How Bob Hutchins' Ethical AI Approach is Winning the Market

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the How Scale Business. My name is Hector San Ban. I am your host and our special guest today is Mr. He is a

[00:00:12] Hector: expert. Upgrade our operating system. So Eric, welcome to the show.

[00:00:17] Eric: Oh, thank you. It's great to be here. Hector,

[00:00:18] Hector: give us a better, , more accurate, , you know, job description, position description, title of what you do, and then we'll get into how you, help people.

[00:00:26] Eric: Yeah, so formally, I'm, the CEO of. A mind for all seasons, and we're a company that helps thousands of people across the country improve their cognitive and mental health.

[00:00:35] Hector: it's something that I think is so valuable. I got into, , you know, this world, , I remember hiring my first mindfulness coach, uh, , when I was a sales trainer because I was like, I suck at sales training. Control of my brain is really what I realized and what I, sort of intuited or, understood at some level that there are these people and they have a, better mastery of themselves and are able to get better results.

[00:00:59] Hector: And, , you know, for the. Decade and a half or so. That's kind of been what I've been trying to do is improve myself knowing that it's, , usually going to result in an improvement in growth in the business. What was your path, or how did you sort of stumble onto this, you know, into this realm?

[00:01:15] Eric: Well, I think stumble is the right word to use, really, because that's what it was. . I originally thought I was gonna be a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and I was trying to stand out from all the biology guys by being a piano and saxophone performance major, which meant I spent lots of time in the practice room and sitting in class and no time having any sort of a life.

[00:01:35] Eric: And so I. I pivoted. I studied interpersonal group communication and psychology. And then I got married my senior year of college. And , by the time we were graduating, my wife and I were expecting our first child. And I had the realization that $8 an hour as an assistant to a farmer's insurance agent was not even enough to get an apartment.

[00:01:54] Eric: So I stumbled into a job because I was desperate in an assisted living community. And I honestly thought I'd do it for like six months until I found my real. Job. And that turned into like nine years with that company. I got an administrator's license, became an executive director, , ended up then taking over a memory care community.

[00:02:15] Eric: And I spent seven years doing that. So after 16 years being around people living with degenerative diseases that wrecked them, like Alzheimer's disease that leaves you functionally like a newborn. , I had learned a lot about how to improve the lives of the people that I was serving, how to take on someone with really challenging situations and find ways to make it a little bit better.

[00:02:38] Eric: And there's a whole story of what led to jumping the ship and becoming an entrepreneur and starting a company in 2016, but. I did, and I still didn't see what I now see today because I was just gonna be a solopreneur. I was gonna have more control over my time and my life and my family situation.

[00:02:56] Eric: And then a year into it, some amazing things aligned and I was able to meet my business partner, , Randy Audrey, who's our chief medical officer. And he and I had studied in two different but highly complimentary areas. He's a brain health expert. He is. done fellowships with some of the top researchers and brain science experts on the planet.

[00:03:15] Eric: And we went all in developing tools and systems initially to help people in assisted living do way better. reverse symptoms of cognitive decline to one degree or another. That sort of organically led to their family members saying, well, you just felt bad and add 10 points on a 30 point cognitive test and he's got Alzheimer's disease.

[00:03:34] Eric: What could you do for my brain? and it's just kind of mushroom from there. I never could have predicted the path, but how many entrepreneurs say, oh, I couldn't have predicted the path.

[00:03:44] Hector: Right. And especially, I think we're in similar spaces where, I'd imagine. You know, a lot of people say, oh, you kind of are where the puck went, or you, you're sort of lucky to be where, you know, the industry went and it seems that a lot of people are waking up to brain health, neuro health.

[00:03:59] Hector: They're waking up to the ability that, you know, neuroplasticity, that the, concept and the idea of them needing to pay attention to their brain. Because I would imagine that 10, 20 years ago, that wasn't really on the radars of a lot of people. And so, my question to you is, what made you think that this was something worth building a business around? I really think, as I think about it and as I look back, Hector, it was about the impact that it could make in somebody's life. When you spent 16 years watching people go from being functional, active, wonderful adults to unable to wipe their own bottom, unable to roll over on their own, hardly able to put any words together, I think it changes you as a person and.

