10X Your Longevity Strategy by Saying NO to Over-Optimization

Blair LaCorte [00:00:00]:
In order to keep growing, we need to be uncomfortable.

Nick Urban [00:00:04]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Blair, welcome to the podcast.

Blair LaCorte [00:00:56]:
Hey, Nick, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Nick Urban [00:00:58]:
This will be an interesting one because you are somewhat of a modern day polymath. You have your hands in a bunch of different pots and you seem to be doing a lot of cool things. Let’s begin today’s conversation with what you were just telling me offline about the way you view technology. It’s exciting, it has a lot of potential and promise. But there’s an over optimization that seems to be creeping more into the picture these days than ever before.

Blair LaCorte [00:01:25]:
Sure, I mean, we’re going to start with philosophy today, but you know, I also wanted to say I appreciate, you know, I’ve listened to a bunch of your podcasts. I appreciate the, the, the both breadth and the depth that you’ve gone into different subjects. So hopefully I’m going to be able to, to tie into that a little bit. But look, my, my philosophy, right, wrong or indifferent, and I come from a different era. I’m 63 now. So I grew up at the beginning of technology, but not where the kids today grow up is that, look, we use technology because we want to control things, right? We want to be able to do things. You know, we want it to mechanize, we want to automate, we want to do AI so we can be smarter. And we’ve been doing that for 40 or 50 years.

Blair LaCorte [00:02:06]:
And there’s nothing wrong with it, except when you actually believe that technology is the answer to anything. It’s a means to an end and it’s a means to control your environment. But when you believe you’re controlling your environment, I would go back to the bastardized Einstein quote, which is, look, the biggest threat to really mankind is when our technology outstrips our humanity, when we stop forgetting that we’re a biological system that interacts with things outside of our body and that technology is a way for us to do that. And we start thinking that technology makes us God, we get into trouble. Right. And I’ve seen it over and over and over again. Your biggest strength becomes your biggest weakness. And right now we’re in the age of technology advancements, so be careful.

Nick Urban [00:02:50]:
Yeah. And that is one argument in favor of the whole holistic lens to health and well being and prevention based medicine. Because we’re an interconnected system of systems that when you actually zoom out and you see how things interrelate and they interrelate in ways that we don’t even know yet, then you’re able to help hedge against the long term potential consequences of thinking you’re optimizing or when you’re actually just causing an imbalance somewhere else down the chain.

Blair LaCorte [00:03:17]:
Right. And you know, I think it’s such an important point you make and I love your background because you’ve, you’ve looked at all these different angles. Look, you know, I’m the, I’m the vice chair of the Buck Institute, so one of the most respected scientific institutes in the world. Right. But we even, we look at science and we say, you know, we own it, we understand about 90% of how a human works. Honestly, most medicine is ecometric, which means it wasn’t done in a three phase study where we proved this thing. We watched people and these things happen. And then we stumbled into this and we said, oh my God, look.

Blair LaCorte [00:03:50]:
And so we got a piece of it and it seems to work again. We don’t know what else it changes. So we then we turn another dial. So I believe in science. I also have a man of faith. I believe that you have to have faith. And I think when we get into this, I can show you how those two things actually fit together. Because there’s more than ample evidence that the way you feel about things impacts how your biology works.

Blair LaCorte [00:04:18]:
I’m not just talking about airy fairy. I’m positive thinker and I love everyone. I’m telling you that, you know, and I’m sure you’ve seen these studies too, but we, we cross reference almost every study on longevity. And when you actually have someone pray for you, you have a 25% better recovery. And when you believe your doctor loves you or cares about you, you have a 60% better interaction with a drug he gives you. So obviously there is science and that’s what we do for a living. But there is, you know, there’s an impact to how our biology perceives and feels the world and how it reacts to that. And I think that’s the yin and the yang of being human.

Blair LaCorte [00:04:57]:
And I love. You’ve gone down throughout your podcast and a bunch of different things, and hopefully today I can maybe pull back on a simple man’s version of how I would fit all of those into a philosophy, because the philosophy is going to be, you’re a system. There’s a bunch of rules of thumb. Test this, test that, and see how it works with you. Right. And then dig down in, because there’s no one that’s going to know you better than yourself. Okay. And when you get cancer, you go to a specialist and you take all these tests and you read everything there is to read.

Blair LaCorte [00:05:31]:
The problem is, when we’re not broken, we tend to not pay attention to what’s working and what’s not working in our body. And I think that’s the major mind shift that. I think we all have to have that. Listen, if I get sick and there’s a golden statue or a silver bullet, give it to me. But I’d rather not get sick. But it’s a different mindset. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:05:56]:
The old adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and of course the cure is great, but if you can prevent it in the first place, let’s go there. But before we even get into that, I want to explore some more of your methodology, your framework, the way you would integrate all of this together. Because it’s very easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest frontiers of modern science and of new health practices. How do you integrate everything into one framework or one understanding? Because that can really reduce the overwhelm. And if we’re all walking around so over overwhelmed by our health routines, that alone could have a negative impact that offsets more than the benefits of those health protocols could be.

Blair LaCorte [00:06:37]:
Yeah, absolutely. And so I am going to ask your. Your listeners forgiveness, and I will give you my opinion. There’s a lot of opinions out there. Mine is going to come from, you know, a misspent youth, athletic youth, a. A desire to really dig down and learn as much as I can about systems and human systems and now system biology. And this is kind of where I’m coming out on it. Right.

Blair LaCorte [00:07:03]:
And so I’ll give you. Give you my framework. The, the first thing I always start with is let’s get back to simplicity. Okay. At the end of the day, humans are a lot like music. You know, we have notes that are hardwired, like our genetics. But when you look at your genetics, you know, you can argue back and forth 5 to 7% are, is hardwired into you. And less than 100 to 1% are really bad things that maybe we don’t know what to do with.

Blair LaCorte [00:07:31]:
So you do have some notes, you have some genetics. And you know, when your genetics are positive, that gives you a head start. But by far that does not determine your, your longevity or your health span 93% of how long. And I’m going to make the argument how healthy you live has to do with your system biology and how it’s dealing with the triggers of your life. Right? And that’s a lot harder because all of those things are determined by where you are, who you’re with and what habits you have. And that’s really, really hard. So when people ask me what are the two great books that I would recommend to think about system biology and to think about how you would change your life. One is, you know, we just hired, you know, Lee Hood a few years back and Nathan Price, who worked with Venter.

Blair LaCorte [00:08:24]:
You know, Lee worked with Ventor to sequence the genome and, you know, helped start Amjad and then ran Gates System Biology. And Nathan is one of the greatest new minds out there in big data and phenomics. It’s all how your genes decide to actually interact with your environment. And so the first book is Scientific Wellness by Lee and Nathan. And I’ll explain why. I think it’s a very simplistic book to give you a perspective. And the second is Atomic habits, because if 93% is lifestyle, the issue isn’t going to be, you’re not going to understand what I’m going to tell you. The biggest issue is that you’re not going to do it.

Blair LaCorte [00:09:00]:
Right. And so, you know, I always say, what are the three things that have to be true for me to want to do something and for me to actually be successful at doing something to expand my health. And the first is, well, it’s got to be proven that it does help your health and there’s a lot of science behind that. The second is you have to like, has to fit in. If it doesn’t, you’re not going to do it. I own two diet companies. I love diet companies. And most people fail and after 18 months they come back when they fail and say, was my fault, not the product’s fault, and then they come back again, okay, Jim’s the same thing.

