How to live to be 100 without chronic disease with James Maskell

Now we're on. Hi guys. I've got a good topic for you today. Today I'm here with my good friend James Mescal and from Evolution Fitness. And what we're going to talk about is the whole concept of why some areas people live to 100. And I've always said, I don't know about you, I've always said I would love to live to 100 if I still had my mind about me and I could be healthy. But I don't want to be in that position if I've got chronic illness and I'm not feeling good and being somebody that's really into health, nutrition and fitness and staying healthy. You know, I've always wondered, you know, why some areas do people stay healthy for so long. And in some areas it seems that everything starts to fall apart even at age 40. So you guys, for those of you that have followed my lives before, if you like my information, please share this video so others can join in. Because I'm going to introduce you to some great stuff with James. And for those of you new to my page, I'm Natalie Jill. I'm a licensed master sports nutritionist and a functional fitness trainer. And what I do is I simplify fitness and nutrition for people like you to help you guys get happy, healthy and fit and become your best you possible. And I love bringing new people on to interview them so you can learn more. So it's not just coming from me, but you can learn from some great people that I have brought into my life. So I wanted to introduce James Mescal to you who I met not too long ago. But he has done, he did some fantastic ted, did a fantastic TED talk. And this guy is so innovative and he's got some great information. And I'm gonna stop rambling cause I've got lot that I want him to share. But I wanted to start with this whole concept of those blue zones and what that means and why some communities live long and healthy.

Absolutely. So there's this guy called Dr. He's Dan Buettner who is working with the National Geographic and he went around to find what he called centenarians people where there was this group places around the world where people are living to 100 consistently. And there's one in Loma Linda, California, just up the way here. There's also one in Costa Rica, there's one in Greece, there's one in Japan. And what he found was that there were a lot of things that they had in common. There are a lot of things that were different. But the one thing that I took away from reading his book was that they all had a really strong sense of community. And, you know, that's one of the things I think that, you know, certainly in American culture, sort of lacking. We've, you know, sort of become a little isolated. And so, you know, I've been interested in what can we learn from that, how can we reproduce that? Because what's really interesting is none of those places have a very advanced medical system, right? It's not that stuff is being done to them. It's just a part of their culture to move a lot, to eat healthy and to have a strong sense of community that supports them. And so we've been looking at ways to sort of reproduce that and create, you know, in our business, the evolution of medicine, how do we inspire patients and doctors to work together to recreate the kind of situation where people can live to a hundred.

When you give like an ideal community, when you talk about the idea of a community, what is the definition of that? Well, I know you said there's some areas, but explain what a good community would mean and why that affects health.

You know, I think it's, it's all the things that happen that provide support. So you think of like in the old days, you had the extended family, right? Everyone knows, everyone supports everyone. You know, the majority of times when you're, you know, you're in sort of our age group, it's the support of someone who's bringing you chicken soup when you're sick, or someone who's helping you to get to the see the doctor or you know, partners that you do. You know, you cook with, you play together, you pray together, you're connecting with other people all the time. There's something just inherently healthy about a strong interactive community. And so what we've looked at is what are the things that they are doing? And we see it's these social bonds. Now what's really interesting is this sounds a little like woo woo. And you don't really know what it is, but there's some amazing new research coming from the UCLA stress lab. And these guys have a, they're doing some research called human social genomics. And what they're doing is actually testing people's genes and seeing how their gene expression changes when they have good personal relations, personal relationships or not. So to give you an example, if you and I and 10 of our friends and we will work at a company and we all get laid off, right on the same day, we all get laid off. We all get fired. We have a two time risk of depression. So our risk of depression goes up two times. Whereas if I just get fired and I'm the only one and I'm singled out, the social bond between me and you is cut. And I'm specific, it's just me. The risk of depression goes up 20 times. Wow. So it's like if there's been moments in your life where there's been an intention from someone to sever a social bond, like you know, a divorce or you know, friendships breaking up or otherwise at that moment has a real deep physiological effect on your body. And one of the things that if that happens over and over again, it can lead to depression, it can lead to inflammation, it can lead to all number of chronic diseases. And so one of the things we're looking at all the time is how can we recreate structures and encourage structures that give people a strong sense of relationship, Someone to talk to, someone to exercise with, someone to pray with, someone to eat with. Eating is a big part of the social bond. And so you see the kind of cultures like, you know, in Italy, eating is a family affair. You know, in, in, you know, in Loma Linda, California, where they have this blue zone, it's, it's the Seventh Day Adventists and they don't eat one day and they walk together as a community the whole time. You've been to Loma Linda, it's pretty polluted place. It's not the, it's not like Costa Rica where everything's beautiful and whatever, but they've the, the, the, the things that they do together trump the pollution in the bowl of la.

