From Sick Care to Self Care: The Future of Medicine with James Maskell

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Welcome back to the Synergy Podcast. We are so excited that you're here with us today for a conversation that truly gets to the heart of why senergy exists and that's transforming the way that we think about and practice healthcare Today. We're diving into a conversation with James Maskell, the author of the Evolution of Medicine, and this book is more than just an action plan. It is a roadmap to create a healthcare revolution rooted in connection, community, prevention. In a world where chronic disease is the norm, this conversation reminds us that the future of medicine isn't found in more pills or procedures. It's found in people. The practitioners who listen, the patients who are empowered, and the community that wants to heal together. Guys, if you haven't already, we would love to invite you to download the R2R app that's reset to Resilience. Inside you'll find weekly free content designed to help you take ownership of your healthcare journey. It'll teach you practical tools, education, inspiration. It's going to help you become an active participant in your own healing. It's also a space where you can connect with others, others that believe just like you. True healing comes from connection and today's conversation. If it sparks something in you, if you believe in this movement toward functional, root person centered care, please take the time, scroll to the bottom, follow us like us and share us. Your encouragement helps get this message out. It fuels the change that we all want to be part of creating. Lori and I are so grateful that you're here with us helping us shape the evolution of medicine. Not just as listeners, but as leaders in your own lives and also in the community. Because this is more about a moment. This is a movement and we're in.

It for the long game today on the Synergy Podcast. We are so glad you're here because we are thrilled to welcome James Maskell, entrepreneur, advocate and change maker in the world of health care. For over a decade, James has been on a mission to transform our broken disease management system into one that truly promotes wellness. He's the founder of Functional Forum, the world's largest integrative medicine conference, and Evolution of Medicine, a platform that equips conventional doctors with the tools and resources to practice more patient centered, functional medicine. His work has been featured on Ted Med, TedX, HuffPost Live and Mindbody Green, and he continues to spark global conversations about what health care could and should be and should look like. James is also the author of the Evolution of Medicine, Join the Movement to Solve Chronic Disease and Fall back in love with medicine A groundbreaking book that lays out the blueprint for a future where prevention, community, and functional medicine come first. Today we get the chance to explore why healthcare must change, what that means for patients and practitioners, and why men's health, too often overlooked, has to be part of the conversation. So grab a cup of coffee, maybe a cup of tea, and your favorite writing utensil. Lean in. You are going to really enjoy this conversation.

James, we're so excited that you're here. And we know, Lori and I both know that you have spent your life working on this healthcare revolution, right? And you're a man in healthcare. And we're seeing more and more men show up in our clinics, which we're so excited about. I think men are willing more than ever to take care of themselves. They're looking in the mirror and saying, hey, I don't like where healthcare is going. I don't like where my health is going. And so we're super excited to see that. But what got you interested in kind of challenging the norm, the status quo of conventional medicine? Like, where did that start for you?

It starts right at the beginning, where I am given different health care than anyone else that I know. You know, and I didn't realize that it was abnormal until I showed up at school and realized that no one knew what a chiropractor or a homeopath was. And I remember sitting with the nurse at school and seeing a piece of paper, like a post it note on the wall, and it said, james Maskell, no antibiotics until you call mother. And then, and reflecting on it, I was like, why that? And why am I the only post it note? It's not like there's a list. I bet if you went into a school today, there'd be like, these 50 kids all have a peanut allergy, right? But back then it was just one. And so I was like, why am I the only one? And so, you know, that sort of sat with me. I had a rebellious phase where I thought my parents are insane. And then, you know, I get to school and get to university and I'm studying economics, and then start to see this sort of exponential cost curve that starts, you know, in the 80s. And essentially the cost of health care going up and up and up, all on the back of chronic illness. And I realized at that moment, these guys don't know what they're doing. Like, this is, it's not. This is not a curve for success. This is not a curve for understanding what's going on and getting a handle on it. This is a Curve for, you know, this is not working. And you know, ultimately I had a couple of kicks from the universe to say, hey know, go and follow this thread. And in 2005, I moved to America, quit my high paying job and went to live in rural Georgia because I had an opportunity to work in a clinic and really understand what a new paradigm of healthcare could look like. And that was from some family connections and it was sort of them that gave me the idea that this would be something that I could follow. And I just knew that they. I also knew I sort of wanted to make my own things and be an entrepreneur and have a varied life. And I, I'd seen some of that through them, so I thought that was a decent bet.

Yeah. So in that clinic in rural Georgia, like what specifically was the focus of that clinic? And how old were you at that time?

I moved when I was 24. I. Yeah, the clinic was. So they had, they had been in the spa industry. So I had, I had actually gone to work in that business. They had a skin care line called Geelique and it was the first skin care line that was sold, that was all natural from Australia and was sold in Spain. Spas. So it was like a spa. And they had run day spas. And day spas actually predate the functional medicine clinics of today by 10 or 15 years in learning how to take cash, learning how to deliver services, learning how to rebook people, learning how to create a great experience. And they essentially convinced me that they were going to build a model for the future of primary care in which was essentially integrated medicine in a spa environment.

