Win At Business And Life In An AI World

Could This Simple Shift Be the Key to Your Next Breakthrough? (Episode 248)

Blair LaCorte is a dynamic business executive who after being raised by two entrepreneurs has taken a path less traveled, unless of course you were Forrest Gump!

Blair has held CEO or “C” level strategy or operating roles in companies such PRG (largest live entertainment production company), XOJET/Vista (largest private aviation company), TPG (one of largest PE firms), Autodesk (largest CAD SW company), and Sun Microsystems / Oracle (largest workstation HW company). In addition, Blair has taken several companies from start up to IPO such as AEye Technologies (1.5b IPO in 2021) and VerticalNet (#1 IPO in 1999).

Blair is currently an Astronaut in training for Virgin Galactic where he expects to fly in 2026. He is the Vice Chairman of the Buck Institute, the world’s leading research organization on longevity and aging as well as Co-Founder and Facilitator of a highly rated Mastermind group of 40 global CEO’s.

What you will learn

  • The value of self-awareness in achieving personal and professional growth.
  • How adaptability and resilience can lead to unexpected opportunities.
  • Why meaningful relationships are essential for happiness and success.
  • Insights on using AI and technology for health and personalized care.
  • Lessons on balancing career risks, timing, and personal authenticity.

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:00:37 – 00:01:16

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today I have with me Blair LaCorte. Now, Blair has one of the most fascinating bios I’ve ever read, and I was trying to put him into boxes, but he’s got so many boxes that, um, I, uh, just decided not to put him in a box, and we’re just gonna have a chat today about what he’s done in life, and he’s done some amazing things including, um, basically taking on Trump and, uh, Also hiring him for The Apprentice because he’s behind one of the biggest entertainment companies in America. Anyway, we’re gonna have a chat about longevity, about space, and on it goes, so. 

Jeff Bullas

00:01:18 – 00:01:29

I’m just gonna hand it over to Blair now. Blair, can you actually tell me your story because, uh, thumbnail sketch, because it’s absolutely fascinating. And um let’s, let’s take it from there. 

Blair LaCorte

00:01:30 – 00:01:57

Yeah, hey, listen, first of all, thank you for having me on, and it’s um it’s a holiday here today and it’s also inauguration Day, so there’s a lot going on on, on this side of the, of the pond. Um, and, uh, I also appreciate, you know, we had a little bit of a chance to talk before this interview about your perspective on life and also You know, taking a look at the hero’s journey and learning lessons from, you know, philosophy as well as uh business. So, I’m, I’m excited to talk today. Yeah, 

Jeff Bullas

00:01:57 – 00:02:26

so one of the things you did mention was that people separate business and life, and, uh, I think one of the little chats we had prior was that, that, that’s just part of being life. So, um, but give us, um, take us from the beginning. I believe you were living on the East Coast and went to Dartmouth and, um, East Coast universities and did a bachelor of Science and Business. So, just give us a quick snapshot of your life and, uh, what brought you to here today. 

Blair LaCorte

00:02:26 – 00:02:49

Sure. And, you know, and listen, I’ll start with, you know, I, I was, I’m a big believer, um, in, you know, analogies and framing, uh, because I think that, well, we all learn differently, if we can understand the story, there’s pieces we can, um, we can learn from everybody. I, I used to love reading biographies when I was younger. It didn’t matter what it was on, um, I would learn something about myself or I’d learn something about the world. So, 

Blair LaCorte

00:02:50 – 00:03:16

You know, one of my, uh, the biggest influence in my life really was my dad, and I’ll, I’m sure I’ll mention him a couple of times in this. But one of, um, you know, the most poignant, um, discussions I ever had was with a high school coach. And I was, I was an OK athlete, um, you know, and I’ll explain why I had some problems when I was younger. So physically, I wasn’t as developed or as strong as many of the other kids, but I really wanted to play, and I really wanted to be part of something. 

Blair LaCorte

00:03:17 – 00:03:42

And he came to me one day and I said, you know, he goes, you’re really trying hard and you’re working hard and you’re, you’re pushing yourself, he said, but let me tell you that if you really want to be a champion, and champion is relative, to be the best that you can be in this life, then you have to start with self-awareness. I said, Well, what do you mean? I, I said, you know what, my stats or things like that, he said, No, you have to understand who you are and why you’re doing the things you’re doing. 

Blair LaCorte

00:03:42 – 00:04:11

Because once you become self-aware, you’re gonna realize, you know, how you work. And once you realize how you work, you can actually optimize that to your sport or to your business or to your family, and they can help you be better. But if you don’t know who you are, they’re not gonna be able to help you. What they’re gonna do is gonna give you the standard things that would be an average, and you’re not average, right? So I said, OK, well, what’s the second step? And he said, well, the second step for most people is disillusionment. 

Blair LaCorte

00:04:11 – 00:04:39

I said, why? What do you mean disillusion me? I just want, you go on, you want to sit down and think about myself and talk about this and figure out why, why would I be depressed? He said, because you’re gonna realize, you, you know, you’re not perfect and you got a long way to go, and you’re afraid of things, and that girl doesn’t like you, and, you know, you’re never gonna be as strong as that guy. So most people give up because once they really dig into who they are, they actually try to optimize their dreams backwards. 

Blair LaCorte

00:04:39 – 00:05:07

To what they think they can do, not who they wanna be. And he said, you know, said all life is about growth, right? And growth mentally is cognitive dissonance. You gotta push yourself and be uncomfortable and growth physically is about building muscle. It’s about ripping. So there is no growth without pain. Um, you have to push yourself, right? And so I said, OK, well, if disillusionment’s in my future, what’s the next step? Um, and he said, look, the next step is very simple. 

Blair LaCorte

00:05:07 – 00:05:50

It’s tiny little steps. They really don’t matter, but you got to pick one thing at a time and you gotta keep moving forward because one of the, you know, the truths of physics is that humans’ body needs to be in motion for anything to function. And so it’s about motion, it’s about momentum. And you may fall back some points, but it’s really about your recovery time to make tiny little steps. Everybody wants to be an overnight winner. Um, but winning isn’t overnight, and that’s just part of, uh, you know, when you look at the misinterpreted Buddha quote of life is suffering, what he really meant was, life is application of of growth, and therefore, 

Blair LaCorte

00:05:50 – 00:06:41

It’s, it’s something you, you know, that you have to do that’s hard. And I’ll leave you with one other thing I heard many years later when we were doing a study of happiness. Um, when you look at the multiplier on happiness, it turns out that you can be happy winning the lottery. You can win it you want it, you were happy. It tends to be the half life of that happiness is very, very quick. People who work hard to achieve something and then achieve it, tend to have a longer half light of happiness, which means that they got more satisfaction. Now, I know we’d all rather, you know, be lucky, and I’m not against that, but let’s not underestimate the fact that your long-term growth um is from working hard and knowing that you actually have achieved something. So there’s my, my 

Blair LaCorte

00:06:42 – 00:07:15

My philosophy, right? So if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna start the interview, I can, I can start you with self-awareness on my part. And if I look at myself, and I, and I’m old now, so I can go backwards and I can say, you know, what, what happened, you know, I would say, um, look, I was, uh, the only child of two parents who went through a divorce. Both of them remarried someone else local, and they both had families. So I was a unique, I was, you know, the oldest, um, but I was also the only. 

Blair LaCorte

00:07:15 – 00:07:45

Right? And especially being the oldest male in a society that had certain expectations, um, I was also a caretaker. Um, well, I look at those two families and what did they do? They both were entrepreneurs, which sounds really cool, but it’s pretty awful because the definition of an entrepreneur is that they’re taking risk and that, and that they’re trying to invent something new and they’re trying new things. And so my um mother’s family, my stepfather and my mother, 

Blair LaCorte

00:07:45 – 00:08:09

Um, he was a Vietnam pilot and uh he came back from the war as a very good pilot and with a drinking problem. So my mother being smart, said he doesn’t drink when he flies because he knows you can’t drink within 24 hours after you, before you fly. So they built an airline and she was on the phones every day and she got us flights. But every month, we made our rent or we didn’t make our rent and 

Blair LaCorte

00:08:09 – 00:08:54

It was, you know, eat what you kill. My dad actually was the opposite of a service business. He was a consultant, uh, a human resource consultant. He was a recruiter in those days. Um, it was not a, you know, a glamorous job, but it was a very steady job, and he hired all the housewives in the neighborhood, and they all helped out, right? They part-time and they all helped out and Um, again, you eat what you kill. So, what I would tell you about my self-awareness is that I grew up with 8 brothers and sisters, staff, stepbrothers, half-brothers, half sisters, two families who you couldn’t differentiate them because I would take siblings back and forth. Um, an alcoholic, you know, violent, you know, stepfather on one side and 

Blair LaCorte

00:08:54 – 00:09:33

A father who was always trying to help the world and help people and give them jobs. And so, at the end of the day, what would you expect came out of that? Someone who was very good in finding out at a, at a, at a dinner or at a party, what everyone thought and making sure that no one thought, um, was always the one who was the peacemaker, was always the one who was taking care of people. So, while I did suffer, I got chances to really grow because I grew as a person, but I also got to understand asset-based businesses where you buy assets like planes and helicopters, and they need to be utilized every day, or you lose money because you owe money on them. 

Blair LaCorte

00:09:33 – 00:09:52

Or service businesses where, you know, there’s no assets, but you’ve got to eat what you kill and you’ve got to keep bringing in revenue, so you’re in the sales business, always trying to get new clients, um, and how those businesses actually work. By the time I got out of high school after working since I was 11, I decided this sucks. 

Blair LaCorte

00:09:53 – 00:10:21

So I’m gonna learn business because this can’t be business because this seems like chaos. And so I got into college and went to undergrad in business, and I got out of college and I found my, a training program, so I could go to school at night for GE and learn business. And then Jack Welch, the CEO liked me. I was a tough kid. He helped me get into, to business school and I went and got an MBA to learn business. So I learned business, only to learn that at the end of the day, 

Blair LaCorte

00:10:22 – 00:10:52

You can learn business skills, but you can’t learn business. And so you just gotta get out there and do it because it’s an apprentice sport. Um, so I would say that’s the 1st 3rd of my, uh, my life, and I think a lot of people look at that and think, wow, that was great. He achieved something. What I achieved was learning what I already knew, that business was about people, and that, yes, those skills did help me later on. Um, but, you know, they’re not for everybody. You know, you don’t need. 

Blair LaCorte

00:10:52 – 00:11:20

MBA or an undergrad in business. I did, because I’d already been mistrained. I had already been playing around without any rules. Um, but for most people, I, you know, with my kids now, while all three of them have ended up in college, I, you know, one of them dropped out for a couple of years and it didn’t bother me at all. Because, uh, you know, I’m a little, you know, depending on who the person is and depending on what your goal is, education is um nice for some people and uh, and 

Blair LaCorte

00:11:20 – 00:11:43

You know, probably suboptimal for others. So that’s the first half, uh, 1st 3. The next 3 was working really hard because I had an imposter syndrome, you know, that I, you know, came from, you know, although people in the, in the, my neighborhood may have thought we were well off, I knew that we barely got by, right? And so I worked really hard. I, um, 

Blair LaCorte

00:11:43 – 00:12:06

Went into consulting, which is most people do because it pays your bills from your MBA loan, um, and I decided not to go with a big firm called McKinsey, even though they were another training program. It would have been great for me. I just didn’t want any more training. So I went on with a 20 person firm and I said it’s time for me to jump in the water and to 20 people, no one’s gonna train me, either I’m gonna make it or I’m not gonna make it. 