So this is really interesting because I think community really gets left out of the equation a lot. Like we talk about, people are educated on, I need to work out, I need to eat healthy food, I need to see my doctor, I need. But people are isolated. Why do you think what has changed that? Is it, is it Internet? Is it what, what has made us feel, what has made this community sense? Because I remember just as a kid, even I think back to, and this is, I'm 44. So just being a kid, I remember just walking outside and playing with the kids in my neighborhood. And you. Only I didn't have, I didn't stay in touch with people all over the country. I had my neighborhood that we were friends with and that's even changed. What, what do you think?

It's ease of communication, you know, with other people. I think, you know, it's, it's a part of the Success of capitalism in a certain way. It's like the dark side of that, where, look, if everyone has their own home, then everyone needs their own lawnmower. Whereas if, you know, if you're in a community, maybe you could share a lawn mower. You know, so it's like everyone, it's that, but it's also like, you know, it's the upward mobility of society. I mean, we are at record comfort levels, right, where people live in amazing homes. And, you know, everyone. Society's generally, you know, changed astronomically in 100 years. You go back 100 years to 1916 and see what life was like in America. There, it's almost unrecognizable. And that's come with amazing benefits. I mean, you've seen throughout the 20th century, their life expectancy has gone up. Now. They just actually said in the last couple of weeks, there was a report that came out that for the first time, life expectancy has not only stopped growing, but has actually started to come down, which is really scary. But there are the, you know, the sort of. The negative side to our prosperity has been more social isolation. You used to have extended families all living together. You had multi generations of families living in the same house. Now everyone lives in separate houses. You used to have kids all living, sleeping in the same bed. Now it's all separation. And so it's the same thing. In my TED Talk, I spoke about the similarity of that and say, our interaction with germs. We used to have a lot of germs around, and then we started killing all the germs. And then suddenly we're isolated and we don't have the same support of these germs that keep us healthy. So all of these things are leading towards a situation where chronic disease can thrive. And what we see in America and all over the industrialized world is an increase in chronic disease. And it's partly to do with the food, it's partly to do with the social conditions. It's partly to do with the lack of exercise and, you know, sitting in front of the computer and not living the way that we are adapted to live. But I think that one of the things that's exciting is that the social component, if you can get that right and you can do other healthy behaviors like working out, eating right, whatever, in a group environment, then you get sort of like a synergistic benefit where you have accountability partners, support partners. I've seen on your videos you've talked.

A lot about that, a lot about accountability. So what do people I'm sure there's getting, we're getting questions about this, but what would somebody do if they feel like they don't have this community and they're feeling. Cause even if you're feeling isolated, then you probably really are isolated. So what do you suggest that someone would do?

