Meet Dr. Jeff Bland
Dr. Jeffrey Bland, World-Renowned Nutritional Medicine Expert , “father of Functional Medicine”, and founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature’s greatest innovations — the immune system. Through Big Bold Health, Jeffrey is advocating for the power of Immuno-Rejuvenation to enhance immunity at a global level, often through the rediscovery of ancient food crops and superfoods. To get there, Jeffrey is building a network of small farms and suppliers throughout the US that take a clear stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship, and planetary health.
Jeffrey’s career in health spans more than 40 years. A nutritional biochemist by training, he began in academia as a university professor. Jeffrey then spent three decades in the natural products industry, working alongside other pioneers. A lifelong educator, Jeffrey has traveled the world many times over in his role as the “father of functional medicine.” In 1991, he and his wife, Susan, founded The Institute for Functional Medicine.
In 2012, Jeffrey founded another educational nonprofit called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Jeffrey is the author of The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life, as well as countless additional books and research papers.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Podcast transcript:
Welcome back to the urban monk podcast. Dr. Pedram Shojai here, excited to be here with one of my favorites. A mentor. The godfather of functional medicine himself. He’s the one who started this party, been at it for decades and many of the famous people who are out there today call him The guy.
He is their mentor, Dr. Jeffrey bland, is the scientist. He really started questioning how we were looking at medicine. He really started questioning how we were looking at patient care and started to open up the aperture into a functional lens. Uh, which eventually gave birth to this entire movement of functional medicine. I got a chance to hang out with him.
I got a chance to tease out some of these concepts. I think you’re going to really enjoy it. Dr. Jeffrey bland.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Well, my dear friend, it is great to see you. Always, always a pleasure getting to catch up with you.
Dr Jeff Bland: Same here. You know, there’s, uh, you know, my, my father said something to me when I was a, a young guy that I, I’ve stuck with and, um, I, I bet as I say this, you’ll say, yeah, that’s a shared experience we both had. What he said is that over the course of, of his life, um, he had three kinds of conversations and he was talk, talking to me about conversations and he said, um, one type of conversations is about people, uh, another kind of conversations about things. And then the third conversations are about ideas. And he said, you know, Jeff, if your life as you grow up is similar to mine, you’ll find you spend most of your time talking about people and things, and you probably won’t remember those. But those times that those infrequent times you’re talking about ideas, you ought to hold onto them very tightly.
Dr Jeff Bland: ’cause they’re precious and those are the most important things. That will change how you behave in your life. And I, I’ve kept that forward in my thinking about how I use my time and these privileged moments with people like you where you can talk about ideas because they will affect people in things in very remarkable ways.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Uh, I love that and, um, I’m not. Surprise that that came from your father, right? Because you, you then carried the torch. Um, I distinctly remember maybe a month or two ago sitting on a, a couch with you at a, a medical conference talking about big ideas and walking away, as I always do, saying, man, I love that guy.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? I love that guy. You’re thinking big. You are getting after the real problems. And as you know, the, the grand Puba of functional medicine, the guy that started this party kind of thing, um, you have committed, uh, you know, these years. Towards really changing a paradigm that needs changing. And so I wanna, I wanna bring my audience up to speed a little bit on that conversation.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I wanna just in a very raw fashion, continue that conversation. ’cause I think it’s a really important one to have, uh, publicly. Um, because with the paradigm shift, you know, we have to hit it from a, a lot of different angles for people to get how we’ve been thinking wrong for so long.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah. Yes. So, um, one of the shared experiences that we have, you and I in life is that we have the opportunity to talk to a lot of people, people of different walks of life, different perspectives, different backgrounds, different ethnicities. Um, it gives a, a broader perspective of what The human species walking on this planet is all about, and one of my takeaways right now is it, and I’m gonna, I’m going to generalize, which is probably always a little bit dangerous when you generalize.
Dr Jeff Bland: But my generalization is that right now people at large are uncertain, they’re somewhat fearful, maybe a little depressed, anxious. Um, it’s a shared emotional state that we culturally have been picking up. Um, probably not just immediately. It wasn’t just COVID-19 alone, it was kind of, uh, COVID-19 that we ran into this kind of triple problem now of people really being, uh, anxious. And it’s seen in so many ways, suicide rates, drug addiction, divorces, I mean, it goes on and on and on, um, just in a daily. Civil conversation, the, the kind of intensity of conversation has amped up the, the number of homicides. I mean, we can, we can just go down the list. So when I asked myself, what the heck is going on? Um, because we’ve always lived to some degree in uncertain times. Um, I grew up in, I was in the first generation of baby boomers after World War ii, so I had a 1946 birthday. And, um, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty coming out of the war, but there was also a sense of optimism. There was this cornucopian attitude that we won the war and we could do anything and the greatness of America. And, uh, and then over time those, those things change. I, I also lived through, as a young adult, the, uh, sixties and, uh, the uncertain situations that were related to the con conflict in, in the, in the China and, and Vietnam and all these various kind of, um. Times that we have to, to, uh, to manage and, and become resilient to. But this time to me is a very, very, certainly in my 77 years of living is a very interesting time that has me to some extent flummoxed, but also recognizing that part of the problem is that all the metaphors that we use are metaphors that tie to fear, tired to thing, tied to things we don’t really want to talk about. And so let’s focus for the moment on what we call healthcare, because healthcare is something everybody uses in one form or another. As you get older, you probably use it more. Um, and what we call healthcare in our country, uh, is symbolically exactly connected to fear, anxiety, and, uh, and depression because it’s, it’s all focused on disease. I’ve often asked myself the question, how many people love to sit down and talk about disease as a wonderful, uplifting topic? And I, I don’t know many people that would say yes, that that’s something you really rejoice over. Uh, even the practitioners of disease management, um, I don’t think love that to be their topic of general conversation, but yet, if we talk about healthcare, it really quickly devolves into disease, either disease care or disease risk reduction. So when we talk about reducing the risk of disease, we’re still tied to disease. It’s like, oh, I don’t want to get Alzheimer’s. Oh, I don’t want to get heart disease. Oh, I don’t want to get cancer. This, whatever the disease is at the moment. We’ve not said one good thing about the uplifting spirit of the human when he’s talking about disease. It’s all down and in rather than up and out. A healthcare system to me is a system that really celebrates and embodies. Expression that the joyful, um, an unlikely thing that we call living at its full potential. When I say unlikely, is it, I’ve asked the question over my years starting off as a professor in, in 1970, I remember asking my students, uh, fairly esoteric question. I’m a, I’m a chemist by training. So, uh, I asked the question, um, what’s the probability in the openness of space that the subatomic particles that make up our atoms, that make up our molecules, that make up our super molecules, that make up our cells, that make up our tissues, that make up our organs, that make up our organ systems, that make up us would’ve spontaneously collected out of open space just by the natural serendipity of things running into one another. And I said, before you answer that question, remember that the density of matter in the universe is about one atom per cubic meter. One atom per cubic meter is about how much on average mass there is in the, in the universe. So what’s the probability when you have one atom per cubic meter that all those atoms would collect together in an organized structure to become us spontaneously, just by happenstance? And my answer is the statistical probability of that happening is so small that we would say life is impossible, but life is not impossible. It is possible. We are an example of that. So how did it happen? It happened by magic. Now, whatever your definition of magic is, whether it’s a spiritual belief system, is, I mean, there’s many ways that you can contextualize the word magic. I don’t want to trivialize that word. I really am, um, celebrating that word because what it means is that we as a living organism can, um, avoid all the natural things that happen in the universe, which things go to hell in a hand basket free of charge. Things don’t organize spontaneously, they disorganize spontaneously.
