May 27, 2025

Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Anthem Founder and Former CEO Ben Lytle

Transcript of the Thirty Minute Mentors podcast interview with Anthem founder and Former CEO Ben Lytle
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Adam Mendler

I recently interviewed Anthem founder and former CEO Ben Lytle on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today founded and led a Fortune 50 business. Ben Lytle launched five successful companies, including two companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, one of which was known as Anthem, now known as Elevance Health, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year. Ben is also the author of The Potentialist. Ben, thank you for joining us.

Ben: Good to see you. I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

Adam: You grew up in Greenville, Texas, the cotton capital of the world. It sure did. You went to East Texas State University for college. You went to Indiana University for law school at night while you were kicking off your career. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Ben: Great question. Well, first of all, I grew up on a ranch. It was actually a working ranch. We did some cattle, but we were mainly cattle ranchers. And don’t think of Dallas and 50,000 acres. We had 250 acres we owned, and then we leased some other, and we had about 250 head of cattle. But it was a lot of work. But it was great from the standpoint of as a kid. you had an enormous amount of responsibility very early in life, and you worked and you contributed. There’s a lot to be said for that, and it’s much harder for kids today to have those kind of opportunities. And then I worked at every imaginable job. There was a town, about 20,000 people nearby, and I worked every imaginable job. I drove delivery trucks for a florist. I drove long-haul trucks for a florist. I was a lifeguard every summer and just had a great time growing up. I got into information technology when I was only 16 and started learning about it at the recommendation of my mother and my boss at the time. And went on to that was what paid the bills and brought me up through the managerial ranks. And maybe because I grew up so young, and I’ll tell you about a transformative event that happened to me. But I moved up very fast. I was a manager over 65 people at 21. And now everybody was young in IT back then, everybody. But I was a manager at 21. I was a middle manager at 25. I actually started my first company. It wasn’t counted into five. There’s actually seven, because I’m now in the seventh, and there was one I never counted, which was one that my buddy and I built part-time. But we built it and sold it. and made a little money, so that was our first entrepreneurial venture. And then I was chief information officer at 34, chief operating officer of a billion-dollar company at 36, and CEO of that company at 42. And so I had a fast rise at the ranks. And that gave me the opportunity to express some of this creative ability and entrepreneurial ability. And I built those two public companies. The one I’m best known for is Anthem. And then following that went on to build three companies with my son, Hugh, out here in Arizona. And I’m very proud of one of the products of that, which we didn’t invent, a brilliant lady invented, but we helped her make it a national name, which was Silver Sneakers, which is today the largest exercise program in the country, I think, with the average age 78 years old of the participants. Fabulous product. And then with my younger son, we formed an AI company three years ago.

Adam: Ben, I didn’t have enough room in the intro to even include silver sneakers, because you’ve accomplished so much.

Ben: Yeah, it’s such a beautiful product. You look and say, boy, you look at life’s change. That thing was. So a deep thanks to Mary Swanson, who invented it. And then my son and I, our wonderful management team that took it national. And the only thing that’s worth mentioning out of those early years was I was working nights, going to college during the day. I had a summer class and I just needed an elective. And it was called Introduction to Personality. I was 20 years old. Didn’t know what it was. I was majoring in business. And I went to this class and this young fellow, probably in his 30s, was a professor. It was only a small class of about 15 of us. And he almost immediately started the class and said, you do not have to be anything anyone expects you to be. And you shouldn’t. Who you are is inside you to be discovered. And once you discover it, to live it. And if you do that, you’re going to have a happy and successful life. And I was like, wow. And so that changed me. I mean, it’s literally like one of those moments, pivotal moments in my life. I got to know him. He opened the doors to human potential and it guided my whole life.

Adam: I love that. You don’t have to be anyone that anyone else expects you to be. Live life on your own terms. It’s your life.

Ben: And you got to discover who you are, because you don’t know initially. You have to discover you and what you’re capable of. But there’s a whole series. That’s what I discovered. There is so much literature out there and so many wonderful stories and practical ways in which you can do that. And that became my avocation for the rest of my life. And I went on to do graduate study in it and everything else. I would not have been successful in my business life or my personal life without that focus. It became my North Star.

Adam: I’d love to spend a little bit of time on that. What advice do you have for anyone listening to this conversation, regardless of where they are on the journey of self-discovery, which is a lifelong journey, on how to get to a place where they can, number one, understand the right North Star for them, and number two, get to that North Star.

