"The Next Trillion: An Interview with Paul Zane Pilzer," by John Milton Fogg, Network Marketing Lifestyles Magazine, September 2001.

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The Next Trillion:

Why the wellness industry will exceed the $1 trillion health care (sickness) industry in the next ten years.

NML: Do you get reactions, people saying, "What--a trillion dollars?!"

Oh, all the time. But put it in perspective. The first IBM PC came out in 1981--and by 1990, PC sales exceeded automobile sales. Nobody knew what the Internet was in 1990; consumers were allowed to get on the Internet with their own accounts and private email addresses only in 1995. By 2000, the overwhelming amount of new wealth and new millionaires in this country were being created by the Internet. Given how fast these new industries grow, one trillion in wellness by the year 2010 starts to look like a conservative projection.

NML: Does that same challenge of the bottleneck, the need for intellectual distribution, apply to the wellness industry, too?

Absolutely. By definition, all of wellness is new technology. There is virtually no place to go learn about it. If you go to a conventional weight loss clinic, they are focused on marketing their processed food products to you--they don't give you lessons in wellness. The information just isn't out there; all the research in the medical business is on sickness. Where does the consumer turn?

The only way to learn about wellness is through someone close to you who has had a wellness experience. You see your college roommate and go, "My God, John, you look great! You look so healthy--what did you do?" You bump into a wellness experience and start to find out that there is a whole wellness industry out there, with all sorts of new products and services.

I went every year to an orthopedic surgeon about my knee. Each year he'd tell me, "It's worse than last year, you've gotta have the operation, Paul." At some point, I started taking glucosamine. Within two months, the pain was gone. I went back to check up with my orthopedist; he couldn't believe it. When he found out that all I'd done was take glucosamine, he said--jokingly, but also truthfully--"Don't spread this around, Paul ... I'll be out of business."

Now, how could it be that a product like glucosamine, a natural substance which has been around for 50 years (primarily as a veterinary product for horses), a product that rebuilds my cartilage and makes me feel so good ... how could it be that nobody knows about it? That's the classic introduction to wellness: typically, you have one experience like that, then you say, What else might there be that my doctor never told me about?

This experience set me on the path of learning about supplements,

You couldn't really have gone into wellness 10 or 15 years ago because there was no wellness industry. Most of these products and services are just now coming out of the laboratory. And when you look into those laboratories and see what's coming, you realize that this business is really going to take off. Of anything I've ever been involved with, the wellness industry looks the most exciting right now.

NML: What connection do you see between network marketing and this wellness revolution?

It's all about the difference between what I call "active learning" versus "passive learning." Conventional advertising media are not effective at delivering what they call "intellectually challenging" information--which is a euphemism for "new ideas."

Think for a minute about how you watch TV. You're sitting back, you're relaxed, on your couch; the last thing you want is to be challenged with new information. In fact, when you do see something that challenges you, something that disagrees with what you already know or think is true, what do you do?

NML: You change the channel.

Right! Television is a very passive medium for learning, so we can't really use it to teach new ideas. It's the same with newspapers. I used to write op-eds regularly for various newspapers such as The New York Times. I'd be at a cocktail party, excited about a piece I'd written, and ask a friend, "So, what'd you think about my piece on such and such?" He'd say, "Paul, I don't read your stuff. I'm a Democrat!" We don't read the op-ed pieces that challenge us. We read the ones that reinforce what we already think.

Most of our information sources today have become passive media. You don't spend time with them to be challenged; when you do encounter something that challenges you, you change the station or read the other column.

The only time you learn actively, meaning that you actually start taking in and considering new information, is when you start talking with someone in a real-life dialogue. First, the person says something you don't agree with. You think, "Oh, that couldn't be true." Perhaps you don't say anything, because you're being polite--but your face gives away the fact that you don't agree. This starts a dialogue: they come back with a little more, you start to respond ... gradually, bit by bit, the dialogue changes your mind.

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