Blair LaCorte

00:12:06 – 00:12:33

Um, and so we built it to 1800 people and we became the largest in the world. Um, we were at the right place at the right time. As my dad would say, sometimes, you know, would you rather be lucky or smart? You always want the macro to be going with you and you’d always like to be lucky. But in reality, um, if you don’t have that, being smart in a down market or being smart when you can’t get a break is no good. So, I picked the right market at the right time. Change management was big. 

Blair LaCorte

00:12:33 – 00:13:11

Um, I was unsophisticated, so when the head of G strategy called me and said, I’m going to a new company, would you like to come over? And I was happened to be reorganizing Mobile Canada, which was an upstream, you know, you know, exploration business. He said, come join me at sun. I thought, I’m on a pay phone. I gotta get the plane. I’m in. I hung up the phone. I made a mistake. It wasn’t Sun Oil. It was Sun Microsystems, one of the largest tech. But once you’ve quit your job and when you travel 5 days a week and you missed it the first weekend, you were home, what the company was, after 2 weeks it was too late. So I just showed up. 

Blair LaCorte

00:13:12 – 00:13:39

And I, I said, you know, I decided a consultant can go in any business and act like he knows what he’s doing as long as he asks questions. So I went in and it turns out that I was the head of strategy for a 33,000 person company. And as I walked down the, walked down the aisle, um, I looked to my right and there was a guy in a hockey uniform who turned out to be Scott McNeilly, one of the most famous entrepreneurs in high tech who built Sun Microsystems. On the left was uh Bill Roduch running HR. 

Blair LaCorte

00:13:39 – 00:14:25

I’m yelling at someone, which, uh, I remember from my childhood, but that was funny for an HR guy. Um, I walked down a little further, it was, uh, you know, Eric Schmidt, who eventually went on to run Novell and then Google, um, running R&D and, uh, then on the left was, uh, Xander who went on to run Motorola, and Carol Bartz, who went on to run, you know, Autodesk and, uh, become the highest uh ranking woman in high tech. So, again, when you’re lucky, Don’t question it. So, I stayed on and um in a very uncomfortable situation and found ways to added value, and my value tended to be in how tech people got along with each other because there were enough smart tech people. And so I figured out ways to build businesses. 

Blair LaCorte

00:14:25 – 00:14:49

And then I did that over. We went, I took over, we took over Autodesk and made that’s now, uh, you know, one of the largest software companies in the world. Um, I went on from there to do a, a startup and which we sold to become one of the largest database companies, um, and then I went on from, uh, from there to, uh, to venture capital and then uh from there to do an IPO. 

Blair LaCorte

00:14:49 – 00:15:17

Um, in the ’99, we were the number one IPO in 1999. Again, you can see a theme, picking the right place at the right time is good for your career. Um, and then after that, when I left, I, uh, joined a spin-out that a friend had done, and whether you call it lucky, it’s pretty unlucky. Um, the spin-out was defense technology, we were turning it into logistics for Target and Walmart, but the second you go to war, they want their defense technology. 

Blair LaCorte

00:15:18 – 00:15:47

And so we went and we were the tip of the spear for Afghanistan in Iraq, um, and basically ran all force deployment. Um, getting done with that, I actually didn’t take a job, um, because I was burnt out and I thought I had PTSD, um, but I turned down jobs for about 6 months, and it turns out that when you turn down jobs, um, that people think you must know something they don’t know. And the firm, one of the firms who kept offering me jobs with their companies was a 

Blair LaCorte

00:15:47 – 00:16:16

Very large, uh, uh, private equity firm called TPG, one of the top in the world, and they gave me a shot, and they just brought me in out of the blue, um, and work on the venture fund and then eventually we started the growth fund. So I’d say the middle of my career was a rocket ship of always say yes, every job I took was through a relationship. So everyone who keeps thinking their resume or their LinkedIn, um, is gonna save them unless you’re extremely technical and extremely focused. 

Blair LaCorte

00:16:16 – 00:16:52

Um, in your skill set and you happen to be something someone needs, a recruiter like my dad looks for people when there’s jobs out there, but they don’t look for general people, they look for a very specific spec. So, I will stop there, because that was probably way too long in the first two halves. And the, the last third after the TPG thing was me not being in technology and not in in investing, but in, um, taking technology and investing and jumping in the In other companies, but I will say that if anyone has never been in private equity, the ability to go buy things like we bought. 

Blair LaCorte

00:16:53 – 00:17:20

We bought uh Continental Airlines, we bought, um, we started Ryanair, we, uh we bought GrowE, we bought, um, IBM and merged it to create Lenovo, all the IBM technology. We, we bought, uh, Burger King, we bought Alcoa. Um, it is amazing when you can actually see and be exposed to these execs that during change, how they act and how they work. Um, so I learned a tremendous amount. 

Blair LaCorte

00:17:20 – 00:17:47

Um, I was an operating guy, so I got to go down and help them, um, but you learned a tremendous amount about how people act during change. Certain people are good when there’s a steady state and they’re excellent leaders and they make excellent decisions and they develop people, um, and some people are really good during change. Um, and one of the questions that everyone on the podcast should ask themselves is that changes over time, can change over time, um, but at a certain point, 

Blair LaCorte

00:17:47 – 00:18:24

You know, where do you want to be and what do you want to do? Because, um, they’re very, very different um types of jobs, um, making it work or changing it up. And uh I’ll leave you with uh something that I think confuses a lot of people. If you look at all my jobs after that, they were either restructuring or growth, and they say, well, they’re very different. Restructuring means they’re messed up. And you’re buying something cheap and you need to fix it, and growth means they’re doing great and you need to grow them. Let me just tell you, they’re the exact same company. When you need a restructuring, you’re gonna replace about 60 to 70% of your exec staff because they didn’t know what to do, so they’re struggling. 

Blair LaCorte

00:18:25 – 00:18:54

When you’re in a growth company, you’re gonna replace 60 to 70% of your exec staff over the first two years, because if they knew how to grow the company, they would have already done it. So, it’s all about change, right? And there’s, again, certain people who are better in change. That doesn’t mean you don’t want, you want to get rid of everyone. It’s just that you change the dynamics of your team and your tribe. So, that’s, you know, kind of my, my career, everything past that was running, you know, the world’s largest live entertainment tech company. 

Blair LaCorte

00:18:55 – 00:19:21

Um, you know, I did the Olympics and the Super Bowl and the, you know, the Grammys and, you know, U2 and people like that, interesting business, running the fastest growing private airline, which we turned in the world’s largest private airline, private jets. Um, and then I went and did, um, autonomous cars. But all of those are taking technology and people and applying it to either a restructure or growth company. 

Jeff Bullas

00:19:21 – 00:19:41

Right. Yeah, it’s fascinating in terms of um uh in terms of how much luck can play in people’s lives. And um essentially saying yes to luck or saying no to it, and I think you’ve maybe got a skill at picking the right things to choose and say yes to. Or, 

Blair LaCorte

00:19:41 – 00:20:13

or I was desperate enough in my early career, let’s just be clear, I did not, you can’t kill a man born to hang. 2, I needed a job, and these people are offering me jobs. Now, let me tell you an example, that’s because I want people, you know, not to think that I’m that smart, right? When Sun hired me and I realized it was in a big tech company and I, and I just gone from, you know, a consulting firm to a 33,000 person firm, they came to me the first day and said, we would like to give you, there’s an executive program, and we, you can choose. You want $10,000 more in salary or 10,000 more options. 

Blair LaCorte

00:20:14 – 00:20:44

And I thought, do not smile, do not smile, do not smile, act like you’re a professional. Of course, I picked $10,000 more in salary. That stock would have been worth $2 million.02 years later. So when you don’t have a choice, you choose to say yes. What, what I always tell people is you should use a little bit more of that. Right, when you’re not under pressure, which is, you know, if the macro is going. 

Blair LaCorte

00:20:45 – 00:21:05

Then my dad would say, you’re either gonna learn or you’re gonna earn. If the macro is going and a lot of people are going in this industry, it doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna make a lot of money. It does say a lot of money is gonna go into the industry and you’re gonna learn something. Um, and you might, by the way, you may earn something, and if you’re doing both at the same time, that’s what I call real luck. Now, the key to life is not to burn. 

Blair LaCorte

00:21:06 – 00:21:44

So learning and earning, you can keep going. But the second you burn yourself out or you stop or you burn your bridges or you’re an asshole, now all of a sudden, you’ve stopped the momentum. So, you know, think about your winning if you’re just learning. I know people get upset with social comparison, they go, I should be making more. OK, well, that the world isn’t fair sometimes. So if you’re learning. The next job you’ll make a lot more, right? Take on more when you don’t feel you’re being paid enough, that means you double down on your flexibility to do more because they owe you. So that when you leave there, you are better. 

Jeff Bullas

00:21:46 – 00:22:05

Tell us about um your experience with PRG and The Apprentice and uh Trump because that’s a fascinating story that we discussed before we hit record button. And that company was PRG which is the largest live entertainment production company in in the world. How’d you get into that and tell us that story that you told me. 

Blair LaCorte

00:22:06 – 00:22:51

Yeah, well, you know, that actually happened, you know, the running into, to, um, to Trump over the years happened both in the airline business. Our small airline actually, you know, that we struggle along, um, but made it work, competed against the Trump shuttle from Boston to New York, which was a terrible business model for him. Um. Um, also, later on in life, we also, um, competed in, uh, at TPG and we also invested heavily in the entertainment business. So, you know, we did, um, you know, run into him as he moved into more entertainment. And the lesson I learned from that was, uh, two people, um, Richard Branson and um 

Blair LaCorte

00:22:51 – 00:23:33

And Donald Trump actually had reality game shows. Um, Richard Branson tried to have a very, very thoughtful show. Um, if you, you only ran two seasons, so you probably don’t remember it. Although you would remember the woman who came in 2nd on their first season was the one who invented Spanx, who became very good friends. The guy who won it. was a guy who started a company called Love Sack, which is a terrible name, but it was couches. And by the way, they’re still around, and he made it, he made it work. Um, but, uh, Richard tried to do a show that was really about, uh, giving people knowledge of how to run businesses, and it wasn’t as entertaining. 

Blair LaCorte

00:23:33 – 00:23:59

Um, with, uh, with Donald Trump, he came in off a very bad loss and needed to make some money, and he was open to coaching on, um, you know, how to actually activate people, how to activate people. Um, for a lot of people who don’t understand reality, um, reality was a summer filler, right? Why would you do it? Because the people, you know, the actors were on. 