Dr Jeff Bland: That’s called entropy. So we collect ourselves into this organized structure called us in a very remarkable way that allows us to express joy, goodness, kindness, um, community, spirit of love. All those things are embodied within our capability. But if we spend all of our time worrying about the downside of what happens if we fall apart, that’s called disease. It steals from us the virtue of being really healthy and well, which means resilient. Now, with that as a context, go ahead. Do you want to say something? I’m doing
Dr Jeff Bland: a monologue here. I apologize.
Dr Pedram Shojai: no, no, no. It’s great. I, I, um, yeah, I’m a tree skier and rule number one, when tree skiing is, you don’t look at the trees. You, you shoot between them. And so if you’re worried about disease, you’re gonna ski right into it. So where your eyes and what are we talking about? And, and so yeah. I’ll, I’ll get back outta the way.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love what you’re saying.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah, I think you, you said it in a beautiful metaphor that, that that is correct. That if you’re driven by the fear of getting a disease, you’re likely to have that experience become a reality. Now everyone probably at some portion of their life is gonna deal with, with something that we call a disease.
Dr Jeff Bland: The question is how fast your body recovers from it and how resilient you are in, in terms of its, um, its severity and the construct of, of resilience is related to a different function other than prevention. It is an active process. Prevention sounds like a defensive. Uh, posture. You can’t win games of life with only a defense. You have to have an offense. And your offense is your vitality, your Joie vi, it’s your Ilan Vital. All these words that are from different languages, uh, principally French, that, um, talk about how we have this vital capability of maintaining our structure and function, and that that is measured in our resilience.
Dr Jeff Bland: And it’s measured by things that we actively participate in, either knowingly or unknowingly, that send to our genes messages. Remember, the genes is our, our book of life. They’re the lexicon for all the things that we can be. They don’t tell us what we are, they tell us what we could be. I think that’s a really important feature of genetics that a lot of people don’t understand.
Dr Jeff Bland: They think, oh, I was hardwired into being whatever it would be ’cause I’m left-handed, or I’m got red hair, or I’m tall, or I’m short, or whatever it might be. Yes, there are certain characteristics that are definitely more likely to be wired to your genetic expression, but the majority of the way we look back and feel is not tied hardwired to our genes.
Dr Jeff Bland: It’s how our genes are expressed in the context of how we’re treating them. What signals are we sending to our genes? What messages are our genes picking up from the way that we live our life each day? Now, by the way, I think what I just said is a build bold idea, and it was that concept as I kept saying it and saying that my colleagues, uh, finally called me on that.
Dr Jeff Bland: Uh, particularly Trish, Sherry and Annette, uh, Giardi one day said, Jeff, you know, you keep harping on this. That’s a big idea. You’re kind of a bold guy. Maybe you need a, a platform that you can speak on this. So maybe you need one more company. Maybe you need one more way of, of advancing that concept. So that became, uh, about three years ago, something I, I really never thought I would do again.
Dr Jeff Bland: And that’s to, uh, to put one more company together to really focus on this big, bold health concept. How do we really find a way with the wisdom of nature to create an architecture in our body, mind, and spirit that leads to a hundred years or more of good living? How do we do that using that universal intelligence so that we, we spend less time with a fear-based model of disease and more time on the building of resilience so that when you’re 70, 80, whatever, you’ve got a lot of go power available to do whatever you want to do. That’s the, the basic concept I.
Hey, just a quick time out here to introduce the gut-check action plan. Taught by none other than Dr. Jeffrey bland. Um, after we finished a six part docu series called gut check all about the microbiome. I’ve thought to myself who better than the guy himself, the godfather functional medicine. To teach a course about how to heal your gut. Um, he was gracious enough to accept.
Uh, we filmed the course. We produced the course and the courses available in the urban monk academy. Just go to the urban monk.com. Under courses and you will see the gut-check action plan. If you like what you’re hearing. This is the person who is teaching you, how to heal your gut. He’ll inflammation heal your life. It’s a no brainer.