[00:04:42] Eric: Because early in the, , initial stages of kind of developing our, protocols and processes, I was seeing people back out of that. I was seeing people who hadn't talked in a couple of years start at least putting some words together or becoming more and more functional. it hit me to the core.

[00:05:01] Eric: It was so deeply impactful on the human level. But I also realized it was, it was giving customers exactly what they wanted. I mean, we were changing the marketing message of some of these assisted living communities to, we have powerful tools to help you hopefully never need what we have as far as full-time care.

[00:05:20] Eric: And if that's not in the cards, if you already need to move in, our goal is to get you back home as soon as possible. Well.

[00:05:30] Hector: Well, I don't know if it was intentional or intuitive, but there's all these aligning of, things, whether it's, you know, the health, business people waking up and then you're sort of coming online to what's possible. You know, in the science and the supplementation and the health and all this, you're an avid learner and I would imagine that, had you tried to start this business 50, 60 years ago, There wouldn't have been as much, , research or, you know, information, knowledge to be able to serve the people with. And so it seems like you're really, you know, taking advantage of something that, ripe to be taken advantage of.

[00:06:03] Eric: I think that's absolutely true. , it's really been the last 15, 20 years that the knowledge has exploded and it's accelerating and I think it's going to keep accelerating, but I'm grateful that it's opened so many more people's minds to even think about the concept that.

[00:06:19] Eric: Hey, I'm not stuck with the brain that I have. I could do something about that, right?

[00:06:23] Hector: my grandma had Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and it was always just a very interesting thing because I never knew her. I only knew her post, that sort of thing. And so just kind of growing up.

[00:06:33] Hector: Thinking that, oh, you're sort of to, this sort of what I thought. Like, oh, we were, you know, we just get it and then that's it. But it seems like obviously that's, not the case. .

[00:06:44] Hector: Are things that most surprise entrepreneurs, CEOs, business leaders, , about the brain neural health? Like what sort of things or misconceptions maybe do they have that, , you think might help 'em?

[00:06:59] Eric: I like that question. I think a lot of people fundamentally confuse what is common with being normal. I think people assume that it's.

[00:07:10] Eric: Normal, that as you get older, that your energy level's gonna start sagging, that your memory's gonna get worse, that you'll just get foggy. And I think a lot of people kind of push that back and they try to ignore it even though they've got this suspicion or this fear that they harbor that things are just gonna fall apart.

[00:07:28] Eric: So I gotta do as much as I can right now. And in, in some ways that's self-sabotage because I think a lot of people push themselves too much when they're young and. Maybe part of that for some people is the worry that I've only got so much time before everything falls apart, and I don't think it has to be that way.

[00:07:46] Eric: I think if I was to pick one other thing that I see lots of business leaders missing and, and many of my clients are entrepreneurs who recognize my brain is my tool in this knowledge economy, we're not. earning our living by brute force labor these days. And so they recognize I want my tool to be as sharp as possible.

[00:08:05] Eric: I need someone with expert knowledge to do that. And so we've served a lot of those people and what I hear from them over and over is they'll come back and say things like. I thought I needed to reread David Allen's amazing book on productivity so I could get more done in my day because I just wasn't doing as much as I was when I was younger.

[00:08:25] Eric: And when we helped them improve their, cognitive scores by 20 to 30, I. Percent over a few months time. They say, man, I just need to get my processing speed 30% up, and I'm getting so much more done in the day and I needed to understand the root cause of why my energy was sagging every afternoon. And I felt like my mind was mush.

[00:08:45] Eric: And now that I've dealt with the physiology. It's like I had a hardware upgrade and I actually really like that analogy of hardware versus software. I like to think of the soft skills, the, conferences that we go to, the books that we read, the podcasts that we listen to, that's like software and everyone knows what happens if you load new software on tremi old hardware.

[00:09:07] Eric: It just is never going to work as well. But ideally. You would upgrade the hardware and you'd keep learning and developing the software, and I think that's a dynamite combination. I see that over and over.