Ben: Well, in a way, I believe we all have the same North Star. We’ll manifest it in different ways. But I believe reaching our potential and living that is a call to all of us. A different way to think about it that I like to think about it, Adam, is ask yourself, what do we share with every living thing? And it is that quest to reach our potential. If you watch every blade of grass, every flower, every tree, it’s struggling to do that. But as far as we know, animals, trees and plants, and other living things, don’t have free will. We have to choose. We have to choose to do it. They don’t. And that’s where we’re different, but where we’re alike. That mechanism’s inside of us, and that drives inside of us. And the reward for it, by the way, is you become wise. Interesting. If you do it, you will learn how to live your potential, and in living it, you will become wiser. And wisdom, in its classical terms, is the art of living well. What’s the art of living well? It means making the best possible decisions throughout your life, because your decisions define you. And that’s the whole game here. I’ve interviewed over 400 really wise, incredible people, not all of them famous, many of them not. But they all said the same thing in many ways. What lights you up? Doing my best. Trying to be my best, the best person I can. Be the best me. That’s it. And that’s what we all share. And you’ll know when you’re on the path because it’ll feel right. When you’re not, things won’t be going so well and you won’t feel so well. But you can find a path.

Adam: Trust yourself, trust your instincts, trust your gut. What other advice would you share for anyone listening on how to ultimately reach their potential?

Ben: You have to ultimately learn to differentiate between you and your ego. Your ego is a function, it’s not you. But our egos have dominated consciousness for most of human existence, and they are not us. One ego sounds a lot like another, so that’s why we can recognize it in other people, see it in other people. And the ego is not a bad thing, it’s just that it can get out of control, and it shouldn’t be running your life. You should be running your life. And you are not it. And you are not your soul. You are not your conscience. You are not your shadow. You are something in the center that Carl Jung called the self. It was also called the id by others. It doesn’t matter what it was called. I called it the I in me. The I in me. That’s what you’re looking for is that coordinator, that choreographer, that manager of those other functions. And it is different. It’s you. That’s what you’re out to discover. It sounds ethereal. It is not. It’s very practical to do.

Adam: Sounds like there’s no I in team, but there’s an I in me. In me. I like that.

Ben: To be fair, I didn’t invent that. I think that was a philosopher called James in the late 1800s who was kind of an early psychologist. But he basically had that same idea. It’s a very old idea that we are not all of those different voices we hear. We’re the one listening. So somebody’s got to be listening. Who’s listening? That’s it. That’s you.

Adam: You shared that you had this incredible early success within your career, rising very quickly, moving up from job to job to job until you’re at a place where you made it. And you made it at a very early age. What can anyone listening to this conversation do to rise within their career?

Ben: One thing that I was able to do, and I give a lot of credit to my parents, because I always knew with my family that risk-taking was an okay thing. My dad was in his own way an entrepreneur, and he took risks, and he knew that was part of life and part of business. If it didn’t go right, that didn’t mean you failed. I never, ever heard my parents use the word failure in the context of me or any of their other children, ever. They always encouraged us and they said, you’re a smart kid. You work hard. You can do anything you want to do. Try it. And so that was a real blessing. And I always felt literally when I was at the top a few times in my career, I threw the dice pretty big. Who sets out to build two Fortune 500 companies with the same management team in 10 years? That’s not a normal quest, but that’s what we did. And we did it with an incredible team. And I knew if that went wrong, it might be hard. I’d start over, but it’d be tough sledding. But I always knew I was going to walk in the house, my dad was going to put his arm around me or one of my uncles and say, oh, that’s all right, son. It doesn’t matter. And do it again. That’s who they were. And that’s one thing that you can do, believing in yourself. And if you have children, raising them that way, which I think a lot of parents try to do today, then you’re going to re-up. But you won’t ever get there if you don’t take some risks and you don’t try and you don’t dream big. The psychologist Carl Jung called it active imagination. But today we would call it visualization. We can be what we can dream. If we can’t dream it, we can’t be it. But the interesting thing is, When you learn to play sports well, you imagine what it’s going to be when you execute that play, whatever it is, or you make that shot in golf, you imagine it. Well, it turns out your brain doesn’t know any difference, whether you really did it or you didn’t. And you’re building muscle memory to do it right. That’s what great athletes do. That’s what I think great entrepreneurs do. We dream it, we build it.