Well, what I think is that there's the double edged sword of the Internet right here. We are learning in front of a whole group here and it's been isolating. But what I have found is that before the Internet you didn't really know who was interested in the same stuff as you in the street. You couldn't really tell who was interested. Now you might see the same person at the farmer's market. There weren't as many farmers markets. You might see the same people around in the gym. But now what you have is you can use these online tools to be able to create offline connections. So what more and more people I see doing is going to find communities online. And I see a lot of community leaders like yourself finding ways for people to find each other locally. So to find accountability partners, to find support partners, to be able to build local connections. So you think like look at the company meetup.com, like meetup, then you can find a meetup in your community for almost anything, Scrabble, you know, all kinds of everything. And so, you know, I think those kind of solutions are good. You know, you have on Craigslist, you have activity partners, you know, different social organizations. I mean, if you look at where is the biggest impact in chronic disease being made? It's being made when you infuse health into an already existing community. So Mark Hyman and Daniel Amen did this thing at the Saddleback Church where they had, they had 200 and they had 20,000 people who were in part of the church. But these 20,000 people would get together on Sunday, but on Wednesday night they'd have a group of five, a Bible study group. So they infused some education about health and that. And between all these people they lost like £250,000. And it was because they already had a social group. So when I see church groups walking together or it's belonging to different social organizations, church has played a big role in that. You've seen religion has sort of fall away in certain parts, is strong in other parts. And so I think that there's new social organizations that have to, that are emerging to either replace that or add value to that.

There's something happen because I think people do long to be part of Something and that's why people get attracted to their specific church or their group or their whatever it is. How does that affect people? Like what actually happens? Does something happen chemically when you're part of a group or what is it just because you're around them and there's more behavior that you start wanting to emulate? What is it that's happening?

Well, the cool thing is about this, you know, human social genomics, no one really knew what the sort of the biochemistry was, but it's obviously a lot of, you know, very. It can affect so deeply, like it can affect at the cellular level, but it can also affect at the systemic level. So what we're seeing is that stress, this is social stress is one area of stress. And as you know, stress is like a, one of the leading causes of chronic disease. But people thought that stress was about like the job or money or otherwise. But it's this social stress that's the most powerful. And so, you know, the mechanisms are becoming more clear now as we can actually, you know, the only reason why human social genomics actually exists right now is 10 years ago you couldn't afford to do genomic panels on everyone. Now with 23andMe, it costs $99, right, to do your genomic panel. And so scientists can do a genomic panel every month or six months and trace the, you know, trace what's actually happening. So we don't know exactly the mechanism but, but it's definitely something to do with the autonomic nervous system and the parasympathetic sympathetic balance. And that's, you know, it's an area that needs probably more things to, you know, more research. But it's very exciting to see. At least we're understanding what's at the cause of all this now.

Wow, Brooks. Brooks is behind the camera. Brooks, what are we getting? Any questions that we're not addressing yet?

People are just loving it. You know, some people are chiming in like Rose. She's like my dad lived to like almost 100 with no chronic disease.

Disease.

He exercised daily, did Tai chi. So I mean really talking about that functional aspect of being healthy prevents a lot.

I think this community stuff is fascinating because it is something we tend to all overlook. And I think people are becoming more and more isolating and nobody's aware of how that's actually affecting their health.

Absolutely, yes, it is happening. But I think as we start to learn we can start to take. And that's the beauty of the Internet. Your double edged sword is now you're Finding out about it, you can realize, okay, this is. Is potentially something that I can do something. It's not something that costs me anything. It's not something. So our work up until now has really been focusing on helping doctors to create structures around their practice. So, you know, one cool thing, and I think your fans might like this. So I've got a couple of doctors now that are doing something like this. People say, guess what? It takes me hours each day to cook all my food. Right. I don't have time and I'm to cook. So some of our doctors are getting groups of people together. Imagine 20 people coming together. You rent a commercial kitchen and you cook 20 meals altogether. So rather than cooking one meal for three people, you're cooking one meal for 20 people. And then you. Everyone's cooking at the same time. You have a meal together at the end and then you put all your stuff in Tupperware and you've got all your food for the whole week in 90 minutes.

And you're doing this in a community.