[00:09:19] Hector: Well, you think about the old axiom, work harder, not smarter. it is literally the, thesis of that right. Is the, exemplification of that. Exactly. And, what I think is coming online for a lot of people is that like a bicep or like, you know, any other muscle, there are ways to, to grow or ways to improve brain sort of things. And we've been having conversations at this event that we're at about ways.

[00:09:42] Hector: Biologically improve and upgrade your hardware. Mm-hmm. What are some of your favorite, , whether it's mindsets, tactics, strategies, like what are some of your things that people practically can do to upgrade

[00:09:54] Eric: their brain health? Setting biomarkers aside because there's lots of stuff that could be measured to deeply personalize this.

[00:10:01] Eric: And I, I think all that stuff really matters at a deep level, but there's a lot of stuff you could never medicate or supplement your way out of. So I'll stick with that right now. , if I had to pick one thing to put it at the top of the list, it would be difficult because you can argue a lot of ways, but I think sleep would have to be right up there, which is interesting because for so much of human history or at.

[00:10:24] Eric: I don't know, 20th and, 21st century history. So many people think, oh, I'll sacrifice my sleep. They make their health negotiable so they can pull other stuff onto their, plate in life, so to speak, and it's health that gives way, and often that's in the form of, well just. won't sleep as much tonight.

[00:10:42] Eric: I'll stay up till four o'clock in the morning getting this project done. But now that we know that sleep is literally when the brain takes out the trash, that's when the glymphatic system runs. That's when if you're asleep, your brain shrinks a little bit. the ventricles, the fluid filled spaces open up.

[00:10:58] Eric: Your brain makes about a cup and a half of new cerebral spinal fluid, and it bathes your brain in that fluid to flush out the, the amyloid beta that builds up in the Alzheimer's brain like, your grandmother had. And, , it flushes out cellular waste and debris. And, , if you're not getting seven to eight hours of depressed full sleep, then you're hosed as far as your cognitive functioning, you're definitely going to have a drop.

[00:11:21] Eric: So that's right at the top of the list.

[00:11:23] Hector: I remember in the sales organization that I came up with, one of the other sort of competitor, you know, offices, their mantra was, team, no sleep. their ethos, was to sacrifice their sleep , in exchange for.

[00:11:36] Hector: Whatever, right? and not realizing that those have long-term ramifications, , that, , you don't always see.

[00:11:42] Eric: Mm-hmm. I think they even have short-term ramifications though, knowing what I know now and what I've seen about sleep, if I heard a team saying We're team no sleep, I'd wanna run away and say, oh my gosh, those are the under performers.

[00:11:56] Eric: And even if they were great, I'd say think of how much more they could do. If they truly optimize the tool that they're working with.

[00:12:02] Hector: Are there things that you see people are lying to themselves about when it comes to sleep? Are there downstream effects that people aren't connecting to sleep that actually impacting their work

[00:12:14] Eric: Downstream consequences from that. , I think they're lying to themselves about things like, , weight loss, for example. Lots of people these days have problems with metabolism of one sort or another, and they need to lose some weight and they wanna lose some weight. But they tell themselves, well, I just need to exercise more.

[00:12:37] Eric: And they don't necessarily want to confront the fact that if you're not sleeping really well, it's very difficult to lose weight. there's a lot about sleep that affects metabolism and people wanna say, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know,

[00:12:51] Eric: human. Well, even if they've read the research on something or if someone's explained it to them, but that doesn't affect me as much as it affects maybe you, and I think lots of humans drift in that way.

[00:13:08] Hector: We had a conversation this morning, and obviously it's. Specific for everybody, but if you could give, you know, some general advice when it comes to something like supplementation or nutrition.

[00:13:18] Hector: Mm-hmm. Are there things that you think, , have a, higher weight or have a, you know, a larger impact than other things

[00:13:25] Eric: I do actually. . I think it depends on an individual's personal situation, but I do think that there are a few supplements having done blood work with thousands of people.

[00:13:35] Eric: , I think there are a few things that almost everybody needs to be supplementing and I think one of the most important things for people to understand about. Before I really unpack, Hey, what are the few things that maybe everybody needs to take is that most people purchase a supplement because of an outcome that they want, and there's a marketing message that says, this supplement is supposed to do this thing.