Blair LaCorte

00:23:59 – 00:24:29

Um, on break during the summer and you’d give the production teams a break, and you needed to do a cheap filler, um, but you also needed to do something that you could get people and switch people out. It didn’t have to be a cast that, you know, stayed consistent and, you know, wasn’t a big thing with SAG and everything, I did it. What we found out later on about reality is, again, it’s like the guy who invented Post-it notes for 3M. He was trying to do something else, and he found this glue and found out, oh, I made a mistake. I, I invented a Post-it note. 

Blair LaCorte

00:24:30 – 00:25:19

Reality was a mistake. We thought it would just be a very cheap uh filler. What we found afterwards was that because we didn’t use fixed cameras in studio, that when you held the camera, there was a micro shaking of the camera, and that activated people’s brains to pay attention. We couldn’t see it, but it activated people’s brains. And this whole idea of inconsistent reinforcement, where someone flips over a table out of the blue. It was surprising and what it turns out to is that both in gambling and in entertainment when you’re surprised to the positive, like either you win money or someone does something you thought that was awesome. I would love to do that someday, yell at someone and throw, you know, jump over a table. It turns out that your brain gets 10 times the dopamine and serotonin. 

Blair LaCorte

00:25:19 – 00:26:07

So you start to get addicted to it. We couldn’t figure out why people liked reality and why even more than that, they liked the villains just as well as they liked the people who were good. And it turns out just like in wrestling, it was because they liked that element of surprise and audacity, because it took them out of their life, and it brought them to a different place, kind of like a fairy tale or a myth. Right, kind of that, let me not think about my things every day. So, uh, Donald Trump became very adept at figuring out how to actually do that and we got his family involved, um, in it to add more drama and, uh, you know, you, you take a look at where we are today, um, it is not unexpected and I think it was in. 

Blair LaCorte

00:26:08 – 00:26:48

It was right after the Reagan election in the United States, the RAND Corporation did a study and said that with the advent of uh media that we would need people that were more entertaining to be president because the complexity of the job is too much for any one person and therefore the application of people being inspired or surprised or. Thrilled by them would be bigger and bigger and bigger and so um they they said that it would probably be business leaders or it would be entertainers or it would be sports heroes. It turns out that sports heroes were too young when they retired. It turned out that business leaders ended up having the wrong temperament. 

Blair LaCorte

00:26:49 – 00:27:16

For politicians because they wanted to get things done and government sometimes can wear you down by, or political campaigns can wear you down by not getting things done. And it turns out that entertainers were very good at actually dealing with, um, you know, this whole idea of ambiguity and staying focused on projection. And so, again, you know, you can like Donald Trump, you could not like Donald Trump, we can have our opinions, um. 

Blair LaCorte

00:27:16 – 00:27:44

But it was not a surprise that we have people who can emote, whether it’s anger or love, um, and that we can have people who their center of gravity lies more in the uh activation than it does in the execution um of things. Um, so my, my, my personal, personal opinion is that this is here to stay. So, you know, if we’re in a democracy, you need to understand it and figure out how you wanna deal with that. 

Jeff Bullas

00:27:45 – 00:27:55

So that the lesson from that is if you actually want to be President of the United States, you need to actually become an actor first and then get into a reality show and then actually then go run for president. 

Blair LaCorte

00:27:55 – 00:28:12

Um, could be, but, you know, take a look at, um, and I, you know, you hate to bring up terms like this because they’re so charged, but if you look at Adolf Hitler, um, he was a, you know, failed designer and, uh, an actor, right, who figured out when he went through training on how to be a great orator. 

Blair LaCorte

00:28:13 – 00:28:42

Yes. I mean, that was in the day before, maybe the, you know, the social media and the TV we had today. But if you look at some of those propaganda films, and you look at the cadence and the, and the execution of, uh, of things, and you looked at the activation of anger, um, look, anger motivates people. Um, and so the world is in a, in a weird place right now, but we’ve been in weird places before, and we’re gonna work our way through because, you know, my philosophy is humans, um, 

Blair LaCorte

00:28:44 – 00:29:13

You know, we, we like to push ourselves to the edges and we like to push ourselves back to the center, and there’ll be cycles. So, you know, that leads us to something we talked about, which is I know what you wanted to talk about today, which is my biggest, um, point to, to kids that I’m mentoring or the people that I work with is, you know, let’s make this clear that business is just a sport. OK. And anyone who thinks it’s more than a sport will not be happy the day they die. 

Blair LaCorte

00:29:14 – 00:29:48

OK, because at the end of the day, um, we are all about, you know, what we do, you know, with, you know, our relationships and what we do with our health. Because I can tell you the first segment, when you start to break down and you’re, you’re gonna die, the first thing you don’t think of is, God, I, I, you know, I’ll, I, I better get back to work. I don’t care if I die a little bit sooner, right? And when you look at relationships, um, in fact, I’m doing a terrible job, Jeff, and I apologize because I’m not I’m not even getting you a chance to, to talk, but I’ll tell one more, one more story, right? 

Jeff Bullas

00:29:49 – 00:30:01

Which is it’s all about for me it’s, it’s basically the, uh, for me it’s not about me, this is about you, because I’m fascinated by your stories and the lessons from the story. So, uh, let’s just keeping 

Blair LaCorte

00:30:01 – 00:30:05

it’s like that old phrase, um, enough about me. What do you think about me, 

Jeff Bullas

00:30:05 – 00:30:06

right? 

Blair LaCorte

00:30:07 – 00:30:24

Happy to. Happy to keep, uh, keep talking. But when I got divorced, which was a terrible experience, and I’m sure people out there have had the same thing, um, I know that there are some people out there that actually, you know, there’s this percentage that had good experiences with it, but when you blow up everything that you believed in, 

Blair LaCorte

00:30:24 – 00:30:59

Um, for most of the time, it was blown up before that and it’s very difficult to work your way through that with the person that you blew it up with, right? There are good situations, I would say, in my experience, 80%, um, tend to be, um, either that they enable you, they call it, um, are you gonna make the trauma, uh, a positive trauma? Are you gonna make the trauma a negative trauma where you basically block off areas of yourself or you’re gonna figure out how to work your way through it. And so when I first got divorced, and I stepped down from Uh, the entertainment company. I went on a speaking tour and I was, um, 

Blair LaCorte

00:31:00 – 00:31:21

With a, a guy that was a palliative care doctor that was overlapping with me in a bunch of different places we went to speak. And I learned a lot about his background, and he had helped 1000 people to die. And then on the 1,000th person, he had a birthday party, and he put a coffin in the middle of it, and everyone was really like, is this a theme party? 

Blair LaCorte

00:31:21 – 00:31:48

And then halfway through, we got out of the coffin and said, this is the beginning of my new life. I’m gonna go out and talk to people about what people have taught me about life, right? And that’s what I wanna do. Um, so, 1000 people died and you can look this up, and a lot of people have done studies on this. Um, what do people talk about when they die? OK, so let’s make the analogy to business. If you don’t know what your goals are, you may be surprised where you end up. 

Blair LaCorte

00:31:48 – 00:32:24

Well, let’s assume that our life is a business. Let’s assume that we can look at other businesses, other people, and what did they look at at the end of their life and what were they happy about and unhappy. And people always put these top 10 lists together. These are the 10 things. Of those lists, what I took away from this was there’s 4 things that actually seem to come up a lot, right? And they’re always in the top 5 of people’s 10. Right? One of them is, who do I love and who loves me, right? You know, what did I, you know, do I, did I find love, right? Another is, um, 

Blair LaCorte

00:32:24 – 00:32:43

Did I make a difference? Are people gonna remember me? Now some of that has to do with kids and who love me and some of it has to do with business and some of it has to do with, with charity, um, right? Um, and a third thing, you know, that always comes up is people look at, OK, um. 

Blair LaCorte

00:32:43 – 00:33:18

If I made a difference, did I believe in what I was doing, right? And did I, you know, did I, was I successful at taking something and believing in it and making it happen? Did I have any control of my life? And if I did have control of my life, was there something I could have done? Like, they always get to this bargaining thing, like I, why is it happening to me? It’s one of the things they talk about. Did I do everything I could have to To live as long as I could. Now, the 4th 1, I think is the one that matters the most, uh, because it’s the only one that’s totally in your control. 

Blair LaCorte

00:33:18 – 00:33:48

So you can say, who loves me and love me. You can try hard, you can do the best you can and hopefully there. Right. I mean, and you can say, did I make a difference? And again, you can try really hard and sometimes, you know, you just get unlucky. And you can say, did I live as long as I could have and did I make the right decisions, eat the right things, live in the right place, do all this stuff. But, you know, it’s out of control. The 4th 1 is haunting, because the 4th 1 that always came up is that I live my authentic self. Mhm. 

Blair LaCorte

00:33:49 – 00:34:30

Did I tell people I love them? Did I take the jobs that I really wanted to take? Did I come out of the closet because I was gay? Did I, you know, say what I wanted to say to the people I wanted to say to them? Right? Did I live an authentic life? Now, the reason, again, that’s haunting is because that was really theoretically up to you. Now, I can say there was fear, there was social pressure, there was a lot of things that may have kept you from doing that, but that’s the one that matters, and it’s the one you have complete control over. So, if we’re gonna look backwards on your business career and business is a sport, then let’s just make sure that business 

Blair LaCorte

00:34:31 – 00:35:00

That you do and who you work with gets you to those four things that are bigger than just business, right? And, and so that’s the way I always start with this, OK, you wanna have, you know, you wanna, you know, have relationships, even if they’re only when you’re working with people, you wanna have, you know, the ability to do good things and to feel like you, you made a difference and you wanna have your health, you don’t want to give it all up, you know, die early because you made someone else’s money. 

Blair LaCorte

00:35:00 – 00:35:20

Um, and you want to do it under your own terms. And so that’s the, the, the big thing that I think people don’t think about. And so there’s two components to that. One is working your way backwards, but the second is realizing that health and relationship um are what drives business. Yeah, yeah, 

Jeff Bullas

00:35:22 – 00:35:47

yeah, I, and I, I agree with you in terms of if you don’t have health then it’s very hard to be happy because you’re just struggling every day. You’ve lost your legs, you, you know, you’ve got cancer, it leads to depression, um. And then relationships. In fact, you’ve just hit the nail on the head that I think it’s like Harvard University’s run the longest, um, study on happiness. It’s 90 years in, and every year they go and talk back to the people that they started with, and some have died, of course. 

Blair LaCorte

00:35:48 – 00:35:51

It’s 8080 years old now. It’s the longest running longitudinal study on the 

Jeff Bullas

00:35:51 – 00:36:42

biggest source of happiness is relationships. And yep, that’s it. In other words, and the thing you’d really hit the nail on the head too for me is, have you told people you love them? And um I do that actually with my male mates, which is actually in the male psyche is actually not cool, right? But I tell you male friends, I love you. a lot of people, a lot of them will see it as weird, but for me, I don’t see it as weird at all. It’s factor. And almost everything I do now is based around trying to actually nurture relationships that matter and choose relationships that matter. Um, because at the end of the day, um, that is the greatest source of happiness produced by the 80+ year Harvard study. 

