Blair LaCorte: Beyond the Safe Zone—Leading with Awareness

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Now, today's conversation is with Blair LaCourte. He is a seasoned business executive and transformational leader with a career spanning aviation, AI, technology, aerospace, and entertainment. He's led companies through startups, IPOs, and mergers, and driven growth and strategic transformation and had a couple of exits, one with a B associated with it. So he's done it all. And he's an active investor and mentor and tries to help as many people and companies as he can get to that next level, especially in today's world. So we had a lot to talk about and a lot in common, specifically actually the Celtics right out of the gate. He was late to the podcast because he was just landing back from being in Boston and going to the Celtics game, game two, which I was actually at and we lost.

So that was a little misery for both of us, but it was a cool way to kick things off. But then we really got into, you know, his origin story, obviously, and how he comes from divorced parents and how they were both entrepreneurs and where he got his grit and drive and determination from, and also his focus, not necessarily on money, because we both agree money can't buy happiness, but money can buy freedom. And for both of us, it's a pretty strong core value. So we dug into that a little bit and also how not having money puts you in a position where you actually just can't take risks and taking risks is everything in this life, right? You don't get anywhere unless you can take a risk, but so many people are held back from taking that risk because they're scared of what happens if it doesn't work out and they can't afford anything.

So talked a lot about that. Then self-awareness, which is a huge part that he dives into. And I was curious about the safe zone because he talks a little bit about being in the safe zone so you feel comfortable and so you're not stressed, but how that compares to laziness and what's the difference and what's the fine line? Because sometimes you need to be stressed out to grow. And so we talked about that a little bit and then also just meaningful connections and where this world is headed and how we just got to get so back to connecting with humans here because look, the IQ game is over already. AI has got it better than us. The EQ is where we really have to focus. So look, I had a whole bunch of questions prepped for this interview.

I didn't get to very many of them though because it was just such a natural conversation. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Blair LaCour, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I'm great. I'm great. Unfortunately, in the prep, we talked a little bit about the Celtics, so I did feel a little pressure. You know, we're going to get over that though. We're going to talk about today's the first day of the rest of our lives. Exactly. Like both of us were at the game last night. Game two for those to listen. The game two of the Eastern Conference Finals, right? No, it's the second round. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see.

But yeah, that'll take us in a totally different direction. There is no try. There is only do, as Yoda said. We won't see. We need to be more positive. We want to see, you know, Warriors and the Celtics in the finals. Love it, man. Well, look, I've been looking forward to this conversation as doing the prep because obviously you've got a pretty interesting background here. You've got some pretty cool connections. We were just talking about your, you were here in Boston, you have about 150 CEOs that you were talking to. Yeah. Great, great group of people. Yeah. What was the theme just out of curiosity? What was the theme of that? So we do a thing called a mastermind and, you know, Benjamin Franklin created these masterminds, you know, back in the 1700s.

You know, he was the 15th, you know, son, you know, he was apprentice to his older brother. He ran away from home at 18, two years of formal education. And he decided that when he got to Philadelphia at 18 years old, he was going to invite a bunch of the, you know, the people who ran little businesses around. And every week they would have a little meeting and every month they would have a big meeting. And they would talk about the patterns of business and the patterns of life. And in fact, if you read Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich, he spends an entire chapter talking about how to focus that. So we do a type of a type of mastermind four days a year. It's it's and if at the end, if anyone wants to see the videos from this thing, I'm happy to give you give you the links.

We do it differently in the sense I just ask my friends to come speak. So we had eight Hall of Fame speakers that came for nothing and opened up and it was, you know, it's it rejuvenates me every time I do it. So even if you don't join, if you're not a member of a mastermind, you should grab a group of people and do your own. Yeah, I love that. I mean, and it kind of goes back to like, you know, you are the people that you surround yourself with. Right. So if you can find some people. Absolutely. And your education isn't formal. Business is an apprentice sport. And in fact, sports is an apprentice sport. Right. So let's stop fooling ourselves that we can go. You know, it's great to do, you know, to do pushups is great to read books.

It's great to study. But at the end of the day, you don't learn anything until you're in the game, until you're interacting with people and you're in a meeting and you got people around you, you trust and they're giving you advice and you're feeling it. Right. This is, you know, we've got to remember we're not human beings. I know you've done a lot of podcasts on, you know, how AI is going to change what we do. Absolutely. And it's really going to change what we do if we don't understand what we do best as humans. All right. It's going to replace us. But if you understand what you do best as humans, then, you know, AI is going to be a great tool. Yeah. It's a superpower. I tell people, you know, and you've heard this a million times, probably say, you know, we're not going to get replaced by AI.

