone having their own language and terminology, everyone really is saying the same thing.

there are some fundamental, what I call universal principles of brain retraining that just seem to apply across the board. I mentioned a few of them, what those are. Certainly awareness is one of them. Having an awareness of your body’s internal state of being, this is known as interception. There’s a lot of practices from breath work to yoga and beyond that. Then there are more scientific ones that include…

biofeedback and things, but ultimately they’re all aimed at strengthening what’s called interoception. There’s an awareness component. There’s an ability to interrupt certain patterns that are what we call maladaptive or not helping us anymore. There’s a replacement aspect. Once you interrupt a pattern, you then need to replace it with something that’s more advantageous. This is where…

certain things like visualization or breathwork or affirmation or things can come in because we know that those change the way that the nervous system functions in real time. And then finally, we want to kind of bundle all of this together into something that’s self-reinforcing. And so there’s a reward aspect. And at the time, I was also just through my own, what I thought was a separate interest, but I realize is now exactly the same. I was also very interested in habits and habit design.

And this was going back about 12 years in Manhattan. There was a, the Quantified Self Movement was just beginning, which is the movement that gave, ultimately gave rise to what’s now the biohacking movement. And I was heavily involved as an organizer in Quantified Self and another group that started here in the city, which was called Habit Design. And so we were looking at these different habit loops. I was kind of putting together all of these pieces. And then ultimately,

Once the pandemic hit and I had all of these disparate tools that to me even at that time felt like, oh man, I’ve spent all my time making a millimeter of progress in a million directions learning these things that have nothing to do with one another. When the pandemic hit, a couple of friends reached out to me that had been through their own healing journey and they said, you know, we want to, we think it’s an important time to put this together into a program and to find a way to weave these pieces together.

I started working on it with them and I started realizing that every person I’d met, everything that I had learned, everything that I had experienced was actually part of the same conversation. It’s all about conditioning. It’s all about the fundamental ability that the brain and body have to continuously change themselves and rewire themselves. I reached out to some of these initial practitioners that had what I had found to be some of the most potent and effective approaches.

those being things like somatics, PRT, which stands for pain reprocessing therapy, and CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy. And we started weaving these together into the form of this re-origin program. So I think bringing these people together was really important because I had a profound experience and my co-founders had their own profound experiences, but we wanted to make sure that we were creating and designing a program that was

not only scientifically sound and accurate and had been validated in clinical settings, but also was being taught in a way that was really doable and accessible. Something I learned really early on as a personal trainer is that you can give someone the perfect program. If they come to you and say, I wanna lose 10 pounds or I wanna gain 10 pounds of muscle or whatever it is, it’s pretty easy to give them on a post-it note, this is exactly what you should do. But delivering it in a way that integrates into their life

and that gives them a sense of momentum and gives them the ability to continuously act on it, that is really the key. And so the last thing I’ll say here is that I get asked the question a lot, what’s the one most important thing to do when it comes to brain retraining? Because ostensibly when you start getting into it, it can seem really, really complex and there’s a fair bit of nuance to it. Just like learning to exercise, there’s a lot to learn, there’s a lot of body awareness and sort of mechanical aspects to it.

And so it’s very hard to say, you know, what’s the one most important thing, but if I had to say one, I would say ultimately, it’s consistency over time. Once you learn the routine or the exercises in this case, it’s the ability to just be consistent with it over the long haul that ultimately reconditions the brain and over time makes dramatic changes. And because the brain, again, is uniquely situated as the CEO or the sort of executive that

presides over all of these organs and cells and systems, any changes you make to the brain can have these really far reaching impacts to how you feel on a very fundamental level. So it’s a super exciting time that the science and the research is kind of catching up to what I’ve been experiencing for a long time and that we’re able to now weave it together and create an organization, a program, and a company like re-origin that’s able to actually deliver it to people in a way

that’s easy to implement and getting results.

Martin 

Yeah, that’s fantastic. The sort of compounding results over time, it seems to be, is, yeah, it’s sort of, it’s come up on a few of the episodes, the podcast episodes we’ve done. It seems to be something that just comes up, you know, find the couple of tasks that you should be doing or the, you know, having the right awareness and knowledge of what you should be doing, but, you know, doing it over and over again is, seems to be the name of the game, if not just, you know,

in business but in health as well. And yeah, that’s really cool that you guys have sort of, you have built a program that helps people do that. Talking a little bit about like the course that you have at the moment, how did you decide on the framework for it? Like, how was it sort of structured? And I guess where there’s some previous iterations of that, has it been a sort of work in progress as you’ve taken the first customers through? Yeah.

