Jay, why don't you talk about the work that's both pioneering and in its innovation but
also return to our roots as physicians and healers and to talk about what that really
means to you. >>Jay Parkinson: Sure. It is a pretty big
day for me actually. Four years ago I started a pretty interesting practice in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn. Basically, what you do, you go to my Web site. It was a well-designed Web site.
You would see what I was all about. And you would say make an appointment if you liked
me. That would enable you to see my Google Calendar, and you can input your address and
your symptoms. That would send an alert to my iPhone. I would do a housecall. You would
pay me via Paypal and then we would follow-up via email, IM or video chat.
It was kind of amazing because I was coming off my second residency at Hopkins. I was
in preventive medicine. Health care obviously to me was pretty broken, as we all sort of
know. And I was able to save up $1,500 and that $1,500 enabled me to open up this practice.
My practice had 10% overhead versus 70% overhead for a regular doctor's office.
It got me 7 million hits on my Web site in the first month. It was pretty amazing because
that said to me there is an interesting demand in our culture for a new way to go to the
doctor. If 70% of office visits can be, you know,
just -- are not even necessary with good communication, a good relationship, what does it mean to
go to the doctor? These are the kind of issues that I have been working on. It is pretty
fascinating because about six months after I started my practice I got this letter in
the mail from the state that said, We're placing you under investigation. You're using the
Internet to talk with your issues. I spent $8,000 on legal defenses, two days off work,
went in and chatted with them, with the lawyer. They looked at all of my records and said,
Oh, sorry. We apologize for the inconvenience. And then it was like these two old retired
doctors whipped out their iPhones and they proceeded to show me how their kids are texting
them and how cool the practice is. Was very excited about it.
It really frustrated me because I'm a doctor. I'm a little bit of a weirdo. I'm a little
different than most doctors. And I step out of residency and into this entire ecosystem
that is not so much uncreative but anti-creative. And I'm a creative guy. And I just think that,
you know, we think differently, and why aren't we the norm?
>>Dean Ornish: So, Chris -- >>Chip Wilson: Call me Chip. No problem.
>>Dean Ornish: Chip, excuse me. You talked earlier about the core values that you built
your company around. And they are different than what most people would say are the right
core values for a business and, yet, you have been wildly successful because of that. Could
you address that? >>Chip Wilson: Well, I think, first off, I
reached that bridge in life where I decided it was more important for me to live the kind
of lifestyle I wanted. So I took this course. It was a Landmark advanced course, and it
really came down to giving without expectation of return.
So I decided I was going to set up a company around that type of thing. And so the real
-- three bases of it were -- really came down to figuring out that in the health care system,
it was -- To step back, in the '30s, people thought it was 30% of all illness came from
stress. In the '50s, 50%. In the '70s, 70%. I just kind of came up with 99% of all illnesses
come from stress. And I started to look into the three things
I kind of set out as the basis for stress. And one is people have a lack of integrity,
meaning that people are telling white lies, are telling lies, are showing up late to meetings,
anything where what they say they stand for and aren't really being.
The second one would be being self-responsible for life. In other words, if I was walking
across the street and the light said "walk," and I got hit by a car and became a paraplegic,
I could spend the rest of my life blaming that person who hit me or I could be responsible
and say, I was out there. I'm taking responsibility for me being out in the world. And now I'm
a paraplegic. What am I going to do about it? This kind of goes back to Cory and Rob's
conversations. The third one I find people have lack of choice
or they don't understand they have choice. And choice all comes from living in the moment.
So, in other words, if I have a bad experience in the past, let's say again with -- I wear
a purple shirt to a party when I'm 13. Then in my future, I will never buy another purple
shirt. So my future is only given to me from my past.
So my ability then to eliminate my past then gives me no future which leaves me in the
present, empty and meaningless which gives me the ability to create my future unimpeded
by my past which gives me a way of operating in my present.
>>Dean Ornish: So in a way what you are talking about is really the goal of most spiritual
teachings, which is whether using meditation or yoga or anything to really be in the present
moment and how empowering that can be because ultimately people only have power over you
if they have something that you need. And you said one of your core values -- and we
talked last night -- was to give without expecting anything. And if you -- that's not the way
that most people do business. But, yet, it has caused you to become very successful and
I think in part because of the core values that you impute to the people when you train
them and the powerful community that that creates, which itself is a healing experience
as well as being a profitable one. Can you speak to that a little bit?
>>Chip Wilson: Well, at LuLuLemon, we call it the law of attraction. So whoever I am
is who I will attract into my life. So if I want to -- and I think this is the
same with criminals and people that are sick, even people that are sick will attract people
that are sick into their lives. So on the very opposite end of that, then,
is, if I want to -- if I want to be great, if I want to be healthy, if I want to live
a long life, if I want to have fun, if I want to have a great sex life, I have to be all
those things before those other people will come into my life in order to confirm and
sustain where I want to be. >>Dean Ornish: Like Gandhi, be the change
you want to see in the world? >>Chip Wilson: Yeah, perfectly.
>>Dean Ornish: You created a different community, although in a different way than most doctors
do. And how have you found that to impact your work?