We're going to get replaced by the people who you learned how to use it. Right. Absolutely. I resonate with that quote. Yeah. And that's one of those things where it's like, it could either be my, my fear with, with AI right now is, is the laziness factor of us as a species, quite frankly, you know, because now it's so easy to get the answer without learning why that answer is or what the other options are. So if you use it as a curiosity tool, I think it's a super power. You can get, Oh, tell me more about this. What's going on here, whatever. But if you use it as an answer engine, I fear that people, because what I keep telling is we've gone from a, a search engine where Google, and you can argue that Google fed us whatever it decided to feed us, but at least it was a perception of choice.

And so we could kind of choose our, our, our source of truth. Whereas AI now gives us the answer. And if you're lazy, you take that answer and go. And quite frankly, it's pulling off the internet. So it can't be a hundred percent accurate a hundred percent of the time, right? Right. Or it may even at some points be hallucinating, but I think it's a, it's a great point, which is, you know, you know, what's the means and what's the end. Um, and you know, the end should always be that we're beating our brain and our soul so that we can get better and better at what we do. And if we're just, if the end is just getting to the answer for that moment, then you don't learn at all. Right. And it's, uh, I know I'm not, I, I am, I'm a recovering Luddite, but I have a great respect for why, you know, technology is going to exist in humanity.

Um, but I'm not sure we're coming to grips with that. No, we're definitely not. So, well, let's get to that in a bit, but I want to back up here a little bit. Cause you got a real, uh, interesting backgrounds, um, that, that led to, you know, where you are today. And I want to start with your origin story, right? Especially on the, um, cleaning planes for your family, uh, and, and what that taught you early days and, and how you translate it. But could you walk us through like growing up as a kid? Like I always like, you know, LinkedIn, we can all read your profile there, but what made you, you parents, where'd you get the bug for business, entrepreneurship, those type of things. Talk us through a little bit about growing up and where you came from.

Sure. And I'll, I'll put it within the context of, again, I'm 63 years old and I'm still learning. And, you know, one of the things I learned over the last couple of days at this conference is I brought in a, um, a bunch of, you know, people who are psychologists and psychoanalysts is that, look, at the end of the day, between zero and seven, we learn how to love or not love, but somewhere between seven and 16, we lose our, we learn our values. And somewhere between 12 and 18, we try to fit into society by developing skills. Now it's not perfect. Some people, you know, you know, go up, some people go down, some people are late bloomers. But in reality, if you think about that, you know, we're inheriting this whole idea around safety and love from what we're seven and we're developing this whole idea of values.

And then we're trying to apply them to skills. So if I go back and look at my origin story, it makes a lot more sense to me. And if, if I make sense to me, I can make sense with other people. And so, you know, both of my parents were divorced, uh, which meant that I had a little bit of trauma, you know, you know, with two people breaking up before I was seven years old. And then somewhere be, you know, between, you know, seven and, and 12, seven and 14, I was involved in both their businesses and they were both entrepreneurs. So not only do you define what love and safety is now you're, it's being applied to you. And so being with entrepreneurs, you know, anyone who's grown up in an entrepreneurial family, you can tell the positive side, which I learned how to work.

I learned how to get along with people. I learned how to get up and do things, right? You just do things. You also learned intuitively that if you don't close the sale, then someone's knocking at your door at the end of the month to take away your house. Right. So there's this underlying sense of pressure, no matter how much money you make, you always are thinking, did I close enough? What's going to happen next month and the month after. So I grew up with two sets of entrepreneurs, you know, my dad was in the service business. He was a recruiter, um, had everything to do with people and understanding people. My mom was, uh, in the airline business with my stepdad. My stepdad was an alcoholic.

She knew that the way to get him not to drink was to book him up the next day. If he was flying the next day, he wasn't going to drink. Right. You know, Vietnam, you know, uh, had a huge effect on him and finding what he loved, which was flying and finding, you know, how he dealt with his emotions, which was, uh, was drinking. So we were busy, um, didn't always make a lot of money, but we booked up every single day and that made us extremely innovative. Um, so I learned a lot about how to be smart and to innovate. Um, I always say, you know, being, being poor, um, the, the issue isn't being poor. It's the lack of degrees of freedom, right? The lack of the ability to take risks and try new things.

Now, when you're really desperate, you know, you, you get creative because you have to, because your back's up against the wall, but it's always has a negative connotation with it. Cause it's, I got to hit this ball or the game's over. Right. Um, whereas if you can develop in a space where you say to yourself, I'm going to take this risk, but I'm going to enjoy it because if I fail, that's, it's a great answer. I took the risk. I now know something I didn't know the next day. And so if I look at my origin story in my life, it's been that battle, there've been that battle between taking risks because I had to, or taking risks because I wanted to learn and I loved it. And so I can point to different points in my career where it looks linear, but you can see when I actually lean one way or lean the other day.