Blair LaCorte [00:09:37]:
And the third is, do you do with other people? And when you really think about it, number two and number three are how you get things done. Do you have a habit or you do you with other people. And if you can have a habit that you like and you do it with other people, it’s going to be part of your lifestyle. It’s as simple as that. It’s not that we don’t know what’s good for you. It’s that second piece in implementation. So you know, we would say in business, we’d say, look, brainstorming, it’s wonderful. Let’s talk about all these new concepts.

Blair LaCorte [00:10:08]:
It opens up our mind. Let’s be, you know, clear. This is, this is the vision of the future. Great. But strategy is about saying no. Strategy isn’t about talking about all this stuff. Strategy is deciding what you’re going to do and what you’re going to focus on and then execution and business model is how you do it. So the same way a business succeeds by looking at everything and being open to the world, really, business strategy is about no, no, no, no, no.

Blair LaCorte [00:10:38]:
It’s not about being creative. It’s about what are the two or three things I’m going to start with? And by the way, when that’s working and the people are doing great at it, maybe we’ll add a couple more things. But the biggest way to fail at business is to continue to iterate or to, you know, continue to not get traction. Right. You middle until you die. So that’s the first thing I would say is, look, this is all going to be about, you know, do you have the right perspective and are you willing to put the time in to change some of your habits.

Nick Urban [00:11:12]:
Saying no is a big part of if building the habits. Because you can’t spread yourself so thin. You’re doing 100 different things so that nothing sticks. You want to be more concentrated and deliberate so that your strategy, your health strategy persists over the long term.

Blair LaCorte [00:11:26]:
Right? And you want to feel like you’re making progress too. Because if every day someone comes in, your boss comes in with a new strategy, says, you know what, you should be taking rapamycin. Oh, no, no, I’m sorry, your telomeres aren’t long enough and you should be doing there. Is there, oh, this peptide. Have you checked out this peptide? That’s all great. It’s actually, I’m not saying it’s even bad, but I’m saying you need to look at that brainstorm. And then we talked about this, you know, off the air. Everybody is different.

Blair LaCorte [00:11:55]:
Everybody is different. They did a study in the 1950s to try to find the best looking person in America. Right. And what you find is that people like People who, they can, it’s, they have common traits. So they picked the best looking, every feature and they tried to put it together and then they found out there was no one like that, okay? Because no one is in the middle, no one is in the norm. So saying that this is exactly right for you, there’s no way it’s exactly right for you. You’re probably left of the norm or right of the norm. I don’t know if you’re one standard deviation this way or that way, but I bet you I can help you.

Blair LaCorte [00:12:33]:
Because if you take a look at the science we have today, we can test a lot of things. Just like when you get sick, they test a lot of things. So by creating a model of your body and watching how it’s working, the biggest predictor of illness is small changes in your blood work over time. Okay, so but if you’re not watching your blood work and you’re not asking why it’s changing, maybe it’s changing because you’re getting older. And maybe you need to offset that, mitigate those impacts by building more muscle mass, which, you know, eats sugar and maybe that. Or, you know, but I can’t tell you until you decide that, you know, this is really about your personal strategy. And, you know, given that I’m on a rant, let me just tell you, if a business has a strategy to make money, you need to figure out what your strategy is at the end of the day. And I can tell you, having spent, you know, six months on a speaking tour with one of the top palliative care doctors when I was younger and reading a lot about how people die, they ask, you know, a few things across culture, time and geography.

Blair LaCorte [00:13:38]:
They’re all the same things. When you don’t get hit by a bus, which you can either look at as good or bad because you don’t know what’s coming and it’s painless or bad because, you know, you don’t want to get hit by a bus. But when you look at people who know they’re going to die and you see the process, the grieving process they go through, first thing is always across every culture, why me? Could I done something different? But the next three things that they always try to optimize on are who do I love? Who loves me? Okay, makes sense. I wanted to know that I was loved. The second thing that they’re always, they always talk about is, did I have a purpose? Did I make a difference? Will anyone remember me? Okay. And the third one, which I think is the most important is really what I believe is the strategy, which is, did I live my authentic self? Because if I. And that’s why you hear the cliches. Cliches and old wives tales are there because people have been saying them for thousands of years.

Blair LaCorte [00:14:32]:
You don’t worry about the things you didn’t fail, that you worry about the things you didn’t do. Did I actually. Did I live my life? So when we’re talking about what your strategy should be, one is we want to live the longest and healthiest life we can. And the second is we want to, at the end of the day, feel like I’m going to die fast and I’m going to die in somewhat of peace because I could answer that question. And so that requires us to, as they say in the Princess Bride, when they sent, you know, sent him back to, you know, where he started was, hey, what is the most important thing for both healthspan and lifespan? It’s getting to know yourself and it’s making connection with other people. And then everything else that we will talk about today is a force multiplier. That number one cause of mental illness under 25 is loneliness. Number one direct cause of death after 65 is loneliness.

Blair LaCorte [00:15:26]:
The number one cause of dysfunction mentally and physically in between is loneliness. So when we talked about technology earlier, there are ways that technology can help you with loneliness. It can also hurt you. And what I would say is that when we talk about the five things that will increase your health span, the number one by far is going to be connection. And it’s also the toughest one to define, right? Because what does that mean? And it really, connection always starts with what we talked about earlier, how you feel about yourself and how you can connect with other people. Because if you can’t connect with other people, most of the time it starts within you, right? And you know, that’s why we like clubs and why we like teams and why we like tribes. And because it helps us, it helps us get over ourselves and connect. So that’s my framework.

Blair LaCorte [00:16:21]:
My framework is, let’s start with the most important thing in the military is the force multiplier. What actually impacts your nutrition, your exercise, your maintenance or sleep, and your exosome, your connection and purpose are number one. The way your immune system is reacting to your connection and purpose actually gets fed into each of those things. And doing one of them very rarely helps people. It’s the system, right? Because at the end of the day, every aging illness that we study and at the buck we’ve been studying for 40 years. We invented the term geroscience and horizontally looking at aging illnesses versus saying that illnesses cause you to age. When you really look at what causes them, they’re all chronic inflammation. Illnesses, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancers, they’re all chronic inflammation.

Blair LaCorte [00:17:18]:
Because, yes, inflammation cures you. Your body goes in and tries to cure you. Chronic inflammation breaks your body down. And so it’s not that we don’t want inflammation, we just don’t want chronic inflammation. And so the best way to attack chronic inflammation is to have your parasympathetic nervous system calm. And we can talk about how you can breathe to make it calm. We can talk about how you can have sex to make it calm. We can talk about all these different ways to make it calm.

Blair LaCorte [00:17:47]:
But let’s be simple. If you can’t find peace within yourself, at least during certain periods of time, your immune system will not have time to rest. And I will argue with you. And I’ve argued, and as no one’s convinced me differently, either in science or in faith, that humans are designed for stress. If we have no stress, we die. If we have too much stress, we die. Cognitive dissonance, creating neurons is by stress. Building muscle is by stress.

Blair LaCorte [00:18:15]:
We are designed to stress. Again, let me just tell you, do not freak out that I’m telling you, just sit in a corner. I’m saying go out there and play hard to the extent that you want to, but everybody needs to figure out how they go through the cycle of repair or you wouldn’t be a biological system, because no biological system is designed to be on the whole time because their immune system can’t actually recover and actually decide how to help you because the number one drug, the one, the golden idol and silver bullet I talked about, is a strong immune system.

Nick Urban [00:18:49]:
A lot to dig in there. First off, dear listener, if you just listened to the last monologue, which was awesome, lot to take in from that. But one thing that I’m going to leave here with is the permission that Blair just gave us to try something that’s a little scary, a little outside our comfort zone, ideally having to do with connection of some kind. So if there’s been something on your bucket list, something you’ve wanted to try but put off because didn’t feel like looking like a fool or for whatever reason, this is the week to give it a shot. Go ahead and let me know on Instagram at High Performance Longevity, what you choose and how it goes. And then after adding it one time, make it a recurring Thing, perhaps once a week, perhaps once a month, but just to get more of those experiences into your routine.