>>Jay Parkinson: It's interesting that, you know, most -- most doctors nowadays don't
work in the neighborhood. Just, to me, it was so fulfilling just to
walk down the streets of Brooklyn and have somebody say, "Hey, doc," it just doesn't
happen anymore, you know. Whenever you -- you know, you treat friends
of friends, you see how, you know, one friend's behavior influences another friend's behavior.
Whenever you go into one person's home and see their refrigerator, you can see how they
eat. Whenever you go into their friend's home, see their refrigerator, you can see, like,
why they're friends. That's really important from the doctors'
perspective, because health is so social. You know, it's funny. I've lived in my same
apartment for four years. And I lived there for three years and didn't
know my stove was broken. [ Laughter ]
>>Jay Parkinson: But I started dating this woman who loved to cook, and she's like, "Let's
cook dinner tonight." "Great. Sounds great."
So I tried to turn it on, and it didn't turn on. A few minutes later, I had to figure out
that you had to plug it in. But the point is, I was stuck in this circle
of eating out, not knowing what I was eating. And it took a new social change in my life
to influence my life for the better. >>Dean Ornish: You know, that's something
I'm so interested in. And especially when you look at the studies that I mentioned earlier,
that people who are lonely or depressed are up to ten times more likely to get sick and
die prematurely. I don't know anything in medicine that has
that kind of impact. And, yet, we don't really embody that in our lives so often. You know,
you go take this job at Omaha, you're going to have to move and drag your kids with you
and not see your friends and make new friends. But we don't factor that into the cost of
the equation. But you've talked about how important those social factors are in your
business and you talked about in terms of healing. To me, part of the value of science
is it can raise the awareness and realize that we are making choices and they have consequences
beyond what we originally thought. I'm curious to know what your perspectives are on that.
>>Chip Wilson: Well -- >>Dean Ornish: The time we have to spend with
our friends and family is not just a luxury that we do after the important stuff, that
maybe it is the important stuff. >>Chip Wilson: I think all I can do is agree
with you. You know, it's -- and it's funny, like, I
feel like I have a utopic life because of everything that you've said up here and everything
you've said, Dr. Cornish. >>Dean Ornish: It's Ornish, not Cornish. It's
like it's not Chip -- Sorry. Chris. >>Chip Wilson: TouchÈ.
>>Dean Ornish: You get a little nervous, you forget.
>>Chip Wilson: It's almost hard for me, because I'm too far in the forest to see -- for me,
it's all worked. And so I -- I'm a born-again, you know, Jesus freak about what it is that
we're talking about. So all I can do is agree with you.
>>Dean Ornish: The last thing I want to talk about in the last few minutes is that, you
know, all spiritual traditions talk about diet, you know, in some traditions, you can
eat this but not that, but in some it will be diametrically opposite. I wonder if sometimes
the act of not doing something helps to make it sacred, not in the dry, boring sense, but
in the sense of the most special, and that, in turn, can imbue it with a lot of meaning.
And I'm curious to know, Jay, in the -- when you work with patients, what have you found
that enables them to make these kinds of sustainable changes? And do you ever talk with them at
the level of meaning and hope and real core values and not simply about lowering their
cholesterol or their blood pressure, living a few months longer? How do you talk with
your patients about that? >>Jay Parkinson: I'll start this off with
an example. There was a study recently published in nature that took about a million people's
cell phones and Geo located them minute by minute for about a month. The study --
>>Dean Ornish: Was this the CIA or -- >>Jay Parkinson: Yeah, move to China, actually.
The study was, we're going to try and guess where this phone is going to be.
The next (indiscernible). What they found, they were right 94% of the time. So that,
to me, means that we're just simple creatures of habit.
What people, I don't think, understand is we're all in a set of routines. We all like
the same food, we all do the same thing over and over and over and over.
And so. So my role as a physician is to understand
routines and to help them understand the positive routines and the negative routines.
That's really difficult if you get seven minutes with your patient. Because you can't be a
good doctor with seven minutes. So, to me, it was about forming that community,
that in-person relationship, augmented by the way we all communicate.
>>Dean Ornish: Yeah, it turns out most doctors wouldn't recommend medicine as a career for
their sons or daughters, because it turns out it's not fun to practice medicine. If
you have to see a new patient every seven minutes, you don't have time to talk about
what's going on in the marriage or the kids on drugs, or any of that stuff. You basically
listen to the heart and lungs, you write a progress note, and you're off to the next
patient. That's why it was so important to me to try to get Medicare to create a new
model that you can spend hours with patients, address the underlying causes and find even
more you spend more time with the patients, it actually saves a lot of money in the first
year, and if it saves money, it is sustainable. I want to give you the last word, Chip. Do
you have any thoughts about -- >>Chip Wilson: Yeah, I'd like to -- two things,
I think, if we want to, like, really think outside the box. I think -- I think we have
to look at, like, just as -- putting an equation to zero and kind of seeing what one end of
it would be, what would it be if we took all the money in the Medicare system and moved
it all to preventative? Just for fun. You know, would it -- you know, I personally
think that 90% of people would live 20% longer, and 10% of people would live 20% less.
But I think we just -- it's too tough to move that system. But I think it's entirely effective
to do everything that you've said in your presentation, and why not.
[ Applause ]