I only bring that up. Um, not because there's anything particularly unique about me. Uh, what may be unique is I'm still trying to actually bring it up so I can talk about it and I can coach and I'm doing a lot of mentoring and I can give those examples to other people so they can get there faster than I did. Because if you look at the three correlates to understanding yourself, self-awareness and safety, number one, mental health, number two, your ability to connect with other people and your social help and your ability to find your tribe and your family. Right. And third, it turns out that it's the number one correlate to health span and longevity because that whole idea of safety is your, um, is your immune system, right?

Your parasympathetic, you know, system is always trying to decide whether you're in trouble or not. And when your brain and your body actually feel like they're in a safe zone, your immune system rests so that it can take the stress that it's designed to take later. So the biggest correlate to whether you, you know, are mentally stable to whether you have good relationships and whether you live longer is this idea of self-awareness. And we don't like to talk about it because we like to talk about the stuff we think we control, like technology. Let me tell you what I just invented. Technology is all about control. It's all about inventing things that we can tell what to do. So either it does it better than us, we don't have to do it, or we feel better about ourselves because we feel safer.

So technology as a tool is awesome. Technology as something that obscures the fact that we're human is really what's stressing out society today in my mind, right? We need to come to grips with it. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB Sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process. It also includes monthly workshops that will be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGVT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process.

Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to jbarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. Where's the line between feeling safe and laziness? And what I'm trying to understand, right? I think we've gotten to such a point in our society where we've gotten it so good. We've lost a lot of perspective on what work ethic is, what it's like to need and want, you know, something because we can have it at a, in a moment's notice. You know, I can go on Amazon, I can get something delivered tomorrow.

If I don't have this, I'll just, you know, ask ChatGVT to do it. So the, the grit factor, and I think the self-awareness piece is, is the critical one. And by the way, great book, grit. There's also a book that I think is just as powerful, but from the other end is anti-fragile. Right now. So I'll give you my opinion on this is that the first thing you said was, you know, we've lost it. We, you know, we're, we're getting, we're getting lazy. Um, and Leota wrote a great book. She's one of the best people on, um, intergenerational communication and what she will tell you in the book. And if you ever get a chance to see her speak, she's just music, just music. Cause she really takes you to a different place, but every generation is defined by the first 20 years of their generation, not by you.

So the reason we feel frustrated sometimes in kids say, saying they got it too good. They're getting too lazy is because they experienced something very different. When you look at, you know, back to the generation after world war two, and then you look at the generation that went through the chaos of the sixties and the seventies. And then you look at the generation that was born after that, they're just responding to their idea of what the rules are and what they need to optimize on. So after world war two, and after every great disaster, you get a civilization. Or a culture or a tribe or a set of people that are driven to actually build and create and, and get stability. Right. But as you move on, you know, whether it's the generation or it's your situation in that generation, you do get immune to what some of the stress factors are.

And so what you end up doing is you create your own stress factor. So although you say we have it better than everyone else, if you talk to people today, they don't believe it. Right. And, you know, if you look at mental illness, it's the highest it's ever been on people under 25 because they don't feel like they have it good. And, you know, if you look at your kids and you say, oh my God, I, you know, where I grew up, I barely, we barely paid rent every month. And, you know, I'm going to do something. I just, my son's graduating next week. And one of my greatest goals was to allow all my kids to graduate college without any debt. Right. They don't even think about it though. They don't think about that.

They're going to graduate because they have no point of comparison. So we have to be very careful when we say, are people working hard enough or, you know, they've got it easy because mentally, unless we show them and we let them suffer a little bit, whether that's our kids or our workers, or even in relationships where we set a boundary and say that's unacceptable and there's going to be a little stress around that, then you can't expect a human to actually grow. I will argue with you that stress is what keeps humans alive. You can't get new neurons unless you have cognitive dissonance, unless you're learning new things. And in fact, the whole theory around flow is that you're actually forcing yourself to learn a new skill so that you're under enough stress that you ride somewhere between the stress and the safety so that you feel like that's the zone where I actually feel safe enough that I know enough, but I'm pushing myself hard enough that I feel like I'm learning that's flow, whether it's flow in sports or it's flow in work.

That's why everything slows down because you're in that zone. But if you didn't stress yourself out, you can't get to flow. Flow isn't that I feel safe on the court. Flow is I'm pushing myself to the edge, but I also feel safe that this edge is where I should be. And just let me say one last thing. Your body can't survive without stress. You can't build muscle unless you rip muscle. You can't actually have balance unless you push yourself for flexibility and things. So we need stress. The thing that kills human is chronic stress. It's not stress. It's that we don't go through the cycle that we were designed to go through, which is whether you call sleep is one way to maintain. But during the day, you can't have stress all the time, or at least most of us can.

Yeah. So I've taken you a total tangent to where we know what we started. No, I'm glad. And that's why I kind of pick a thread and pull on it. Because I think that you'd said something and you talk a lot about this as far as self-awareness. And I'm trying to think of, you know, and you also talk about values when you're a certain age, right? And there's a conscious component to that and a subconscious component. Absolutely. I think, right? Because I didn't really nail my like hardcore, like these are my values and write them down until I was in my thirties, quite frankly. You know what I mean? You actually had them. Eighty percent of them were pre-wired. That's why the church has confirmation at a certain age.