Tell us a little bit how you’ve sort of crafted that and the iterations you’ve made along the way.

Ben 

Yeah, so as you mentioned, we brought in these doctors and researchers we call the Brain Trust. I started off with just two Brain Trust members. We had a clinical psychologist and a PhD neuroscientist. And that has since grown to include technologists and all sorts of interesting people, all with an orientation around the brain and how the brain affects the body. But working with them was really…

really paramount because they came with a lot of experience in clinical settings, could help us develop these exercises and structure them in a way that was implementable in an online program. And then we, like any kind of, I think, startup mentality, it was a really iterative process. For me, it started 10 years ago when I regained my health and had people reaching out to me for

questions and support and I did some health coaching and stuff. So I had the chance to work with hundreds of people over a decade just on a one-to-one basis and see what stuck with them, what worked for them, what didn’t, how to relate things, how to explain things, what went over their head. And so there was a lot of iteration taking place there such that by the time I started putting together the program, I had kind of an idea of a framework, which then got…

rejiggered as I brought in these other experts. And they said, nah, that’s not gonna work well. We gotta explain it this way instead, or that should go here. And so it took on a little bit of a different life. We then assembled a focus group of 50 people and ran them through the first version of the program and got their feedback and followed them for about six months. And based on their feedback, we made a next version of the program, which was like our official launch

2022, 2021 rather. And then we did one more iteration on that. So based on the next year and a half or close to two years of feedback, we redid the program and made it even better. And I’m sure, you know, maybe another three years from now we’ll be redoing it again based on further feedback. I like to say that the program is as dynamic as the brain is itself. It’s constantly getting better and remapping itself.

But yes, it wasn’t just like put it out there and pray for the best, pray for the results and everything. It was a very much very iterative process and continues to be to this day.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. And if you start to look back at, you know, all the customers you’ve, you’ve taken through now over, over a couple of years, is there a couple of things that have stood out to you that have you sort of set, you can say where they’re the couple of things that are really making the biggest difference for your customers is there a couple of things in the program that are sort of highlight, like really making the biggest impact for, for your customers.

Ben 

Yeah. So from a high level, re-origin really consists of three things. There are three main value propositions. There’s the program itself, which is like education, teaches them the ins and outs of what the brain has to do with their condition and how to self-regulate. There’s coaching around that as well, group coaching. And then there’s a community in which the entire program and coaching setting is sort of like seated within this community. For me, like I had always

probably because my learning disability or just my own way of doing things as a kid, I was always kind of a loner. I liked these solo activities, solo sports, and juggling and surfing and bike riding and stuff, and wasn’t a big team person. That’s probably the thing that has changed the most in my life is seeing the importance of and the value in community. And I think that bar none, the thing that’s had the biggest impact on our members is, yes, the…

the exercises and the consistency and all of that, but doing it in this communal setting, where we have people from, I think, 24 different countries now, and having them be able to come together with a common experience, but most importantly, a common intention of rewiring their brains, making progress, and getting healthy. That has been incredibly powerful, and it’s produced this sort of.

you know, Roger Bannister effect where one person sees another person making progress and that, you know, opens their mind to the possibility of progress and just makes it easier to do that most important thing, which is take consistent action.

Martin 

Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m glad you mentioned the community because that’s a trend that we’ve seen. I mean, we work with a lot of online education brands and, uh, one of the trends we’ve seen is, you know, people buy a program or an online course, uh, or a membership and, you know, there’s a lot of individual modules for them to go through a lot of information to consume, uh, and for a lot of people that works, but for

a large majority people invest in information. And we have so much information at our fingertips already. Having one more sort of course to go through and continue knowledge sometimes is, yeah, people just, there’s a lot of people that buy courses and never actually get through them or only start a small percentage. And actually there was, a lot of our clients have sort of observed

behavior from their customers, which was they weren’t really watching much of the material, but they were in the community always engaging and asking people, you know, questions about the topics and, you know, getting answers and sharing feedback with others. And I guess also, as he said, getting inspiration from what other people are doing and just, just by being part of the community that have a similar objective, in this case, you know, getting healthier, you know, seeing people, uh, doing that and, and

you know, seeing the progress that they’re making is sometimes enough to put people into action and credit. So yeah, I’m glad to hear that a community is a really big aspect for you guys. And I’m sure there’s some really cool stuff happening in there. Just shifting focus a little bit onto the more growth side of the business and growing an online education business. I’d love to hear a little bit about, you know, what’s worked well for you over the last, you know, one to two years, like now that you’ve got

really sort of this core program. You’ve got a team around you now, and you’ve got some great results for your customers and are doing some really cool stuff. What’s worked well from a marketing perspective and growth perspective of growing reordered over the last couple of years.