Blair LaCorte [00:19:34]:
Right. Listen, let’s dig into that even further. You know, the science says that when you’re kind to someone, you get more back than you do get. Okay? The problem is we don’t know what we’re going to get back from a physical standpoint, so we’re afraid of it. So if you’re walking down the street and you smile at 10 people and all of them look down, that is their biological reaction to not being part of a tribe. When an animal looks each other in the eye, they’re challenging each other. They need to know that you are actually being kind. So smiling, nodding your head, changing your body position, and saying hi.

Blair LaCorte [00:20:12]:
One exercise to do is try to say hi to 10 people walking down the street. Now, at the beginning, they’re going to look away after three to four seconds. It’s just the natural. Do not take it personally that they hate you. Why do you feel like they hate you? Because that’s your protective system saying, they don’t want to talk to you, don’t talk to them. But as Nick said, if you do that 10 times in a day, it’s the equivalent of building one new relationship. Okay. It’s very, very powerful to be connected to your environment.

Blair LaCorte [00:20:44]:
I actually had an accident, and they redid my face, and no one recognized me. And it was the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen, which is how I started, you know, studying brain science, because people didn’t recognize me, even the people in the coffee shop who didn’t know my name. Okay? We need that belief. And that’s why tribalism is so important to us, is finding people who we feel safe so that our immune system can actually recover because we’re not worried about getting attacked. So I love your suggestion. Pick one thing. Say hi to a bunch of people. Hug someone for more than seven seconds.

Blair LaCorte [00:21:21]:
It releases dopamine and serotonin. It’s very uncomfortable. So pick someone that you know you’re not going to get sued by, but do it for seven seconds. It’s as Nick said, it’s uncomfortable, but the science says it’s really good for both of you.

Nick Urban [00:21:36]:
Yeah, I’m a big fan of extended hugs as well. And I guess maybe it’s just that Austin is weird, but it seems to be more acceptable just to hug someone and inhale at the same time and then exhale at the same time. And it feels much more connected and settling than it does just to do a one Second hug. And I think even just one or two of those a day is profoundly more impactful than, say, 10 surface level hugs.

Blair LaCorte [00:22:00]:
I absolutely agree. So there’s two things that anyone can do that are going to make you feel uncomfortable until you do enough of it. You know, my dad and I, before he passed away, you know, we used to do, because my parents were divorced and I’d see him on weekends, we’d do one random act of kindness, whether the person knew it or didn’t know, it didn’t matter. And then we would meet on Friday for pizza and talk about it. Now, you get two benefits out of that. The first is that you did something that you had control over that you knew was a positive thing. The second is we talked about it. So him and I had something that we believed in, that we talked about and made a deeper connection.

Blair LaCorte [00:22:41]:
This is not rocket science, but we’ve forgotten it because we’re so focused on the more complex things out there that we forget that our body is just this parasympathetic nervous system that’s looking for ways to actually calm down.

Nick Urban [00:22:58]:
Exactly. And that’s been one through line in my last nine months or so I keep mentioning on the podcast. But it is the role of the nervous system in overall health and also in longevity.

Blair LaCorte [00:23:11]:
I don’t.

Nick Urban [00:23:11]:
Maybe you’ve heard of it, but some people call the interconnectedness of certain systems the nice network. And I think that stands for neuro, immune, cutaneous and endocrine. And how they all interact with each other and they influence each other. What’s the role of the nervous system? Why do you focus on that?

Blair LaCorte [00:23:31]:
Because that’s the way we’re designed. So humans among mammals have two things that are very, very different about their parasympathetic nervous system. One is that it connects to everything in your. In your body. Right. And that at different times, 80% of the traffic goes one way versus the other way. We always think to ourselves, well, it must go from our body to our brain. Right.

Blair LaCorte [00:23:53]:
You know, my hurt, my foot, I’m in pain. I touch something that’s hot. The majority of time, messages are going from your brain to your body on whether it can relax or not. That’s the first thing. The second thing is we have a superpower, which is imagination. We can actually imagine it, imagine connection. So I can say, wow, I really like Nick. I listen to his podcast.

Blair LaCorte [00:24:15]:
I feel like I know him. I feel like we believe in the same things. Animals can’t really do that. They have to be in a group And a tribe and an alpha, and they have to see each other physically, whereas humans can actually organize in much larger groups than animals can. Now, Dunbar’s number would say that any given time you can have an emotional connection with 150 people. Given the size of your neocortex, the size of your brain, that could be true. And it’s been around for a long time and people can’t disprove it. I think that that’s linear, not geometric.

Blair LaCorte [00:24:48]:
I think you can connect with many more people, but you have to connect in different ways. But we actually are designed to connect because there’s two things that overpower us every day. One is the amygdala is looking for fear. It’s looking for survival. And that’s why we’re so aggressive as a species. We’re always feeding in. When I used to design targeting systems, right? And so in targeting systems, when you biomimic the human eye, you look for size, vector and velocity. Big things moving fast towards you like an animal.

Blair LaCorte [00:25:22]:
That’s how your eye decides what to pay attention to. Now, when you’re walking down the street in a city and a car’s going by you, you say, ah, I’m on the sidewalk, right? What’s the big deal? That’s your conscious mind. Your unconscious is still worried about that. Which is why they say, go take a walk in nature. Why? It’s not just nature. It’s that there’s no big things unless a bear comes after you doing it. Another is another sense is your hearing. When you hear a discontinuity sound, you go, oh, that’s a problem.

Blair LaCorte [00:25:51]:
Right? That’s a problem. That’s something coming after me. It’s growling. That’s why AC DC ramps you up and classical music ramps you down because the resolving of the chords takes down your parasympathetic nervous system. So the first thing to note is you were designed to be fearful. And so if you don’t find ways to let those systems relax, you will spend most of your time in an agitated state. In America, the average person is at a 25 to 75% stress level. And you say, oh, at least we’re not at 100%.

Blair LaCorte [00:26:24]:
Well, that sucks. Because what you want every day is you want to be low and you want to be high because your machine needs to see where the boundaries are so it can rebalance itself. So when they talk about doing hit workouts, you need about 10 minutes hit. At minimum, you can do 30 or 45. You need 10 hit, but you actually exponentially increase the hit effectiveness if you do 10 of lit. An lit could be meditating, or it could be sitting in a corner listening to music, or it could be putting on an eye mask so that you’re not getting any visual stimulus. But that’s how simple your parasympathetic nervous system is. It just needs to be able to relax.

Blair LaCorte [00:27:05]:
In the old days, we either ran towards animals to kill them or we ran away from animals. So we had high, high stress. And then we went and we played drums and we ran around and hugged each other and we, and we calmed down and we don’t do enough of that, which is why western society has the biggest issues with chronic inflammation. Then you can add in food and other pieces of the puzzle. But this is why connection matters, is because without safety, the human system does not actually function well. And that’s why when you look at the blue zones, the one thing you can find in common is in blue zones is either either intergenerational or affinity groups. So one of the biggest blue zones in the United States is in Los Gatos, where the Seven day Adventists are. What do you mean? Because they have a very big community and they’re very consistent and the Amish are too.