Adam: You built so many different highly successful businesses. You shared your philosophy behind getting started, not being afraid of taking risks, eliminating the word failure from your vocabulary altogether. How were you able to build Anthem, this incredibly successful company, Fortune 50 business today doing more than $175 billion? What were the keys to going from idea to Fortune 50 company?

Ben: Well, the first was I had this wonderful mentor. who was the CEO when I was Chief Operating Officer. And I asked him, when he designated me to become his replacement two years before he left, I asked him for that period of time for me to go off and come up with a strategic plan that could really change what we were and what we could do. And he and the board gave me that blessing. And when I came back, before we went to the board, I sat down with his team besides me, the enterprise chief operating officer, but not everybody reported to me. So it was all the people reported directly and him as well as me. And I explained the plan and they all laughed. They literally laughed and said, you got to be out of your mind. Except one guy wasn’t laughing. And it was the CEO. And he said, this might work. And that’s a good measure. Anytime I’m dreaming something up, I do my homework. There’s rational reasons why Anthem could be successful and could be built, but you have to believe in it. And then I had this amazing group of executives and employees who believed it too. I spent the time to explain to them how I thought we could do it, what the risks were, and they went, we’re on. And many of them are still there to this day. I think all of us who from that time were part of that original group look back and we kind of stand in awe of what we did. You know, what kind of heck did we do? But I think we were so convinced that this was going to turn out to be something really special. And as we began to have some success, we just doubled down. and believed in ourselves even more. And then I left the company and the team continued. And there’s been many CEOs since, and you can see the results. Some were better than others, but most recent leadership particularly has been incredibly strong. And so I think once you build that tradition, it’ll tend to carry on. It can be destroyed, and we see it happen in companies all the time. You’ve got to keep your head up. But I think the core culture there was very good.

Adam: You had a vision and you didn’t care that the people around you who were smart people, who were successful people laughed at your vision. It was a vision that you believed in. And going back to what we talked about before, you weren’t thinking about, is this going to fail? You were thinking about, how is this going to work? And how am I going to surround myself with people who can execute on this vision? And how can I communicate this vision to the people around me so that we collectively can make this happen? And that’s how it all came together.

Ben: That’s it. And one of the really exciting things for me was in the days when we were growing the company, because we started with 2,300 people, and I think we were close to 60,000 when I left the company. And it got harder, because I could see all those people, we could talk about it, and it got harder and harder and harder. We did the best we could, and we put a lot of effort into it. And the CEO who followed me did the same thing. He put a lot of effort into reaching all the employees and letting them know what we were trying to accomplish. One of the exciting things about AI is that a CEO today can create an avatar of themselves, looks like them, talks like them. They can have a one-on-one conversation with every single employee, a quarter million. And it’s a personalized conversation between them and that employee. Now, it’s not them, but it is as close to them as you can create. And you can always, at least the way we’ve recommended people to build it, you can always say, if you want to talk to real me, I’ll have to do it in a group or something, or I’ll send somebody to talk to you. But give my avatar a chance. And I think it’s going to open a level of communication that’s incredible at fast-growing companies and in virtual companies. companies with 250, 500,000 employees.

Adam: The landscape is changing as rapidly today as it ever has before. And I know that that’s a topic that you’re deeply passionate about. How can anyone listening to this conversation navigate change effectively?

Ben: Well, that’s what my book series was written to. How do you adapt to this new reality that’s emerging and just right now? So right now we’re seeing it every day and it’s going to get faster and it’s going to arrive faster. First of all, stand back. This is the period of greatest change in human history, meaning it’s going to be the fastest and the most profound. It’s going to change how we learn. How we work. how we live, and even how we evolve as human beings. That’s how profound this is. And we get to be part of it. I mean, can you imagine the billions of people that went before us and the billions that will come after us? But we’re right here at this pivotal change when human potential is going to expand like crazy. So I’m excited about it. Look at the future through that lens. If you look at the future and you do the knee-jerk thing, what your instincts will tell you to do is to be frightened, to resist, to hide, to avoid. It’s not going to work out well for you. And we know that from other periods of prior great change, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, three prior industrial revolutions, the American Revolution. It was the people who dreamed and the people who saw the opportunity in change and didn’t react with fear or pessimism. They’re the ones who really thrive. And so that’s a decision you can make. Nobody can make that decision for you. I think my books help because I explain why this is happening. The odds are it’s going to ultimately be a much better life.