Blair LaCorte

00:36:42 – 00:37:12

And it’s every study, but let me just give some people some hope, which is based in an unfortunate reality, OK? That we all aspire to this. It’s really freaking hard to have relationships because just like a mathematician will tell you, You’re solving your formula about who you are and how you know yourself, and you’re solving someone else’s formula, and you’re coming up against each other, you need to find commonality. That takes work. It takes work with the relationship, and it takes work not only in what you do, but. 

Blair LaCorte

00:37:12 – 00:37:41

What you don’t do and what you expect and what you don’t expect. There’s a, a four-block matrix in psychology called the jury box, right? And what it tells you is that on the top left-hand corner is what I know about myself and other people know about myself, right? And that’s who you are in life. You know it, and other people know it. And it’s, so they, they understand who you are, and they, so they feel comfortable with you, right? Now, if you push down from that, what if I know about myself that other people don’t know? 

Blair LaCorte

00:37:41 – 00:38:07

And that’s basically sharing more, which is more vulnerable. There’s a reason why you don’t share it because maybe you don’t think they’ll like you. Maybe you don’t think they can handle it. Maybe you don’t think you do it. And so one of the dynamics that you deal with on a daily basis is who really knows you? Because if you’re trying to solve your own formula about what you’re doing and all, the only people in your life only know what you’re giving them, and you’re only giving them what you think is advantageous to your survival today. 

Blair LaCorte

00:38:07 – 00:38:51

You’re not actually getting to go deeper and figure out who you are and what your subconscious is causing you to do, right? That’s why people go to therapists. And then people go, I, I go to therapist, and it’s so me talking, they don’t tell me what to do. No, but it’s you talking to another human. And it’s you saying it out loud. And it turns out when you say things out loud about yourself, it brings it from the subconscious to the conscious. And when you bring it to the conscious, whether it’s an aspiration or a fear, now you’re in that jury box of what you can then show other people, because you’ve accepted it and therefore it can be shared and you can process it on a, on an active way. Now, there’s another vector. 

Blair LaCorte

00:38:52 – 00:39:12

Let’s go to the right side. It’s what I know about myself, um, is in one thing, but what other people know about me that I don’t know. I have a blind spot. I am very aggressive when someone brings up something, right? Now, again, it’s vulnerability, but it’s not your vulnerability here because you have no idea that you’re being a dick. 

Blair LaCorte

00:39:13 – 00:39:50

But other people do. They talk about you behind your back and they say, you know, don’t bring this kind of stuff up, or he’s not good at that kind of stuff. Or, you know, he doesn’t like to go out to team dinners and therefore, he doesn’t realize that we talk about a bunch of things because he’s an introvert, and we wish we could share them with him. Now, that is, can I get someone else to be vulnerable to take a chance where they’re gonna come to me and say, look, I, I don’t know if you know this, but you really insulted me the other day. Now, you can, the reason it’s vulnerability to them because you could say I’m not your friend anymore, or you’re fired, right? So being open. 

Blair LaCorte

00:39:50 – 00:40:36

To that also helps you grow and it expands your box, because now you know something about yourself that everyone else knew, but you weren’t actually consciously accepting. And you can decide to change it or not change it. But again, Those are two vectors on the, on the jury box. And until you start doing things that push yourself a little bit further, um, you can’t get closer to people. The average male in the United States has less than one friend, what they define best friend, OK? And the way we define it is even worse. The way we define it, and it may be different in the UK, but the way it’s defined it from the studies that were done in the US is that um it’s the person I’ve known long. 

Blair LaCorte

00:40:37 – 00:41:12

Not how many times I talked to him and not what I talked to him about. Now, the average woman in the US says they have between 3 and 5 friends, but the way they define it turns out to be not how long they’ve known them. Because they, you know, it’s what they talk about and how many times they talk to them. So they can develop a new friend very quickly because if you’re talking about something that I’m really interested and I’m struggling and you’re there for me, I become friends very quickly. whereas guys, it’s tougher for them to become friends later in life. Now there’s also a structural component to that which is. 

Blair LaCorte

00:41:13 – 00:41:50

You know, listen, it’s not fair. I think Title 9 in the US I was a, a youth coach for 15 years, and I coach, girls, awesome for girls to do sports because it teaches you about teams and teaches you about competition. But for men, They also get judged externally by a lot of external factors. What’s your title, how much money do you make, because you have to be a caregiver. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I’m just saying in general this is what the studies say. And you know, who did I marry and do I have kids and are my kids successful? Those are things that tend to be drive a male. They tend to be things that um. 

Blair LaCorte

00:41:50 – 00:42:16

Don’t require friends outside of work or family. Yes. So men tend to, as they get older, used to have more friends when I’m playing basketball with someone and I’m doing things with them, they tend to have less friends. The friends used to come, come to their wife or their kids. Yeah. OK. So when they retire, men died very quickly because they lose that sense of relationship because their anchor was work. 

Blair LaCorte

00:42:16 – 00:43:02

Yeah. And when they don’t have a format to have a relationship, it becomes very, very difficult for them, um, and therefore they get lonely and therefore inflammation happens and, and so forth and so on. Whereas women tend to be much better as they get older, and in fact, if you take a look at the life spans, it it shows that, right, that they, they end up living longer, uh, because of that relationship. Now, what’s the marriage thing you talked about? Um, it turns out, That it is about relationship, even marriages that aren’t perfect. You live longer because you have at least a structure of a relationship. You may not be happy sometimes, but you know that you have a relationship, and therefore, you feel safe because ultimately, 

Blair LaCorte

00:43:03 – 00:43:34

Performance at work, performance on your health, how much inflammation is in your, your body, and performance in um relationships is all based on safety and trust. And so you have to tribalism is all based on, I may not love everything about my life, but I have my tribe, right? And that’s why there’s a huge surgence of men’s groups in the United States. Yeah, not just men’s groups, there’s a lot of women’s groups as well, but even more men’s groups because men are in worse shape. Yeah. 

Jeff Bullas

00:43:35 – 00:44:12

Yeah, there’s a group in Australia called, um, which has been running for quite a few years now called Men’s Sheds. Uh, a men’s shed. So it’s actually been really, really good. But the interesting thing about men, you mentioned about, uh, actually you have to be at work, and basically it’s a little bit, it’s a competition, so they’ve got, they don’t want to look weak, they don’t want to look vulnerable. Um, I do remember a friend of mine, um, used to be a neighbor, and, um, very successful business person, uh, became a lawyer. And I’d ring him occasionally and I’d ring him and he’d go, what are you calling for? I’m going, um, actually just ring to say hi, I don’t want anything from you. 

Jeff Bullas

00:44:13 – 00:44:54

So this is a guy that’s been very hard to actually connect with, in fact, I’ve, I’ve given up because um he just doesn’t get it at all, but, um, and that segues into relationships and you talk the thing about self-awareness um and awareness of others. For me, the best course I’ve ever done was a 6 month counseling course which had 2 components, just 2. It started with self-awareness. And we went to little workshops, you know, within and then we’ve got the larger workshops where you learned about what people thought of you, how you communicated, you grew self-awareness. And you couldn’t be aware of others until you were self-aware. 

Jeff Bullas

00:44:55 – 00:45:30

And so that’s sort of the two components, and it was basically a listening course because the reason I went and did this is because my father was the best talker on the planet, but the most shit listener on the planet. And I, I don’t believe he ever heard me. But he talked to me, and I said, I wanna be a better listener, and that’s what drove me, I said, I don’t want to be like my dad, and this is the thing about learning from others. Um, and it, it was a 6 month course, weekly, um, meetings, it was fantastic, um, changed my life professionally as well as personally. 

Blair LaCorte

00:45:31 – 00:46:18

I thank you for sharing that because dude, that is exceptional that you went out and did it. Not only that you found the course, but that you found the motivation to do it. And this is back to positive trauma and negative trauma. You had a trauma, you were struggling with your dad. You could have taken that as a negative and trauma and it could have closed off yourself, or you could have taken it as a positive trauma that I saw it, he couldn’t do better. Um, but I wanna do better, and I’ve got a chance to do better and therefore I’m gonna go do this. So, you know, we talked, uh, off, off a podcast about longevity. So the number one correlate to health span, not lifespan, but health span, how many healthy years you have, is, um. Is connection. 

Blair LaCorte

00:46:19 – 00:47:07

By far. And in the military, we would call a force multiplier. If you have connection, then what you eat, how you exercise, how you sleep, and the environment that you’re in is multiplied by 10. If you don’t have connection, you can eat well or you can exercise all the time, and you don’t get most of the benefit, right? Now, we talked about this. The reason for that is the connection. You know, um, most mammals have a parasympathetic nervous system, but human’s vagus nerve, which connects our brain to our heart, to our stomach, um, to our, all of our organs, um, is actually very, very different. Um, and in fact, 80% of the traffic isn’t from the body to the brain, which is what most people would intuitively said. My body’s telling me how I’m doing. It’s from the brain to the body. 

Blair LaCorte

00:47:07 – 00:47:35

Um, and that has the size of the neocortex, the size of the brain combined with the vagus nerve is why humans have been able to actually connect in larger groups. Most animals are only able to connect in smaller groups, right? You have to physically be in a, in a neighborhood. You have to interact with another animal so that they understand who you are. We have not only the ability to connect, but we have the ability to imagine and redefine connection. 

Blair LaCorte

00:47:35 – 00:47:59

And what I mean by that is we can say, I’m an Australian, and I, I meet someone in an airport, hey, hey, and we’ve connected. That doesn’t mean we’ll get down to 9 levels intimacy, but we’ve connected to the point where the first thing isn’t that you look away because that’s the first human instinct, because remember, when an animal looks another animal directly in the eyes, it is considered a threat. 

Blair LaCorte

00:47:59 – 00:48:38

So when you’re walking down the street, you look at how many people will, if they don’t recognize your face, look down before they actually get too close to you. Yeah. Because it’s a natural thing that’s built in. So let me tell you the kicker to that, right? It’s something you just said. Is the kicker to that is there, there’s, you know, there’s a lot of components, but there’s 3 that I like to talk about that I think are the biggest. One component is um I’ll go from the backboard. One component is um connecting to something bigger than yourself. So it’s got nothing to do necessarily with you, but it’s got, I’m part of this book club and I’m connected to people bigger than myself. A second is that um 

Blair LaCorte

00:48:39 – 00:49:07

You know, that I have a purpose that’s connected to other people. We feel the same thing and we’re making progress together. But the most powerful is actually the most narrow, right? Which is that having one, now, I used to call it unconditional love, and my, I’m married to a um very famous psychoanalyst, and she would tell me, no one has unconditional love, right? Which is probably the truth, but it just sounds better than uh that you have a dyadic relationship. 