Blair LaCorte [00:28:02]:
We’re all looking for the moments that we can. So if you have a nuclear family that loves you, and when you get home after work and you, your temperature comes down, that’s an example of a blue zone. Now, it may not be enough of a blue zone if you have small kids, but you know, they’re making you tougher if they don’t kill you. But that’s the big thing. And why, you know, we can spend some time on some hacks and we can tie it into some of the trends, but if you’re not focused on the top thing, which is how do I actually find a dyadic relationship with at least one person at any given time? If you’re not looking at can I be connected to something bigger than myself? And you’re not looking about what gets you up in the morning and the rest of it can happen, it’s not bad. It’s just not going to be as effective.

Nick Urban [00:28:48]:
Yeah, I’m with you on that. It makes perfect sense when you say you want to help your system recalibrate by getting clear and showing it where your upper limit is and where your lower limit is. You were mentioning using tools like hit like high intensity training to push the, the level up your heart rate, up your nervous system to become more sympathetic. And then lit being like Low intensity.

Blair LaCorte [00:29:12]:
Training, which is for. For people, can be a lot of different things. It doesn’t have to just be meditation. Now you could say low intensity training is doing what you talked about before. It’s doing block breathing. I am going to lower my parasympathetic nervous system’s intensity by doing block breathing for two minutes. And I’m going to do that five times during a day. Okay? What we’re saying is think about ourselves as a machine now.

Blair LaCorte [00:29:37]:
It’s a machine that we know has a really special thing that we’re either driven towards fear through our amygdala or we’re driven towards love to calm down our parasympathetic nervous system. Everything else is almost irrelevant. Those are the two things that you can say we go after sex, but I would argue that intimacy is love. But when you look at that, those are the two things we’re optimized for. And there’s ways to do that. And once you do that, and once you know that’s the most important thing, then feeding the machine the kind of fuel it wants when it needs it going. And I would not call it exercise. Humans aren’t designed for exercise.

Blair LaCorte [00:30:15]:
We don’t need exercise. Right. The problem is we need exercise because we’re not moving every day. So movement is more appropriate. Maintenance is more appropriate than sleep. It’s sleep and touch. The amount of touch you have during a day, you know, you know, the biggest biome on your body is on your skin, right? And touch. And your nervous system, when you start talking about the nice network and hugging and then ultimately, what’s the environment you store your machine in? If there’s pollution or you smoke cigarettes or you’re putting on, you know, stuff in your dishwashing liquid that you’re drinking, of course you’re going to corrode the machine.

Blair LaCorte [00:30:49]:
But the number one thing about our machine is that this parasympathetic nervous system is always asking itself every second of every day, am I moving towards love or I’m moving towards fear? And it’s going to have a different reaction. And you want it to have that reaction. You want it. If there’s something fearful, I need to jump out of the way of that car. And if there’s something opportunistic like I can get closer to someone, we got to get over ourselves because honestly, that’s what we’re looking for. We just feel the mental risk in our society is that there’s not, there’s not enough common ground. When you get put in a group at Work, and you spend a lot of time together. You find ways to like people, and you find ways to feel safe.

Blair LaCorte [00:31:35]:
But when they did, when I can’t, when I give a speech, I go, look, I want you to break up in little groups. I can see the hatred. Hatred, right. You’re. I don’t know these people until five minutes later. There’s a difference. But you said it earlier, humans are made to be uncomfortable. That’s how we learn.

Blair LaCorte [00:31:57]:
That’s how we calm ourselves down. That’s what I would say about the way that we should look at this is starting at the top. It starts with how you connect to the world.

Nick Urban [00:32:09]:
In my own experience, I go out of my way to say hi to people when I go on my daily walks. I do a nice long walk every morning and I say hi. And I say, the vast majority of the time, people don’t make eye contact. Sometimes I’ll just smile like nothing in response. Then I wonder if it’s because I’m 6 foot 3, 220 pounds, and, like, a bit, like, intimidating for some people. And then I also. My mind wanders to perhaps it’s not even me to begin with. Perhaps, like their nervous system and where they are in their day and life and everything.

Nick Urban [00:32:38]:
And it’s just interesting to look at the situation from a bunch of different vantage points and realize that each of them can be equally correct.

Blair LaCorte [00:32:47]:
Right. And. But let’s go to Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is usually the number one answer. I can tell you that you don’t store someone’s face in one place. You store it in seven different places. Why do I know that? Because when I lost my face, I could see people struggling because my shape of my head looked the same, my nose didn’t. The difference between my eyes looked the same, but my cheekbones didn’t.

Blair LaCorte [00:33:10]:
Right. My jaw line didn’t. Right. So they were going to all of these things, trying to say, who is that? Do I recognize them? Why are they doing that? Because they need to know whether I’m safe or not. Okay. So when you’re walking down the street, the simplest answer to that is that as they’re looking at you, they’re going to decide very quickly, do they know you or not? And if they don’t know you, looking you in the eyes is a sign of aggression for most mammals. Now, if you happen to be smiling, that may bring down that piece. But if you happen to be big, maybe it’s more intimidating.

Blair LaCorte [00:33:44]:
Which is back to a lot of the studies that have Been done on diversity. Sometimes we miss the point of diversity. We say, oh, my God, we should put more people that look like this in a group. And the reality is that’s great. But if they don’t get, there’s like eight or nine levels of intimacy before you get down to the place that you feel like, oh, my God, this is my family, right? If you’re only focused on mixing it up at the high level and say, well, I have these type of people and they look different, you need to find a commonality below that, you know, So I always use the serendipity theory. You go into a bar and you meet someone and they had a T shirt on, and you said, oh, did you go to school there? And they said, yeah, you know, I did. Because we’re trying to find some commonality to make sure they’re safe, right? And then I say, oh, you know what? My sister’s best friend, I went out with her. I love her.

Blair LaCorte [00:34:35]:
All of a sudden you drop two levels, and all of a sudden, for better, for worse, you feel safe because there’s a serendipitous connection and you know, now something about the person. So when you’re trying to figure out, you know, how to get connected to someone, you’re trying to figure out how to let down their guard. Because it’s automatically geared into us now. We’re on a. We’re on a normal curve. There are some extroverted people that. That don’t have a big guard. There are some people that are introverted that really are terrified.

Blair LaCorte [00:35:08]:
And if we, every time we see someone who’s terrified of us, think they hate me, I think we’re going to be wrong, right? And so. But it’s the fact that you even think about it, you know, puts you ahead of the game. Because, you know, the other thing is we’re always trying to be more efficient, right? Why is muscle confusion. I owned a bunch of gyms, right? Why is muscle confusion such a big thing? Because your body doesn’t want to exercise. It sucks because you’re burning too many calories. Now I have to go find more food. That’s the way your body thinks. So it uses less calories every time.

Blair LaCorte [00:35:42]:
You do the same exercise at the same time every day. That’s why. Oh, well, let’s go to muscle confusion so we can make it actually get stimulated again. So think to yourself how the difference is. We’re trying to limit issues and our neurons are trying to put neuron paths. What’s safe, what isn’t, what Exercise. How can I do it more efficiently? In order to keep growing, we need to be uncomfortable now. And.

Blair LaCorte [00:36:08]:
But I just want to finish with. I know there’s people out there that you look at them and think, they don’t seem to have a problem with it all. That’s because they’re just different. But they have other things that are screwed up about them. Okay. They may be easier at connecting. They may have another issue. So let’s, you know, we’re, you know, I have three sons.

Blair LaCorte [00:36:27]:
They’re very, very different. Right. But they love each other because they know each other.

Nick Urban [00:36:31]:
Another challenge, when you’re walking by someone and you go to smile, it’s also a good opportunity to think, what is something, all else equal, that I can appreciate about this person and. Or if I was going to strike up a conversation, I can point this out and create that connection. Point.