The church goes after you between eight and 12 years old. I mean, in a good way. They want to actually get exposure. Education used to be highly focused at eight to 12 years old was when they really put a lot of effort into it. And if you look at youth sports, which has taken over a big piece of that, the eight to 12 year old, this is when you actually get a chance. Because after that, after about 12 years old, 75% of the influence doesn't come from you and the actions. It comes from who they hang out with and what they're seeing in the world. So if you don't get your kids those good values right there, they can't develop their real values after that. Because when you say it takes you until 30, it does.

You have a set of hypotheses and a set of rules in your head. And you're trying to figure out whether you agree with all of them or not. And somewhere, any young people out there, don't marry a guy before 30. We don't know what the hell we're doing, right? Women are much more mature. They mature much faster than we do. We're still trying to figure that out. Find them when they have enough time and then you'll see a window. And the window will be a light goes on. They go, oh my God, I'm not just out there to go get a date. I'm going out there to find someone I love. And that's the window. And then grab them. And then manipulate us to be a better person. It's funny you said that. I literally had this.

My daughter's 14. And I literally had this conversation with her the other day. We were driving. I go, you do realize that you're going to be frustrated with the boys your entire life, right? And she's like, why? I was like, because you're going to be more mature than every kid. Because she's already a very mature 14 year old, even for her friends. And so I'm like, you're like, and we're idiots, like, and we're idiots for a long time. So what I told her, you know, we have our own charm, you know, we have our own charm. Right. And that's the reality is that, you know, women will definitely have the upper hand. But what you want to find is, you know, you got to find someone with good values. Because if you find someone that doesn't have good values, it doesn't matter how hard you try.

If, you know, I always say when I was coaching, look, I can help you as an athlete, you know, for, and I say this to kids, I say, I can help you, but I can't hold you up. If I tell you too much of what to do or give you this formula and tell you to do it every single time, the second I turn around, your legs will have not got stronger, you'll fall down. I said, but if I help you to integrate some thoughts and some theories into it, and I see you responding to it, I will know where you want to go. And that's the same thing, you know, I, you know, I have a stepdaughter, I don't have a, you know, a biological daughter, but I say this to you all the time, like, you know, watch, try to help and watch and then make a decision.

You got to make a decision on, you know, is this something that I want to spend the rest of my life, you know, holding someone up? Or is this someone I can help enough that they'll turn around and say, I want to help you, right? Because love is selfish and unselfish. You can't actually stay in love with someone who doesn't give something back to you because you will burn out. You'll get either get frustrated or you'll crumble. Okay. You have to find something, someone who's selfishly will give something back to you. And that's a dyadic relationship. And if we get later talking about in health, the number one correlate to health span, especially in women is dyadic relationships. How many do you have people with empathy and compassion that will take action when you ask them?

That is a powerful, powerful thing, um, for your health. Sorry. My wife came to me about, I think about six months ago, when I forget where she had heard it, but she's like, say we're both of us together are a hundred percent. So I bring 50, you bring 50. That's not always going to be the case, right? Sometimes I'm going to be down at 10, 20% just because I'm too stressed out. So the other one needs to lift up to 60, 70, 80% to equal that out. And so we actually do approach each other every once in a while. And we'll just straight up say like, sweetheart, today I'm a 20. Like, I'm sorry. I don't have much to add. And no problem. I'm here. I'm an 80. You know what I mean? I'll carry it. But then the next, you know, two days later, it's like, Hey, I'm back down to 50.

Look, I commend you because that has, that hits two things that I struggle with still every day. And I, I'm amazed that, you know, how many people don't think about this, but number one, you had vulnerability. You said, I'm not going to be perfect. And number two, you validated the other person and said, when you do this, I appreciate that. And therefore you can get over those hard times. When you talk to someone who's been married for 30 years, there's four years in there that they hated each other. You know, if you added it all up, there were moments where you're like, Oh, you're killing me. You're killing me. And there, you know, probably one year in there where it was really stressful because they didn't have it at the time.

But what held you together over 30 years was you had the same set of values, whatever you were going to, you know, we were going to raise children. We were going to build something. We were going to support each other in, in, you know, doing what we need to do. And you found that, that you could hold it together because you had a bigger picture of it. You know, today, you know, there's too many algorithms and there's too many ways to, to, you know, get a real quick return on something. And we're always looking for, uh, uh, you know, feeling good. What's going to make us feel good. And clearly when you swipe another one and swipe another one, there's going to be someone else out there. Clearly it's just not true.

