BACKGROUND Dr. Taylor Cushman is a board-certified internal medicine physician. With his wife, Rachel Cushman, PA-C, he co-founded Paragon Total Wellness, a physician-led membership practice in Scottsdale, Arizona. Paragon doesn’t bill insurance. One team handles each member’s medical care. Taylor studied molecular biology at Arizona State and holds a master’s in exercise and wellness. He earned his MD at the University of Arizona College of Medicine — Phoenix in 2019, finished his internal medicine residency there in 2022, and has since practiced hospital medicine in Phoenix. He’s a father of two, and a friend of mine these last 11 years. I met Taylor in 2015, when I was 18. Sammy, a friend I grew up with in Tipton, Iowa, had moved to Phoenix to go to Arizona State and live with her sister, Rachel, who is married to Taylor. I’d come down to visit Sammy, and over those visits Taylor went from Sammy’s brother-in-law to my friend. He was halfway through medical school then, and he studied harder than anyone I’d ever seen. I didn’t understand how a person could work like that. I was secretly struggling with a stimulant addiction at the time, which says something about how I thought work got done. Eleven years later, Taylor and Rachel are family to me. The morning I wrote this, Taylor and I ran ten miles together. In this conversation, we started with fatherhood — how his first kid moved him “from the starring role in the movie” to the supporting cast. We got to the anxious kid who outran his anxiety with “motion and achievement,” and to what medical training does to people who show up wanting to help. Taylor laid out a healthcare system that’s good at keeping people alive and bad at making them well. Then he explained Paragon, the practice he’s building, even though, in his words, “I did not want to start a company.” The last question came from Brittanie Winfield, the show’s previous guest: where do you feel emotion in your body? A BIT ON CRAFT DEVELOPMENT I’ve been studying great interviewers — Lawrence Grobel, Playboy’s “interviewer’s interviewer,” is the current fixation. Oriana Fallaci too (an Italian journalist), what an amazing and brave woman. The more I learn, the more convinced I am that an interview happens twice in a way. Once in the room. Once in the edit. It’s all about getting the raw material, and then learning how to tell the best story with it, while being faithful to the source material. Some psychology behind the cuts: * Edit blindness. Film viewers miss about 25% of cuts, mostly because they’re absorbed in the story. Cut at the end of a thought and nobody hears the seam. * Event segmentation. Your brain chops a continuous stream of conversation into discrete events and updates its model of what’s happening at the boundaries. Nine chapters, nine clean boundaries. * Curiosity gaps. Curiosity is the itch of a gap between what you know and what you want to know. Curious brains recruit dopamine circuitry and remember more, even things they weren’t trying to learn. An open question keeps a listener leaning forward. * Peak–end. We judge an experience mostly by its most intense moment and by how it ends. So the episode ends on the most vulnerable 3ish minutes of the conversation. Links for more info * Paragon Total Wellness website * Paragon Total Wellness Instagram * Taylor’s Instagram with health-related bits This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitchellpenningroth.substack.com