Blair LaCorte [00:36:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, my. My wife always says, well, you always have these shirts with something on it, like, you know, and I have my South African rugby shirt on. I said, you know, I. Number one, I feel an affinity because it reminds me of that. But number two, I get more conversations by people saying something about. And especially for those of out there that, you know, went to Dartmouth, I can go anywhere in the world with a Dartmouth shirt.

Blair LaCorte [00:37:12]:
And it’s not like Harvard or any of these other places. People come up to you and they want to know you went to Dartmouth. Because most people don’t buy a Dartmouth shirt like they buy a Harvard shirt. Right. Because it’s a tiny school and, you know, it’s not like the brand name isn’t as high. So, you know that there’s someone out there. And, you know, they call us a cult because that’s because they’re jealous. And they, you know, they’re jealous that we have, you know, green as our color.

Blair LaCorte [00:37:36]:
But that’s the kind of thing there’s signals that you give to people on whether you’re safe or not safe. It’s not just looking and smiling. It couldn’t be waving, and it can be making some comment, whatever that is. But you can’t be connecting all day long. So you have to decide when are those times you want to reach out.

Nick Urban [00:37:59]:
All right, let’s talk about the interplay, the connection about your approach to health and business, because we haven’t touched at all on your business background. And you have done a whole lot of different things across a bunch of different industries. And it seems to me like you have a framework that you apply to everything beyond just the framework. We were talking about earlier, Well, I.

Blair LaCorte [00:38:22]:
Actually apply again back to thinking, what are you good at and what does your body like? I think I stumbled early on into what made me feel comfortable. Right. So it’s going to sound crazy, but I grew up, you know, my parents were divorced, two entrepreneurs, they struggled along and neither one of them was doing well at the same time. And so I was, I grew up looking at love as I’m helping, I’m helping an entrepreneur. So my trauma is worrying about whether we’re going to have money for the end of the month. So we all have trauma and we all have coping mechanisms for trauma. So when I got out of high school, I, you know, I said, oh my God, I’m working in an all night gas station just so I can make money so I don’t have to ask anyone. I’m working in their businesses.

Blair LaCorte [00:39:05]:
You know, I said, I am going to go to college and I am going to learn business because this is nuts and it’s really stressful. And I had, you know, eight brothers and sisters between the two families. And so I went to undergrad business and then I went into a training program with GE in business and then I went back to business school. So I was going to make sure I was safe only to actually get a job. My first job out of business school, doing change management consulting, which is really helping people be entrepreneurial. So what I found my through line was, was I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I wasn’t going to take the risk to start something from zero, but I was very good at taking something either that was broken or that was growing like crazy and they actually are the same thing. And helping people understand, how do you move that to its next level? And that takes two things, understanding people and understanding patterns.

Blair LaCorte [00:40:01]:
It doesn’t mean I had to understand the industry. There’s enough people understand the industry. So if I understand people and they trust me, I don’t need to. So I could jump from, you know, running the world’s largest, you know, live entertainment technology company to running the world’s, you know, now the world’s largest private jet charter company. To me, they’re the exact same thing there. You know, you just have to understand how to actually find from the people and the patterns, how to recognize where it needed to go next. I mean, and every business to me usually has one clear theme, right? I call it a burning platform at the beginning. Now in the jet business, it really came down to a thing that they, I think they called a la court formula out of a Joke now, which is when you own your own jets, which in private aviation most of the time you don’t because you’re using someone else’s jet to charter it.

Blair LaCorte [00:40:54]:
Someone rich person bought it and they love it and their wife is mad at them and she said we never use it and it costs us a lot of money. So they charter it out on the side so the people who are chartering it don’t have to own the asset. It’s a very different business, right, then an airline where you buy all the assets and then you’ve got to actually bring in money because you have to pay for your leases and your debt for buying them. So in the private jet, it really just came down to longer flights. Stupid. Because it turns out that when you own an asset, there’s 85 flights that are over two and a half hours across this country. And if you had a super mid jet and we had the largest number of super mid jets out there, that you would want to go to those 85 cities because then you don’t have to reposition, there’s no deadhead. So I’m flying, when I’m flying, there’s an eight hour duty for pilots.

Blair LaCorte [00:41:45]:
So I’m probably not going to get two flights a day. So if I fly three hours, it all drops to the bottom line. And by the way, most of the maintenance is triggered by takeoffs and landings. So cycle time. So one takeoff and one landing for three hours is better than two one half hour flights. Because my maintenance costs are lower and my fuel costs are lower because at a higher altitude I’m not taking off and landing, so I don’t actually use as much fuel. So everything came down to if you own 75% of the longer flights in the country, then you will bankrupt everybody else, which is what we did. Because they were charging dollars per hour, right? They weren’t thinking about what flight it was.

Blair LaCorte [00:42:22]:
They’re thinking, if I’m getting that much per hour, I’ll make money. Because on average you would. But if someone was evil and came and took all the long flights, you would be doing all the short flights and all of your costs would go up. Right? And so simple concept, an asset needs to be utilized. So how much did I buy it for? How much does it cost me to run and maintain and how many hours a month can I keep it in the air? And it turns out longer flights, Right? Whereas in the, you know, the live entertainment business, you know, we were, you know, we ran 80% of the concerts, over 2,000 people, we ran every Broadway show and every live event in the world. The Olympics, the Super bowl, the Grammys, the Academy Awards. So we were thinking, you know, what kind of business are we? Are we an entertainment business? And then other people would say, no, no, you’re in the asset business because you bring in lights and video walls and things like that. The reality is the burning platform in that business had nothing to do.

Blair LaCorte [00:43:17]:
It’s not that inventory wasn’t a big deal. It had to do with there’s 3,500 people in the world today that can put on a live event. Okay? It takes 17 to 20 years for them to get good enough that they will do a live event. And not. Because when you think about a live event, there’s one thing that everyone goes, oh, well, yeah, if you screw up, you’re going to lose the customer. Great, that’s true. The other is it’s a partnership. So the Academy Awards starts, they put it together, then we tear it down.

Blair LaCorte [00:43:46]:
A Broadway show starts, and when it’s over, we tear it down. A movie starts, when it’s over, we tear it down. A band goes on concert tour, we tear it down. So it’s important for them not to own the assets. Nope. No question. But it’s also really important not to fail. And when you not going to fail, a live event is a system.

Blair LaCorte [00:44:05]:
Does the audio, video, scenery, lights, roadies, ticketing all work? Because if any of those break down in that system, the event gets, you know, gets broken down. And so it turns out that the burning platform from us was, you can’t make those people overnight. They started building stages, and, you know, the two places they came from. When I went to HR and said, give me an analysis of, you know, we have 3,000 people around the world. Where’d they come from? Two big places. Family member, just like the circus. How do you know about that? You go run live events. And the second was some kind of prisoner work rehab program because they, you know, you built stages, and that gave them a start.

Blair LaCorte [00:44:49]:
And then once they got a start, they came out and made something phenomenal I like. But the number one thing we did is we had a rehab program because just like the artists, if they needed help, I could not replace those people. So we were very cautious of saying someone who’s a great performer probably has an addictive personality, and maybe they have gambling or maybe they have what? Whatever. And if they start to feel like they’re not working enough or they’re working too much, we need to help them. Go in there and talk to them and help them and hug them and help them fix because so people wouldn’t realize it, but our number one asset was those people. They’re unbelievable. They’re just as good as, you know, we did everything. We did.