Enjoy the rest of the show.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love it. And, uh, yeah, I’m excited that you’re back in the ring. Um, you certainly haven’t been slacking for the last few, few decades and the fact that you still got fight in you is great for all of us. Um, this concept of prevention as a business, um, if, if your business model is billable, units of diagnosable disease and then you got a guy walking in saying, we’re gonna talk about prevention, that’s like saying, I’m gonna stand outside the Starbucks and not let people in.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah, exactly. Right.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, the cash register won’t ring. Nobody wants that. And so I, you know, I’ve been in the corporate wellness realm since 2001, two, and I can tell you when I first got in there, it was very much a dog and pony show. They wanted to say they had it, but at the end of the day, the incentives weren’t aligned because the, the money was actually made in sick care.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right. And if you look at this entire sick care ecosystem. It’s not just the hospitals, it’s not just the drugs, it’s the food makers, it’s the chemical makers. It’s all of these different inputs that create the ecosystem that create dis-ease. That is an incredible business. I mean, listen, if you wanna, you know, if you wanna run a parasitic plantation, it’s an incredible business to mine off the vitality of humans.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But it’s unethical and it’s, it’s be it’s past, its time. We’re done with it. And so now we’re, you know, mother Theresa, I, you know, I say this a lot, mother Theresa said, look, I won’t go to an an anti-war rally, but if you have a pro, pro peace one, call me.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So this is our pro peace
Dr Jeff Bland: You said it You said it beautifully. That’s correct. Yeah. You know, I, I, I wanna make it clear that I’m, I’m not anti-medicine at all. I was, I was trained and, you know, went through a lot of years of taking tests. A and so I, I believe that there is a really good place for, uh, for crisis intervention, for hospital-based medicine for interve in intervention medicine. We all may go through periods of our life, could be an accident, could be an acute, something where we really need that skill. Unfortunately, we’ve got that skill at a high level of sophistication today. Um, and so I, I celebrate those individuals who have selected to go that direction. I think the problem, uh, is when you start institutionalizing it into a system that is financially based and you’re not making decisions any longer of what’s best for the patient, you’re making decisions that are best for someone’s economic model. And, um, I, I think that what’s going on right now is that because people haven’t found a great way to. Monetize in an institutional way, uh, being well, uh, that the default then becomes let’s institutionalized being sick because everyone who’s sick wants to find a solution to the problem and they’re willing to pay virtually anything to get out of it. So we, we have kind of a boundless ability to continue to inflate prices and to add more services and to kind of make this thing where everybody gets a piece of the pie. Um, so I’m, I, I’m really not gonna talk here about the institutional changes that are necessary in the disease care system because I think Those are needed. But one of the things that we are not spending time is talk about the other side of the equation, which is the healthcare system, which is sponsoring and promoting high level function in individuals. Because it is clearly obvious. The data says it. If you can get people’s function to be better, their need for a crisis disease intervention becomes lower.
Dr Jeff Bland: So it’s another way of. Cost containment, is to improve people’s function. And so that to me is a much more positive story. It’s not a negative when you talk to people about wouldn’t you want to go somewhere and do something? Maybe you want to go to Kilimanjaro, maybe you wanna to go diving at the Barrier Reef.
Dr Jeff Bland: Maybe you want to go to your granddaughter’s high school graduation and and look great and, you know, whatever it might be. Those are different aspirations than I wanna prevent Alzheimer’s or I want to prevent a disease of the De Jo. And, and I would say it has a different emotional context associated with it.
Dr Jeff Bland: People feel much more Spirited when they’re doing something proactive to improve their function. Then if they’re just kind of saying, well, I changed my number on some biometric, uh, number and, and I hope that has some benefit to me in reducing my risk to disease some years down the road. Uh, very kind of ethereal and esoteric concept. It’s very, the, the I, what I call the feeling state, how we feel, look and act every day. That’s a reality that everybody can measure. They don’t have to have a number. Uh, they can wake up in the morning and feel it. So this construct of function, improving function, and I and I divide health, uh, from a functional perspective in the, in the four subcategories, you’ve heard me say this many times, and that’s your, your structural function, which has to do with the musculoskeletal system activity. All the things that moves you a mode of force. Um, the second is your metabolic or physiological function. Those are all the, the gushy things that go in cells. And, and then the third thing is your, um, your cognitive function. How this spinal tumor that sits on the end of our spinal column called the brain can servee you well and create time forward, time back, and creative outcomes that even beats generative ai. And then last is of course your, um, your behavioral function, which you might call your psychic function. Um, things that are hard to measure, hard to quantify, but we all know are very real. I mean, it’s why, uh, in the earliest cave paintings of humans in caves that they were talking about things beyond them, talking about, uh, spiritual life. So those four functions, uh, weave together, uh, to create The us, our functional us, the whole of us. Now, the interesting thing to me is each one of those is measurable. Each one of those is modifiable based on what we do as human beings. So we can either take the luck of the and be passive and just assume our function will happen by however it happens, or we can say, no, I really want my function in all of those four areas to be as as good as it as possible based upon my genetic potential. So I’m gonna take on the responsibility to have a, my healthcare system that’s gonna be big and bold for me. That’s going to focus on improving those functions. Because if that happens, maybe I have less worry downstream about these diseases that I don’t really want to think about. So that, that’s the model that I’ve been trying to advance.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love, I love the paradigm shift of that, right? The scoreboard needs to change. If your scoreboard is just, Hey, how many fatalities were on the freeway today? You see a very dark world. You know, it’s like how many people got to, got to work and got to live. Today is a very different side of that story. Now, on the health side, uh, you know, you have the disease side, which is like, I, I get your Chem 20 says here, you’re not dying.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Come back when there’s a problem. Then our thermometer gets stuck at the not sick, not disease line. , right? So I, I feel like, I feel like there needs to be a new scoreboard in the four categories that help us know that things are moving. And look, there’s, you know, all sorts of biological age. There’s all sorts of really cool new tests that we could talk about.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, but what . Objective metrics will help us know that we’re starting to win on the vitality side of the spectrum.
Dr Jeff Bland: Oh my word. I am, I can’t believe that you asked that question ’cause it’s the perfect segue into my most optimistic, uh, thinking about where we are. Um, and I’m embodying it right now, holding my hands up. You can probably see, uh, I’ve got an aura ring, I’ve got an Apple watch. I have other biometric devices, but we are the first generation of human beings in the history of humans that have the ability to measure things about our function 24 7 365 in real time. These are not just fitness trackers, they’re not just sleep monitors. These are functional monitors. We haven’t contextualized them yet that way, but I’m telling you that’s where we’re going. You probably heard that the new generation of Apple Watch is gonna have both continuous blood pressure and blood sugar measurements on an Apple Watch.