So you're doing it in a community. You're meeting new people, you're making healthy food, you're controlling all of the ingredients. You're eating unprocessed. Right?

Yeah, that's the goal exactly.

Just like the book says. And you're creating real food in community. That's the kind of thing that hits all of those areas, and that's what we're trying to help. Dr. Sachin Patel is a guy in Mississauga, Ontario, and that was his idea. He started doing it and through our business, through our functional forum, and we speak to all of the progressive doctors out there doing functional integrated medicine, trying to help them to recreate these structures of scale.

I love the whole idea of the progressive functional doctors that you mentioned a few times too. Can you. I want, I'm just want to just touch on a little bit what that means.

Yeah. So look, most doctors are trained in reducing symptoms, getting rid of your symptoms. But what that's. That really works well in acute disease, if you get hit by a truck, if you have an infection, otherwise you want someone who. With those skill sets, if you have chronic disease, you want someone who's going to improve the function of your organs and systems. Chronic disease, especially those diseases that have a lifestyle component, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and more and more, autoimmune disease, we're seeing that, you know, lifestyle played a role in it. And so you can't unwind that with drugs. It has to be a lifestyle shift. And what you're seeing is, you know, more and more examples of people reversing their type 2 diabetes, reversing their autoimmune disease, reversing heart disease by, by working with doctors who can help to implement these kind of lifestyle changes. It's going to be changes in diet, it's going to be changes in the way you deal with stress. And what's really exciting is that this, our business is called the evolution of medicine because it's medicine adapting to its new environment. The new environment is chronic disease. The old environment was acute disease when everyone was dying of typhoid and that kind of thing. We did well with that through social programs and nutrition and sanitation. We did really well with dealing that. Now we have a new, we have a new environment and medicine is having to adapt to its environment. And what we're helping to do through the evolution of medicine is helping doctors to create structures that work for chronic disease.

Wow. That's a pretty innovative, cool concept too because I think this is what is missing in so many places. And I know you guys can relate too about feeling like when you don't feel well or something's going wrong, you're being diagnosed with something and then you go to the doctor and you're just given a prescription and it's a quick five or ten minute appointment and you're not, nobody's talking about community or the whole everything else that's going on.

You know, Doctor. Modern medicine was created in an environment with acute disease. And so they were, they were trained in that. And it's really not the doctor's fault. You know, they were trained in that. They're just in a system where they can only see people for seven minutes. So let me give you an example of another way that doctors doing this. Imagine instead of, imagine instead of, you know, seeing a doctor for five minutes, you and 16 other people with type 2 diabetes could be in a group. So you know, rather than the doctor trying to say the same thing that they're trying to say in 30 minutes, in two minutes, which is impossible, they give a 30 minute lecture. They tell everyone like a small group.

So they can all hear the same questions.

Yeah. And then, then the next, so that's 30 minutes and then the next 60 minutes, the Dr. Takes each person one by one for like a semi private visit where they might work on your medication or diet. And a health coach is actually facilitating a conversation with the other people. Because some people are introverts. They're not going to ask the question. Some people are extroverts. They're going to ask then accountability buddies. My mother in law last year lost 100 pounds. And the only thing that she did differently was that she had to, she had to call someone at the end of every day and tell them what she eat.

That's just being accountable, being accountable.

And she didn't want to call them and say, hey, I had like four Big Macs, I did what I said. And it was just that accountability. And that was the only thing that changed. So look, the thing is about that kind of thing, it doesn't cost anything. The biggest problem we have here in medicine is that everything costs a lot. There's like a significant amount of cost. And medicine, whether it's the patient paying or the company paying or the government paying, it's going to run out of money. And so what we need to do is find ways to recreate this community, recreate this peer to peer support because that didn't cost her anything. And guess what? The person who was that accountability partner, it didn't cost them anything. And you know what, it's like there's value to the teacher too. They get value from like just being a supportive person. You see aa, Alcoholics Anonymous, those kind of things. You know, your sponsor. This is not a financial transaction, right? This is just people helping each other through and that's I think what we really need to do. So thus far we've really been coming at it from the Dr. Angles and helping medicine to evolve. But in our next iteration, we're really going to bring it straight to the patients and so say, hey, let's get together in groups, let's work together. And some of the structures that we set up for, you know, insurance or other things have been looked to see how we can work together to bring down costs and make it happen.