Blair LaCorte [00:45:29]:
Britney Spears show we did. You know, you name an artist, we did it. The people who put on that show, behind the scenes, you can say they don’t sing the same way, but that show would not have happened, you know, the halftime show in the super bowl without someone in a black jumpsuit that looks like a Navy SEAL with a bunch of little things in there, you know, pliers and stuff like that, hanging upside down, fixing something two minutes before we go on, before we did it. So what I would tell everyone out there is that, you know, when you’re looking at businesses, there’s always a simple truth. And when you’re looking at yourself, there’s always a simple truth. So as we look at our systems, ask yourself. You know, the question is, what drives you and what causes you to have negative outcomes? Right. We don’t tell people not to drink, but we do tell people that if you’re going to do something bad for the machine, you know, make sure it’s got something to do with connection, and make sure you limit it to the smallest amount you can, because there is no way that alcohol is good for you.

Blair LaCorte [00:46:32]:
How bad it is for you will depend both on your genes and on how you balance it with whatever else you do in your life.

Nick Urban [00:46:39]:
I’m glad you brought that up because I was going to connect the dots between what you were just mentioning and the burning platform that we can build guardrails around when it comes to biology. And it sounds like that is a good start, as is working on the nervous system and the ability to shift from sympathetic or stress state to relaxed state. Parasympathetic. Any other facets of it that we should consider?

Blair LaCorte [00:47:04]:
I think you hit if a human has a burning platform, it’s how are you dealing with inflammation, which is the parasympathetic nervous system? And how are you dealing with the way that you connect to the world? I’m not telling you. You need to go out to a party every night. We mentioned the word dyadic relationship, and there’s a bunch of studies on connection, and there’s also a bunch of studies in psychology for years on dyadic relationship. Right. It’s do you have one person that you could talk to that you both believe has empathy for you, which means they know enough about you and they care about you? But also has compassion for you, which means by deed or action, you believe that if you got in trouble, they would try to help you even if it wasn’t good for them, Right? If you have that, it’s a supercharger to your. To your parasympathetic nervous system, it doesn’t even mean you have to talk to them. But the fact they exist gives you validity. So for parents with young kids, they don’t need more than one friend at any given time.

Blair LaCorte [00:48:02]:
And it’s not bad to have more than one friend because they learn about what’s acceptable and not. But for all of us, and let me tell you, the supercharger to the supercharger is in order to accept compassion, you have to believe you deserve it. So of people who talk about dyadic relationships, there’s a certain number of people who have them. There’s a certain number of people who believe my wife cares about me and I think she would help me. But there’s a big percentage of those people who actually don’t believe they deserve it. Because if you don’t beloved yourself. And that’s not a. You know, this thing where you sit there every day and go, I hate myself.

Blair LaCorte [00:48:38]:
I hate myself. Deep down, we all have a little trauma, right? That’s how we get through life. And what happened in the first eight years of our lives actually impacts how we perceive love. Okay, that’s not saying between 8 and 12, you get into values and you can’t adapt that. But the trauma and good trauma and bad trauma that you feel when you were growing up, you try to replay it out, which is why sometimes we end up marrying our mother or our father, right? Because we try to fix it. Which I wouldn’t say is a good strategy given my record, But I would say that when you look at this whole idea around compassion, it again starts with compassion for yourself. And so if you’re compassionate to yourself, you’re much more likely to have a good dyadic relationship with another person because you believe they can love you. And that is really the most important.

Blair LaCorte [00:49:27]:
Like one trick we were talking about, like saying smiling to people, My dad would always say, you know, if you care about someone, write them a card when it’s not their birthday and it’s not Christmas, and send them an email or a note or a picture or a card, whatever you want to do. And why would you do that? Because subconsciously, when they get it, they’re not going to think of it consciously. But if you. If you really interview them, they’ll say this to you. Wow, they must have really cared about me because there’s no reason for them to have done this. It’s not my birthday, but they must have been thinking about me and thinking what a good person I am to write this note. It doesn’t cost you anything. What it costs you is again to be it.

Blair LaCorte [00:50:09]:
To be, you know, forward thinking and proactive and to have intention. So if your intention is to connect with people and smile, your connection is to make dyadic relationships deeper. To send a note then 10% of your day it would be great to do those kind of things, even if it’s not every day you can take a, you can take a rest day. But the world would become a much different place if everybody for 10% of their day. Now why did that happen more often when we were in small villages? Because we’re screwed if we don’t get along with those people.

Nick Urban [00:50:43]:
Yeah, that’s a simple one too. And even if it’s not a full 10% of your day, if it’s 30 seconds or a minute per day, one action like that compounds over time and it doesn’t really cost much.

Blair LaCorte [00:50:53]:
And I would argue if you start with 30 seconds, just like with weightlifting, and you get to a minute, you’re going to get to five minutes. And if you like it enough, it won’t feel like you did 10% of your day. It will feel like that’s who you are. A bunch of studies on people, poo, poo, positivity. I mean, Kim Cameron was a good friend and wrote all the books in the Positivity Institute. And I really believe in it and I read a bunch of his studies. When you study one negative person in an office, all these studies came out and said it brings down the whole office. Now we thought at the beginning that was because you interacted with a negative person.

Blair LaCorte [00:51:28]:
It turns out that one negative person interacting with someone else who then happens to interact with you actually has the same effect. Because we are actually designed to read when we’re in trouble or not in trouble and we’re able to read energy. When you become within three feet of someone, you read their energy field. So no matter what they’re saying to you and looking you in the eye, you know this. You can feel when someone’s in a bad mood or you can feel when someone’s tense. A dog can feel anxiety and so can’t you. So again, making yourself healthier also makes everybody else in your village healthier. This is really system, system biology.

Blair LaCorte [00:52:06]:
We’re just this amazing machine, right? But we also, the way that we grow is through ambiguity. That’s dealing with our need for love and our need and our desire to survive, right? Which is our fear. And we’ve got to, you know, you know, we’ve got to deal with that because that’s the special gift. There’s a. A part of your brain that if you look it up, they’ll call the God complex. Now, do they know it’s God? No, they don’t. But when you’re praying or you’re believing, you’re connected spiritually through something that tends to light up. So why do they call it the God? Because we must need that.

Blair LaCorte [00:52:42]:
That, you know, I’m not telling you that you have to be a religion, but we must need that feeling connected. And it turns out that that same area of your brain for a lot of psychedelic trips tends to light up. Now the argument with psychedelic trips is, is it a reset or does it have a degrading capability where it opens you up for a second? But again, just like everything else, I go out and I lift weights for one day. Now, I wouldn’t say do acid every day, but if you can figure out how to open up and light up your system by doing things that are healthy for you, then maybe that’s how we all become better people. People and how we make the world a better place. You know the, the hardest part, if you. There’s a book on, called Civilization, which talks about one of the worst things for humans is civilization. Because once you get 10 or 11 layers above the tribe, the people who are drawn towards that kind of power tend to be.

Blair LaCorte [00:53:34]:
They’re normal. They just, you know, 10% of people are narcissistic sociopath. Now, we hope they’re not malignant, but that’s the kind of person. And why would they be drawn that way? Because they want power, because they understand power. And they’re better at that because they don’t worry about everybody all the time. Doesn’t make them bad. Just like every sociopath isn’t a serial killer. But the problem is, over time, the people who really, really want it and will do anything to get it.

Blair LaCorte [00:54:02]:
You can have a benevolent dictator who’s really good at what they do and just happens to have that profile. And you can have a really malignant one. And so civilization has got to be, or has to be, my dad would correct me, has to be impacted on one person affecting two people, affecting four people. So we can’t always depend on policy coming down. It has to be that policy comes up. The reason that when you take a look at the Catholic religion in the United States, adapted and start talking as much about hell and more about love was because Buddhism was here in the 60s and they were starting to see a huge amount of young people move towards that. So we can impact even the strongest organizations, but we have to do it from one person, affecting one person.