Yeah.

And so I was inspired by that. I moved, I worked in the warehouse for a bit and then I started working in the business. And it was a beautiful old home, like in the nicest street in a little town in North Georgia. And, you know, I spent about half of my time working on sales. So I was sort of making calls and trying to get different businesses in the local community to use the spa. But then I was also working behind the front desk. And in the year and a half that I worked there, I saw a few things that I couldn't forget. One is I saw people reverse their chronic illness. And there was a naturopathic doctor on staff there and I worked with him, I saw what he did, I started to learn what he was doing. And it was essentially clinical nutrition. There was some phytotherapy, there was some homotoxicology. So he's really built doing this sort of range of services that, you know Sort of advanced functional medicine doctors do now. He had his own way of assessing what was going on. But I saw people reverse the chronic illness. And, you know, I worked there for 18 months because it didn't happen appointment to appointment, but it did happen over 3, 6, 9, 12 months. And it was very formative. Those experiences were very formative. And I thought to myself, is that just happening here or is this happening anywhere else? And so the next job that I took, I went and took a sales job and I started selling supplements to practitioners like yourself, stuff. And the next seven years was the deepest, broadest experience of really understanding the natural, the professional natural health industry. I had 14 states, I had all kinds of clinics from micro practices in people's garage all the way through to going to meet doctors in hospitals that didn't know what had happened, but their wife had got better and they wanted to know what this was and all everything in between. And I think I just had such a broad experience there and I really started to understand what was holding back this medicine from becoming the standard of care for chronic illness. And I think since then, since 2014, it's all been removing the blockages for that to become the norm.

Yep.

So that's where you discovered a lot of those blockages is being out and about in the different practices. Right.

Asking a lot of questions, seeing those, seeing, walking into the clinics, like seeing how the flow was, seeing, you know, what changes were, what was different in those kind of clinics from clinics that were just doing conventional medicine. And this was the very early days too. Like, there's so much innovation that's happened in the last 10 years, but that those early years, that was 2007 to 2010, pretty much. And you know, so it was a very different industry at that point.

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I love that you got your, your peak of interest with economics. You're seeing that what was, what was currently happening was not working economically. You know, that you were way ahead of awareness there and kind of positioning yourself in a position to learn. Like, what is working? Is this working? Is this path something that's worthy to pursue and promote on a global level? So I love that you've done the work there. Yeah. So what do you think are the biggest roadblocks to making this mainstream?

There's a, you know, there's a lot. And ultimately, if you look back at the last 11 years, it's really been sinking, you know, seeking to unblock those things. So if I just take it in sort of chronological order, you know, the first thing that I came across in 2013, I mean, there's a lot of different issues, but the first thing is most doctors don't know about it, most practitioners don't know about it. You know, you can't even imagine it now. But in 2014, there was no free content online for practitioners about doing this. Right. The only way to find out was to hear it from another practitioner. Spend $5,000, go to a conference, and it's just unlikely that anyone would do that. The only people who would ever do that are those doctors or practitioners who had like a personal experience. You two perfect examples. And it's like once you've experienced for yourself, you have to follow that thread. But that was not the norm. So with the functional forum, the goal was how do you make it so that any doctor in the world could find out about it? And that was the beginning of the functional forum. Then second, it's like, okay, I see that there's some people who know about this, but they're not doing it every day. And that's a combination of they're not confident, they don't want to be the first person over the Parapet. Right. Because back in those days you could lose your license for practicing outside of the standard of care to the clinical confidence and then also the opportunity to build a business. So in those early days, if you had to launch a new clinic, you have to do a long term rent on a building, you have to hire a few staff, you have to do this. Suddenly you're looking at a $250,000 investment and that's a big risk. And that wasn't happening. And so we started to push the idea of the micro practice where you could practice mainly off a laptop in a much smaller space so that it could look more like a $20,000 investment, which I think was a lot more palatable. So those were, those were some of the early days in sort of starting to understand what's stopping people who already know about it from doing it every day. You know, we looked at business models, we looked at, you know, team, you know, ultimately you need a different team. You need people who are going to facilitate change in the human. So that could be a health coach, that could be a group. Right? There's different, there's a, there's a layer that's needed to inspire and change in between the visits, which was new. You don't need that when you're just giving people drugs and telling them that's fine. So there was that. I flirted a lot with trying to understand insurance because I saw that the biggest thing that you would hear from patients was, well, why doesn't this person take my insurance? So it was like, okay, is there a solution? There starts an alternative to health insurance to see, you know, what would happen if you put health coaching and this kind of care at the front of a program. And that was, that's interesting. And then the last few years really started to think of, is there a more efficient way to deliver the care itself because there's not enough of you. And we also started to see that when you pair sort of functional medicine with community, the outcomes were better and the resource use was a lot less. Right. You don't need the best. Better outcomes are being achieved by a group run by PAs and health coaches rather than one on one with a doctor. So there's something there. If it's better outcomes and it's lower cost, that's where we need to sort of follow in. And then I think the thing that I'm working on right now is really what I hope is sort of the last friction point is that, and you guys could probably speak to this better than anyone. This is intellectually taxing work when you're taking on especially, like, complex chronic illness for people who have, you know, pre diabetes and they just need the lifestyle shift. Maybe not, but for the kind of patients that are coming into the clinics like yours, where they, like, have multiple causes, multiple issues, tons of symptoms, you know, those are people where it's intellectually rigorous to try and work out what is driving what. And so now I'm. What I'm focusing my time on is trying to make that process easier, because I don't think every doctor is going to take functional medicine training. I really don't think it can happen. But I do think that if you look five years out, I could see a situation where every clinic is using decision support that has, you know, that has the functional medicine operating system sort of built within it. And so those are some of the things that's been the journey. And I feel like at each point it's like, do it enough so that there's enough momentum, and then I got to move on to the next thing. In that way, it's probably not best for building businesses, but it's certainly best for, you know, fulfilling my appetite for transformation. And, you know, also other people end up doing it. Like, we had a program for doctors, one of the first programs that helped them build a successful practice. Tons of my graduates now have programs where they help other graduates or they help other doctors. Great. So I don't need to do that anymore. You are actually a doctor doing it, so you do it. And I'm going to focus on this next thing.