Right. Yep. And that's why I tell people that, you know, and I told my wife this when we met and she didn't like it. Um, but I said, Hey, I just want to be clear here. You don't complete me. Like I'm a complete person. You're a complete person. This isn't a Jerry Maguire thing here. I don't believe in, in, you know, there's only one person out there for somebody because if I did, then I'd question everything about every relationship I was ever in. I think love is a far more powerful scenario when it's a choice. When I choose to love you, as opposed to figure out some cosmic thing that's going to bring us together here, because I, I, I think I really completely, I'll give you some science behind that.

Right. Which is, um, again, we've gone off into the, into the tangent world, but you know, Hey, we're, we're, we're, we're having fun. We're, we're talking, look, why is the dyadic relationship, a one-on-one relationship so important? It's because when you find your tribe and when you find someone in your tribe that you believe you're safe with, again, it re-optimizes your parasympathetic nervous system, your vagus nerve, which goes from your brain to all your organs, your mouth biome, your stomach biome, your skin biome. You have 10 times more organisms that live on you than you, than live in you, that they're your own cells. Those organisms talk to you because they help protect you as well.

When they know that you're in a place that matters and with a person that matters, they function better. Your body functions better. So what is the dyadic relationship at the, at the surface? It's one-on-one. You're talking to someone. We used to call it the airplane, um, the airplane syndrome. You meet someone on an airplane and all of a sudden you start talking to them and you start talking about all these things you haven't talked to anyone about. Right. And then you get out the airplane and you go, I feel energized. Right. This was the best conversation I've had. I, and I did it on an airplane. Well, it is actually not a surprise because on that airplane, you were sitting next to someone and it happened to come up that you had kids or they had kids or you did this for work or that.

And you brought up subjects that mattered to you and you were open with them and you were vulnerable. And then they told you how they felt. So you didn't feel alone. Then you tried to help each other. So kindness. And so you're, you're putting it into it and then you get up and there was no risk and they walk away and you feel great. Well, that is, you know, the secret to life is finding those relationships. And the more continuous they are, um, the more power they have. So a dietic relationship starts at the beginning with, do I believe there's someone here who sees me and empathizes with me and wants to learn about me? Oh, Hey, where are you going? Are you going home? I'm going, you know, you start right.

Start there. The second level, which is the supercharger to a dietic relationship is, does it build strong enough that you will actually feel like that person's compassionate towards me? Now in an airplane, it's tough, right? They feel like they empathize. You've got the first level, the second level. What does compassion mean? It means that you actually believe by deed or action that if you were in trouble, they would try to help you even if it wasn't convenient to them. Let me give you a little secret. You want to make your spouse happy? Send them a card, not their birthday, not Christmas, not Easter, not on a holiday. Why? Because when you see that they're struggling and you buy them a card and you take the action and it's not required, it's not required.

They know that you must have gone the extra mile and thought about them. That's compassion. Okay. So, you know, the second level and the superchargers compassion. Now we started talking about self-awareness. So the real trick, which who knows how many people actually get to it or how many times you get to it, is that not only do you meet someone who you feel sees you, cares about you, will do something for you, but will you accept it? Because a lot of, you know, our conscious, you know, our conscious about 20% at the most of what we do, 80% is subconscious. If you've had a difficult time in your life or you don't believe your mother was, you know, loved you, you have a difficult time subconsciously really believing that anyone will be compassionate, that you deserve it and that they really love you.

That's why it's so important to work on yourself because no one can help you unless you surface those things and you talk about it with that person that you think loves you. There's a thing called the Johori window, which psychologists learn in their first year, which is when you join a tribe, which we need to survive, which is connection. So, you know, first is connection with yourself, second is connection with tribe. You, you give a public image, right? And the image is what you know about yourself, but you want other people to know. And that's the image that hopefully is the most positive so that people like you. Okay. Vulnerability is when you share more than you would share with the common person.

Right. And, and so you're taking a chance. Why are you taking a chance? Because when you go deeper and start talking about negatives that you know about yourself, but that other people don't know about you, you've now made yourself vulnerable to rejection. Okay. So if you're not telling your spouse or your partner things that are deeper so that they can start to figure you out, number, number one, they don't understand it. So they may react poorly, but more important than that is once you say it out loud, you're more likely to get over it because you've said it's real and this is who I am. And if this person stays with me and they heard that, then they really love me because they're really loving the authentic thing.

They're not loving my image of myself. So, you know, again, maybe we'll talk about business in the first last five minutes, but business is just a sport that people play. That's it. Right. And I was, and I was going to ask on that because you do, you do a lot of work with the Buck Institute and longevity research. And I'm kind of curious, you know, health leadership performance piece here. What was, I guess, through your, through your research, through your understanding, like what was the most surprising, uh, factor that was related to, to strong leadership when it came to mental health, physical health, or, or just the, the being wealth health, if you will. So, so the most surprising thing shouldn't have been surprising to me at all, but that most leaders don't, um, they don't do self-care.

