How One-Arm Ironman Built an AI Health Revolution

It's something I started six years ago. It was going through tough divorce. It was definitely a period change. I wanted to address it head on. I took it serious.

I started training at day. Six weeks later, in the middle of training, I was hit by a car while cycling. Tony Madrano was a resilient, mission-driven and innovative entrepreneur. Former US Navy officer in the CEO and co-founder of longevity plan.au

where he pioneers AI-powered solutions for longevity, health, and human performance. Drawing from his journey, he applies AI and endurance-driven lessons to help others build healthier, more resilient lives.

In my AI and software experience that I got from my first company.

He merged those together into a company that uses software to help athlete. I have a team of researchers from Stanford Harvard MIT that work with me. I'm the happiest when I'm doing the hardest work.

“How have you compressed all those magic terms and put it into the future of artificial intelligence?”

I believe. It spans the goal. Like a super high school, Internet Elvis. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over.

I'll tell how we're doing. The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. Welcome back to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast for Insight Success. I am Maria Gutierrez. This gorgeous man that is staring at me is Tony Medrano.

He is our operations CEO of the day. Tony. I'm going to stare at you, Baba. Look at you. Look at you go.

Sir, you are a man on a mission. You are not just an iron man, but you are also a man of artificial intelligence. Where do you want to begin?

Well, first of all, thank you all for having me here.

Really, really pleasure. Great studio. And you just great talent that you have on the show. We just got started. You're flattery.

Yes, sir. Oh, no. So, absolutely my pleasure.

“You know, I mean, they're both intertwined.”

My Iron Man journey and my CEO's journey. The Iron Man journey may be most recent so I'll bring that up. It's something I started six years ago. It was going through tough divorce and I knew that there would be, you know, a potential for depression, a lot of emotional ramifications.

She and more evolution. Yes. It was definitely a period of change. I wanted to address it head on. But instead of it letting it control me, I wanted to control it.

So when I did was I jumped into Iron Man triathlon. I had a friend from Stanford Business School who had run 15 of them at the time. Right on. He was a world ranked champion and challenged me on a dare to run an Iron Man with her. She thought it was kind of a joke to get serious and I started training at day.

Six weeks later in the middle of training, I was hit by a car while cycling. I wish you were. Of course. Of course. I mean, well, I'll tell you, I was new at cycling.

I was new at swimming.

I had never entered race in either of those.

I had done one marathon in my life. I was not a varsity athlete in high school. I won't work out, but I was basically going couched to Iron Man in 90 days. And Iron Man for everybody's knowledge is why they regarded as the hardest single day sporting event in the world.

Yep, to a difference is harder, but that's multiple days. We be the friendship. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it is a, a hundred or forty miles total. Two point four miles of swim in the ocean. 112 miles bike ride.

And then you run a marathon, 26 point two miles. So training for that hit by a car separated my right shoulder permanent separation. I crawled my way to my car drove my way to the doctor. He x-rayed me right away.

“My first question was, can I still do my Iron Man in six months?”

He said, maybe come back in two weeks. We'll see how you're developing. I kept doing my training. I kept doing the exercises he told me. And two weeks he said, I think you can make it.

We're on. It made me dull down. It really gave me the motivation necessary. So I ran the event six weeks after the, the checkup, 90 days after starting going from couch to Iron Man and head to swim with one arm to point five to point four miles.

Like hold my beard. It's make this harder. Exactly. Exactly. The smooth one arm is challenging.

Yeah. That's not a word away. And cycling with one arm meant I couldn't change gears. I couldn't get down in, in the arrow position like you see most triathletes, you know, long distance cyclists.

Yeah. So writing in one gear also don't, don't try that at home. Yeah. And so I should for your first time. Exactly.

First time is almost suicide. I actually, I didn't tell my trainer that I had a separate shoulder because I knew she wouldn't let me run the race. And for the final part of the marathon, I had to run the second half with my hands interlaced behind my head to keep my shoulder in place from falling out.

So I was running the last half of the half marathon like this. And the fans were cheering.

And I was not. You're just in constant agonizing pain. It was just keeping it together literally doing it together. Right, on dude, where does that go? Hey, I don't want to interrupt.

“I was going to say, where does that grit come from?”

Like you, you were upset. You were like divorce, ultimate change, ascending. Let's go for it from couch to iron man to injury to back to iron man. Like what was going on through your, your, your, your food taunt called your body. Why were you energized to prove this to yourself?

I had always been gritty.

Nothing came easy. I went to Harvard as an undergrad, but that was on a military scholarship. I had, I got in, I had the scores, I had the grades, I had no way to pay for it. My family was not of the means and I found a way. I was through the US military.

