PLMI Announcement

I won't belabor this too long, but rather just to tell you a little bit about this. For me, extraordinary opportunity to make this transformation on our, on my specific journey of life. And I think you all recognize as you start to grow up that the legislative recreation that we have as youth, which occurs as a concept of going to different schools and maybe our parents move and you know, we don't get kind of voluntarily recreating ourselves. We have to do it just as a natural growing up. And as you get older, it's more difficult to recreate yourself. But it's important to do something. You've got to constantly be renourishing, you know, going up apoptosis to stuff that doesn't really work anymore and creating newness from that which gives you better function. So this is my recreation into the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. And it has a variety of different objectives that I'll be speaking to. It's a not for profit organization. I first, before I go any farther, want to acknowledge DEFRAD and all of my metagenics colleagues and our new owners, Altacor, how appreciative I am. They have given me complete license to try to orchestrate this transition in my life at 67 into where the best next step will be for me to make a contribution. And I have 6 million miles of travel. So the question is, have I met any interesting people in 6 million lives other than flight attendants? And the answer is I have a. I'll use an old language, a Rolodex of incredibly influential people all around the world that I have been unable to really fully connect with in the ways that I would love to, to create value. I can't do it principally because I've got a lot of things going on. It's a 247 job that I've had here for the last many years. And so Metagenix has been very, very gracious in saying, okay, if this is what you want to do, then we support it. We'll provide an unrestricted Grant to a 501C3 that you're going to run and go for it. We don't know what it's going to be, but we'll let Jeff Bland kind of lead the way. So it's a really huge gift that I'm getting to be able to make this transition in my career. And let me just tell you quickly what the PLMI mission is. Obviously it's to contribute to the reduction of the global burden of chronic disease through the incorporation of what I was just talking about, personalized lifestyle medicine and delivery of healthcare. Our vision is that the institute will be committed to the increasing understanding and dissemination of the authentic. And I want to say that's where my kind of bibliographic kind of approach will play a role. The authentic emerging biological, social, environmental science that form the foundation of personalized lifestyle medicine to make it authentic. And it will help transform healthcare globally. And our values are fairly simple. The values within the PLMI is that we value the importance of unrestricted access to information, unrestricted access, transparency to information to promote individual health. As such, the PLMI will recognize that the solution of the world's health care challenges will derive from successful collaboration among individuals of diverse expertise, backgrounds and belief systems. We don't care about what pedigrees or initials are after your name. What we care is bring the far in belly for the best you can be to create a robust, punitive, disruptive, interactive community that will take the best of ideas and filter them into the latest of practice. Now you can ask me a question and I think it's the most fundamentally interesting question in all of your minds. How does this differ from Am I forming another ifm? No, IFM is an unbelievably successful organization. My wife Susan and I every day are feeling blessed with what's happened to IFM since we stepped off the board and allowed us to have a free reign to be an independent educational institution. If you watch its publications, its training programs, its certification program, it's just been an amazing accomplishment under David Jones and his colleagues and the faculty. And Lori Hoffman is the executive director. And that has been a focus, a very successful focus on implementation in the clinical practice of these concepts that I've been describing in systems biology. That will not be the mandate or the objectives of plmi. There were two mandates or two objectives of IFM when it was formed. The principal one was the one I just described. Get things into practice so they can be codified and apply. And IFM has done an extraordinary job in accomplishing that. And we'll continue to refine that. The second objective relates a little bit to my personality, which is let's continue to bring disparate opinions and have kind of a very high level, hopefully polite debate among differing opinions to filter down and smooth and polish ideas to the best of refinement so they can be entered into the system to keep it robust and fresh and at the cutting edge all the time so it never gets institutionalized. I hate institutions. I hate them because they become sclerosis. They have their own death certificate built into them generally. So the question is, how do you prevent sclerosis? And it's difficult to do both of these at the same time, right, to reinvent yourself while you're also codifying and objectifying and procedurizing. So there seems to me that there's a place for both of these responsibilities to be achieved. So my talent, my skill, I believe, and as I look back into my own inventory of the last 40 years is I'm an ear monger, I'm a connector, I'm a fugitive from a hostile land of debate and I love that inquiry process that goes with differing opinions. So my objective is to take all these people, I've met all these opinion leaders around the world and bring them into a virtual gathering place and create a robust environment that then influences curricular development and process in clinical practice so that we are sister organizations with those that like that are teaching people how to do this. So I see us as complementary. I see us as we're going to have a consumer component because there are a lot of consumers that have great ideas. We're not discriminating between consumers and professionals. We want the best of ideas to come in. We want blog sphere to be active. There's going to be a whole publication activity. We've got big social media and this is going to be the site, hopefully if we do it right, where you go to find the best of the new ideas, the debates, the controversies, the different opinions and experts in the different chronic illness areas that are going to weigh in with their thoughts about how you might weigh some of this information so it can filter into places like IFM to keep all these opportunities robust and cutting edge. So with that as a construct, what are we going to do? I think I probably said it. We're going to collaborate with thought leaders around the world and decision makers in how this lifestyle medicine evolves as a clinical solution to their burden of chronic disease. We're going to provide educational resources that will help facilitate the successful adoption that will be through all different media, video, audio, text, all sorts of different things. We're going to work to engage researchers, clinicians, educators, patient advocacy groups, medical institutions, medical societies, regulatory, legislative groups to help move its mission further. And we are very impatient. We want the adoption of personalized lifestyle medicine to happen within the lifetime of us, non geologically. I'm Turning back to Mr. Howard. So again I want, as I, as I give the clicker back to him, I want to thank you Fred, personally and all of my colleagues at Venetics for the gracious confidence that I will do this job well and, and that I've been cut free. I'm back. This is back to zipper free. And remember, as many of you know, I started as an academic and left my professorship in 82 to go to the Pauling Institute. I'm back there. I think it's going to be a very, very interesting thing to take some stuff out of my pack so I've got room to put other things in. And I like to think that as this of this we're going to get to the top of the mountainside. I think gravity is our friends who start running down the other side. Thank you very much.