Dr Jeff Bland: That will not require phlebotomy. You won’t have to take a blood sample. You’ll be measuring it in real time. CGM, real time, continuous blood glucose when a person has access to that information. And it can go to the cloud and it can go through an AI program and it can follow them daily. They don’t have to become experts in their physiology. It will download to them, probably to that device in real time. Hey, you know you’re strand off a line. You ought to consider this. Why don’t you get up and walk for 20 minutes? Why don’t you drink more water? Why don’t you, uh, go out and uh, uh, read a poem? Why don’t you, you know, you can take more vitamin C it could be a million different, uh uh. Activities that are all proactive. They’re not any one of them going to, oh, do this, to treat a disease, go up and get an antibiotic. They’re going to be how you personalize your approach to living to maximize your genetic potential. We are at the threshold of that happening right now. Now for a lot of people, this sounds like a mumbo jumbo and gobbly goop, but it reminds me very much I recall going into the hobby store when I was at, in Palo Alto, California, at the Linus Pauling Institute a number of years ago when I was on sabbatical. This is the, uh, 1980. And I went into the hobby store to buy an Altech computer kit so I could come home and my son, my middle son, and I as a school project, could put together our first red board of computer and, uh, this is pre apple. And then right after that, of course, outcomes, out of that same area that we were living at the time, uh, comes these two weird guys, that came out with this microcomputer and, and then, uh, obviously the, the gates with Microsoft, with software. And now people started to say early on, well, why do we need a computer? That’s a hobby. That’s for, that’s for geeks. You know, I, we have IBM to do computing. We don’t need computers. And there was a lot of pushback, as you probably recall early on with the development of this chip technology as to how it was gonna translate to consumers. Now we can’t even imagine a life without, without, uh, mobilizing and using the extra corporeal brain that we call the microcomputer. That same thing is gonna happen in healthcare. It’s gonna happen extraordinarily rapidly because of the acceleration of adoption of new ideas. It’s gonna create new industries worth billions of dollars that don’t even exist today. It’s gonna open up opportunities for people to have access to health in a new way. That’s not just the prevention of disease, it’s actually how do they achieve their optimal function, cognitive function, things that will measure brainwaves, things that’ll measure their ability to know when they’re relaxed, when they’re parasympathetic and sym.
Dr Jeff Bland: Uh, and sympathetic nervous systems are imbalance. All these variables that were previously reserved for a few subspecialists of medicine that would only hold the information lock and key, giving it out for a fee to their patients now suddenly will be accessible to everyone. This is a transformative process.
Dr Jeff Bland: This is big and bold. That’s, I’m very fortunate to say I’m still alive in the field as it’s happening. I wondered if I would be, but it is happening in real time right now.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It seems like these carbon based organisms from. Which we hail and which we’re still part, are now melding into carbon silicone based organisms in, in a lot of ways. And it’s, it is scary, right? Like, it, it, it also can feel dystopian. It also, you know, there, there are some data privacy issues that we could talk about, um, that will eventually get worked out, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Because monetizing my blood sugar, um, you know, should be my business, not, not some companies, right? Um, I know a lot of people that are sitting on the fence with this that are like, all right, well look, that sounds great. When it’s there, I’ll start wearing the gadgets. I want your opinion on data backwards, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like, is it just ’cause the algos aren’t there? Just ’cause we haven’t figured out all the stuff. If you’re not capturing your data now. That’s lost data that could be learning for the algos going forward. That may or may, may or may or may not save your life. So just curious about the people that are sitting on the fence and whether or not it’s better to just grab the data as early as you can.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, I, I think that’s really a great question as well. Wow. Uh, uh, we’re down the right journey here together. Um, I had a lot of pushback from people, uh, at the turn of the millennium when I was starting to advocate that we all have our genetic testing done. This is just as the, the start of, uh, gene testing started to become available at a price that people could afford. Um. And we’ve known by Moore’s Law that the cost of gene testing has gone down. Logarithmically, uh, since even 2000, no one could only the elite could afford financial elite could afford gene testing early on. But now, uh, with 23 and me and other companies, you can, you can do this very reasonably priced, and people would still say to me, what do I know wanna know about my genes?
Dr Jeff Bland: I might learn something bad. I can’t do anything about it. You know, it’s just like, uh, shame on me for being born with the wrong parents. Um, but the model I, I kept saying is, no, that actually is. You’ll learn much more than that. you’ll you’ll not learn how you’re gonna get sick. You’re gonna learn more about how you’re gonna stay well, and that’s where we’re heading.
Dr Jeff Bland: And if you have that information, that information doesn’t change. Your genes don’t change. So once you’ve got a good analysis or as a reputable lab has done that for you, that’s your running record. That’s your book of life forever. And as we learn more We will, then you can use that same information in new ways to create better understanding. Now it’s turned out that, that which I, I put in a book. I, when I think back, I didn’t realize how far ahead of the curve I was, was called Genetic Nutrition Ear. It was really the first book about Nutrigenomics, um, that was published in 2008. So that was a few years ago. And, um, that book. Really kind of forecast exactly what we’re going through right now, that this information will prove to be more and more useful as we learn better what it means. And now a person might say, well, I’m still very apprehensive. Um, I really don’t need to know this. Um, then what I would say is, then let’s go with go with the ride. Because even if you don’t know your own genetic information, what you’ll find as other people are learning about their gene information, genetic information will have application to you.
Dr Jeff Bland: And, and so that then takes me, this may seem like an illogical jump of a, a leap of abstraction here, but for me, that led me to the question of what can we say is a shared equity of every human being that’s a marker for how they are functioning, based on how their genes are being expressed. What, what are, where would we look to answer that question?