Okay. And when they don't do self-care, they not only are not as effective with other people, but they eventually burn out in whatever they're good at. Is it because they don't know how to do it or they think that's weakness or like, what, what are the reasons why? I think those are two of the big three, right? I, you know, I don't think it's appropriate. It's, it's weakness. This is, I, you know, I'm a leader. I'm going to project strength, right? I don't know how to do it because, you know, I have never, this isn't something we talk about a lot. And especially with men don't talk about it. And with women, it's actually worse because women are trying to project that they can play by the same rules as men.

So even if they know how to do it, they actually go out of their way not to do it. I'm not going to be considered. I had a boss that did not want anyone to know she had breast cancer because back in those days that people would have felt sorry for her and she wouldn't have been a leader. I have women who say, you know what? I'm not going to say I have to go home for dinner because the second I say that, that actually makes me look different than everybody else here makes me look weaker. So number one is we, we think it's about strength, right? Number two is we don't know how to do it. Number three is that we actually don't understand how important it is. It's something that's a nice to have.

Now, if I had a great athlete, I was just with George Mumford, a good friend of mine, and had him speak at my conference. And he's been a performance coach to Michael Jordan and Kobe and a lot of the great athletes. And he's, and we were talking about, after I gave my talk and he gave his talk, he said, we just gave the same talk. He said, if I had an athlete and I told them, screw it, I want you to train 24 hours a day. I never want you to take care of an injury. I don't want you to tell me anything. And let's not talk about what you did wrong. Let's talk about winning. He said they would burn out, but we don't do that. In fact, we spend more, you know, when you look at what Mark Cuban did, he, you know, he's, he's a great business person.

So when he bought the Mavericks early on, he couldn't go over the salary cap anymore. So what he did is he bought four coaches for every player, which didn't count, right? And what is he doing? He's a psychologist. He's got, you know, someone doing performance. He's got someone doing, you know, uh, you know, family relationships because we're on the road all the time. Those are the same kind of things you need in business, right? You need to be playing at your best and you need to recover, right? And so this whole idea, you know, and I was just surprised that when you look at it, it wasn't just that the people burned out, um, from work, but they died sooner, right? And in fact, when you look at the opposite side of that coin, where you can prove, you know, when you have a, you know, an opposite case and you can prove it.

One is, you know, you see the damage that's being done. The second is that you can take a look at every study and, you know, that had been done on guys retiring and it's a little better today, but it's still the same, uh, the same track is they all die within two to five years after they retire. Why is that? Because when you've made your entire self-care and relevancy and connection network and all your friends are business friends and you retire, they're not probably going to hang out with you anymore, right? And they're still working and they're doing things and you don't have that same sense of that you have a purpose. And so what happens is, you know, maybe you go play golf and maybe you find a good friends group, but if you don't, you end up dying.

So this whole idea that we're an athlete, we should take care of them ourselves is, is a big deal, which is one of the big reasons I, I, I pushed this down on all the CEOs I coach. Love it. Um, another one, well, you're big into relationships and I think I said, I mean, 150. Well, I'm not a swinger or anything, if that's what you're saying, I like people. Yes. But I mean, I think that's part of your, you know, your ethos, if you will, is, is, is connecting with people. How do you maintain connections, uh, in a world that is, that is so distracting, right? Like meaningful connections. And that's where I think, cause we all have so many connections, but there's only a certain amount of meaningful ones we can have.

So a, how do you determine which ones are the meaningful connections you want to, and then B, how do you maintain them? It's a book I'm writing right now that I've been writing for four years that someday I'll, I'll, I'll get to actually publish, but I'm writing it because I've been interested in it. Right. And I'm interested in it because I, a terrible thing happened and, you know, good news, bad news, bad news. Who's to say now it looks like it wasn't a terrible thing. It actually, it put my life on a different trajectory, but I got divorced. Right. And I was just, I was just shocked. But you get divorced and I hope people that haven't been divorced listening, but if you have, you'll understand this completely.

It's not just the sense of failure. It's not just the terror that your kids are going to be punished for what you didn't do. It's not just your self-esteem. It's that your entire social network now becomes polarized. At the extreme, you have to pick me or you have to pick her. Right. But everything gets polarized, you know, you know, who you hang out with, what events you go to and things like that. And so I started looking at Dunbar's number, which is that classic survey that was done 60 years ago, 70 years ago, about how many people you can connect with. And he had this theorem. He was an anthropologist and he was a psychoanalyst, which is a very rare double PhD. And so he looked at the size of the neocortex, the size of the brain, and he realized that humans had a very interesting capability.

And one piece of the capability was that they could imagine and create fiction, which meant they can create connection outside of physical bounds. You know, every other animal, you know, if you're in a pack together, you know, the other animal, but if the pack breaks up, they're not thinking about the other animal. Right. But we can actually do that. And so his theorem, which was tested over and over and over again, and I think it's linear, it could be geometric, but the linear theory is that you're emotionally connected to about 150 people at any given time. And that's the way, that's the size, it should be, that's the optimum size of a tribe. So early on, people like Microsoft, they would never build a division under 150 people, right?