Gosh, that was so enlightening. Just to follow that. Two things I want to say is, number one, that chronic patient that you're talking about, not only. I feel like what you talked about being a challenge for them is just the complexity of us as practitioners treating them, but also they have a very transactional mindset. They're used to transactional care, and they're not used to transformational care. And that level of care is difficult. And it takes a lot of people on the team, and it takes time. It doesn't take a single visit. It takes multiple visits. And getting their mindset shift is really, really hard. That's number one. And I think number two is I want to know this passion that you have comes from. You are very persistent, and you are. You just have this desire to change lives. Where does this come from?

That's a good question. You know, I think, like, we're all kind of our father's children in a certain way. And my father left conventional Society in 1968, to follow a spiritual path. And the purpose of the organization that he was part of was really about how do we live successfully on this planet, you know, and ultimately, that looks like consciousness creation. I think there's a lot of. A lot of the work that's happening in clinics like yours, you know, that the transformation that's occurring inside people's heads where they realize they are actually powerful. That's the leverage point that I saw that was like, health is the place to achieve maybe that grander goal. So I'm inspired by that. Like, I'm still committed to that. I think about that every day. And that's. That's why I'm involved with it. I would also say there's things along the road that have happened. In the first job that I took, where I was a supplement sales rep, the supplements that I sold were used by doctors that were on the very, very beginning of really understanding autism as an environmental illness. And so I was probably annoying to hang out with and not invited to dinner parties because I knew then, one, that autism was going to be a huge issue, two, that it was environmentally driven, and three, that it could be reversed in certain circumstances if you did the right therapies. Most people didn't even know what it was, you know, or still don't know what it is, or have never seen an autistic child that has to wear a helmet, has to wear a diaper, and, you know, beats up their mother. Like, I saw enough of that to realize, man, this. This is. This is an egregious human pain that needs to be solved. And, like, I'm going to keep going at that to solve that, because having met some of those mothers who have to deal with someone that's physically stronger than them that, you know, cannot participate in the world. And with the way that we participate in it, it's. It's. It leaves. It leaves a memory. And you feel like we have to do something about this, because if there's 10 times as many of those kinds of kids out there, or 100 times as many, like, what does society even look like then? And, you know, the cost structure is really huge too, right? So it's $3 million of care per child over a lifetime. You multiply that by 100. Again, they're like, whatever the curve at we're up here starts going like that. And if my job is to try and flatten the curve, this is a huge issue. And so I've been sort of motivated along the way by seeing things that I can't forget.

Well, the world definitely needs what you're doing. We have followed you for a long time and have really appreciated your work and the progress that you've been able to make. You know, what are the things that you're seeing at the community level? Like you mentioned community care, getting the community involved. What have you seen work the best and getting that community input and community outcomes?