Dr Jeff Bland: If we weren’t gonna do a bunch of lab tests and we weren’t gonna engage in all the esoterism that’s available, where will we start? And when I asked that question, I came to the conclusion there’s really two ways that our body interacts with the outside world and the inside world, 24 7, 365, and that’s the nervous system and the immune system. Those two systems, which by the way, crosstalks are, there’s really the nervous immune or immuno nervous system, neuro immune system. Uh, they’re in constant communication and they’re constantly sampling the outside world and sampling the inside world and then making decisions as to how the rest of the body should perform. So I came to the conclusion like, well, let’s see if those are the ways that our body is constantly sampling the outside and inside world that are telling us how we’re gonna look at and feel. How fast can you change those? Now we know that you can change your Thoughts and attitudes and beliefs, meditation, many different technologies, techniques, and going historically, way back, you’re a master of this, um, have trained over thousands of years of experience how to do that around the nervous system. Um, now we’re learning how to do that through the immune system as well because people are starting to say, well, hold on just a minute. Doesn’t the, aren’t the cells that are in our immune system turning over about every 90 to 120 days. So the cells that make up our immune system four months from now won’t be the same cells that make up our immune system today. So then the question is, will they be as good, better or worse, the ones they’re replacing? And when I got thinking about that, then I recognized that the latest immunological research coming out of the Centers of Excellence of Immunology are saying that our immune system can be trained. It can be learned just like our nervous system can be trained, just like our muscles can be trained and that you can train your immune system to be more fit and more resilient, less angry And when an immune system is angry, it’s inflamed. And so one of the things that we know is inflammaging is one of the conditions that we associate with, uh, promotion of age-related diseases. So you can retrain that immune system just like you can train your nervous system by a certain discipline, which we call immuno rejuvenation.
Dr Jeff Bland: And that was where we finally landed in big bull health. That was our, the tip of our spears. Let’s focus on, on revitalizing the immune system.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So this is big and I want to dive into it. There’s just, there’s one concept I’ve been tripping on for a few months now, and it all started with a bout of insomnia. And I’m like, why the, why the hell does this guy have insomnia? And it was after a trip to Europe, you know, weapons free on gelato and pasta and just all of it.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And, um, it turned out that I was having endotoxemia from all of the gut inflammation and, you know, dug into the literature. I’m like, holy crap. It, you know, the endotoxemia very much is messing up the clock genes in my liver. And it’s really, it’s, it’s making my body feel unsafe. And, and back to like the sick care model.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Oh, you know, it’s problem, problem, problem. Unsafe. Unsafe instead of, you know, stepping into a beautiful meadow and, and feeling the, the sun on your face and being vital and looking at positive things. And so if the entire orientation of the body is, you know, the immune system and the nervous system feeling unsafe, when the hell are we gonna heal?
Dr Pedram Shojai: How are we gonna heal? Right? And so this concept of us constantly being under attack from internal or external forces, I think doesn’t get enough attention from people who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stress, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gut, right? And, and so these are such huge levers that I just want to kind of highlight what the good doctor is saying here in that I think
Dr Pedram Shojai: This is the crux of all of it is if you can make your body feel safe and if you can make your immune system rejuvenate, suddenly we’re in a very different conversation, right? We’re not in wartime economy, we’re in peacetime economy. I.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yes. Oh boy, that’s a great metaphor. So let’s, let’s talk about this, this thing that’s on everybody’s mind right now. Autoimmune disease. Um, we seem to have a a pandemic of autoimmunity. And, and in the medical world, there are 88 different diagnoses of different types of autoimmune diseases. Um, uh, multiple sclerosis, uh, uh, Crohn’s disease, uh, inflammatory bowel disease, um, gluten neuropathy, uh, type one diabetes, um, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, erythema, ptosis.
Dr Jeff Bland: I could do, uh, thyroiditis. All these conditions fall in this umbrella of, um, autoimmune disease. So when you ask a, a medical person to give a, an explanation, a simple explanation to their patient, what is autoimmune disease? It translates into something like your body’s become allergic to itself. It doesn’t like you anymore, so your immune system is actually reacting against your body. Now, I have to say, for years, and when I say years, I really probably should say decades. That hasn’t really set very well for me. Even going back into probably high school, when I first started learning about autoimmune disease, it just didn’t seem somehow right to me that some morning your body wakes up and it says, you know, I really don’t like you anymore. And so your immune system starts attacking you. And so I then I started asking the question, well, is there an alternative explanation? I. As I probe the literature over the last decades, the answer is yes. There is an alternative explanation. And by the way, that alternative exploration, uh, explanation, even though I talked about it some 30 years ago, it was considered heretical. Now it is getting more and more support in traditional medicine. What is that alternative? The alternative is that we self over time become more non-self. Now, how would that happen? It would happen because we’re exposed to things that damage us. They damage us to create our bodies no longer the same as self. So our damage body becomes non-self, and then our immune system actually does what it’s supposed to do. It’s there to pick out non-self things that are not us and to try to get rid of them. So we become the innocent bystanders to an immune system that’s actually doing, its its work. Now, if you apply that into autoimmune disease. it be, it begs a real interesting question. By the way, 80% of patients diagnosed with autoimmune disease are women. Now do women have weaker immune systems than men? No, they do not. They actually have stronger immune systems than men. Look at the covid relationships. SARS cov to two. There were many more in men than there were in women. The different, the challenge of, uh, with women is they have more complex immune systems because their immune system has to come to grips, possibly with having a foreigner on board could even be an alternative sex to them that’s gonna live with them for nine months. And so their immune system has to be very capable of na of handling all these complexities. And so that immune system may be much more sensitive to when the body becomes non-self. So the women don’t have defective immune systems. They may have super vigilant immune systems. It’s not like a defect in your genes that you got autoimmune disease. It’s that you are responding to a body that has been exposed to something that has created self to become non-self. Now what can do that?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, that is the question of the hour.