Blair LaCorte

00:49:07 – 00:49:35

Um, but I’ll use the correct term, so in case she ever listens to this, she’ll say that I’m smart. So you need at least one dyadic relationship at any time in your life, and it doesn’t have to be the same one. What’s the one dyadic relationship? You could say, well, I need one friend. I need, but what is a dyadic relationship? It’s that if you have someone that actually you believe is empathetic to you, that cares about you, that hears you, that sees you. 

Blair LaCorte

00:49:35 – 00:50:16

Even if they haven’t been able to help you, them seeing you actually calms down your system because you know you’re not alone. OK? Now, what’s interesting about that is I use the word empathy, and we all kind of understand empathy is caring, like, do I believe that person cares about me? Um, but really the big supercharger in this is in compassion. And there’s a big difference on whether you believe someone’s empathetic to you, and you believe someone’s compassionate to you. And there’s a very different psychological meaning. Compassion takes empathy to the next step, which says, by deed or word, they will sacrifice themselves to help me when I’m in trouble. 

Blair LaCorte

00:50:17 – 00:51:04

They will step in and tell me. They will make an action. They will do something for me that I didn’t even know I needed done because they are compassionate to me. And you say, oh, that makes a lot of sense. They’re not only empathetic, but they’re willing to take risk. Uh, and all of that makes a lot of sense. But let me tell you, the most important piece of that, you can’t believe in compassion unless subliminally you trust someone. And it turns out that most of us don’t trust. So what happens is we could have someone that’s both empathetic and wants to be compassionate to us, but until we subconsciously believe. That we can trust them. 

Blair LaCorte

00:51:05 – 00:51:40

That we don’t get the benefit of their compassion. And this comes back to what you said about saying I love you. Because the first step to bringing from subconscious to conscious that fear is to decide. That you are gonna take a risk with that person and you are gonna say something to them that externalizes this need. Now you love them. And you’re gonna sit there with that detonator, they have a detonator to your soul. Because if they come back to you and say, dude, give me a break. 

Blair LaCorte

00:51:41 – 00:52:08

That’s gonna crush you. But if you don’t externalize it, and you do have these deep issues from your, your childhood with your dad, which we all have, we’ve all, that’s what we carry with us, is that if you don’t find someone that you can talk about that with, and then you don’t find a way that you can both trust each other, um, then you’re giving a lot of stuff up for free, cause everything else you do will not be turbocharged. 

Blair LaCorte

00:52:08 – 00:52:41

And so, again, we can’t control everything. We may have great friends and great lovers, and then they go away. So I can’t promise that you can have that as the optim is. I want that from the time I’m born with my parents to the time I die. Um, yeah, you know, I don’t know what the percentage is, but I can tell you all of us have had heartbreak, right? That’s just part of, part of the thing. But if you don’t go for it, there are some people at the ends of the normal curve that are just very introverted and don’t need any emotional safety. There are also people who are just ah. 

Blair LaCorte

00:52:42 – 00:53:01

I’m a narciss, I need you. I need you, I need you, I need you, need you. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, and we need at least one thing in our life. Now, where, um, most people don’t recognize is pets fill a big gap. Because it’s easier for us to trust them. 

Jeff Bullas

00:53:01 – 00:53:15

Yeah, that’s, and that’s the thing that really intrigues me is the dog explosion. And maybe that’s basically the canary in the coal mine that we aren’t letting ourselves be vulnerable and allowing ourselves to be you’re feeling 

Blair LaCorte

00:53:15 – 00:53:20

nervous that the world isn’t getting easier, it’s getting harder, 

Jeff Bullas

00:53:20 – 00:53:37

yeah. Yeah. So for me, that’s just, I’m watching it because there’s been a, you know, Dog explosion basically is pets in the family and uh it’s it’s almost that pandemic proportions really, there’s are more dogs and humans. And there’s, 

Blair LaCorte

00:53:38 – 00:54:15

but there’s a need. I think you said something that most people don’t think about. It’s not just that it’s great, it is great. I love my dog. I really love my dog. But why is it becoming so much more common? And the reason is that even people who may not have been dog people or didn’t grow up in dogs are starved for connection. And so it’s not a bad thing. You’re just adding more connection and the only time it’s bad is when you also don’t say, That I need it from humans, and this can’t be a substitute. It has to be a complimentary piece. Yes. 

Blair LaCorte

00:54:16 – 00:55:06

Yeah, so, you know, I’ll give you an Australia story. So when, when I was at TPG, we bought a company called Petco, right, which was the biggest pet retailers. Um, we also bought Pet Barn, which is one of your largest, right? And, uh, so I got to see all the research and the research was startling, um, on two sides. One side was the um morphization of animals, um. 80% of people um that had a dog, um, that they got as a puppy would call themselves mother and father. 75% of the people in the US um would buy their dog um Christmas or Halloween costumes. Right? These are really deep seated. 50% of women said they love the dog more than they love their husband. 

Blair LaCorte

00:55:07 – 00:55:40

On the average day, right? So this amorphization, right? The other thing that was fascinating was it was being, uh, that when you looked at where all this stuff was, you know, the new businesses were coming from, like organic pet food, the majority of organic pet food companies were run by women. And they were under $10 million. So all of these blue buffalo and all of these things were, were women led because they felt more comfortable with the fact that, you know, I love my dog and I’m going to externalize that, and I’m gonna do something for the people I love. 

Blair LaCorte

00:55:40 – 00:56:23

They were they were doing this stuff. So, what you’re saying is very true, but it’s been a trend that’s been, that, that was back in 2004. So this has been 20 years we saw this, which is why we got into pet grooming and pet insurance and organic, um, you know, foods and costumes and things like that, because it brought people together. In a way that they, uh, you know, that they could then be even friendlier. One of the biggest drivers back to this connecting with something bigger than yourself, dog parks. Hm. Supercharged, supercharged. People will approach your dog before they will approach you. Yep. If your dog’s playing with my dog. 

Blair LaCorte

00:56:24 – 00:56:33

They will actually come over and then they’ll start talking to you. And you find that you end up in a group of connected friends that are connected through your children. Oops, I mean your dog. 

Jeff Bullas

00:56:34 – 00:56:34

Yeah. 

Blair LaCorte

00:56:35 – 00:56:37

Cats are not so much, right? 

Jeff Bullas

00:56:37 – 00:56:48

I know. Well, it’s interesting. I, I remember a story about 5 or 6 years ago about an Aussie guy, uh, who went to Bali, uh, constantly, and he’d worked out how to pick up women, and it was by having a dog. 

Blair LaCorte

00:56:50 – 00:56:53

Oh, I, well, listen, that’s just tactical implementation of good. 

Jeff Bullas

00:56:54 – 00:56:57

Yeah, he, he worked it out because he was aware. 

Blair LaCorte

00:56:58 – 00:57:43

But you know, look, again, if it brings down the barriers, there’s 9 levels of intimacy that we go through, right? And so what happens is on the first level, um, for threat is do they look like me, which is why prejudice isn’t, is, it isn’t about prejudice, it’s about safety. Right? So if someone looks like you, you’re more likely to believe that they’re not gonna hurt you. But as you work down those levels of intimacy, things like serendipity, um, drop you very quickly, like, oh my God, I just met you on the train and you, your brother went to school with my sister. All of a sudden you start trusting them because, oh, we have something in, in connection. Dogs are one of those things. We have something and I watched the way you treat your dog. 

Blair LaCorte

00:57:43 – 00:58:33

Uh, you seem not as, as threatening to me. Um, but it’s not, you know, something to, to, to keep in mind is that look, at the end of the day, I just want to circle back to where we started. Life is about health and it’s about relationship. And then business is a sport we play. Inside of that. And in fact, when you go into business, one of, one of my mentors, you know, who, who really invented, you know, marketing, modern day marketing, um, said to me one day, look, when you look at sales, sales in a business is really a relationship. And there’s only two things in a sale, math and human psychology. How do I do the math if I’m gonna make money, how much should I charge? What will they pay? What’s the elasticity demand, and why do they want this? 

Blair LaCorte

00:58:33 – 00:59:03

They’re not buying a drill. They’re buying a hole. They’re not buying a hole. They’re buying it to a TV that they needed to put up on the wall. They’re not buying a TV. They’re buying their friends on TV so they feel safe. They’re not buying their friends on TV so they can watch a show. They’re buying, you know, a good night so that I can have sex with my wife. So in reality, they’re not buying a drill, they’re buying intimacy because either they’re getting it through their friends on TV or they’re getting it in a shared experience. And so, 

Blair LaCorte

00:59:03 – 00:59:28

When people buy things, whether it’s B2B, which I spent a lot of time in, or it’s B2C, you have to ask, what is, what is it that they’re really buying and that’s, that’s your human psychology. So it really does still always come back, um, to, you know, it’s about humans. So we gotta stop thinking that it’s not. Um, technology is just, you know, different ways to do it with technology. 

Blair LaCorte

00:59:28 – 00:59:55

Like I would argue that SEO and SCM they were just very effective ways of doing direct mail, right? Um, and now they lose their effect because once people get overwhelmed, then you have to find something new to do. But SEO and SCM, you know, they’re all about how do you engage and activate, what is it psychologically that you’re doing that makes someone think they wanna actually um engage with you. And so if you can’t empathize and see through the lens of your customer, 

Jeff Bullas

00:59:55 – 01:00:22

I know you think your product’s great. I know it, but you have to ask yourself, why do you think it’s great? Do you think it’s great because you invented it? Or do you think it’s great because you use it? And if you think it’s great because you use it, remind yourself of why it’s great and how it makes you feel, because then you’re able to actually connect with someone else. Um, makes it makes them feel that way and they’re gonna be an advocate and a customer. 

Blair LaCorte

01:00:22 – 01:00:38

Which, you know, sort of, uh, that the statement you said about how does make me feel this just reminds me about when you’re doing presentations and talking to people is, I don’t. I can’t hear what you’re saying, but how does it, how does it, how do you make me feel not what you’re saying, basically, I’ve said that really badly, but, 

Jeff Bullas

01:00:39 – 01:00:45

no, I think that’s exactly true. you only remember 20% of any presentation you remember. Yeah. 

Blair LaCorte

01:00:46 – 01:01:30

How did you, yeah, so I can’t hear what you’re saying, but I can’t remember how you made me feel. That’s maybe the best way to say it. So let’s do a little quick segue into longevity, which you’re obviously very involved with and, Really interesting today though, OpenAI has just announced that it’s created a AI for longevity and working with a company and and Sam Altman’s put $180 million in, he’s just announced a, AI designed specifically for longevity, working with a company that said it’s going to actually add 10 years to people’s life. So what are your thoughts on Health and AI and longevity. 

Jeff Bullas

01:01:31 – 01:01:36

Sure, sure, how much time do we have left? Because this is, this is a big, big subject. I’m, 

Blair LaCorte

01:01:36 – 01:01:38

I’m open here, so go for it. 

