Thomas Drew is co-founder of 1AND1, a mental health and wellness company whose purpose is to drive behavioral change through expert-driven content, technology, and services. The company’s website, 1and1life.com, provides original articles and product reviews on health covering what the company describes as “the seven dimensions of health” (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social, financial, physical and environmental). 1AND1 also produces a podcast called “Off the Cuff with Danny LoPriore,” which is described as “an unapologetic, unrelenting show about mental health.”
I wanted to catch up with Thomas to hear about the origin story for 1AND1, the progress the company is making towards making holistic health information more accessible to underserved communities, and the importance of providing nutritional information to these communities.
“The way we look at it is that if we can really help people, in their bad habits, create good habits, and have those habits lead them to fulfillment and lead them to their goals, through our technology and through the community and our ecosystem — the statistic that we really built our business around and that I’m always obsessed with is that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year on trying to make people physically well, and mentally well, and all these things… and around 80 percent of these people will still fail to reach their goals. And that’s a huge problem,” said Thomas.
We chat about 1AND1’s plans for the future, which may include an app designed to help users incrementally improve their well-being, discuss present and future partnerships, drill down into 1AND1’s demographics, and explore the company’s social impact ethos.
“There are so many statistics that I could just go through where it’s like ‘oh, my goodness, we’re going through a crisis,’ and, not just that, people are truly realizing that if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. One of my favorite quotes is ‘the man who is healthy wants 10,000 things; the man that’s sick only wants one thing.’ And I’ve been there. And until you’re there, you don’t really understand that, but when you get there, your really realize the value and the importance of holistic health — of the mind and of the body.”