Ben 

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll start from a really high level. And I think of marketing as, I’m sure people listening have, you know, understand the concept of like funnels and things like that. And, you know, sometimes when we think about marketing, it’s easy to go down the road of thinking about it as a form of like coercion or trying to convince people of something. And there’s a lot of that in…

many arenas today, I have a little bit of a different perspective on it and a different approach, which is that, first of all, I don’t believe that everyone is our customer. I think that only people that really resonate with what we’re offering are going to be our customer. Our job is really to connect with those people. I think of it on a really fundamental level. Out there in the world, I believe that in every

literally in every cell, in every person, there is the innate desire or if that implies too much intent, you can say there’s the innate propensity to be healthy. So every cell essentially wants to be healthy. When someone is experiencing anything other than perfect health, they could really benefit from a program like re-origin. And so the question then becomes, how do we connect with people?

who’s on a cellular level, they wanna be healthy. The cells want to go in this direction. They want to organize themselves and cohesively. And just like in an organization, you need goal alignment among all different departments and team members. Similarly, our bodies need goal alignment. All of the cells need to be aligned in terms of what they wanna produce for the system in order for health to prevail. So, like how do you connect with people who are experiencing anything other than good health?

And then from there, it’s just the one question that I think pretty much the only question you need to know to be a marketer or to learn that process of marketing or getting a product out there into the marketplace is really what’s the next bottleneck? What’s stopping them? And then it starts to become clear. So the very first one in the beginning is, oh, okay. Well, the-

The first bottleneck is they don’t know re-origin exists. They don’t know about us. So then the question is, okay, well, how do we let them know, how do we get in front of people? And for that, we started with organic content production, something I had some familiarity with, some basic SEO, and then later on went on to start YouTube. But basically just like putting information out there, even in small arenas on Facebook and little groups and little friends and pockets and stuff like that.

And then you start to get feedback. And then you might see that some people see it. So now they know that re-origin exists, but they don’t act on it. And then the next question is, okay, well, why didn’t they act on it? Is it that they don’t resonate with the messaging? Is it that they didn’t understand it? Is it that they understood it, but they didn’t think it was for them? And then you start to say, okay, well, the next thing apart from the connection is the messaging. How are we communicating this?

And so it’s always kind of about going down that rung and finding like, where is the disconnect? Where’s the disconnect? If you’re coming from that place of like true belief that what you have can really help someone, in my mind, then there’s very little reason for them not to take action on it. And the act of marketing or getting something out there is really just an act of identifying what is the next area of disconnect. And the great thing is what

people often forget is that we’re living in a world where we can communicate with people. We can ask them, what was it about that? Was there something else that you found preferable? Did you not understand what it is or what it can do? Is it the pricing? Is that the issue? And so little by little, you start to, sometimes we think of it as overcoming objections, but you start to identify those areas of disconnect and then build.

more streamlined ways of delivering your message to people in a way that resonates. I always say, for one of the things I’ve been doing from the onset, I still do it to this day, is I do weekly Q&A calls. So anyone who’s listening who’s interested in this or not interested in this, you can join one of my weekly Q&A calls. It’s always me every time. It’s no one else. People get on a live Zoom call and they ask questions and the question always inevitably comes up of like, you know,

how do I decide what to do? There’s other things I could do for my health. There’s even other brain retraining programs out there. How do I decide that this is the one? And I always tell people the same thing in utmost sincerity, which is ultimately, I believe that there are many roads back to wellness. And the one that will work best for you is the one that resonates with you the most strongly, because that goes back to that first principle of consistency. So if you feel like you’re forced to this

that this doesn’t really resonate with you, then this isn’t the right program for you. Kind of goes back to the concept, not everyone is necessarily your customer. But more often than not, when you put something out there with a really good intention, you believe in what you’ve done and it’s worked for people and it’s worked for myself. And then it does resonate with them, which is that’s the part I would say is probably out of our control. Then the connection is made. And then they find themselves in it and going through it.