Nick Urban [00:54:51]:
Blair, you mentioned something earlier that I think we’ll get some eyebrow raises and it was in the context of the traumas we have. You mentioned marrying our fathers and mothers and I think you mean marrying people that have in display similar characteristics or traits.

Blair LaCorte [00:55:09]:
Sure. And that can be very good because that’s the way you experience love and safety. And that’s, you know, zero to eight is really where your personality either is expressed or repressed. It’s also because you’re so helpless, where you actually feel love. That doesn’t have to be your father, mother, any caretaker, Right. The interactions you have. And no one is perfect. I’m a parent.

Blair LaCorte [00:55:31]:
We’re all, you know, parents spend their whole lives waiting for kids to come back. I’m still, you know, I wait every day for them to thank you for your sacrifice. Right. And kids, you know, as they get older, every day are waiting for you to say, well, you know, I want you to apologize because you really screwed that up. Right. And both of those things are true. The whole point is that, you know, we take a long time to gestate as, you know, you know, as human beings. And so we are very helpless at the beginning.

Blair LaCorte [00:55:58]:
The values that you get between 8 and 12, now, these are gross generalizations, right? That’s why the church and schools really focus on 8 to 12 year olds over history. Right. Because that’s a place where you start to get. The parents have a big impact on when we send them out, do I walk the way I talk? And when they interact with other people and do those values accepted by society. Spoiler alert. For those of you who have young kids between 12 and 16, 75% of the influence, if not more, comes from outside you. They don’t care anymore because once they’ve got some set of values set somewhere in junior high school, the trauma begins because we’re trying to fit in. Because if we don’t figure out how to fit in outside our family, we’ll never fit in society.

Blair LaCorte [00:56:38]:
And then somewhere, we hope, between 16 and 24 years old, we’ll develop skills. Now, when we say skills, it’s repeatable things that we do that society says are good and that we feel control over. So if we feel like we have some control now, all of a sudden, we come out and we have some trauma, we get some values that we’re going to hopefully go back to. We’re going to actually figure out how those values fit and who I’m going to hang out with, and then I’m going to find a way that I can fit into the tribe. And the tribe will say, they’re really smart, they’re a good teacher, they’re a good hockey player. They’re some skill that everyone goes, oh, and I know I can do that. Right? And so that’s the cycle that we go through. And so when you think about your relationships with your.

Blair LaCorte [00:57:23]:
Your parents and your siblings, it will express itself. When you get to the point where you want to have an intimate relationship. And by the way, there’s constructive things, and if you have a great relationship with your dad, hopefully you will look for someone who has those attributes that your dad does. But there are going to be bad things, and you sometimes are drawn subconsciously towards them. And I’m going to get in trouble because I’m not a doctor, even though my wife is a psychotherapist and has called a doctor. She’ll get mad at me. But I’ll say it in a very general way, which is there are a lot of times we try to actually fix the things that we didn’t get when we were younger. And so if we didn’t feel like I had a good enough relationship with my mother and I could never actually connect or save her, I’m going to try harder to find someone like her and do it right.

Blair LaCorte [00:58:11]:
And so that’s bad if your mother happens to be a narcissist. Not saying anything. But then you will find another narcissist and you will say, I can do this. Not consciously, but subconsciously. Why? Because you feel comfortable that you understand that kind of personality trait. The reality is that, you know, like everything else in life, we can. We can help other people be different, but, you know, we can’t change them. And the key is that we have to know where our boundaries are.

Blair LaCorte [00:58:42]:
No one’s. No one’s perfect. And it would be a very boring world if everybody did exactly what we wanted them to do.

Nick Urban [00:58:51]:
Yes. Yeah, I agree with you on that. We have a few minutes left, so I want to do a hard pivot here. I’d be remiss if we made it this far. And I didn’t ask you at all about what emerging technologies and innovations are exciting you these days in the world of human health, performance, longevity. After all, you’re with the Buck Institute, and you also are studying this stuff on your own accord. So I’ll give you the floor. What’s.

Nick Urban [00:59:19]:
What’s coming up?

Blair LaCorte [00:59:20]:
Sure. You know, and again, I think Atiya did it well in the blue zones when he said, here’s what I do. Start telling you what you should do, right? Which is there’s some really interesting things that are happening out there today. And I would say that probably the most interesting is this whole idea around predict and prevent. That science really is at a point where there’s things you can do to predict illness before it happens, whether it’s your genetic doing. Your genetic, which now is $250. Now, I know, but it’s not your 23andMe grandfather’s genetics. Today, there’s 120 million anonymized records.

Blair LaCorte [00:59:59]:
We know a lot more than we ever knew. And they can run it against those records and they can do a lot of prediction and they can even tell you what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. So Nathan did a study at Arvindale. I’m going to pronounce it incorrectly. 5,000 people over 10 years, and they can actually tell you now, looking at it, they can tell you, if you have high cholesterol, can it be brought down by exercise? Because if your genetics said you shouldn’t, then it’s probably lifestyle and you can bring it down and they prove that. But if you were, you know, out there, you were going to get high cholesterol, then maybe you need a statin, right? Maybe you need some kind of intervention to it. And if you’re going to take a statin, it can also tell you which statin was probably going to work for you. Whereas today they do what they did with chemo years ago, your doctor says, well, try this.

Blair LaCorte [01:00:46]:
We’ll see if it works. That’s what they do with chemo. You know, if the chemo wasn’t killing you, they gave you more. If it was killing you, they brought it. But today you can actually have precision medicine. So not only can you predict, but you can actually have precision medicine. So there’s a lot of things you can do. If you got cancer, you would go out and have every test that you needed done and you would find all the information you needed.

Blair LaCorte [01:01:09]:
What I’m telling you is creating a digital twin. I use that in loose terms. Going out there and having the extended genome, even if you don’t go through all of the issues in the biome and having the extended set of biomarkers. If you find sickness, okay, you need to deal with it. If you don’t find sickness, what you get is your biomarkers when you were healthy. And the best way for them to cure you when something goes wrong is to compare it, because no one’s the same. Saying you have high cholesterol does not mean that you’re going to have a heart attack. You got to look at your A1C, you got to look at your liver enzymes.

Blair LaCorte [01:01:48]:
You got to look at all of these different factors. And unless you look at them together, you will not see what’s changing at the same time. So the number one thing I would say to you is that it does not cost a lot to at least get tests done now with biomarkers. You know, there’s people like functional health and things that we don’t endorse or not endorse anybody. They say do it every quarter. And as a predictor, you can see changes. Is it going to help you avoid it? It’s hard to tell, but there’s definitely an advantage to that. But if you don’t at least do one set of stuff every couple years now, again, people will argue about the full body mri.

Blair LaCorte [01:02:28]:
You can go back and forth on that, you know, whether it’s really worth it or not. Again, I, you know, I’m not. But I can tell you that doing a genome and a biome and biomarkers is going to cost you less than $1,000.

Nick Urban [01:02:43]:
Okay, by biomarkers, you mean a simple blood panel or maybe a thorough blood panel.

Blair LaCorte [01:02:49]:
And I’m saying, given what you find in your genetics and your biome, I would do an extended panel that’s personalized to you. Like, what are the things that that’s telling you that maybe you should look at? Right. You know, you’re not doing 35 versus we’re doing a study with ARPA H and DARPA where we’re doing millions of biomarkers, and we’re also doing it temporally over time because your body ages. So if you’re going to take a blood test, take it at the same time every day. Your body is four years older at the end of the day than is the at the beginning of the day. So you may get different results, but that takes you to have to think to yourself, well, I’m always going to get these tests done in the afternoon or I’m always going to have done in the morning. So the first thing I would say is you know, do biomarkers. Now I have a GLP one, right? So why would I, why would I have this? I don’t, you know, you know, there’s a lot of evidence right now that microdosing on small doses.