It's a great question. You know, I think we all felt as a society, we felt the lack of community during COVID And I think everyone's becoming aware of the fact just how important that is. I think we're still suffering significantly from it. I think you are seeing that the organizations that have traditionally sort of created community, like churches and so forth, starting to really, like, flourish again, because people realize that that kind that is valuable beyond what you're actually doing. There's connections that are happening there too. You know, I'd like to share an experience that that happened. So in April, I put on an event called Healthy El Dorado. And it was sort of a model for a county, a county by county transformation of healthcare. I wanted to see, like, could I take my county that I live in, which is 200,000 people, mainly rural, but kind of connected to one part of Sacramento in California, and, you know, could we put on an event that showcased the resources that already exist in the county that create health so practitioners like yourself, but also farms and gyms and alternative schooling and that kind of thing. And it was. It was very interesting and. And I learned a lot from that process. But one of the things that was really cool is that we. We had a six month. We had a meeting of essentially, you know, people, volunteers and partners from the first event. And there were three women that came to that event who were. Who wanted to be volunteers. And the story was exactly the same. I was sort of at sea medically, right, either for myself or my kid. One woman had breast cancer. Another woman, you know, had stuff going on with her kid, whatever that looks like. I came to the event, I found some resources. I've been implementing those resources, and my life has changed dramatically for the better. And I want to support this moving forward. That was really cool. That was a great moment because it was like nothing new had to happen. All you had to do was to actually connect things that already exist and just put people, make them aware of them. And so I was excited about that, that process. I was hoping that, you know, this would happen. This would have happened in hundreds of other counties. But I think I maybe overestimate or, you know, underestimate my own skills as an organizer. And you know, my hope is that other counties would have taken this on and sort of followed the model and done it. We'll see. But I can see that it was really valuable. And you know, we're going to do it again in April. And you know, this year it's not. We did it at a high school, which was really cool. In fact, another knock on effect is that we served locally sourced food at a high school to show what a school lunch could look like. And this week, you know, in California, they've just voted that you can't serve ultra processed foods in schools. And they're expecting that that's going to start to, you know, have a wave of focus around the country for something where there is really unity on at this moment. So, you know, there's a lot of good that came from it. Learn a lot too. But ultimately I think this kind of initiative is valuable because it's really just connecting people to the resources that already exist. And those could be health resources, but those could also be community resources.

That's awesome. You know, pre pandemic, we had a group that was doing eat, move, relax. Susie Foote was the head of that in our community. But very similar to what you're talking about, having all these local community resources pulled together, we're talking about doing it again. So maybe we can partner with you in April and do what you're doing here, because I think that's phenomenal. Community is the way to go. I mean, and to your point, a lot of people don't even know the resources that they have right in their backyard. They just don't know. And they don't oftentimes know what to look for online, how to vet the proper resources. So I do think getting them together in the same room, there's power in that.

And one of the things I heard you on, and I don't remember when your TED Talk was done or if you've had more than one, but specifically the one where you were talking about community being more powerful than any medicine, and that sounds so profound, I would imagine for those who just don't understand the power of community, but sitting here as a healthcare practitioner and having been in it since, well, 19 years, 20 years for Kelly, I'm going to tell you more than ever that rings true. I don't know when that was recorded.

But more than ever, 2015, I did that TEDx talk.

Oh, wow.

The actual quote was community, not medicine, creates health. And so it's not that it's more powerful than any drug because like, ultimately if you're an acute situation, there may be a drug that could really save you at that moment, but that's not health, that's not creating health. Right. And that's the difference. Like we're in the business of health creation. You know, ultimately there needs to be an ecosystem built for health creation. You know, ultimately practitioners like yourself are, you know, are playing a part of that role. But it's pretty inefficient, right. One at a time only working with people who are already chronically ill. I think there's massive opportunity for community, for peer to peer delivery of value, for, you know, how do you change a culture? Right. How do you really shift a culture towards health? And that's more like schools, that's more like businesses, that's more like faith based communities. And so I think there's a lot more to do there. And the work continues.

Yep. And one of the things you said at the end, and I'll probably paraphrase it in the same way, so please correct me, love it, is you challenge them in the room to just connect with someone else in that room, a few people in that room. And our connection now as we sit here in 2025, heading into 2026, we do have the luxury of connecting now digitally and getting information out too. And Kelly and I just released an app because we're trying to, we're trying to figure out the new consumer. Right. We have. They're new consumers, you know, with attention spans that are super short, watching a lot of videos, being inundated with influencers that are often not influencing in a way that aligns with our belief system and health and nutrition and what wellness really looks like. They're getting inundated with all of that. So we're trying to create more and more connections of wisdom pearls in ways that people can learn so through an app and through some curriculum, but in those always having community, because without community, I don't think the learning to the extent we want it to happen is going to happen.

Well, community is also by its nature messy. You know, it's messy. You can't really control how people are going to get on with each other when you connect them, especially if you get into, you know, testing topics. But ultimately that is part of the medicine too. It's working out to be with each other. And that's, I think, the biggest thing that we're all learning, learning and that we're all continuing to learn. And you know, I've sort of aggressively put myself in places to try and push that part of it forward because I realize it is quite easy in America to just go through your life and not be forced into different type of situations. So, you know, I forced myself into being in this men's group, right, that I've been in for six years. And most people don't really understand why you would want to do that, but I recognize that coming face to face with, with, you know, real accountability, real emotional maturity, you know, having a place that isn't my. My spouse to, you know, deal with stuff that's going on in my head or things that are going on with my life. You know, I recognize that that's really, really powerful and parts of that were really triggering to really be honest at a. At a deeper level or really, you know, build trust or, or realize that not being honest doesn't create trust and that those kind of areas. So I think, I think it is messy and it's tricky and you have to kind of want to do it because you can opt out of everything, but then you can also die early from a chronic illness.