Right, that's literally why I'm here is Operation CEO is looking for veterans who've served their country, but then gone on to the BCOs. So I've had that grit and creativity since I was maybe ten. You know, sir. I was selling a candy bars that lunched money, whatever odd job I could get working full

time when I was 16, full time through college to pay for rent. Even I had the military paying for tuition. So I would always find a creative way. This was just another creative way to make it one arm through an iron man. Oh, right on dude, that's awesome.

I got to figure out here on this quest, which I'm sure we will on Operation CEO, the episode. This is Operation CEO, the podcast.

“How does one land on AI? I was an engineer in the military.”

We're in a firefighting department, a board of destroyer, very hands-on act action-packed. Well, I named like that. I hope sure, so it's hope so. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't that action-packed.

Nobody died on my watch. Cool. I wore any series injuries. It was a very, very part of that. That I saved a couple of lives.

It was a good story later. You know, I went to Stanford Business School and law school. And there, you're right in the middle of Silicon Valley. And you're bound to learn something about the latest technology. It's just by who you're around.

So talk about the being in the, in the right rooms. Exactly. And I come to Valley, it's this room after room. As a recommendation, you know, I was usually up until 18. I was the smartest person in the room.

Oh, yeah, right on. Once I got into Harvard and started attending, I was at least SmartParse person there. So therefore, I was learning a lot.

I guess, as a suggestion, it's always the best place to be.

Be in a room where you're not the smartest person. I started in my entrepreneurial journey by starting a company. If two years into my four year program of law and business started a company raised money from soft bank. One of the biggest venture capital firms in the world raised a second round from them. We're the company up to 120 people.

I was the only one with leadership experience. We've managed people because we were all in our late 20s in grad school. Crazy. So I immediately, you know, like was promoted to be president. Yeah.

Random operations of the company. It was fantastic experience. We effectively built the platform. For what is now the app store used on Samsung and Apple devices. Right on.

It was a little early. It was before the smartphone. So it was a little clunky. Yeah. Before a web apps.

They were just running on four web apps. They were called do dots. They were called the arts instead of others. So we were very neat and creative. But, you know, employed 120 people.

And it's awesome. Got a lot of great business done. So that was another creative endeavor with a lot of obstacles. Because money. What year was this?

This was 1999 and 2000. Oh, cool. Yeah. I didn't end up in Silicon Valley until 2009, 2010. Oh, wow.

Yeah. It was a good time to be there. Because things were quieted down and a little less hyped. A little more substance. Yeah.

For sure. For sure. Have you been back recently? To the middle of the area. I have.

I went to my business school and lost some reunions just three weeks ago. I spoke really on the same subject about resilience.

And basically, the anybody can run an Iron Man.

Awesome. You and without it ain't swimming cycling knowledge. You know, hopefully a person will come to it with a little more experience than I did. It'll be a little safer. I was going to say it's crazy how some determination, some consistency and some discipline.

How far I can get you.

“How have you compressed all those magic terms and put it into the future of artificial intelligence?”

Great question. So my company, longevityplan.au. Great name. Literally is modeled after what the NFL does for its product. The NFL does for its players.

I create AI models and a digital twin for each player to increase their, you know, their longevity, their health spans or do's injury, increase recovery, to monitor certain things to optimize their performance. My company does that for the, you know, the aspirational athlete, the executive who wants to be an athlete also. Yes sir. Doesn't have the time in money like the NFL players do.

But still, once that same personalized medicine and the same optimal outcomes. So I've taken really my Iron Man experience myself being, you know, broken many times. And my AI and software experience that I got from my first company. Yeah sir. Merge those together into a company that uses software to help athletes.

Right. Just using personal coaches or a billion dollar budget like some, you know, some leagues or teams will have to do it at a cost where millions of people can have a personalized AI solution for their own performance optimization.

All of those play a big part.

“I mean, certainly without the mental side of it, you can't perform a repeat.”

Right on. Absolutely on board for the AI revolution even though it's, I feel like it's, we're already like five or eight years into it now. For folks like you die that completely comprehend what's been really happening. I feel like I come from the entertainment world obviously. I feel like every agency should have an AI clone of all of their talent and should be able to,

to, to warp through time through the past or the forward into in the beginning into the future and basically have their talent. AI ready. So if you want Brad Pitt from early years, here you go loaded into your unreal engine. If you want Brad Pitt from 30 or 45 years of the future loaded into the AI agent. So even if that person passes away, that legacy is still an AI form.