Adam: For those who are not as comfortable with change, who might say, I understand that I need to adapt to change, but I don’t really know how. What advice would you share?

Ben: There is some work you have to do. You have to have some knowledge about why this is happening and where it’s heading, because it has a direction. It’s all around you. You’re not paying attention to it. But you have to understand change is going to happen no matter what. And nobody can make this choice for you. Nobody can convince you. You have to ultimately convince yourself, okay, I can sit here and cower and I’m going to get run over. Or I can get up and start looking for the sunshine and run towards it. And there is no easy way past that. There just is no easy way out of it. There’s no magic pill you can take that’s going to suddenly make you be what you should be, which is a pragmatic optimist. And a pragmatic optimist is smart enough, look at the arc of history. Look where we’ve come from. Only 10,000 years ago, we were little better than bees. We were nomadic people living in hunter-gatherer tribes, barely surviving. And life was hard. In most of human history, it’s been very hard. It’s hard to survive, hard to live. We live in the best time in history, by any stretch of imagination. Now, why, after 200,000 years, and really longer than that if you count from the time we began as a species, is it suddenly going to go over the hill? It makes no sense. All the arguments are, we’re headed upward. We’ve always headed upward. That’s what change does, is it creates the opportunity for us to grow exponentially. And that’s what’s going to happen. And so get with it, or you can let your fears drive you into the ground, but not a good idea. And you can go read, go learn. Don’t stay ignorant about what this is all about. That’ll help you because you’ll start to see the things happening around us are amazing, absolutely amazing.

Adam: It’s great advice, thinking about it through the lens of leadership. The most successful leaders are adaptive, flexible, ready, willing, eager to pivot when the time to pivot comes. And a point that you made, the importance of being optimistic. The most successful leaders look at the glass as half full and are able to get the people around them to look at the glass as half full, are able to communicate a positive vision, are able to uplift the people who they lead so that the people around them are feeling better and are able to perform better.

Ben: Yeah, I’m a big fan of Jamie Dimon’s. I’ve watched his career as he’s matured and led and I love his view of the future, he said to one crowd, and I don’t know if this is a direct quote, quit worrying about your jobs. You’re going to work three days a week. You’re going to have to do the best work you’ve ever had and make more money than you’ve ever had. Because that’s what declining population is going to do. There’s going to be fewer people and we’re going to need everybody. And I think he summarized it so well. I think that’s from the career standpoint. I think that’s going to be true. And I could tell you equally, we’re going to be able to travel in ways. Distance has been a big issue and defined the way people live since the beginning of time. And we’re watching distance melt as an issue. We can live anywhere, work anywhere, travel anywhere, and more and more people are doing it all the time. And you give it another 20 years with all of the things that are being invented in mobility, and it’s even going to be more so. But at the same time, we don’t have to travel. We can leave electronically, we can see things electronically, and that’s going to continue to get more amazing as well. And again, all of that, I tried to wrap into that description of what this new reality is going to be and why it’s occurring. And it’s really a convergence of change forces with technology. It’s not just technology. It’s change forces like changing declining population, aging population, democratization of products and services, meaning more is available to everybody. And the pace of change and how the pace of change is going to cause us to have to adopt some of these technologies on our own. And distance, changing distance. Those are the kind of forces that are driving us. along with these incredible technologies, like AI, like quantum computing, like worldwide high-speed communications, and neuroimaging and brain mapping, understanding better how our brain works. All of those things are huge, and they’re moving so fast and going to create some wonderful things. They’ll bring challenges, too, but that’s what makes us good. When something goes wrong, we have something new to fix and something to make better. That’s what we do as human beings.

Adam: You mentioned Jamie Dimon as a leader who you admire. You’ve obviously had an incredible track record leading so many different organizations. What do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Ben: Well, an organization gave me an award last year, and they asked some of the people who’ve known me the longest about what they thought went into why I had been so successful as a leader, because some of them had worked with me, some of them were peers. But one fellow said it really well. He said, Ben’s a great leader because he likes people. He really likes people, and he likes being with people. And when he played it back, I went, you know, he’s right. The way I lead, and I think a lot of leaders lead this way, is we help people that work with us, our colleagues and our employees, try to see the best in ourselves, try to see the potential in ourselves that they can’t see. And that, when you do that, boy, that absolutely explodes energy in an organization because people know it. if you’re doing that, as opposed to trying to criticize them down into the ground, you’re trying to say, no, I see this better thing in you. It works with your kids too. When you’re dealing with your kids, if you just criticize them, they shut down. If you say, look, I know you can do better. I know this isn’t your best work. I know this isn’t your best value. Let’s figure out what happened here. That’s a whole different kind of conversation. And of course, I’m not being Pollyannaish. You’re going to have issues in business, you always do. But if your heart’s into helping people, organizations, and the world figure out what its best is and drive towards it, that’s a very rewarding life. And it’s a very rewarding job, no matter what the title is.