[00:14:00] Eric: And they say, oh, well I have that symptom so I'm gonna try it. But they often have little understanding that one symptom can have 20 or 30 different root causes. And what matters is why do you have that symptom? So let's say that someone just feels foggy. Well, it's the biggest reason that you're foggy.

[00:14:18] Eric: Go to our earlier conversation is that you're not sleeping. I mean, you might be able to hide the symptom with a stimulant or something, maybe, , get hopped up on caffeine, but that's not really the answer to the root cause issue. , I think ideally you consume a supplement if you need something that is supplemental and you measure it.

[00:14:40] Eric: With a blood test wherever possible, or maybe you have a cognitive test where you understand, whoa, I have, I have a memory problem, so I need more of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, so I'm going to use a really high quality choline supplement. So I have the building block for that. That's a little bit more of a measurement.

[00:14:59] Eric: Or, hey, my B12 level is two 50 and optimally it'd be over a thousand. now we, can measure something, we can apply an intervention, we can adjust it. So at the outset, I think that's something that people need to understand. and, and to translate

[00:15:13] Hector: that, I mean, as I'm playing devil's advocate, I know there's a listener who's going, yeah, but how does that translate? How, what's the ROI? Because I think that when you talk about something like, you know, low B12, I mean, that's, low energy. And if someone doesn't have energy, then they can't finish their task list. They can't finish their actions, they don't have the, capacity to make those extra calls or do whatever it is.

[00:15:33] Hector: And so mean, maybe you can connect the dots a little bit more, but I think that these things have real business.

[00:15:40] Eric: What makes it harder to show up in your business than your negative voice getting in your head and just having a field day with you? Well, if you have low folate, low B nine, you're highly likely to be at least anxious or more depressed, if not even suicidal. If it's slow enough. And if you don't have enough B12, not only is that gonna affect your energy level, but.

[00:16:02] Eric: There's also research that links that with psychosis and things like hallucinations. Now obviously most people who are running businesses are not out hallucinating, but if you wanna talk about how much mental health matters, you've gotta have the right ingredients on the pantry shelf for things to work, right?

[00:16:19] Eric: And we're all trying to make this recipe every day. In our brains to have things work the way that we need to so that we can show up for people. And entrepreneurship is hard enough as it's without the physiology not being there to support us.

[00:16:32] Hector: Yeah. We don't have the base hardware to your point.

[00:16:36] Hector: Yeah. And that's not working in working condition. It makes it hard for us to layer on anything on top of that. Yeah. , as well. what else might someone take in, you know, if they have a regimen or a, curriculum is not the right word, but what else might go into them taking care of their, brain?

[00:16:51] Eric: Yeah. Maybe I'll give you a summarized list and we can unpack any of them that you want to. . Certainly brain training matters, meaning novel cognitive experiences. We're not talking about doing crossword puzzles or something like that, but, , you have to create conditions where the brain would have a reason to make new synaptic connections and to become more resilient.

[00:17:10] Eric: , exercise is huge for brain health. There's tons of research on what exercise does and lots that we could unpack there. diet certainly matters. you can't outrun a bad diet, as lots of people have said. , I really believe that that's true, but I think there's too much tribalism about diet and there are too many people that think there's one diet for every human.

[00:17:32] Eric: And I think if they argue there's one best diet, then they probably don't understand physiology very well. Not that I'm the world's greatest expert on it, but I know that humans are very different. And my 16-year-old son that. Is training for cross country season and running 10 miles a day is metabolically in a very different place than an 80-year-old that's been sitting on the couch for 40 years.

[00:17:53] Eric: Right.

[00:17:54] Hector: it's important that you bring that up, that everybody find what, works for them. What I know didn't work for me is when I used to get, , a California burrito in the middle of the day. , to digest all of the carne Sava and french fries that were, , wrapped up in delicious.

[00:18:08] Hector: But, , you know, it

[00:18:09] Eric: had its repercussions. Right. , maybe we could talk about a couple of principles that are illustrated by your example. 'cause I think we get further dietarily when we leverage principles. , one of them is. We should eat according to our goals. And if your goal during the workday is to have steady energy, then something that's going to cause your blood sugar to spike and crash is going to work against your goal.