Dr Jeff Bland: Okay, so now we get into solutions that come from understanding of cause. So let’s use a simple one that everyone knows about sugar. So let’s assume that we’re gonna eat a huge amount of sugar in our diet ’cause we like sweet and mean. We have those people out there like JJ Virgin and many others talking about the hazards and the dangers of sugar. But we don’t buy into that. We say, no, come on, people eat a lot of sugar and they’re still living to be 90. So no big deal. I’m gonna just eat a lot of sugar. Now what happens based upon the way that person processes sugar and there are biological variabilities depending on your genes as to how you can manage sugar, but that sugar goes into your, into your blood and. If your body can’t really manage the load of sugar that you’ve just absorbed, then what it does is it puts sugar in places that it really is not the best place to be put in terms of physiology. That’s called glycation. It’s a word that means your sugar attaches itself to proteins. These become reservoirs for picking up the sugar in ways that the body really doesn’t know what else to do with it. And so that becomes what we call glycation or glycoproteins. Now, why is that of any interest to this concept that we’re talking about with autoimmune disease? Because once that protein becomes modified by attaching itself to sugar, it’s no longer your body’s protein. It’s now a foreigner. So who do you think gets introduced to that Your immune system? Now you’re gonna ask me a question. Well, Jeff, if that’s true, shouldn’t there be a correlation? We, I call it a morbidity between .Diabetes and arthritis. And the answer is yes, they’re interrelated. People who have those conditions often have both of them because your body is now put into a state of alarm with foreign, these foreigners. Now, what happens then? If you take that person and you put ’em on a low sugar diet, a low glycemic diet, lo and behold their arthritis improves. How did it improve? Because it cooled off your immune system. It didn’t feel like it was in a foreign environment. It wasn’t doing the battle that it thought it had to do to protect you against a foreigner. Now, I could go down a whole laundry list with you of other things that would do the same thing like dysbiosis. You talked about dysbiosis mean your gut microbiome, that three to four pounds of living bacteria in your gut now are not friends anymore and they’re producing foreigners that your body says, oh geez, foreigners on board.
Dr Jeff Bland: I better do something to fight back. And where? Where is your immune system clustered? 60% of it’s clustered around your intestinal tract. So it picks up that information saying, Yik, we gotta do battle against these foreigners. Now your body becomes systemically alarmed. We call that an autoimmune disease. I, I could go down the laundry list, but I think you get the drift of how this model fits together.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So this glycation, I mean, obviously the . The, what, what a smart animal does is to stop poisoning itself, right? So you, you stop taking the sugar over time, problem solve. But once you have a sugar bound to a protein, how does the body need to process it? Um, aside from wrapping it with, with an, an immune cell, is there a way the body can get rid of it on its own?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Or is it the vol, the sheer volume that brings the immune system on board and says, this is, this is too big of a problem.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah, I, I think you, you said it well. Uh, there, there, there are actually multiple mechanisms where your, uh, where your body can actually get rid of, break down and Excrete the waste products of these foreigners. If, if that were not the case, we probably wouldn’t live past five years because we’re being exposed to all sorts of foreigners all the time.
Dr Jeff Bland: So our body has to find ways to getting, getting rid of them. And there are multiple paths, detoxification pathways, pro proteolysis pathways that do that. Let, let me use an example that probably most people are familiar with. We’ve all heard about A1C measure your A1C. Now what is A1C? A1C is, is the, the, the full name is hemoglobin A1C. So what is hemoglobin? Hemoglobin is that protein in your red blood cells that binds oxygen and transports it to cells so you can live, use oxygen to, for metabolism. When your hemoglobin has too much sugar in your blood cells, what does it do? It becomes glycated, what do we call that? Hemoglobin A1C. So that sugar bound to your hemoglobin protein. That’s why it’s a measurement of diabetes. The higher the sugar that’s bound, the higher the A1C, the more problem your body has in managing sugar. Therefore, what do you do? You give an anti-diabetic drug, or you go on a dietary intervention that lowers your A1C and lo and behold, not just your diabetes improves, but your functional immune system improves. Inflammation goes down. Your, your fat cells no longer become alarmed and you don’t have angry fat anymore. They don’t cause you all this joint pain and they don’t, uh, contribute to cognitive dysfunction because you’re, you know, have brain cells that are dying. Remember, our brain has an immune system called their microglia. So all these things are interconnected. This is the functional medicine model in, in, uh, example. And, and that’s why we believed in big, bold health, that if we could get people to understand their immune system. To have ways in a, in a reasonably short period of time, say less than 90 days, rejuvenate their immune system. The effects they would have on how they look at and feel would be dramatic and the long-term effects on their function would be extraordinary. So that was, that was why Big, bold Health was born,
Dr Pedram Shojai: So let’s talk about this rejuvenation. Um, obviously you stop the bleeding, you don’t bring on the sugars. How are you actually rejuvenating the immune system and what is the intervention there?
Dr Jeff Bland: you know, oh boy, this, this, you know, we didn’t practice ahead of time. This is a really fantastic, uh, questions. Um, so all of this that you just asked, uh, was a black box that I, I would have to wave my hands and kind of speculate on an answer. ’cause we didn’t know 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, that’s how recent these, um, discoveries are. Thanks to discoveries that have, uh, found these processes by which old cells are gotten rid of through, uh, autophagy and, uh, the damaged powerhouse of the cells. The mitochondria are, um, replaced by new, new mitochondria called Mitt autophagy. Uh, those, those biological processes that have been only discovered in won a Nobel Prize within the last 10 years for their discovery are starting to be seen as how the body actually has these processes. Now, here is the secret that the world is only recently. When I say the world, I guess I really mean the world of science. There’s only recently discovered, it turns out that there are things in our diet that we kind of trivialized. Uh, we call them phytochemicals. They’re plant derived nutrients that people thought nutritionists weren’t that important because we couldn’t find a disease that would be in their absence caused by their absence like you do with vitamin C and scurvy. And so we kind of, in nutrition thought these things that were things like isoflavones and polyphenols and, and, uh, steel beans. And, uh, these have names like quercetin and Luol and, and, um, isoflavones, like genine and ine. And there are actually thousands of these different, um, materials found in plant foods. And we thought that they were just there, but they had no benefit in humans of, of significance. That’s all been changed recently because it turns out that what’s been discovered is that members of these, these families in plant foods, these, uh, phytochemicals, particularly the polyphenol family, uh. Hesper and lutein res, uh, resveratrol, um, quercetin, uh, rutin, those kind of molecules and foods, they have very, very powerful effects in programming epigenetically the genes of ourselves. They tell the genes how to express themselves by this process called epigenomics, meaning above the genes. They mark the genes with specific regulatory marks that tell the genes, read here, but don’t read here. They’re extricated parts of our book of life. We’re not gonna read like alarm. And they’re good parts of our book of life.