Can you talk a little bit more about that? About.

Yeah. So look, I grew up in England and in England you don't have health insurance. Everyone's just covered by the government. Now people think that that might be a solution in America, the single payer. But actually England's in even worse trouble than, than the US right now. All the doctors are quitting. There's a strike of doctors in the UK right now and it's the same problem. Chronic disease costs a lot more and there's not enough money to go around to pay all the doctors.

Will you take a second go into some of those chronic disease costs? Because I don't think people understand it because it's like I only pay $100 a month. I don't think they understand like those numbers you were talking about earlier. Because I don't think people really grasp.

Yeah. The drugs that you take for type 2 diabetes, metformin, like Humira, an autoimmune disease drug. This costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. It's just that your insurance company is paying for it, so you're cost blind. That's the other thing is you're not seeing the cost that actually it costs the medical system. Your insurance companies pay for it. Why do you think your health insurance is going up 30, 40% every year? It's because they're paying those costs and they're passing them on to you.

And what are some of those annual costs? Just because I don't think people really know.

The highest patients could be 50, $250,000 a year. You know, we're working with some companies where they're paying the cost. They're self insured, these companies, and they're having to reinsure themselves against the potential that 10 of their employees get type 2 diabetes. And their costs are $250,000 a year. And that's $2.5 million for 10 employees.

And that's why everyone's cost is so expensive.

And there's no way, because 10 employees, they're not even making their gross salary is not 2.5 million a year. So that's where it's like, that's where, you know, like you said, it doesn't matter who's paying for it. Yeah.

So like, you know, so that this is a huge problem. And what these functional doctors that we're working with doing at, like how do you reverse that? How do you get people off the drugs? And that's the, that's the new game in town is like how do you reduce costs? Because in America there's not the incentives to reduce costs because everyone's in on making a ton of money. Insurance, insurance is the one. Everyone thinks like your insurance company wants to save you money, it wants to save costs, but they don't because it's cost plus. If you read the Obamacare legislation, they have this 8020 rule. So if your health insurance is $1,000 a month, they take 200 and 800 goes towards payment of services. If it's you know, $100 a month, that would only be $20. So there's an incentive to keep the numbers going up. Same with pharma, same with hospitals. When I found this out, I was shocked. Other than that, shocked, but I was a little bit shocked. But that's why we're working to try and create systems that really work. So, yeah, you know, these people, there's certain people that it costs a lot and it's not their fault. You know, they're just doing. They go to the doctor and the doctor tells them what to do, but that's the standard of care. And these heroic doctors have gone outside of the standard of care to learn about how you reverse chronic disease. And I was telling you earlier, it hasn't come to America yet, but it's going to come on BBC America. Check out my main man, Dr. Rangan. Rangan Chatterjee. 6 foot 7, Indian doctor on BBC TV. Reversing type 2 diabetes in 30 days. Reversing chronic pain and opioid addiction in 30 days. Because it was like Dr. Osmit's super nanny where he goes to live in your house, right, for 30 days. And so you're seeing more and more examples of people reversing their chronic disease. And so people are like, oh, you can do that. That's a possibility. Because your doctor didn't tell that. They're like, you're on metformin forever. That's what they tell you. And so you're getting more and more examples. And so these heroic doctors have learned things like functional and integrative medicine, learning how to help patients adapt and change their lifestyle so that they get well. Up until now, this has been on people like you and, you know, to empower people to work out better, to do things. And that's why I think, you know, people like yourself have a really important role to play in changing healthcare. But we need the medical system to.