Because if you couldn't connect with these people, then it really became difficult to figure out how they would innovate faster, right? So when you look at those 150 people, they come in concentric circles, which is one he called family, another he called friends, another he called connections, another he called acquaintances. They mean slightly different things than we use in our common parlance. But when you got to the outer circles, it was literally just someone that you recognized. I know that, I know them, I know their name, or I know what they look like. I may not have really had a conversation with them, but they're safe. They're safe. And that's that, and I can smile at them and that interaction.

In fact, 10 of those little interactions, you know, add up to a very strong bond. So if you smile at 10 people a day and they smile back, if they smile back, those 10 interactions to your body and your brain are like that you just got another very close friend, right? And so we are ultimately, you know, connected and relationship is the basis for a lot of this. And we fight it. And so when you look at your contact database, one of my companies early on was I developed schemas and hierarchies. So all the stuff on Amazon, how did you compare this shirt to that shirt? Or how do you compare this bolt to that bolt? Back in the old days, it was very difficult. And we built these schemas and hierarchies.

So I started to, I always go back and look at the history of things to understand it. And what I realized is that our contact databases were built for computers, not for humans. So I got 15,000 contacts. It's got nothing to do with me. It was designed to do an, you know, a search. It was designed so I could search a keyword. And the keyword was brain. I was named, right? And so there was no contextual. Like when you ask a person how they know someone, we had a company that we built and we sold it to Tinder early on, which was called Human. And it was designed around if I have the internet and someone's going to come meet me, let me go search the internet and find out everything about that person.

His sister went to school with my sister. Those are serendipitous connections. They bring you down two levels in your intimacy level, right? Because you go, that has to be in something if this is true. So this whole idea about relationship technology is designed for efficiency, not real relationship. So I know you've heard this, the cliche, your contact database is not your contacts. And your Facebook friends are not your friends. Now they are influential to you because they go right to your amygdala. And your amygdala is designed around telling you when there's trouble or when there's pleasure. Okay. So Facebook doesn't talk about this, but I spent a bunch of time with Tristan who did the social dilemma and also Francis, who was the Facebook whistleblower.

Cause I want to understand if we're going to, we're going to figure out a way around this. How do we do it? And you'll see that in Facebook, they did a study that if you'll be who you are, your friends are, your friends will start to look like you. If you're, you're out of shape, your friends are going to be out of shape. If you're in shape, your friends are going to be in shape because you are who you hang out with, even at that level. And the whole idea of social comparison was for engagement. But if you look at what it does to a human, especially to a young girl whose brain is, is, and they, they're more mature. So relationship means more to them. If you are the lowest in a tribe or a pack, you're dead, you're dead.

You're either on the edge. So you're the one who's going to get killed first, or they're going to kick you out because you suck. So if you tell a young girl that she's fat and no one else is fat, then she believes she will die because her amygdala is actually getting that, that sense every time they get the feedback. So this whole idea around relationship is, is very, very important. Um, and the average man in the United States, this isn't, this isn't, this isn't true outside the United States, uh, has less than one friend on average. Ah, Jesus. And when you define it, what's more important is how they define a best friend. They define it as who they've known the longest. Um, not how many times they talk to him and not what they talk about.

So literally you go, who's your best friend. They'll tell you who they've known the longest. Right. And when you talk to women, it's five to seven and they define it by how many times they talk to him and what they talk about. Okay. So that they, they morph over time. So we have a loneliness epidemic in, in the United States due to both. Both our focus on capitalism and business, but also because at the end of the day, technology is more prevalent. So we think we're connected to people, but ultimately our true self, our shadow self, as, as John would say, the person that is down below us, that knows who we really are is always screaming. The number one cause of mental illness under 25, loneliness.

Number one cause of death after 65, loneliness. Number one cause of violence, um, in between, um, is loneliness. So when you look at, now you can, again, I'm not political. I'm an American. I'm not a Republican and Democrat, but when you look at groups like MAGA, or you look at groups like BLM, I'm not comparing them and saying they're the same. I am telling you that they have a lot in common. They're about belonging. They're about belonging. And in fact, if you go back far enough and you stop looking at the word for what it is, a conservative or, um, you know, someone who's liberal, those words have got nothing to do with politics. They've got to do with psych psychology and how your brain works.

A liberal mindset is I'm always worried about the weakest in the tribe and a conservative because I want the tribe to survive. So I'm worried. I'm worried that we're going to implode from the inside. And a conservative mind says, I'm always worried. I'm going to be attacked. Now, politicians have hijacked those terms and they've used social media and they've, you know, for their own means to activate us. Now, what I will tell you, which is very scary is in the last 33 advanced civilizations, there's two factors that have brought them down. One is the whole advent of there's a dislocation at a basic human need at a low level. There's a technology that allows the masses to move and that there's a charismatic leader.