Blair LaCorte [01:03:46]:
We don’t know why. And it’s just like kind of post it notes which were a mistake. There were some glue that they didn’t, didn’t work because it wasn’t sticky enough to keep things glued together. And then they figured out how to do post it notes from it. The first GLPTs. This isn’t a new drug. It’s been around for almost 20 years for diabetics. Again, one of my big rants is that people think that there’s a conspiracy theory people want to have cancer because the cancer industry makes so much money off of you.

Blair LaCorte [01:04:12]:
The reality is they do cancer drugs because there’s money in it, not because they are trying to get you to get cancer. It’s that we don’t prevent it and therefore they want to cure it. Diabetics have been using this stuff for a while because there was money in it, right? But when you look at it, it was designed to go into your stomach and attached to your stomach. It ended up attaching to your brain and it tends to bring down inflammation on a holistic way. We’re not sure why, but it looks that in low doses that it’s actually very effective at reducing risk for heart disease and dementia and everything else that goes with it. Early days. So predict and prevent to me is the, you know, is the big thing. The other is, you know, this whole idea around what you would do to optimize, participate in optimizing your routine for some people, you know, I mean, I always tell people, the one I forgot to say is do a cgm, do constant glucose.

Blair LaCorte [01:05:10]:
Now why? Because we spent billions of dollars for diabetics to go see what peaks your sugar. If certain things now it’s hard. You have to do it two weeks and then take a month off and do it two weeks. But if you find that you’re allergic to something or it’s peaking your sugar, then maybe you should change your behavior. Predict and prevent what’s going on. So I know we run out of time. So those are my big ones is I would do a genome, I would do a biometric, I would do a CGM and I would do some extended biomarkers at least once. And keep your own medical record so that if something happens, just like for the cancer doctor, you bring a bunch of information in your GP is a great person, but 99% of what they’re trained to do and what they are rewarded to do is find illness.

Blair LaCorte [01:05:55]:
And 100% of what a hospital does is to treat illness. So yes, you may have someone talk about preventative, but like we, this is my past life. We, we invested in a company called Grail. Have you ever heard of the Grail test? The number one answer when I ask people, have you heard of the Grail test? They ask your doctor, Never heard of it. It’s experimental. It’s a wild goose chase. Rich people, right? But the Grail test has been around for a long time now and it’s actually pretty good with very few false positives of which they can always be double checked by a colonoscopy. If it says you’re looking like you’re heading towards, you know, colon cancer, the problem is it’s 800 bucks.

Blair LaCorte [01:06:37]:
So is that predictive? And would I do that every two years? I do. Right, because it’s very, very effective. Why do. Why is the ama Google the Wall Street Journal article on the Grail test and you will find the number one group that’s fighting the Grail test is the ama. Non insurance companies even, they’d love it because if we could really catch cancer early. And the reason is because it’s hard in our model today, which means that we have to participate and take on more responsibility. And you should always go to your doctor. They are awesome and they’re trained well.

Blair LaCorte [01:07:15]:
And it’s just that the more information we can bring them, the better they’re going to be at helping us.

Nick Urban [01:07:22]:
Wish there was more prevention based education in the curriculum. Perhaps it will be in the near future. And more open mindedness towards evaluating new interventions, new technologies, new molecules, old molecules. I think that’s going to come in the future, hopefully sooner than later.

Blair LaCorte [01:07:40]:
I think so too. And it’s already happening. But I just want to say this isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is an economic theory. Our entire system is built on treating sick people. Right? I mean I’m not. That’s not bad. We, when I was at my investment firm, we owned a couple of hospitals. We invested in epic.

Blair LaCorte [01:07:57]:
It’s a beautiful system for treating illness. But what’s happening in the US the reason our numbers are so bad, why we’re 39th in longevity and we’re the worst in the world at dying early. Not early longevity, but health span, our health span. We start deteriorating with at least one chronic illness going to 2, 3, 14 years. Number one in the world. Why is that? Because what we’re doing in our society is actually hurting us. And then we’ve got this thing on the end which is trying to fix us at the last minute when the cost is highest and the outcome is lowest. It’s not that these aren’t heroic people, but we’ve got to move down the cycle.

Blair LaCorte [01:08:35]:
And I’m just not sure that that system can move as fast as an individual. Now I will not say which companies I talk to, but when I talk to senior execs at insurance companies and I ask them whether they took the grail test, said of course, but I can’t. How can I get it done? Because the average American changes job every two years and the average insurance broker comes in every three years. And by the time in a five year window that I help you avoid cancer, you’ll be at another insurance company that those are not bad people. They’re just, they’re trying to figure out the same way we are. Which the thing I’m going to say to you is read Scientific Wellness and Atomic Habits and go after predict and prevent and then participate and personalize. That’s all it’s about. So if you really want, I can tell you having been there when you know, unfortunately more people that I want to talk about have passed away.

Blair LaCorte [01:09:29]:
If you told them they could get two more years of health span not suffering for two more years with a chronic set of illnesses, they would do anything. And so we have to say to our future self, what would I do right now and what can I do that fits in? And the key is it’s got to be something you enjoy and it’s got to be something you do with someone else because those are the habits that will stick. You don’t have to do everything we talked about on the show, but if you pick up one thing and it.

Nick Urban [01:09:57]:
Sticks, it’s a benefit with you on that. And I think having a downregulated nervous system or nervous system that can access a downregulated state and having ample physical and mental energy makes behavior change much, much easier.

Blair LaCorte [01:10:14]:
100% now you’re 100%. And so it continues to always come back to that. Our, our secret weapon as our parasympathetic nervous system. If we get that right, everything else that we talk about is a bonus. And by the way, I’m not saying you can’t go do 45 minutes ahead, but if you’re not actually doing the basic stuff, that stuff doesn’t have as much of an impact. You’re wasting your time. Right. If you don’t move 15 minutes every hour.

Blair LaCorte [01:10:40]:
Two hours of exercise at the end of the day is a negative trade. Every study, go, go look it up. Every study. Because 50 if sitting for eight hours is so detrimental to your joints and your organs and you’re ecstatic that you can’t make up for it. So I’m saying go do some exercise you love and do it with other people, but move 15 minutes every hour. So, you know, anyway, thank you for the chance to rant and rave, but, you know, hopefully we sent out some positive energy in the world today. And the reality is we don’t have to do big things. We really don’t have to do big things.

Blair LaCorte [01:11:16]:
And then, as we will always say, stay away from as much sugar as you can.

Nick Urban [01:11:21]:
Well, Blair, neither of us have been Moving around for 15 minutes in this last hour, so I will let you get your movement in in one second. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. If people want to connect with you to follow your work, how do they go about that?

Blair LaCorte [01:11:35]:
Sure, you can check out my LinkedIn and if you want, you know, we have some videos and things on, on this, you know, on under PPE Mastermind, my coaching group. So we always post whatever speakers we have come in, we post some videos or ask me on my LinkedIn and I’ll send you links to them.

Nick Urban [01:11:52]:
Okay. Well, we got through a small fraction of all the questions I had for you and that’s a good thing because there’s a lot of ground to cover here. Perhaps we’ll have to do another round at some point and dive deeper into some of the new findings and your changing thinking and applying some more of the business mind and the pattern recognition into different domains of life.

Blair LaCorte [01:12:12]:
I love it. Cool.

Nick Urban [01:12:14]:
Thanks again, Blair.

Blair LaCorte [01:12:15]:
All right, I’ll try to be. I’ll try to live long enough to get another interview. Perfect.

Nick Urban [01:12:21]:
Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources [email protected] until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.