Yeah, you need the medical system because, I mean, I can share nutrition and fitness and health and mindset, but I'm not a doctor, so I don't have that credential. So, you know, and I always tell people, this is my opinion, this is what I know, this is what I share to people, is what's helped. But I'm not. You still have to check with your doctor, but then it's, who's that doctor? And what are they telling them?

Absolutely. And so you know what, the first thing that we're trying to do in our business is improve the supply of these doctors because there's a demand for functional medicine, but there hasn't been the supply. And just to go back to what you're saying before, so, you know, one of the things that we started last year was a company called Liberty Direct. It's libertydirect.org and it's an affordable alternative to health Insurance. And what this means is basically like you, me and 35,000 of our healthy friends decide that we're going to share our costs. So if you get hit by a bus and it costs 35 grand, we'll all chip in a dollar for you. That's essentially how it works. Doesn't work exactly like that, but that's the premise of it. And the cool thing is that because.

Everybody'S sort of doing the same thing. So stay healthy or they're agreeing to.

You agree to be healthy, you agree not to abuse drugs, you agree not to, you know, abuse alcohol, you agree, you know, you have to be kind of healthy to get in. It's not health insurance. It's an alternative to health insurance. But the key thing that's valuable about Liberty Direct, if you're a member, you're exempt from the Obamacare mandate. So you don't have to. And you can see, you can look up health cost sharing. If you Google it, you'll see there's been articles in the Wall Street Journal recently saying, guess what? All the healthy people are going to health cost sharing, because guess what, it costs half the amount. And so if you go to libertydirect.org, check it out, see if it's a fit for you. I put myself and my family on it. We feel like it's a solution for healthy people to be able to not essentially have to pay everyone else's costs. And if you do have a chronic condition, that's what Obamacare legislation was designed for.

Is there any downside to doing something like that? I know that's pretty scary for people if they've been, if they rely on insurance and they're relying on what they've had or they're on a lot. Like, what would be the downside to something like that?

Look, if you're a person where your cost, like the cost of your drugs plus your doctors plus everything, plus if you add up all the costs, if that's more than you're paying in your premiums, then you've got a good deal with Obamacare and you should stay there. If you're the kind of person that's healthy and fit and is not use, you're just paying your money every month and it's just going out and you're not using it all, you're not going to the doctor and you're paying for all the stuff that keep you healthy out of pocket, like your seven Day Jumpstart by Natalie Jill or your, you know, your, you know, your gym membership or your supplements or otherwise. I think this is a much better option.

Okay, so just. That's good information. Brooks, what questions are we?

Well, a couple people are asking about that doctor's name from the UK.

Dr. Rangan. R a n g a n chatter g chatter c h a t t e r j ee I'm actually going to see him tonight because he's flying for the conference that I'm going to in San Diego. But this is going to come on BBC America, it just launched in BBC Asia. And because he's a very good looking Indian, 6 foot 7 guy, I think he's going to be a megastar. And it's because he's showing, you know, the point of the, the show. He goes in and he lives with you for 30 days. So he sees, you know, how you sit at your office desk, everything, and he sees what's in your pantry and he sees how you work out.

You can't cheat with that.

And he sees all of it. And it was amazing to see people being inspired to take the changes, to have an accountability support and so forth. Now we can all say that that plan doesn't scale.

Yeah, of course you can't scale it.

So we have to find ways to scale it. And what we're seeing is that like doctors and health coaches working together, doctors using technologies that help them. Like we've got a technology right now where instead of writing down your food diary, you take a picture of everything you eat and your doctor can see, right? So your doctors say, hey, you know, looks like you're doing well. Or, you know, like when I did it, I forgot to do it after the first day. And so I got a nice text message from my coach saying like, you didn't eat anything today. And I was like, I forgot. And then I was back on and then I was accountable and did it. Look, I am.

Accountability works. Accountability works. And it's figuring out how to make yourself accountable.