So for men, I love that you brought up a men's group accountability. I think that is huge. I think that's huge for men and women. But a lot of times men do push back in engaging in that way and being intimate and having those hard conversations in relationships. So what other ways do you support yourself as a man looking for positive health outcomes, Longevity, vitality, You know, what. What are the pillars that you lean on as a man?

I'm not sure if I'm a typical man at all. And I'm not even sure if we have, like. I'm glad that you see that you see more men coming in. I don't know if that's desperation or I don't know if that is actual a change in the culture. I think, I think a lot of these biomarker, you know, the, the availability of consumer biomarkers is changing the game, I think, for men because they can actually see, oh, my score is low, how do I improve that score? There's a sort of a competitive nature that is allowing that. I think, you know, that sort of information used to only be available through practitioners like yourself, you know, or otherwise. And now that the availability of that, I think is probably a net positive still at this point. And certainly when it comes to men and bringing that, like the biohacking thing is quite male focused, but I do think that ultimately it has the same goals as people who might Come into your clinic. So I think again, it's, maybe it's a net positive. You know, I was thinking to myself this morning, I was in a sauna. So on Friday mornings we have like a, there's a, there's a big sauna down the road and a bunch of friends. We all, we all go. This is the first time that I've been able to go this season. I haven't been since the spring. But I was thinking to myself that I, at every choice, I sort of choose to live in what I would call the new story, right? The new story of health. And that means. Okay, yeah, look, it is more annoying in most cases to try and work out who grew the vegetables that you eat. But like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna find a way to do that. So we have this vegetable box that comes in and we know the guy and he sends us the vegetables. You know, I, I chose not to send my kids to a normal school, but I chose to co create their education with a learning center. And again, it takes a lot more time. There's an expectation that you're going to be participating, building the school. I've been on the board for four years. The first three years it was like having another job I didn't get paid for. But now it's kind of settled down and we've got 100 kids and we've got some stability. But like, these are all choices that I felt that I had to make because I just didn't feel like, as the protector of my family, that I couldn't just continue on to make the choices as normal. Because ultimately I felt like these were giant experiments that no one knew the answer to. Think about one example, the cell phone in the child's hands. That is an experiment where we're in it right now and you're already starting to see the signs that other countries are like, we have to do something to really change this because it's a disaster. But my kids are 4 and 12 right now. Either I can send them to public school and hope for the best and know that like some kid is going to have it and almost anything in the world could be accessed from that phone right then. And my kid can be in that friend group, right? Never mind video games and all that other stuff, or it's going to be a lot harder, but I can like withdraw them from the experiment, right, and, and take control of the things that I think are really important now. I used to live in New York. I used to live in la. It was cool. It was fun. I had cool, fun friends doing cool, fun things. I don't have as much cool, fun stuff going on. But I know that I made the right decision for my kids. I see them flourishing in a beautiful way. And, you know, it's not without its. Its trials and tribulations. But I also know, like, my daughter, who's 12, can have sleepovers, which I know that most people don't think that is possible. And it's because I know the people. Like, I know the people who they would go to. I've been to their house. I know who they are. I know what their choice places are, too. And I know the agreements, both explicit and implicit, that we've made about how we're going to raise our kids. So I have no fear for them going, you know, to another. To another house. And I think there's a level of. There's a level of community inside that, that is a level of trust inside that, that I think that everyone, like, yearns for or knows that was possible at one point in the, you know, in the past or that existed at one point in the past that has been, like, taken away by technology, that has been taken away by suburbia, that's been taken away by, like, our ability to access whatever we want at any time and to find and curate and organize. That is hopefully a gift that my kids will appreciate, if not now, then in the future.

Yes. What I hear you saying is two things. Be the change you wish to see in the world and create the change you wish to see. Right. It's. It's you creating that. That you obviously know what's important to you. You know what you want, what experiences you want them to have, and you're willing to put in the effort to do that and to create that.

And Lori, what I heard him say was, if I'm ever on a desert island, I want him with me because he's gonna figure it out.

I mean, there's plenty of things, but I think I'm good at figuring it out. I would say that, like, the school project as an example. Not possible. Like, I'm not a teacher. I'm not any of those things. So, you know, it's like. Many hands make light work for sure. You know, I think one of the. My wife and I, when we. We have talked about what our core values are, I think that the first four core value is we say first things first. And, you know, ultimately it's very easy to get sort of distracted by all kinds of other things, but it's like make the most important. The most important thing. The most important thing. And, you know, if you have that as the sort of North Star, then it's actually not that difficult in each moment, in each decision to work out what the most important thing is. And that meant moving to the countryside and, you know, doing life differently. And that was first things first.

Right. Well, that's also intentionality too. And I'm sure that it's holding each other accountable to first things first because we are human and it is very easy to get distracted or to, you know, get set in our own ways or sometimes take the easy path. So I can imagine that comes with a lot of communication and connection time with your wife too.