That person's family still gets the sort of copy and paste some of those attributes into the athletic world.

And like it's, it's amazing that you casually just said that NFL players have a digital clone that essentially AI clone.

If you will not a digital clone, AI clone that represents who they are. You can sort of attribute and find to that version and test that out before you apply it in real world. Exactly. Exactly. And the term digital twin became decades ago from the industrial and power plant.

Or you know, industry because they didn't want to fool about his nuclear power plant parameters. Yes, sir. You know, on the real life. Absolutely. And my experience in the Navy running a power plant.

“You certainly wouldn't want to test a lot of things out.”

Yeah, it's better to have a digital clone. And the fact that we don't make avatars that are a physical, certainly embodiment. But instead, it's a series of machine learning model. Correct. It occupies for their health outcomes.

It's the same sort of thing. You might feel like testing some certain right neutraceuticals or maybe some radical new exercises.

But let's test them on your digital twin first.

And then see how how that interacts with your injuries. Yes, sir. And your own personal allergies. Those are things. And then what's cool.

There's if you want to talk business. You can ups up charge and be like, well, we can now, and tell what you're going to feel like in a certain time of day and a certain weather or certain height because we've got your digital clone mapped out. And this in this reality.

So it's like now expect your heart rate to be a certain rate because you are operating in a different height. Like there's so many cool things that you can do with this with this technology. The amount of data that we as an industry are getting right now with the wearable technology. Oh, yeah.

Is a myth. So, you know, so many people have Oras, Woops. Yes, sir.

All kinds of all kinds of wearables, Apple Watch, Google products, Garmin, almost infinite.

And now the challenge is to make use of that day to make it actionable. Yep. And that's what we're here for. We really want to make that actionable for the normal person. Yes.

That's a person with a middle level of tech-sabbingness. And I completely agree. Rudy is is is completely preaches this when he has a sick day, which is very rare. He'll actually send us a stats. I'm like, this is why I'm sick.

He'll he'll send us the entire digital print out. I like to them to the level to someone ever degree. That's like, this is why I'm out of shape or whatever not. It's a great dream now. But I mean, like, this is why X, Y, Z happened today.

Well, remember, Rudy's video. He's training for an Iron Man. Oh, yeah. For sure. He completely converted his office into just his gym.

You got to cut through the gym through the ball pit to get to his office. So that man is on a mission. And yeah, I actually met, I met, let's call it happy, happy Rudy, that really loved cheese. And now when we were introduced to each other after after I went on my sabbatical production,

we came back and shot it filming legacy makers. And that weight loss is just a whole new confidence. Because I also was a little plumpy and recently losing weight. That is so important for the confidence of the soul and the heart to feel good, look good, and operate well. Do you feel like when people are happy, they're just operating well?

“And do you feel like it's important to track when a person is their happiest or they can form even better?”

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's good to reward that happiness with success. Absolutely. And I think that's what I found. I, you know, I track my life, especially for the past six years.

And so I started running Iron Man as a keeping track of of my performance. I'm the happiest when I'm doing the hardest work. Crying up those hills, doing those crazy five hours of cardio is a day getting ready for an event. That's one of the happiest. I can't do that forever.

Physically and mentally. I'm finding ways to do it to keep the happiness up. We're not even if I can only train an hour of day like when I travel. Tony, what is your hustle? What's getting you out of bed?

What is, I actually walk me kind of through your morning superstitions. When I'm excited about something which has been the past six months, I pop out of bed at two, three, four in the morning. Right on. Just a couple hours of sleep.

I know sleep is really important for you. But I can't help myself sometimes when I'm excited. And there's two things that excite me. Sometimes it's a workout. If I'm in the zone for training for an Iron Man.

So that'll be six months before. I try to do one every year. Or it's trained for it. If business doesn't allow me to compete because it takes a week. Then I don't do the event.

But it's still in training mode and in that shape. So that'll get me out of bed.

Yeah, or a good four hour workout.

Swimming the ocean in the morning. Something like that. Or work. I come out of bed. Jump out literally with an idea.

“Go straight to the computer and start working.”

And some of you friends have seen me do that and then surprised. What is he doing it? One in the morning getting out of bed. We're going to bed at the stage. Yeah, yeah.

It's fantastic. And that energy is contagious to others. Absolutely. Really one of the reasons I started doing is being a fitness influencer was kind of a joke. Dude, my Iron Man mentor challenged me to spread the good word about how one could do that later in life.

You got that athletic in the toughest sport out there. And even though I'm kind of shy, I found pleasure in communicating my daily training regimen. What time I would get up? I would film it. What workouts?

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