Adam: Ben, I absolutely love that. When I give talks, one of the things that I share is a list of the key characteristics of the very best leaders that I’ve put together from my conversations with thousands of the most successful leaders across all different fields. And right on that list, love of people. You can be successful in many things in life without loving people, but you’re not going to be successful as a leader if you don’t deeply love people. And there are so many great examples of that. I literally just did an interview with Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who was talking about his dad, the late Senator Ted Kennedy. And one of the things we were talking about was, what made Ted Kennedy so successful? Love of people. And I love what you shared right off the bat, talking about all the people who work for you, the one commonality. What made you such a great leader? What made you such a great person to work for? Three words, love of people.

Ben: And I think that was true. I didn’t fully appreciate it until I heard it from one of my oldest friends who really did watch me go from an unknown young executive to all the stuff I’ve been able to do in my life. And I think for him to nail it down, that that was the core thing that he saw that I thought, yeah, he would know. He’s watched the whole ride.

Adam: Ben, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Ben: One of the things I mentioned here, in the first book, they always say an author has one chapter of each book they love the most, what they’re the most proud of. And I have one in that first book. And in that first book, it is a chapter called Success. And what it does is I attempt to redefine success. Because one of the mistakes that most people make, and I’m confident it is a mistake, is defining success as money, fame, power, appearance, social status. None of that is success. They’re not bad things, but they’re not success. And I can attest to that because, again, in these interviews of some of the wisest and also some incredibly successful people that I made, these 400 plus, they basically all said the same thing. And what I define success is, is when you lay your head on the pillow at night, you know you gave it your best. At the end of your life, you know you gave it your best. That’s success because that’s you. That’s the way you will define yourself. And if you give your best and you’re doing your best to be your dead level best and doing it in a way that you make the world a little better and people around you a little better, then that is true success. And that’s what I would focus on. And the only question I get sometimes is, well, how do I know? You’ll know. Guaranteed, because only you know whether you did your best. And life can’t ask any more of you and you can’t ask any more of yourself. If you do, that’s perfectionism and it’ll fail. Give it your best. Know that you gave it your best every day and you will be a success.

Adam: Ben, I love it. And your definition of success is virtually the exact same definition of success as that of the great coach John Wooden.

Ben: Yeah, great coaches, that’s what they do. They can’t ask any more of you than your best. They’re trying to help you see it, discover it, and then do it. That’s it.

Adam: John Wooden’s definition of success, the peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

Ben: And see, that’s what I was saying. I believe, and I think if you watch it in nature, you’ll agree, that’s what every one of these trees and plants is doing, except they’re not conscious of it. It’s hardwired in them. But they’re doing the same thing. And you’ve mentioned visiting the desert. Anybody who’s visited the desert, you’ve seen, walked by, a tree growing through a rock. And I’ve often thought, that little tree doesn’t know it’s busting that rock up and doing its best. If it was a human, 50% of the humans would probably go, this isn’t fair. How come they got the forest floor and I got a rock? But that’s not the way life works. And so we all have to make the best out of what we got. And I think it’s a great lesson in life. But I love Witten’s definition. It’s absolutely the same as mine. Absolutely.

Adam: Ben, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Ben: Well, thank you. It’s been great fun. I’ve liked your show for a long time, Adam. Keep up the good work.

Adam: Really appreciate it.

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Adam Mendler

Adam Mendler is a nationally recognized authority on leadership and is the creator and host of Thirty Minute Mentors, where he regularly elicits insights from America's top CEOs, founders, athletes, celebrities, and political and military leaders. Adam draws upon his unique background and lessons learned from time spent with America’s top leaders in delivering perspective-shifting insights as a keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. A Los Angeles native and lifelong Angels fan, Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders.

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