You think so? I mean, limited recently, like, she's got her own business. She started to go. That's a lot. And, you know, she hired three people in the last month and so has been like, full there. I'm doing like all the dadding, you know, taking the kids back and forth because, you know, I have a more sort of like flexible schedule, I guess. But yeah, I mean, it does take that kind of communication. We are trying to get into a habit of quarterly getting together and like, hey, how did things go? What do we want? You know, what's important to us, what we want to do in the next quarter? I. I wouldn't say we're in the right. In the complete rhythm that I'm hoping for yet, but like, certainly it's. It's on the radar and we are going through the process. It's just happening in 30 minute conversations when the kids are in bed or, you know, that kind of thing, as opposed to the dedicated time that I think we need.

You guys are in the hard years right now.

Anybody can do it. What you're saying is that people can do it if they're serious about making that happen. No matter how busy they are, they can make. They, you know, if it's a priority for you, you can make that happen. So you guys are in the hard.

Years, and I love the fact that you have clear core values, because I do think that that limits the amount of conversations you have to have. Not that you don't need to have those conversations, but if you all already know your core values, then the decisions you're making every day are going to align with those core values and keep you out of the weeds so that there's not as much disconnect in the relationship. So I love that you've done that and I love what you're saying about having a quarterly meeting. I think that's very wise and kind of sitting down. What went well, what could we do better? Because you guys are in the hard years. You're in the years where the kids are not only physically demanding, but emotionally demanding and going in all these different directions. And so I think it's really wise to have that time to pause and sit and ask the hard questions and be willing to make change moving forward.

And it wasn't my idea either. This is like listening to other people who have the life that I would like to have, you know, or, like, are aspirational to me and seeing how they do it. And that's something that's come up a lot. So always learning, always trying to, you know, work it out better. And, yeah, that's just. It's all. All of us are doing that all the time.

And that's a pearl of advice that you just said. And I think that's where, you know, I think Kelly said it earlier. So common that men don't have accountability groups for whatever reason, or accountability or those close, intimate relationships with other men. And I think that you. You said just now how important it is to look for and emulate the behaviors of others. Not everything about their relationships, but you pricking and choosing the ones that you want to emulate, because that's the life that you're looking to.

We talked earlier about more men coming into the practice today, and you mentioned maybe that's out of desperation. You know, I really do think it's a movement. I think that men are recognizing their strength within the family. I think they're recognizing that when they make a change, the family makes a change, and it's up to them to set the tone, which I'm so excited about, because we need men stepping up. We need men taking charge and leading their families in that way. So I'm really excited about what I'm seeing. I feel like if we can get both husband and wife in the program and having them work together as a couple, that's even more beautiful because they're working toward a common goal. But oftentimes we'll see one come in, and then a few months later, the other comes in. And sometimes it's the wife leading the pack, but oftentimes today it's the man leading the pack. So that's inspiring me to have different conversations, even with my female clients. Like, what's going on with your husband? Are there things he's struggling with? Does he deserve a conversation, encouraging them to come to visits, you know, come have him come to your Library visit, have him come to your grocery store tour or some of our classes that we offer so that he understands what you're going through and vice versa if he's coming first. Offering that to the, to the wife as well.

Well, I would say, you know, I recently went back to Georgia. Maybe last summer. Maybe. Yeah, last summer, summer 24. And I got to go back through the old town and I was, was shocked at the number of health focused businesses there than I had been years before. It was a market change and that was really inspiring too to see that, okay, there is a demand for health related services. We were breaking new ground there. Like no one knew what any of these things were. No one was taking supplements, no one was choosing a different form of health care. And now it just felt like there's demand for this. And I think there is a sort of a revolution underway. And one of the things that I've been excited about is that when I started, most of these practices were in sort of like blue cities, right? So there was Boulder, Colorado and Asheville, North Carolina and New York and la. And what I've been excited about in the last year and a half is starting to see that this is, you know, across all politics, across all culture recognizing that we are chronically ill and that, you know, there is more that's going to have to be done to take, take accountability. And I, I think I see that as unity. I don't always, it doesn't always appear to other people when I'm saying it as unity, but I see that as unity. And I'm hopeful that, you know, we'll continue to, that whatever's happening will continue to happen. Because I think that, I think health transformation, I still think that health transformation is the key to societal transformation because relationship, quality, empowerment, all of these tools that happen through a significant health journey have ripple effects into relationships and community and purpose and mission, all those kind of things, 100%.

I think I hear what you're saying is when people don't feel well, they don't connect well, they don't make good decisions oftentimes. And then that leads to more dysfunction and degradation of that relationship. And so I agree, I think health is your largest asset. Lori and I have said that a lot in our content creation and we need to be willing to invest in that, whatever that means, time, energy and resources to kind of move the needle there.