[00:18:33] Eric: , way better to just. Have the steak, maybe have an avocado with it. Have prioritize the protein and the fat because we're not gonna have so much of a sugar spike there and that's gonna keep our energy steadier. I actually eat very different during the workday than I do in the evening or than I do after a heavy workout or something like that.

[00:18:52] Eric: 'cause the goal is different.

[00:18:54] Hector: Are there any other things that you think are, helpful and valuable for people

[00:18:57] Eric: too? Yeah, yeah. Just a couple other things I'd throw on the list. , one that's often overlooked and not understand as well as it should be as dental health. , lots of people who donate their brains to science and die with Alzheimer's disease are found to have p gingivalis bacteria living in their brain.

[00:19:13] Eric: , well that's the bacteria involved in gum disease. And there's a lot of things that can happen in the mouth where that bacteria could be leaching into the bloodstream, igniting an inflammatory response, and lots that we could talk about as far as how inflammation ties

[00:19:27] Hector: in these

[00:19:27] Eric: telltale

[00:19:27] Hector: signs, , that people think is.

[00:19:29] Hector: fine, but their dental health or their, mouth is actually not,

[00:19:33] Eric: , well, certainly there are obvious signs. If your gums are all swollen and bleeding, you have obvious gum disease or your, teeth are deteriorating and in sad shape. I. Then, yeah, you can assume you've got some problems. But we've seen clients over the years that had totally normal regular dental X-rays.

[00:19:52] Eric: But when their dentist did a cone BM CT scan that would look at things from a little bit different angle, it's a different type of imaging, they found pockets where bone was kind of etched away and they were leaching bacteria into the bloodstream. So. That might be a little bit more diagnostic, but other signs would be, , sometimes on a blood test, your high sensitivity C-reactive protein might be really elevated.

[00:20:16] Eric: That's a general marker of an inflammation, and one of the things that could trigger that. Would be a dental infection. So there are clues Yeah. And things to look for.

[00:20:26] Hector: Yeah. Anything. It's just people becoming more online to the importance of these things outside of just brushing your teeth and do, you know, don't have a cavity or whatever.

[00:20:35] Hector: it's a little more than that.

[00:20:36] Eric: , what else? Anything else? , we talked about supplements. I would also mention stress management. Yeah, that's huge. Stress really does affect us in negative ways. We know that when people have chronically elevated stress, it causes deterioration of the memory center, of the brain, the hippocampus.

[00:20:53] Eric: , and that's also ground zero for most Alzheimer's cases. So I think the thing that people miss with stress management is they think it's all about. Eliminating stress as much as they can, and I'm a big fan of eliminating unnecessary stressors, but you can't get rid of every stress, and I don't think we should either.

[00:21:11] Eric: But what we neglect is intentional counterbalances. If stress goes up, then are we intentionally doing everything possible to. Have a commensurate increase in our, counter strategy. Yeah,

[00:21:24] Hector: this is great. And I'm sad that we only have like, you know, half hour to get into all this. I've got a couple more questions for you, but.

[00:21:31] Hector: If people want to find out more about you, go deeper in your world, where's the the best place for people to go?

[00:21:37] Eric: Yeah. The easiest is to go to a mind for all seasons.com if they want to take a self-assessment even that looks at lifestyle factors and looks at, , even their understanding of some biomarkers, , if they go to a mind for all seasons.com/energy, they can take a free assessment that's available to anybody and, and learn a lot about.

[00:21:59] Eric: Where they are as far as their brain health.

[00:22:02] Hector: And last question here, in your opinion, , what is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:22:07] Eric: I love that I'll borrow words from one of my good friends who's a tremendous business leader and he's a mindset coach for professional athletes, and I've heard him say many times when you get comfortable being uncomfortable, you become unstoppable.

[00:22:22] Eric: And it seems like the more I step into discomfort. Intentionally and the more I really take calculated risks, the more things scale. I find more solutions that way, and that's been helpful for me.