That's the power of community. That's the power of community. And the other thing about community is vulnerability. It's being able to be like vulnerable in front of someone to say like, I don't know how to eat healthy, can you help me? People want to have a, like a very, you know, they know what's going on. They got everything together. But to be able to be vulnerable in front of someone and, and say, look, I really don't know what to do. Let's help each other out. The most powerful, mutually beneficial relationships that we see that really contribute to the health of communities. And people are those kind of really honest relationships. And I find that when people can find things that they have in common that are based around, especially when they get together to do healthy behaviors, I think that's, that's sort of a structure that we can build things on. It doesn't cost anyone anything.

What other questions, Brooks?

I mean, I think that's pretty much it. I mean, a lot of people really like the topic.

Awesome. Where can they find your TED Talk if they want to hear that?

Yeah, if you just go. James Maskill, ted, if you just Google that, you'll find it. It was on this tiny island called Guernsey, which is a tiny island between England and France. And they have a goal to be the healthiest place in the world by 2020.

Okay.

So I sort of laid out my vision for what it would take. And it's all about using technology, using peer to peer community support to create healthy communities. And that guy, Dan Buettner, who I was mentioning in the beginning, he's tried to bring the ideas from, from blue zones into America. And he did it. He's from Minnesota, so he brought it to Minnesota. And the Results are staggering. 41% reduction in costs. You know, communities deciding for themselves what's going to make them healthier. Not like us telling you, well, patriarchal. Do this, do that. No, it's like, hey, what do you guys need to be healthy? People know. Yeah, right. They knew already. And it's just about bringing it out of them. And so, you know, that's, that's what I see the future as is like communities coming together, deciding what they want. There's more than enough money to go around. It's just the money's been used in the wrong places.

Okay, and then where can they find out more about the health insurance, the health insurance alternative that you mentioned?

Yeah, it's liberty direct.org. check that out. It's, you know, it's, we typically get the most numbers of people coming in during open enrollment, which starts November 1st. And so we see a big spike. But I can tell you this, and not many people know this, you can sign up for Liberty Direct anytime, and you can also just stop paying your insurance premium anytime. You can just stop paying. And so, you know, I would, if you take out Liberty Direct, if it looks like a fit for your family.

But, you know, you apply for it, correct?

You apply. You see, if you're brought in, if you have a chronic disease already, you'll either get accepted as a provisional member where you pay a little bit extra, but you get access to an ongoing health coach or, you know, you just be accepted or you'll be rejected. They only reject 3% of people. But this is, you know, the whole plan is like, how do we, you know, the incentives are the opposite in insurance. It's like, how do we create as much cost as possible because we're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to maximize profit. And we're going to do that. This is not. This is like, hey, we're all going to come together and we're all going to keep ourselves healthy. That's the model, and I think that's the model for the future. And I think what we are at the beginning of here is an amazing test to see what are the models that really helped get to control chronic disease. And I think that Liberty Direct, plus functional medicine, plus the work of people like yourself who are inspiring people at scale through this kind of thing. That's a structure that we can build on.

Any final takeaways that you want to let them know to help move towards.

What about an awesome quote?

Oh, yeah, I like it. Awesome.

My favorite quote, Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk. He says, community is the guru of the future.

Community is the guru of the future. I like it. And that was the guru of the past, too. So that's. That's amazing. Thanks, you guys, for chiming in. Listen, this you. If you missed the beginning of it, you can always go back and rewind. And please feel free to share this. I also tagged where to find James and where to find his company. And we'll make sure we put links below so they can find some of the stuff that you mentioned, if that's okay. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. As always. Comment. We'll try to get through more questions later if we missed them during this. And also always let me know what other topics you'd like to see. I love bringing people on and interviewing and I learn new things as I'm interviewing them as well. So let me know what topics you'd like to see from me or from people I'm bringing on. Have a great day, you guys. Bye.