And much like yourself, from a different perspective, you know, our goal has also been as we have been some of the things that helped us the most from 2010 to probably 2015, when there wasn't a whole lot of that online was the people that did pour into us. They were there for the engagement of case studies and challenging us. And so one of the things we want to leave a legacy with is doing the same thing. And so that's why we created our other business Synergy is to enhance other practitioners learning, hopefully speed up the learning and be a resource for them not to be an island, because I do think that we, as we are trained, we were trained to kind of be an island. And unfortunately, or, and maybe we weren't trained that way, maybe in traditional we were, but even when we got out, we were an island because we just didn't have anybody else doing it. So we had to really find those people doing it and doing it the way we wanted to do it to train into us. So we love, love, love the opportunity. So commonly kind of like what you're doing, but a little bit different, is pouring into and hoping to educate other providers of care, helping them grow in scale without burnout. Because you said it earlier, it's very, very easy. Unfortunately for us as providers that genuinely care, it could be really easy to burn out. And so we have to really grow and scale without that burnout and figure out who to leverage and what resources to leverage to help that. So it's been a joy to be able to do both of that. Not only have our clinics, but that too.

Yeah, I mean that it's critical. I mean, some green shoots I think, is that younger doctors are coming out like, thinking about health. I think it's impossible to ignore. I think, I don't, I don't think the system has changed at all, but I think the culture has changed. And I think young doctors are realizing that they don't want to be the people with no answers to the questions of the people that are well informed because they, you know, read need. And so I think there's in, in younger doctors, I think there is at least an awareness of the fact that chronic disease is environmental mainly, you know, and that ultimately there are things that you could do to reduce your risk and that there are things to do to reverse your chronic illness like that. I think it's, yeah, medicine and the medical education is much, much slower to change, but the culture has shifted and I think people are aware of it.

Well, I was interested in hearing you say, and now that I know that the ted talk was 2015, how at that point, I had always heard that 10 to 15 years between research, catching up with clinical practice, but you actually said at that time is around 15. I think you said 15 to 18. So. And I don't think people really realize that. They're like, there's no research. Well, there is, unfortunately. You have many that were trained, that are just utilizing what they were trained, and they. They never continue to educate themselves, and they're stuck in how they were trained, and that's how they're practicing medicine. So. Which is sad.

It is. But there's, you know, there's sort of a weight of pressure moving in this direction again, you know, when I first started, I think a lot of practitioners were scared. Like, I met this. I remember meeting this dermatologist, and his wife was a functional medicine doctor. And he went to the conference and he liked it, and he actually realized, you know, skin. It's a big deal. And it's obvious that skin things aren't just skin things, that there's. There's whole body issues that are manifesting as skin issues. And he knew all of that, but, like, he couldn't say any of that at his annual dermatology meeting. And more than anything, he wanted to, like, not embarrass himself in front of his dermatology peers more than anything. Like, not more than reversing a chronic illness more than anything. And so that, you know, that's. That's a hard thing. You know, that that's a hard thing to shift. But I think. I think we're making progress. We'll see.

I agree. I agree. Yeah. The days of being called weird and voodoo and all of that, and remembering my mom in the ear going, it's okay to fit out. You don't have to fit in. It's perfectly fine. I'm like, thank you for that skill set that you taught me early in my life, because it became okay. Never comfortable, though. I'll be honest, I think we all, to some degree, want at some point in our lives to fit in. And it was quite hard to be different. But I have to say, we have to take a stand moving forward. It's going to become more important to take a stand for what you believe in and then be the change. Create the change that you want to see in this world. And you're doing that. You're doing that every day. So how you already hinted to what's next for James Maskell, but I want to hear it again, because I want to hear how we can be a part of helping you on your mission for change.