Jeff Bullas

01:01:39 – 01:02:24

So look, um. You know, I’m a, the vice chair of the Buck Institute, so we’re, you know, a nonprofit, but we’re a basic research institute. So we’ve pioneered everything from ketosis to senescence to autophagy, almost everything that you’ll read or anything you’ll see for a trend, um, we were probably the scientific community that looked at the basic mechanisms. Um, we’re not a translational health. You know, organization, which means that, yes, many of the drugs, maybe they got the basic research for us or many of the activities you do, they learned about the basic research and what they would do and then they, you know, someone applied it to, to something. So I’d say there’s two things, you know, around AI. One is that um 

Jeff Bullas

01:02:24 – 01:03:10

My learning over the last 3 years has been that 90% of medicine is ecometric, which means that it wasn’t done because we invented something and did a 3-stage trial, or whether that’s an exercise or whether it’s a drug, it doesn’t matter. It’s we watched people over a long period of time and we figured out what works and what doesn’t work. That’s what most medicine is, OK? Um, now, in the past 100 years, medicine has Um, Especially around longevity, turned to curing acute illness. So when you look at why the average lifespan of people has gone up, um, it’s been two main factors. One is the elimination of childhood illnesses and deaths. 

Jeff Bullas

01:03:10 – 01:04:06

Because an awful lot of people. So it’s, it’s skewing it. It looks like people are living longer, but in reality, a lot of people aren’t dying earlier, right? So, you know, vaccines, um, and things like that were, were, you know, huge impact, right? Antibiotics, where we could cure illnesses very quickly that didn’t kill you early in life, OK? Um, the second thing that um we’ve done extremely well in Westernized medicine, um, is that we’ve learned how to intervene once you’re broken. So we’ve extended the time of period once you’re already broken. Um, so I want you to think of both of those things as the last 100 years have been unbelievable in medicine, but both of those things are treating something after there’s a problem. Yes OK. So when you look at AI, I predict that most of illness before it shows up. 

Jeff Bullas

01:04:06 – 01:04:57

It shows up in your system. Your system is struggling, it’s struggling, it’s struggling, and then your gene. You know, expresses itself into a cancer. Right? Most of the illnesses, you can see months to years before they actually happen. So when you take a look at big data analysis in AI, um, I, I, you know, we as an organization hired Lee Hood, who with Craig Venter, um, sequenced the genome. He also started a company called Amgen, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Um, he’s also known as, you know, he worked for Bill Gates and ran a systems biology organization and Nathan Price, who’s, is, um, His #2, who’s, uh, hopefully will win the Nobel Prize. What both of them came to was that when you look at the human body, it’s a system. 

Jeff Bullas

01:04:57 – 01:05:20

And there’s some things that are obviously, don’t take poisons, move every day. Those are things that are common, but how you, what you eat and how you eat it, and when you eat it, and how you exercise and when you exercise, they’re all about for your body, which things will your body accept and which things will it not accept, and therefore, it will, your genes will express, and you’ll get an illness and then we’ll have to solve it. 

Jeff Bullas

01:05:20 – 01:06:06

So they have a, uh, uh, there’s a book, the number one book that I’ve ever read, um, and again, I’m biased because we hired them, um, but we hired them because of this book. It’s called, uh, The Age of Scientific Wellness. So in the last 100 years, we’ve learned how to treat illness. Now, what they, the proposition they make is we also have a lot of science that can predict illness, but our healthcare systems are designed as sick care, not as healthcare. 98% of what your pediatrician does or your GP does, is to actually find that you’re sick, so he can help you. Yes. Very small preventive, because preventive is very complicated. And if you’re under um. If you’re over 40 years old, you had zero medical training in the United States on preventive care. 

Blair LaCorte

01:06:06 – 01:06:48

0. That’s very interesting in Australia here, we actually have, especially as you get older, the health system encourages what we call preventative care. In other words, you have an annual blood test that looks at all the markers that are the highest risk factors. And I was talking to a good friend of mine, Steve Rayson, he’s from the UK and over here watching the tennis, he’s a tennis tragic, lovely guy, um. And, uh, he’s spending 3 weeks watching the tennis. I could handle about 2 days, but not 2 weeks. But that’s OK, that’s Steve. We all get different, we’re different people. That’s great. So, he said that in the UK it’s hardly any preventative medicine done at all, whereas in Australia it’s actually a very important part of our system. 

Blair LaCorte

01:06:48 – 01:06:52

But we, you can ignore it. You’re going, I’m not gonna get a blood test for you. 

Jeff Bullas

01:06:53 – 01:07:04

So look, so you guys are, you’re doing one thing, you know, one of the pieces, right? They say predict and prevent, which means to your point, you have to collect data about your body when you’re not sick. 

Blair LaCorte

01:07:06 – 01:07:08

And I notice you’re wearing an aura ring as well. 

Jeff Bullas

01:07:09 – 01:07:13

Yeah, of course. And you know, have you, have you worn a CGM? 

Jeff Bullas

01:07:15 – 01:07:17

constant glucose monitor? 

Blair LaCorte

01:07:17 – 01:07:19

I haven’t done that, no. OK, 

Jeff Bullas

01:07:19 – 01:08:05

so every diabetic diabetes in the world wears it because they’re already sick and we spent a billion dollars developing these things that can track your blood sugar. Why wouldn’t we as healthy people, 15 days, 2 months a year, just like you took your blood test, see how our glucose is spiking and what foods are doing it. Yeah. It’s $150. OK. I’ll tell you at the end, there’s, there’s 10 things you can do that will add, add 10 healthy years to your life, and there’s 5 tests that you could take for under $5000 that will probably reduce your risk of dying accidentally by 50% and increase your probability of living longer by 80%, right? That’s how simple it is. There’s a lot of stuff out there, but you have to actually test things. 

Jeff Bullas

01:08:05 – 01:08:35

When you’re healthy. And in fact, the number one thing is that if you wait till you’re sick and then they do 100 blood tests, because now you’re sick and you go to a specialist, they don’t know how to compare it against what your blood looked like when you were healthy. If you fall down or get in a car accident and they hit your head, the number one way they know to drill a hole in your head to let out the pressure is how close your brain is to the edge. If they haven’t have an MRI when your brain is normal, They take a guess on whether to drill a hole in your head. 

Jeff Bullas

01:08:36 – 01:09:16

So having a healthy model allows you to see when you’re sick, what’s changed. OK? So predict and prevent. The other half of that is participate and personalize, which means you’ve got to actually participate and, and go out and do these things because the good news about Australia is they’re actually doing a bunch of blood tests, but there’s, I’ll give you, you know, A bunch of other things that you could do that will cost you almost nothing, but that you can bring to your doctor. So when you go to your doctor and you say, I’m not feeling well, here’s my test when I was healthy, can you look at this? They’re very good at diagnostic. 

Jeff Bullas

01:09:16 – 01:09:58

That’s what they’ve been told. But without the data, like for instance, you take a blood test, the average uh doctor takes less than 17 biomarkers when you do your yearly physical. And that’s for high-end yearly physical, OK? And one of them is cholesterol. So, your cholesterol is up, your cholesterol is over a certain amount, which is the average. That average is no one’s cholesterol. And it has nothing to do with you. In fact, there’s a standard deviation, you know, on both sides of that average that tells you where you should be. So unless they can see a jump in your cholesterol, then that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Now, even if there’s no jump and it’s high. 

Jeff Bullas

01:09:58 – 01:10:26

The next thing you have to ask is, does it matter? Because your system. So if your pancreas works very, very well, uh, you don’t have liver fatty liver infiltration, that your um A1C is actually down, which is the average, you know, glucose in your bloodstream, um, if your insulin resistance looks good, then you having high cholesterol has no bearing on anything. In fact, there’s never been a test, at least a major test, maybe there’s been a minor one. 

Jeff Bullas

01:10:26 – 01:10:55

That has proven that cholesterol leads to heart attacks. All the tests have been done, that cholesterol for someone who’s had a heart attack is one of the three major markers of having a second heart attack. But every doctor will go to you and say, you have high cholesterol. Um, I didn’t check your genetics because I can check in your genetics to see if, if you’re naturally would have a high cholesterol. It costs less than $250 to check. They don’t know how to do it because most doctors aren’t trained to read a genetic test. 

Jeff Bullas

01:10:55 – 01:11:24

And they say, I’ll put you on a statin. Now, number one, when they put you on a statin, you’re gonna change your blood chemistry. So if your body was designed to have that high cholesterol and you take a statin and lower it, you’ve injected something that will change something else in your body. May not be anything, may be very bad for something else, right? So 12, the statin you take, there’s 6 or 7 different types of them. I can tell by your genetics which statin will be most effective for you. 

Jeff Bullas

01:11:24 – 01:11:43

But what they say is take this, we’ll see if it works and if that’s not working, they give you another one or give you another one, right? Because they’re very cheap, but what you’re doing is you’re throwing drugs into your body and you’re changing your body chemistry and you’re experimenting with things that could be hurtful to you, right? The next thing that you need to know is that your biome. 

Jeff Bullas

01:11:44 – 01:12:09

Only 10% of any drug you take into your stomach is not going to be affected by your biome. And in fact, 25% of every drug you take is eaten by your biome. So I can also take a biome test for $250 and I can tell you whether that statin will be eaten by your stomach, so you won’t waste time. Now that would require me to have you have your genetics already done so I can look at them, and it will require me to have your, see what your biome test is. 

Jeff Bullas

01:12:09 – 01:12:37

Most doctors don’t know how to look at genetics and biome. So they’re looking at your cholesterol and they’re saying, let’s take a statin and, and hopefully it will help you. Now, on average, now let’s just call it an average. Now there’s a point to this ranting. On average, they’re gonna help some people. Why? Because on average, the high cholesterol probably isn’t good, and on average, they’re gonna give a statin to someone that’s probably gonna work. And by the way, insurance pays for it, it’s really cheap. 

Jeff Bullas

01:12:38 – 01:13:18

Do you know why it’s really cheap, Jeff? Because we used to own at TPG, we own the biggest 3, tier testing, you know, was in the world, OK, called quintiles. It’s no longer called quintiles, but, um, because when they tested the drug, everybody knows as a business person that the key is to get an FDA approval because once I get that I can charge more. So how do you get a better FDA approval if the two things you’re testing for is efficacy? And safety. So, you know, let’s see if you get this trick question. How would you optimize if you had to test for both efficacy and safety, what would you do in your test if you wanted to get your FDA approval faster? 

Blair LaCorte

01:13:19 – 01:13:20

Obviously saved him. 

Jeff Bullas

01:13:21 – 01:14:08

You would go farther in safety, so it’s safe for everybody and you would focus on making it really effective for a very small audience in the middle of the normal curve and then you would say that that normal curve has one standard deviation on each side that people who will get some benefit from it. Some will get better than others, but the people in the middle will be perfect. So most drugs that you get are optimized from very, very narrow audiences. And in fact, it was a study done in the US on the top 10 drugs on TV that the top 10 drugs that they advertise on TV have less than 10% effectiveness to the average person who would be looking at this thing, which is why they’re spending the money to put it on TV because it’s got big safety but narrow efficacy. 