Every one of them, you know, okay, now they gunpowder was invented and they could use that. And then there was a charismatic leader that happened along at the right point in time to do it. Right. When you look at the other factor, it's when a tribe gets to over 70% either liberal or conservative. When you do not have 60-40 or 50-50, the tribe implodes. And the reason is because the liberals focus too much on the minority. Now, again, I'm not trying to get in trouble. I'm just giving you an example on this. I believe in, I'm a liberal, I'm a social liberal. So I actually feel it. I believe that this is crazy about, you know, not letting people be who they need to be. And I believe that transgenders have rights.

But when it becomes so prevalent that the majority of that liberal tribe doesn't believe you're taking care of them. I sat across the table with a guy whose daughter plays volleyball and the visceral reaction he had for the first time he voted for Trump. I said, you hate him. Why did you vote for him? He goes, I'm not doing this anymore. My daughter plays volleyball and they got a guy playing against her and I am not doing this. Right. That's the way a liberal tribe implodes. So you have to be very careful that you do the right things, but you never forget. I'll tell you, it's even scarier how a conservative tribe implodes. In a conservative tribe, the focus is around external enemies. So you get aggression and you drive aggression.

And then the people who rise to the top in a conservative tribe are the people most prone towards taking action towards that. Now you take a look at someone like Churchill. Churchill was a mass murderer. Okay. He killed more people than, you know, most people realize in India. Okay. He took over during World War II and he was very aggressive and he was the right thing for the British people. Does anyone ever ask why he was voted out of parliament the day after the war? That's their hero. He was insane, but he was the right guy for the right time. But he was really, you know, a very aggressive person. Right. If you go back and look at his quotes, I'm not saying that you shouldn't be protective or you shouldn't be aggressive.

What I'm saying is that I'll go back to, you know, something I learned from the Israeli military is when you have a really hard decision to make, they would do the rule of seven. They would take the, whatever they were going to do, they would take three people and put them in a room to debate on that side. And then they would take four people to debate against it. Even if they believed in it, they were going to debate against it. And at the end of the day, even if you went with the same decision, you would understand what the other side was both so that you could bring them along. But secondly, if it went wrong, you'd have already thought about why it was going to go wrong and how to mitigate that.

When you don't have people be Americans, then you don't have the knowledge that you need. And you don't. So, you know, we need to get back to where we can argue. But at the end of the day, we've got to find things that we actually believe in enough that when someone's in trouble, that we're there to help them and they believe we're compassionate. Yeah. And that's where love comes back. And I know love's a weak word, but it's not. It's what drives humans. And if you don't have love, you have the opposite of love, right? Which is, you know, evil. Yeah. And I think that's a kind of full circle conversation comes back to values, right? I mean, I think if I have always said, if you and I share core values, right?

We don't have to share all of them, but if we have to share core values and we can argue and we can debate all day long. Or even 70% core values, I can respect you. Yeah. But in order to get to them, I have to know you well enough. And if I'm standing in a different crowd, I never get to know that you are like me. And that's the challenge I would give to everyone who's listening is, you know, introduce yourself to people. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, we got to wrap this up. We didn't even, I didn't get to like 10 of the other questions I had for you. So maybe we're going to have to do a part two. Everyone always asked me about, you know, cause I'm going to go to space. That's good.

We didn't talk about that. Cause that's the least interesting thing. It was on the list. I was kind of curious what the, everyone works their way up. You're not, you're back. You're going to space, right? Yeah. No, but awesome. Well, look, tell the audience where they can find out more information about what you're working on and where you want to point them. All right. Well, and next time you want to go to scoreboard, you let me know. I'll get you some free drinks. Well, next time you're in town, let's, let's tell me when you're in Boston. I'll grab a drink. I'd love to go to scoreboard and grab a drink. Number one sports bar in Boston. Remember that. It's in Woburn, Mass, kid. Bring it over.

All right. Great, great talking to you. Absolutely, Blair. So again, thanks. Any, any specific place you want to point people like the site or anything like that or your mastermind? Listen, if you want a cheat sheet on things you can do, I'm not a doctor, but I work with doctors all day. Go to my LinkedIn and just say, Hey, I heard you on the podcast. Can you send me your little cheat sheet and take it within, you know, a grain of salt? This is what I do. Or if there's anything else I can help you with it. It's really easy for me to do. Go to, go to LinkedIn. And if you're looking at coaching and stuff like that, you can look at our PPE mastermind site, PPE mastermind. All right. Love it. Awesome, man.

Well, thank you so much. It was a fun conversation. It was great. I really enjoyed it. Let's do it again. Definitely. Everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile today, you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side. Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough.

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