I think where functional medicine and those ideas having a lot of success is where One little piece of it can be sort of packaged and scaled, right? So the latest thing is the consumer lab testing thing. I think it's a net positive for now, I don't know in the future. But the one thing that our community does that has not been packaged and sold is the core of the work, right? Actually being with people, understanding their history, getting to the root cause, removing the root cause, getting them better, and then supporting them ongoing. That is the real medicine. And that thing is hard to package and sell and scale because it takes real human interaction, real human brain power and those kind of areas. So I've been radicalized towards working in dementia care because I had a moment a year and a half ago where my father, you know, suffered a very significant cognitive decline, rapid cognitive decline. And long story short, my functional medicine doctor, who's my friend and my doctor and is a leader in the space of reversing cognitive decline with functional medicine, she knew more about his situation, having never seen him in living across the world than all the doctors that were there. Like, they were all, this is death. This is what it looks like. Prepare his things, it's over. And I was like, I just went to his house and I could see that he's been living in an acutely moldy environment. This is acute mold poisoning, right? To go from being fine, having lunch and then being like comatose in the bed, like, is, you know, that was, that was the gap. And I was right and they were wrong because in the non moldy environment, he had to come back. And six months later, he's reading four books a week. So, you know, that really, again, like, the first thing that kind of radicalized me was the kids and seeing the, those kids. And now at the other end of the spectrum, I'm seeing that. How can we, how, you know, this, this information must become part of the future of medicine. This has to be part of it. Because if you miss something that obvious, you know, and everyone's just sort of asleep at the wheel. And so, yeah, I've been working for the last year and a half to really find a way to make it easier for clinicians to do the work of reversing cognitive decline, which I would say is probably the hardest of the hardest, right? If you look at functional medicine generally, getting someone who eats too much and has prediabetes to eat a bit less and get their metabolic system back in play, that's not that difficult in the screen of things. Getting someone who has mild cognitive impairment to understand what's driving it in this person and then remove it when the clock's running against you because the brain power is lose, losing as you go. It's the hardest work. So that means it's the most important. Like that means it's the most critical work. That's where the it's going. And I'm sure you, you may be seeing this, but we're certainly seeing 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, people having, you know, having early stage cognitive decline, whether that, you know, whatever that looks like, or mental health issues that's being driven in the same way. So that's what I'm working on right now. We've got about 50 clinics that are using the software. It's called True Neura. And the goal, if I said in five years time, I think that precision brain health should be delivered in senior living centers. And I think that actually that all the incentives exist for that to happen. It's just that it has to be organized in a way that's not as crazy as the current way that functional medicine is practiced. With all the labs from different companies and all the numbers hard to understand. And then the synthesis of all the data. I'm sure you guys have sat with a patient that is chronic is tricky and it's like 18 PDFs. How do I work out what's the most important thing here? And that takes a decade of experience to work out. We don't have a decade. So how do we synthesize the data? How do we organize the data in a way that can clearly say this patient? It's mainly mold with a little bit of metabolic inflammation and a little bit of hormonal issues. And based on what we see from other phenotypes who are similar to this, we're going to recommend that you do this, this and this. And it could even be like a large language or a small language model eventually. Right now it's set up to help clinicians like you take on brain health patients and be successful. But our hope is that eventually any clinician can use it. But it will be built on the first database that actually is tracking the reversal of cognitive decline. And ultimately this has never happened before. It's new and exciting. Coming up soon, you will see the first placebo controlled trial of the methodology. The preprint will be coming out in December. It's called the Even Thea trial. E V A N T H E A and my partner, Dr. Berg was one of the trial sites for it. I think the preprint will come in December and then the actual print will come out in April of 2026 in the Journal of Alzheimer's. And it'll be the first time that there's been a placebo controlled example of the methodology to show that it works and works consistently. And it works way better than any of the medication that's currently very expensive and doesn't work. And so when that happens, then the question will be, well, how do we get 1000 times as much of it as we have now? And I'm already thinking about it and trying to make it happen. So I'm hoping that at that moment we'll be able to do something really significant in that space. I'm also interested in building a network of pediatric primary care clinics. You know, there's a movement towards direct primary care in January. Your membership fees that you would pay to a direct primary care clinic can be paid pre tax, which you asked me at the beginning. What's the biggest issue that holds everything back? And maybe we should just finish with this. I think if everyone listening to this, whether you're a patient or a doctor or a practitioner or whoever you are, you could recognize that the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies have way much, way, way more control over medicine than they should. And I've been to other countries and I've seen who controls it in other areas. And ultimately you might also agree with me that really the only two people that matter in medicine is the patient and the practitioner. Right, because the patient is actually the one who's the most important patient centered care. But that dementia example gives you a thing where you can't reverse really your own dementia. You have to have someone do it for you because they have to be able to work out what's going on and make up the plan. So those two people are important. So in this legislation that comes out January 1st, basically insurance and pharma can both get kicked out at the same time. Because ultimately if you're a practitioner and you are licensed to practice medicine in your state and you can have a direct relationship with a group of 400 patients, you can decide the standard of care. You don't take insurance and they can pay for it with pre tax money. So it's a once in a generation opportunity to realign the finances of medicine. And primary care is the most important thing. If you have high quality primary care, the rest of the system, you know, it, you know, shrivels because you don't need as many of everything else that happens. It's really the most important thing. And so I think we have a once in a generation opportunity to transform medicine. But what it takes is practitioners and doctors to step into the responsibility for taking care of those 400 people directly. And I want to support more and more of those. We probably helped a thousand go for. You guys have probably helped some done along the way too, to do that. And I think that this is a moment. We have a window where if 100,000 clinics happen like that, it's not like it's going to go away in 2028. This is a new way that most people are getting their care paid for. Employers want to pay for this because they know that high quality primary care saves dollars everywhere else. So this is a moment for all of us. And I think it's the most exciting legislation that's existed because it allows a situation to unbalance what has been horrifically unbalanced for generations, which is the control of pharmaceuticals and insurance over medicine. And it doesn't have to be that. That way, but it does take courage and it does take participation from practitioners.

That's right.

So like I was saying earlier, standing up. Standing up, yeah. And. And doing. Being willing to do things different being. Being willing to take chances and then. But you're doing it collectively in a community. And that's what's going to be very, very powerful. Right. Because we are stronger together. We all are. So thank you for all of your work, for all of the years, all of your dedication for who you are, for who you stand for, or for what you stand for. It's been such a pleasure to know you, to have had you here, actually in my home. Yeah. Talking about group and, and the power of group many, many years ago. But it's been really cool to watch you grow and continue with this passion to change lives. So any way we can help you, we would love to. And I'm certain that you're gonna have a standing alongside of you on this mission to change the world.

Thank you so much. And yeah, thanks so much for having the opportunity to be with you here. And look forward to the next session.

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