Jeff Bullas

01:14:08 – 01:14:43

So and it’s a very, they’re very expensive drugs or statins which are very inexpensive drugs that have the same thing. I don’t think these are evil people. I think we have a system that actually allows drugs to get in, um, this way, but I think if people don’t actually personalize and participate, then they shouldn’t just believe that it’s better than nothing because there’s a lot of different ways to skin a cat. Right, and you, when you get cancer, I guarantee you, you’ll spend a couple of months becoming an expert. Why not become an expert in your own body chemistry? 

Blair LaCorte

01:14:43 – 01:15:07

Exactly. So let’s lean into personalization for the individual in terms of uh doing the right things, OK, so. You said everything’s about average, OK, so. What do you need to do tests that then reveal what your gut biome’s like, what your genes like, what your biome test is? How do you personalize 

Jeff Bullas

01:15:08 – 01:15:45

your? So this is, this is where participate becomes painful. Because you have to participate in this. So what would you do? So, I’ll give you 5 things that you’re gonna say, 00, you may have said them differently and you’re, you’re really articulate, so maybe you convinced me, but I’ll tell you the 5 things and none of them will surprise you. But what I’ll tell you inside the 5 things that you need to do to live 10 more years, um, I’ll tell you that there’s a couple of them that are general that everyone should do, but most of them are unique to you. So anything you do beyond those is unique to you and you better figure it out because you’re wasting your time. 

Jeff Bullas

01:15:45 – 01:16:10

So, um, for instance, I’ve owned, uh, two diet companies in my career. I love diets. Diets are great. Diets mean that um you’ll use my product and when you fail, you’ll blame it on yourself and then you’ll be back in 18 months. Absolutely. They don’t blame on the diet, they blame it on themselves because that diets work for someone, but it may not work for you. 

Jeff Bullas

01:16:11 – 01:16:35

Because your body chemistry is different, but we want an easy, easy answer. So let’s go through. I already told you the first one. You gotta have connection. Number one cause of mental illness under 25 is loneliness. Number one cause of, of death over 60 to 65 is loneliness. Um, number one, none of this other stuff helps you if you’re not trying to figure out where you are. Now, you may be an introvert, you only need one friend. 

Jeff Bullas

01:16:35 – 01:17:07

And you may be an extrovert and you need a lot of friends who aren’t deep, but you need constant contact with people. I can’t tell you, but I can tell you, you need connection and you better figure it out, OK? Um, now you look at the other 4, right? And the other 4, are pretty standard. If you are a machine, and you are a machine, you’re a system. The first thing you’d say is what fuel do I put in that machine? Yep. And how much fuel do I put in that machine? Yep. 

Jeff Bullas

01:17:07 – 01:17:37

And everybody needs different fuel. So let’s do the two or three things that will, that you should do. So if you’re going to put fuel in your body, number one, I want you to sit down and do what the eccometric thing does over 5000 years. Most medicine is by observing ourselves and saying every time I drink. This happens to me. Every time I eat this kind of food, I feel sick to my stomach. Every time I do this, I feel bloated. So the first thing is to ask yourself, 

Jeff Bullas

01:17:37 – 01:18:14

What you like. The second thing is to actually do a couple of tests that are not very um expensive. One is you can do a food sensitivity test now, and it will tell you what you’re allergic to. What does that mean? It means when you eat that food, you can still eat it, but it’s causing an inflammatory reaction in your body. And inflammation, when we went, you know, one of the reasons we’re the most famous um longevity Institute in the world is because 30 years ago, we got it right. We invented the term geoscience and what we said was, um, The number one factor in illness is aging. 

Jeff Bullas

01:18:14 – 01:19:12

If you look at it straight out, I can show you a chart and you’ll say every, every one of these illnesses is caused, gets higher and higher in aging. Now, the reality is that curing those illnesses slows down aging because it flattens the curve. So what are those illnesses? It turns out that what most people in the world would call aging-related illnesses all have one thing in common, and that one thing in common is that diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And arthritis, all of these, and Alzheimer’s, all of these age-related illnesses. Actually are caused by chronic inflammation. Yes, yep. So what if people go, what do you mean is illness causes inflammation because your body needs to come in and fix it. It absolutely does. But chronic inflammation means that your body doesn’t clear it, that you stay in crisis for too long. 

Blair LaCorte

01:19:12 – 01:19:15

Now what happens all the time, yeah. OK. Right. 

Jeff Bullas

01:19:15 – 01:19:43

And so what happens when you stay in crisis too long? A couple of different things. People don’t want to take genetic tests. It’s crazy. Less than 101% of genetic tests are going to find something that’s incurable. And if they find something that’s incurable, most likely they’ll find something that actually can give you extended life. So I get it, we’re all afraid, but that is the worst excuse not to get a genetic test is that you’ll find something. Um, 

Blair LaCorte

01:19:43 – 01:19:56

so what you’re so what you’re saying here is number one, let’s break down the 5. So we get a bit of a structure, um, because I like a bit of structure. Um, so connection, fuel was number 2, is that correct? 

Jeff Bullas

01:19:56 – 01:20:53

Right. Fuel and I, and so, and then you’re gonna, you’re, so it’s movement, fuel, right? Fuel is number one. I’m a machine, what fuel do I put in? The second is not exercise. Exercise humans don’t need exercise. Um, and I’ll explain to you why it’s movement. We need movement. If a machine does not move, it actually starts to actually deteriorate. OK. The third thing we need is maintenance. OK. A machine needs to be maintained and it needs a maintenance cycle, OK? Um, and when it breaks, it needs maintenance, OK? And the fourth is the environment the machine lives in. The um exo exosome, right? What the environment lives in. So, the only thing I was gonna say about genetics is that when you look at it, only 7% of your health is really impacted by genetics. Less than 101% are, are not changeable. 

Jeff Bullas

01:20:53 – 01:21:17

And the rest of them are whether your genes will express in a certain way. 93% is what you do, how you treat the machine, what you put in it, what’s the fuel you put in it, how it moves, um, how it is maintained, and what, where it lives. OK, now you can say there’s sometimes, uh, you know, if you’re poor, you don’t have a choice about all those things. That’s the truth. That’s why poor people live less. 

Jeff Bullas

01:21:17 – 01:21:41

You know, healthy lives and they die soon. So let’s just like say to ourselves, OK, I, I believe you, Blair, you’re a genius. I’m a machine. Now my machine needed connection, but now I’m happy and I wanna live, OK? Or I’m happy most of the time. I wanna live because no one’s happy all the time, right? And so I’m gonna look at fuel. So the first thing to say is, how do I actually figure out what fuel’s good for me? 

Jeff Bullas

01:21:42 – 01:22:04

I take a, a food sensitivity test. It tells me I’m allergic to certain things. Now, sometimes you’re allergic to certain things because your body is allergic to it. You’re just allergic, it’s not a high level, but you’re allergic to it causes inflammation, but that inflammation over time builds into something, right? The second is, I eat too much of the same food, your body will get allergic to that food, you need to take 6 months off. 

Jeff Bullas

01:22:05 – 01:22:25

So I like corn and I eat corn every day. Sometimes your body needs a break, OK? Because that’s where your, your body works, right? Um, another is a biome, right? Now, biome, we’re getting better and better and better and understanding it, but there are more organisms in your stomach than they’re in your whole human body. And every bit of fuel that goes into your body has to pass through your biome. 

Jeff Bullas

01:22:25 – 01:23:11

So if you didn’t do a biome test and you don’t know what your biome is doing, is it healthy? Is it not healthy, um, then everything bit of fuel that goes in your body is going through a filter. It’s like basically saying, I’m going to put it through the screen, but I’m not going to look at the screen at all, right? OK, so first thing is collect some information, right? The next is, there are certain things in fuel that’s very clear, right? One is that, um, If you eat, you know, a variety of food, that’s very good for you. If you eat, um, vegetables, more vegetables, which are leafy with a bunch of different, um, attributes to that’s healthy. Don’t eat all of them, but you have to eat, you know, if you eat fresh food, 

Jeff Bullas

01:23:11 – 01:24:00

That’s important because if you take a look at highly processed food, they not only have chemicals, but when you heat them up, they actually, those chemicals turn into carcinogens. And then the most important thing, the number one thing is something that you already know. It’s called autophagy. We spent a lot of time studying it. If you starve a rat, if you starve a dog, if you starve a human, if you starve a human down to 600 calories a day, he will live 10 years longer. Yes. Done. Now, it may feel like 20 years and he may be miserable, but you will live longer. The number one factor is the amount of calories you take in, because your body was designed over 3000 years to be in starvation. And let’s go back to growth. Growth comes from stress. 

Jeff Bullas

01:24:00 – 01:24:44

So when the body is stressed, it actually finds mechanisms to stay alive. So autophagy drives the energy of left, goes to the center of the cell. Now, we don’t know exactly why, but when the all the energy is going to the center to survive, there’s less energy for misreplications of cancers. There’s less energy for, um, you know, for viruses, there’s less energy for inflammation. So you have actually limited the number of illnesses that you could get and therefore, you’ll probably live longer. So, first thing, take a few tests to get the, get rid of the easy ones. So do a scan. Second is follow these rules, which are pretty general, right? 

Jeff Bullas

01:24:45 – 01:25:14

Third is, let’s experiment with you as a human, because no one is the same. Um, which diet is best for you, your biome will probably indicate that. I can tell you from your genome that you process sugars a certain way. So for people who process sugars directly into basic sugars, carbs are gonna be really bad for them. Because the glucose is gonna spike immediately, um, and so you’re gonna be more susceptible to glucose spikes from carbohydrates. 

Blair LaCorte

01:25:14 – 01:25:21

OK, so let’s, let’s go straight to, you mentioned that you can do 5 tests that will help you live a considered healthful life. 

Jeff Bullas

01:25:22 – 01:25:45

Well, that’s the, that’s the, the ultimate scan. The, the, these are, these are the tests to tell you how to optimize your fuel. Then there’s tests to optimize your movement. Then there’s tests to optimize your, you know, maintenance, um, in your, in your zone. Do you wanna, if we want to, I can skip over those, I can go to you. What would you do to actually level set to catch things before they catch you, right? 

Blair LaCorte

01:25:45 – 01:25:52

thumbnail sketch that that would be. Right. Yeah. So I’ve got, we’ve got the 5 down. I think connection saying happiness first. 

Jeff Bullas

01:25:52 – 01:26:13

Let me, let me just say in movement, it’s not exercise. Um, it’s that you move 15 minutes every hour. If you move 15 minutes every hour, it’s better than 2 hours of exercise. And it’s not, every, every study says the same thing. It’s not high intensity workouts that people sell. If you do at least 10 minutes of high intensity, at least 10 minutes of low intensity day, your machine goes up. 