Dr Jeff Bland: They’re the joy and bliss stories that we want to read. That is cell renewal. And so it turns out that these specific polyphenol materials, these, these phytochemicals in certain plant foods have this remarkable ability to help rejuvenate cells, particularly those cells. That are turning over fairly rapidly and where those reside like our skin, our epithelial cells, our immune system cells. So these are the wonders that we have learned about the power of nutrition. Now you say, well what about the Mediterranean diet? Doesn’t the Mediterranean diet contain a lot of these colored vegetable food products that are rich in poly, these uh, phytochemicals? And the answer is yes. So is there a connection between the Mediterranean diet diet that that has now been found with the epigenetic regulation of the immune system? The answer is yes. When we eat those foods that are concluded in the Mediterranean like diet or the Asian diet, some people call it the Mediterranean diet, that diet then sends signals to our genes that regulate the expression of renewal of cells like our immune system. So that’s immuno rejuvenation and that’s how we fell on Himalayan tery buckwheat. It turns out that this ancient 4,000 year old food that was lost in America some 200 years ago has the highest level that we can find of any plant food in these immune rejuvenating phytochemicals. And for some strange reason, it just got lost in the American diet a couple hundred years ago, and now we’re bringing it back.
Dr Jeff Bland: We have organic farmers that are for the first time growing it back again and, and we’re looking with studies on its remarkable ability to rejuvenate the immune system.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So you said the magic number’s three to four months before the immune system kind of turns over, if you will. Um, I, I don’t know very many Americans that have that, that a attention span, right? In terms of, you know, staying on something for four months to to, to see the results. And that tends to be the challenge.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like I could do intermittent fasting for a week and be like, look, I lost two pounds. It works right? Whereas spending four months. Really replacing the immune cells and rejuvenating the body. Um, it’s hard to understand what the payload is there. So I’d love for you to paint the picture of then what happens once you’ve rejuvenated the immune system and what kind of the downstream, uh, effects of that are.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, again, thank you. The, uh, ’cause I would’ve glossed over that, but I think that’s a critically important, uh, feature that you just brought up for complete, um, turnover of your immune system. Yes. Maybe 90 to 120 days. However, if your first approach in immuno rejuvenation has to do with restoration of your gut microbiome, that can start in 48 hours. So already you’re getting the, the, the payoff. Is to reduce the load of the aggravating things that is causing your body to want to be at war. So our approach, it’s, it’s a three, what we call three pillar approach. It’s a, it’s an approach to, um, rejuvenate the immune system through the resurrection of younger naive immune cells that don’t carry bad messages.
Dr Jeff Bland: That takes a little longer gut immune response through the resurrection of the microbiome that’s quick and then quelling the existing inflammatory signals that are associated with your body at war, which is our third pillar that occurs with the omega threes that are rich in these pro resolving mediators. So, uh, it’s a three tier approach that has short-term payoff and long-term benefit or longer term benefit. That’s, that is the approach.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. I love that. Um, the, the fourth pillar, if I would be bold enough to add one, is, uh, you know, one of the things that MINDBODY practice has slam dunked on in the literature is modulating this activation of the NF kappa B pathways. And so doing all this and then learning to chill out, whether that’s prayer, meditation, tai chi, or whatever, um, has been where I’ve seen just incredible results with people who finally take control of their lifestyle.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? And, um, these are huge levers, folks. Like these are as big as it gets. And we’re not talking about whack-a-mole with diabetes or heart disease, and, you know, just chasing all these symptoms. We’re talking about fixing systems at a very high level. Downward so that downstream the entire body is happy.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and I, I just, I just love the perspective on that.
Dr Jeff Bland: I think you, again, um, th this is, uh, to me, like giving me goosebumps because the way you’re contextualizing this discussion, um, is the context that people really under need to understand. So. As you know, we’ve got these cranial nerves that are constantly, um, speaking to various parts of our body. One of those cranial nerves that is really important for everything that we’ve been talking about is the, so-called vagus nerve and the vagus nerve innervates the gastrointestinal tract that goes right to the central nervous system and it also innervates and connected to the immune system. And so if we talk about the ways that we can get quick messages to our brain to relax, to get our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system balanced properly, it is to do multifocal intervention, which are stress management meditation, relaxation program exercise. These are all sending signals to our vagus nerve microbiome resurrection because that you don’t wanna send ’em bunch of toxic chemicals to your vagus nerve. So you want to balance your microbiome and you want your immune system to be in harmony ’cause it’s speaking to the vagus nerve. So all those things together form a program. We, that is the immuno, we call it the immunity plus program. You’ve gotta have all those components to get maximum benefit. So what you thought was your lot in life of just being constantly war with yourself, you can put yourself at peace.
Dr Jeff Bland: That’s the, uh, the objective.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that you get the peace diet and, and one of the things that I wanna ride into the barn in on is. Once the body becomes more resilient, when, you know, we have this, the opposite is this loss of tolerance, right? Where, you know, your gut wall is at a hair trigger and the guns are out. Uh, your, your immune system is wrapping these glycated proteins and you’re, you’re just, you’re loss of tolerance is because your body is, is freaked out, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: In a very real way, once that fuse starts to lengthen, and I’d love to hear this just in my own clinical experience over the years, I could actually see psychological resistant resilience. I could actually see increased tolerance of other people and neighbors and people honking. It actually changes the human and so on, on a micro macro level, as people start to heal in this, I’m actually seeing them be better global citizens.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m actually seeing them be better parents. It’s, it’s really a phenomenal thing to witness.
