Why Good Health is More Than the Absence of Disease with Dr. Jeff Bland

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Prevention is an aspirational term that really is very squishy. It's like the word love. We all use it. It's a very important term, but it has very hard boundaries. If you're trying to use it as agape but someone perceives it to be amore, that can get you in trouble.

Here's JJ Virgin Triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New.

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It's time to reignite wellness.

Today I get to interview one of my heroes. And you know, it's kind of fun in life when, when your heroes become your friends. And that is how I feel about Dr. Jeff Bland. He is someone who I started learning from, gosh, 20 years ago, I guess maybe a little longer, and got obsessed with him, with whenever he spoke, I tried to be there, listen and learn. And you've if you are in the field of functional medicine, you know who he is because he's really the father of functional medicine. He started out as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Puget Sound, became a tenured professor there, then spent a couple years working with Linus Pauling at the Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine over at Stanford. And that was when he went and made his big transition, which you'll hear about during the interview. And he went and co founded the Institute for Functional medicine, known as IFM, in 1991. Now if you're in the community, whenever anyone's asking where should I go? What doctor can I find? I always say go to, go to Institute for Functional Medicine and you'll find them there. And we'll put the link to that in the show notes. And he was the president and chief science officer of Metagenics. He founded the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute in 2013 and now he has a super cool project. It's really his legacy work, which is Big Bold Health. We're going to talk about that in the podcast. I'm going to have links@jjvirgin.com forward/big bold Health. For a lot of things we're talking about, you're going to definitely want to go there. You'll also want to grab his recent book Disease Delusion, came out in 2016, ranked as a book of significance. He has done so many amazing things. He's made an impact on so many people. But you know, I mean in talking to him today, and I'm excited to share this podcast. I think what you're going to realize is there's that was probably, probably the warm up act and today we are going to be talking about why prevention is really a ripoff and a different way to look at health that's going to really help you in defining your own health and knowing what you need to do there. So before I dive in to this super provocative and compelling interview, I want to do a shout out right now to Hot Wheels FJ Cruiser. I would really love to know the background on that screen name. Hot Wheels FJ Cruiser says Keep the inspiration coming. Five stars. I'm crazy about this podcast. I listen in the mornings and you help me get my day started right. I'm a fan forever. Thanks so much. Ah, thank you. Super appreciate that. And if you haven't left a review yet, subscribe to JJ.com you can subscribe so you get all the awesome interviews with my fabulous guests. I'm also doing my own solos too. Every week is a an interview with a guest, a solo, and then Friday Q and A. So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out there. Now I want to share another cool thing with you and then I will be back with this awesome interview with my hero, Dr. Jeff Bland.

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Doctor Jeff Bland, one of my favorite humans. It is such an honor to have you on the show.

Oh, boy. I can't tell you how much I've looked forward to this. Jj, You're a voice of reason and I really appreciate having a chance to talk with you.

So I want to start, because we are going to talk, talk about some really interesting, kind of a provocative new way to look at health that really should be the way we've always looked at it. But before we go there, you who started out as a professor of biochemistry and then went on to really be the father of functional medicine, you know, what happened here, it wasn't a logical career path.

No. I'll just give you one anecdote. Because our lives are always, you know, what do they say life is? What happens in between our plans. I think that's the anecdote. So what happened for me is in 1981, I had the privilege of taking a sabbatical year with Linus Pauling at the Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine at Stanford. And it was really one of those. Well, not one of. It was a life changing event for me. I ended up spending two years there. And by the end of that two year period, I made the decision that going back to my tenured faculty position was, was really not what I wanted to do with my life going forward. Even though I had a family and tuition was paid for my kids when they went to college, and all those benefits you have with a professorial job in managing your time in life kind of seemed to be in the rearview mirror at that point for me because as I left, Dr. Pauling, two time Nobel Prize winning laureate, still the only person to win two independent Nobel prizes in two different fields, one in chemistry and one in peace. He said to me as I was leaving, he said, jeff, thanks very much for your years of service here. You really made some great contributions. I hope you'll continue to work with us. But I ask you one question, and that is, is your classroom big enough as you go back to your teaching position? And that virus that he put in my nervous system stuck with me all the way. Driving home with my family in the car, my Three sons and wife back to Washington State from Northern California. And by the time I got home, I recognized that it wasn't big enough, that really my advocacy was to try to teach health practitioners how to do preventive medicine in their practice. So that. That's what led.

But there was no such thing at the time.

No, no, there wasn't. It was. It was a big leaf of abstraction, so. So to speak. And. And when I told my parents, my. My parents had asked my dad to take early retirement, and he had moved up with my mother to Washington State. And they kind of watched the house where we're gone those two years. So I was happy to be back and was telling him how good it was to see them. And then I said, by the way, I've just decided to give up my tenured professorship and I'm going to start a company to try to teach health practitioners how to do prevention. And there was, you know, kind of dead silence in the room. And then finally my mother said, I think he's actually serious. And so my dad came out of retirement. He was. Worked with me as my business manager for the first six years. It was a lot of fun, actually. And eventually we grew that up to be quite a substantial operation over the next 10 years. So that was a seminal event in changing my focus of where I wanted my energies to go. And it was the best decision I ever made in my life.

It was the best decision you ever made for a lot of people's lives.

Well, thank you. That's very gracious.

I mean, it's impacted my career and so many people's careers, and because it impacted our careers, impacted so many people's lives.

Lives.