Jeff Bullas

01:26:13 – 01:26:38

Down and it moves, you’re done, right? Now, adding exercise on top of it, freaking great. But if you don’t do those first two things, it doesn’t matter how much you exercise, right? And then sleep, it’s the time you go to bed every night, match your chronotype. It’s not how many hours because you’re 20% more effective when you go to bed at the time your body wants it, because all your deep sleep comes in the 1st 2 hours of your chronotype, and all your REM comes in the last 2 hours. Right? And the exosome, it’s 

Jeff Bullas

01:26:38 – 01:27:04

You know, what you put on your skin, what you put in your mouth, dishwashing liquid, what do you put, you know, that easy. So, what tests would you take now that you’re doing all the right things, but you don’t want to get caught? Like, you would say, I need to do a complete analysis of my body. I would do a high intensity MRI so that now, no matter what happens to me the rest of my life, you would see what I looked like when I was healthy. Because you hurt your knee, they take an MRI of your knee. 

Jeff Bullas

01:27:05 – 01:27:31

Right? This is the most expensive one. It’s 2500 $3000. It’s very expensive. But if once in your life you don’t take a full body MRI with a high intensity, when you get hurt in any part of your body, they will not have a scan to compare it against because they will only scan the pieces of you that were hurt before, right? The second test is the one you talked about, biomarkers, you know, and. 

Jeff Bullas

01:27:31 – 01:27:54

You know, the best practice is to do it 4 to 2 times a year, but at least 1 times a year, you would do, you know, 50 to 100 biomarkers, depending on what your genetics that you should look at. And you just have it in a spreadsheet, they would have it and when they come in, they would see changes in your biomarkers. I can tell you, you’re gonna get sick from your blood work before you get sick. It’s easy, right? 

Jeff Bullas

01:27:55 – 01:28:17

The third thing I would do is, uh, you know, around maintenances, I would have a wearable, whether it’s the watch or the aura ring, so I can see over time what’s happening to my, my patterns. That test is, you know, 300 bucks. It’s a, it’s a aura ring, right? The 4th test I would do is a biome test. Now, this is less um studied, um, 

Jeff Bullas

01:28:17 – 01:28:45

Than genetics. I would do a genetic test and a biome test. Those are two, right? Genetics, there’s hundreds of millions of records that are anonymized. So now with genetics, I can take your genetics and I can predict what may happen to you from all these other anonymized records, right? We did a study of 5000 people over 10 years. Um, now that was anonymized, so I can’t go back to those people. Um, but now that we’ve seen what’s happened, we could have told them they’re gonna get pancreatic cancer years before they did. 

Jeff Bullas

01:28:46 – 01:29:12

Didn’t understand it until we looked at all the system changes that went into it, right? You have the advantage now to actually look at your stuff and say, oh, those, look what happened to those people, right? The biome is less studied, but there’s still 100 million worldwide biome records. The problem with biome is every region has different things, different things. Um, and then you would do, um, what I’ll call the last one is predictive tests. 

Jeff Bullas

01:29:13 – 01:29:41

OK. There are a lot of protein tests and there’s a lot of blood chemistry tests that have been proven extremely effective, like the SoMA test, efficiency of each organ. You may not um profile as sick, but it may, your lungs may be much less effective than your pancreas. And that means something, right? Your body is making up for something, right? There’s something going on. Or things like the grail test, which is something I funded 15 years ago when I was in investing. 

Jeff Bullas

01:29:41 – 01:30:08

Um, it can predict the top 50 cancers, um, before they hit stage one. Once you hit stage one, we don’t know what to do. 90% of the body, we don’t understand. Remember, we just don’t understand it. So when you get stage one cancer, there’s 12 to 24 methods and mechanisms that are impacted and they vary per person. So what we do is we take chemo and we burn everything, including your immune system, and try to kill it, and then we grow back your immune system. 

Jeff Bullas

01:30:08 – 01:30:33

Right? The reason we do that, even today, is in the old days when I was doing uh uh stuff we invested in a company called Genomic Health, they just give everyone the same amount of, of chemo. They never test for, and you, if the guy was dying, they give him less. If he wasn’t, they give him more. We’re better, we, we now are better at chemo and radiation, but they’re still blunt objects. They kill everything because we, they’re fast growing. 

Jeff Bullas

01:30:33 – 01:30:59

Um, and so we try to get rid of them, but what happens is once you’ve done it, your immune system is never the same again. So even if you don’t get the cancer back, you will have some other issues, maybe it won’t kill you, but it will impact you because your system and we hurt the system. So taking tests like the grail test will tell you things like it looks like you have a predisposition for this type of cancer, and these are the lifestyle changes that I would do now. Does it guarantee you? 

Jeff Bullas

01:30:59 – 01:31:35

No, it doesn’t, but does it take down the probability heavily? It does. Uh, I’ll leave you with one last thing. When we went to seniors and senior centers and we looked at, we can create a synthetic blue zone because people hate senior centers. It’s a place to go to die. I don’t want to go die. Right, I, I, you know, so we said well why don’t we give them this information they, they, they control the food they have exercise, they have all your medical records, they have doctors on site. Let’s create a blue zone and we can do this now. The bad news is 93% of lifestyle changes which people don’t want to do. It turns out that the number one thing that seniors were afraid of was losing their mind. 

Jeff Bullas

01:31:35 – 01:32:22

They can deal with a walker. They can deal with arthritis. They can’t deal with the fact that I may lose who I am. So their number one thing they wanted was something to stop, to, you know, to help me, um, cure dementia. It turns out we spent billions and billions, and we’re not any closer to curing dementia, because once the neurons die, it’s very difficult, um, and, and to, to bring them back. But we’ve made tremendous, um, uh, you know, progress in delaying it 10 years. So, if you know that you have predisposition, or you know that it looks like you’re heading that way, then you can start doing things and now you’re motivated. Right. So, again, that’s my, uh, my, my, my talk for today. 

Blair LaCorte

01:32:23 – 01:33:18

Thank you very much. It’s been an absolute blast. I’ve I’ve learned so much. I’ve taken a lot of notes. Um, and are reflecting what we’ve been talking about and hearing your story. Um, there’s a great quote, um, attributed to Socrates which said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I like that. And you’ve just talked about examining almost every corner of your life from relationships through to health. Being aware of all of those, and I think um and for me, what has become more important in the last few years, and I, Since I turned 50, I’ve lived what I’d call a more considered life, in other words, not taking on doing what society expects of me, not what my parents expect of me, but to live a considered life, and most people don’t. Live considered or examined lives, do they? 

Jeff Bullas

01:33:19 – 01:33:58

And you know, part of it is that, you know, we’re moving so fast, and that technology is having us move faster, that we feel like we don’t have time, and that is in our control, right? And, you know, back to that, you know, thing about when you’re on your deathbed, did you live, you know, the life that you wanted to live? A lot of times, the influences you get about what your job is and should you make more money and where do you live, they’re all coming externally. So I agree with you. I think that that Socrates has, has aged extremely well, and if we don’t watch out for it, it, um, it’s gonna destroy us because in America, the average age is going down for your health span. 

Blair LaCorte

01:34:00 – 01:34:01

It is I’ve been watching. I’ve been watching that. 

Jeff Bullas

01:34:02 – 01:34:42

I mean that’s, that’s a crime. We spend 10 times more, but it’s because we’re not gonna, we’re not, we’re not predicting and preventing, which is what science is for, but more importantly, we’re not personalizing. And participating in deciding what we wanna do with our lives, um, and for the people who have no choice every day who are subsistence workers and they get up and they grind through it and I feel bad for them, um, we need to help them but you can’t help them until you help yourself and so for 50% of the people in the world like you and I and most of us out there who can make choices every day, we owe it. To society to make better choices so we can take care of the people who can’t. 

Blair LaCorte

01:34:43 – 01:35:15

Yeah, I think it’s very important what I call a modern society or any good society is where we look after the people that can’t look after themselves. And that’s something that I think as humans and as society and as governments we need to double down on that because there’s gonna be 10% of people, as a rule of, you know, whatever. That can’t look after themselves, mental health, bad upbringing, you know, whatever it is, um, so I think, you know, just to be kind to each other and, and tell people we love them before we die. 

Jeff Bullas

01:35:16 – 01:36:06

Yeah, I, I, I agree. Look, I’ll I’ll give you the, the statistics on kindness are, are out of control, easily interpreted, which is when you are kind to someone, you get more back in return. That’s not just a saying. You look at the brain chemistry of someone who does something kind, even if it’s you anonymous, they actually, their brain chemistry changes and releases protective mechanisms into the body. Why? We’ll, we’ll finish. Where we started because we are all connected tribally and we all want to be connected and our parasympathetic nervous system wants there to be safety and when we are kind to others, it actually makes us feel good about the world, which calms us down, which allows us to be healthier. So. 

Jeff Bullas

01:36:06 – 01:36:27

You know, random acts of kindness, um, as small as they, they, they can be, um, are, are something that all of us should be practicing every day. So Jeff, it was great to meet you, man. I, I appreciate you giving me all the time and I apologize for the uh number of words, but I’m gonna win the record of the number, most, most words spoken. On your podcast. 

Blair LaCorte

01:36:27 – 01:36:39

It’s absolutely fine. I’m gonna ask you one little question and um Is if you had all the money in the world and I think you’re actually quite well off, what would you do every day if you weren’t paid for it? 

Jeff Bullas

01:36:41 – 01:37:20

I, I would do what I’m, I’m doing now, which is, um. You know, getting up and I went to yoga and, uh, I had lunch with my son, and I, um, helped a couple of, uh, kids in mentorship. And I got to talk to really smart people like you that made my brain work. And, uh, you know, I, I, and hopefully, you know, I’m making money at some of my investments, but, you know, that’s the, that’s an outcome, not a, you know, not, not a driver because You know, if you, if you have good relationships and you help people, um, then you’ll get opportunities to make money. 

Blair LaCorte

01:37:20 – 01:38:04

Yeah. I thought that was the answer you’re gonna give because you’re redoing what you wanna do and um. And also I think you continue to follow your curiosity because it’s been um, Just hearing your story is that you’ve turned, you’ve followed so many curiosities, I think you’re just generally a curious cat and um, And it’s a great way to live. And as Joseph Campbell said, um, there’s no purpose in the world except to follow your bliss, and I think you’ve been following your bliss, uh, for a long time. So it’s been an absolute pleasure, Blair. Um, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, our fireside chat, and, um, your hero’s journey story. That’s been fantastic. Thank you very much. I just, 

Jeff Bullas

01:38:04 – 01:38:06

we’re we’re all trying to make that a longer journey. 

Blair LaCorte

01:38:07 – 01:38:24

Yes, we are, and um. I’ve got a Garmin watch and I’ve got an aura ring and they tell me different sleep scores, but it’s an indicator, not, not the truth, but it’s a good good pick up trend, so yeah, it’s um. It’s great to have the technology, but you’ve got to use it. 

Blair LaCorte

01:38:25 – 01:38:32

Yeah, I, I 100% agree with you. So listen, thank you. And, uh, well, I hope we, we, uh, get to do something again. 

Jeff Bullas

01:38:32 – 01:38:42

I’d, we’ll look, let’s check in in a little, in a few months, a year, whatever, and we’ll, uh, double back and see what you’re up to. And, um, thank you very much, Blair. It’s been an absolute pleasure. 

Blair LaCorte

01:38:43 – 01:38:45

Yeah, for me as well. Take care, Jeff. Thank you. 

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