Dr Jeff Bland: Uh, that’s a drop the mic, what you just said. I, I’m, I’m serious. I, I think we, we just take, we need to take a deep breath. Anyone that’s listening to this or watching this need to take a deep breath and, and, and give themselves a luxury of oxygen in every one of the neurons of their brain. Because what you just said is the profound outcome of all this scientific gobbly go that I’ve spent my last 70 plus years trying to understand the signals that we’re taking in. All these various signals can either be harmonious and send us into a blist state, or they can be disharmonious and create us into an alarm state. And it’s really, you know, people talk now, talk about psychedelics. What are psychedelics? They’re kind of refreshing by wiping away and allowing a blank, uh, slate to occur through neurological resetting. So that you can set new messages in place that are not kind of, uh, layered with debris in the toxic waste dump of experience. And a lot of people have the toxic waste dump of experience that is really blocking the white light of joy from being seen, being illuminated. So I think what you’ve said is absolutely on spot, and that’s why I think it is so important for a person to, to look at all the various tools. You know, when we go into to want to a physician to wanna be treated for a disease, we’re looking for a magic prescription that will go back and will take, and that molecule that we’re gonna get on that prescription will solve our problem. Well, the body is much more complex when we’re talking about the, uh, the, the state of being at a state of unrest and being a state of fear and being a state of not at home.
Dr Jeff Bland: Our ecology is disturbed. We don’t have a resting point. It’s like jumping out of a plane of, uh, without a parachute and that we feel like we’re in free fall. We need to find a place to link to, to, to, to uh, connect. And it’s multi, it’s more than one point. We need to set out multi foal approaches towards sending the right signal of tranquility. So our diet becomes one of those, our, our daily use of time and how we consider the use of time, the relationships we share. You can have toxic relationships just as you can have toxic chemical exposures. And we can have toxic nutrition we know that for sure. Uh, with ultra processed foods. So this is really what we’re trying to teach people when we talk about immuno rejuvenation, that we can give them some booster rockets and we can help a person within a month to really start getting a felt state that will improve.
Dr Jeff Bland: But the long-term payoff is to reinforce these in multiple ways that they’re thinking about the way they want to live and how it’s sending signals to their body.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. And if, and to come full circle on how we got here. Look, allopathy has been wonderful. It saved gajillions of lives. But if you think of some of the origin story, early Day Allopathy wins. This came for World. World War I, world War ii. This is about saying we’re gonna patch up our guys and get ’em back out there to fight.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It was well within this paradigm of battlefield medicine. And so the only way you actually solve the problem of that mash unit is to negotiate peace upstream. Right. But if you’re still in the war, it’s, it’s, it’s good for the war, but it’s not good for the society to just patch guys up and get ’em to get out there and shoot again.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so I, it’s just an interesting point in our history and the evolution of medicine where I just, I’m enjoying pumping the brakes and having these discussions because it’s obviously not working for chronic disease. People are obviously unwell and the roots of it, Dr. Jeffrey Bland just went over and went through.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So I, I, I just, I, I would love for our listeners to just pause and think about the strife and the conflict their lives. Whether or not the strife and the conflict that they’re gut lining and what they’re eating and all this may be contributing to the unease and the lack of peace in their life. And, and just, you know, it’s as above, so below type of moment right in, in what we’re talking about with healthcare.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and I just, I love it. I love what you’re doing at Big Bold Health. Um, I love this concept of immuno, uh, rejuvenation and, um, I would love more and more doctors to understand what you’re doing and get on board with this different paradigm.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, thank you. I, I think one of the things that I’ve learned through this last three years, um, you know, we’ve had a chance now to work with our regenerative farmers. I’ve, I’ve got my hands now in the soil. I never thought that I’d have that, uh, that chance. I, I, we’ve we’re working with our group out in the Elucian Islands with our sustainable, uh, fish oil products and what it’s, what it’s taught me, uh, and these people, these are real people, these farmers, these fishermen and, and the people we’re working with in any populations in Alaska, for instance, that are, uh, working with us. We’re all aspiring, no matter who and what we are, we’re all aspiring for the ability to get up in the morning and feel that we, we can do what we want to do and we can do it well and, and feel good about it. And, and if that’s a shared common aspiration, we need to find ways to help one another to achieve those objectives. And one of those ways that we help one another is helping to identify those things that steal from us, those opportunities, trying to get rid of those while we’re adding back the things that give us options and opportunities. And, you know, I, when I was talking to, um, to my little group at Big Bull Health about this, you know, there, there’s, there’s statement was, well, what we’re really trying to do is connect the planet together with the microbes, with the soil, with the plants, with animals, with us.
Dr Jeff Bland: And to form that there is a common thread, there’s a through line that connects all of those. So if you’re doing good for one, you may be doing good for all. And so how do you find that through line? ’cause it adds purpose to our lives. It adds benefit to everyone else, not only people but the planetary, uh, diverse biodiversity. So it’s changing our mentality at a fundamental level as to what we are and where we sit in this system and, and, uh, our abilities to, to create goodness around us. The only thing, only thing we have is our, our sphere of influence. What starts with us, some people have very broad spheres of influence. They have down low downlines of a million podcasters. The other of us just have us and maybe a friend or two, or our family. But all of those are spheres of influence that have importance in creating this new reality.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. And, and you’re podcasting to every cell in your gut lining, in your podcasting to every cell in your body with the sugar that you’re eating. So, you know, let’s look at the internal audience first, right? And, um, radi Radiate Vitality from the inside out. Uh, Jeff always, always at delight. Um, how do people, uh, find what you’re doing at Big Bold Health?
Dr Pedram Shojai: How do they get started on these protocols?
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah, they can either go obviously to ww dot big bold health.com, or they can go to jeffrey bland.com. That’s jeffreybland.com We have resources available at either of those places.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love it. Always a fan of the work you’re doing. Um, always excited to hear of the next thing that you’ve uncovered. You’ve been uncovering research and, and really stirring the pot for a very, very long time, and I’m so happy for one that you’re still in the game. Please don’t stop. Uh, the world needs you.
Dr Jeff Bland: Thank you. I feel the same with you. And, uh, look forward to us, uh, taking this walk down this journey together. Thank you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Amen. Amen. Thank you.
Well, I certainly hope you enjoyed that show as much as I did love Jeff bland. Uh, what a gem of a guy, um, Please leave a review. I’m starting to get back into podcasting and bringing you the best of the best. So reviews do help. Uh, so if you have not done so already subscribe to the show, review the show. Say something nice if you can.
And also again, gut check action plan. This is a course taught by Dr. Jeff bland himself. You could find it in the urban monk academy. Just go to the urban monk.com. Look up the courses. If you need help fixing your gut. Why not swim upstream, go to the best of the best. I’ll see you in the next show.