And so we see an abnormally high level of engagement with our program. We have over a 90% completion rate for the program, which I think is ridiculously high for online education. We have a really high percentage of people who experience, over 94% of people experience significant improvement in even physical symptoms, which is really high for this type of approach. And I really attribute that to

connecting with the right people, having the right people come in who really want to do this, who believe in their ability to do this themselves and who ultimately, yeah, are just resonant with the message.

Martin

Yeah, no, the resonance I think is such a good point. Yeah, if you’re not, you know, emotionally invested or believing in what you’re doing, yeah, there’s already a disconnect there from your brain into the physical body as well. And yeah, there’s no way you’re going to be able to stay consistent with it. Just on your community and the customer base that you’ve built, you mentioned, you know, you’ve got obviously a good connection with them there. What’s

Yeah, what do you love most as sort of the creator of the program? What do you love most about the community that you’ve created and connecting with them?

Ben 

Yeah, I can put my finger on it actually. I love seeing the paradigm shift in people. When people come into the re-origin program, of course they have the intention, they wanna get better. There’s a part of them that might believe, not for everyone, but for a large number, there’s a part of them that doesn’t fully believe that it’s gonna work for them. Doesn’t fully believe that their brain can really retrain and that can impact, that can fix their health.

And I know that because I was there myself. And there’s something that happens, we talked about the science of small wins, when people start taking steps and they start to get some results, and it’s not linear, sometimes you do things and it doesn’t work or it brings you in a different direction. But when they start to take those steps, there’s this point that I see people reach where they believe, like they go from thinking, there’s no way I’m gonna get better because everything I’ve tried in the past has not worked, to thinking,

there’s no way I’m not going to get better. This is just inevitable. And then they get that conviction in taking these steps. And that for me is like the biggest thing because as far as I’m concerned, like the job might as well be done at that point. They’re definitely going to make it.

Martin 

Yeah, because from there, then it’s, you know, they’re going to take care of themselves. There’s no longer a need to, you know, motivate themselves almost. It’s just sort of like, it’s part of their, their belief system now. So that’s, that’s really cool. I can imagine. Yeah. The satisfaction you get of, you know, obviously the, the massive impact, the way this has turned your life around, you know, from being bedridden to, you know, getting your life back and then seeing.

you know, that occur for your customers must be, yeah, it must be a really, really good feeling. So, yeah, congratulations on building a program as well with a 90% completion rate. And it sounds like you’ve got some good metrics or systems in place there to also track the results for your students as well, which sounds really, really cool. So, yeah, great to see that that’s all, yeah, moving along in the right direction for you. Just one more question on sort of the marketing side.

where are most of your customers coming from now? How are they finding you? How are they coming through into the program? And I love the weekly call. I think anyone that’s got a sort of more high ticket program or something where there’s coaching involved as well, I think having these weekly question and answers is a great way because obviously all your customers for sort of anything that’s a bit more high ticket or more of an investment, you know.

there certainly is a buying process where people are sitting on the fence for a little while before they make the decision. So I really liked the question and answer weekly call. But yeah, just quickly, where are most of your customers finding you at the moment?

Ben 

Yep, blogs and YouTube primarily. Yeah. We have done a bit of paid ads. We’ve had some issues there with things breaking when we’ve changed over our website and broke the learning cycle and all that exciting stuff. But the thing that’s been the most consistent is really just organic, putting out the message, connecting with people and meeting them where they’re at. That’s also a great way, especially YouTube I’ve found is an amazing way to…

to gain feedback because people leave comments. And if again, like with utmost sincerity, you really ask people for their feedback, they will give it to you. And that’s super helpful to help refine the messaging and way to connect with people in a way that’s authentic.

Martin 

Awesome, awesome content first. All right, wrapping up, just one more question. If people want to learn more about re-origin, where should they go?

Ben 

Yep, anyone who’s interested to check it out can look at re-origin.com. That’s with a dash, re-origin.com. You’ll also find us on YouTube at re_origin. If you just punch that in, you’ll see all of our videos and our growing channel there. And yeah, if anyone is interested to learn more, you can always reach out to support@re-origin.com and myself and our head community manager, Natalie. We read all those messages ourselves. So.

You can be sure that all questions will be answered and all mysteries will be revealed.

Martin

Awesome. Yeah, definitely go check him out. They’re doing some great work and yeah, jump on the weekly question and answer call with Ben as well. Super cool. Ben, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. Yeah, absolutely. Go challenge him. Awesome, man. Thank you so much.

Ben 

Yeah, go for it.

Ben 

And bring some tough questions. Yeah. Bring some tough ones. We like them. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Martin. I really appreciate it.