And so thank you for taking that, what I would call a big, bold step back then. And. And you continue to do those. And now with this thing of, you know, this idea of starting big, bold health. And you're in your. Now you're in your 70s. And I'm going to back it up a little bit because I remember hearing someone. Someone sent me this article. How about, like, you peak, you know, you peak at like 45, and by 50, you've done everything that you're really going to do. And then it' this downhill slide. And then I went to the Grammys last year, and it. There was Dolly Parton and Diana Ross and. And they were amazing and singing their hearts out. And I'm going, and then I hear about Elon Musk's mother becoming a covergirl at 69. And. And I go, who says so, man, I Feel like I've been just everything I've done to date as a warmup. So. So now you're starting big bold health in your 70s. What. What the heck is it?

Well, what happened to me, and I'm. Some of this experience in your own life is you. You reflect on your past, you look at how your journey is taking to a certain point. You feel very privileged to have had those experiences, to have met the remarkable people you've met, to be influenced by all sorts of different input. And I've traveled over 6 million miles in my years, so I've traveled around the globe many times and been associated with extraordinary thinkers in all sorts of different fields. So as I, as I look back at all of those experiences now in my early 70s, I said, you know, there's some payback that I feel I owe the system for all these opportunities. And the world is really in a situation where wisdom is really important. I think we need to find guidance through the sticky wickets of our day into leading a world that's as good or better than that which we founded for our grandchildren or whoever it may be coming up in future generations. And I recognize that I had the, the really privilege of having information through this last 40 years, particularly working in this field that could be advantage to many, many people if I just hung in there and reconfigured my focus away from practitioners for a while to really the people that make the change in our healthcare system, which are the consumers themselves, and try to find ways through help with people like yourselves to make this information accessible so we can really catalyze this transformation from a disease care focus into a balance with health care and disease care being part of our future. And so that really re. Emboldened me to say, okay, if I was to do this, this is my, my magic wand, what would. What would it look like? And my colleague Trish Urie, who has worked with me over for over 20 years, said, Jeff, you know, you sound like you're speaking boldly and you're kind of a big guy, so maybe you ought to call this big bold health. So, so that. That's how it all emerged.

I love the brand. I love it. And I, I think we cannot stress enough. So I'd like to dig into it, the difference between disease care and healthcare, because you see people going to their doctor and becoming, like, incensed that they didn't talk to them about nutrition and lifestyle, but yet that's not the way our system's set up. So can you talk about those distinctions?

Yes, I want to really criticize myself first because in this reflective process that led into the development of Big Bold Health as a concept, I, I came to a kind of an aha ism. And it really was a little bit shocking to me actually, because as I mentioned, I left academia to start a company to teach docs how to do prevention in their practice. And what I recognized after some soul searching is that the term prevention is a ripoff. Now why is it a ripoff? Theoretically and aspirationally, it's a very good term and it's something we would all aspire to, want to do. But in actual practice, the only way you know, if you prevented something, quite honestly, is if you got the disease and then you had to treat it. Because if you didn't get the disease, you're not sure if you just got the luck of the draw or whatever you did really was the important criteria for you not getting the disease. So what I started to recognize is that prevention is an aspirational term that really is very squishy. It's like the word love. We all use it, it's a very important term, but it has very hard to define boundaries. If you use it wrong, if you're trying to use it in a way that is agape, but someone perceives it to be a more that can get you in trouble. So love is a very difficult word to kind of quantify as is prevention. And what I really started to recognize is that I look at my 40 plus years in this field advocating prevention and ask what was the stickiness of the idea and people really changing their lifestyles to really be significantly improved and stay with that for many years? I would say it was very small because prevention is something that people will not stick with. What they will stick with, I believe is something that delivers value as they perceive it in their daily life. If they don't feel it, they don't sense it, they don't have it with them. Then prevention is a kind of a broad brush, kind of euphemistic term without much meaning that doesn't lead to compliance and adherence. So I started to recognize that the term prevention, although aspirationally good in terms of reality, is pretty much a rip off term that we need to redefine the concept of health away from prevention or disease risk reduction. Because quite honestly, those terms are really owned and co opted by the disease care system. So I was working kind of inadvertently for perpetuation of a system that I really didn't totally support. And you know, if you want to birth a healthcare System. You can't birth it out of a disease care system. They're antithetically different. They have different models, they have different languages, they have different objectives. We need a disease care system and thank goodness as we have one, and we hopefully will make it even better. But that doesn't mean out of the disease care system is to be born a health care system. And that's the problem we have today because the disease care system is trying to own and co opt the healthcare system, which it's not trained to do and doesn't deliver the good. So that led me to this big, bold concept that we need to dedock sever the umbilical cord from the disease care system and start with a fresh language. It's a blank slate. How would we really define health so we can objectify it as quantitatively as we define disease once we have that.

You know, when you say this, Jeff, it's like, it's so obvious when you say it that it's like, oh my, of course they need to be separated and they're distinct and of course. Right, so, yes. So you were getting into like how we define health.

Precisely. And that has been, I believe, the major challenge that we've confronted, we've been faced with because disease is very well quantified. You know, you have these diagnostic criteria, you can memorize them in medical school or whatever, and you can recite them on demand and everyone kind of nods their head yes. And we have these reimbursement codes called international classification of disease that gives everybody a very sharp edge on how they define disease. Now we go over to health and we say, well, what is health? And we don't have sharp edges, we have fuzzy edges. And in fact, we have a question on our website, on the Big bowl health website, which is what is health to you? And interestingly enough, I've been using this question now with my kind of market survey out there in the, in the world for some time. And I have yet to have a person say that their definition of health is the absence of disease. That I have many, many definitions of health that are individual to that person's aspiration. And therefore, we need to find a new way of defining health that incorporates people's objectives, their own sense of what to them defines health, and then allow them to achieve that and move away from this concept that health is the absence of disease. It's much more than that.

When I also look at, and I would think that for people I always look at, what's the transformation they're looking to Achieve. Let's talk about like someone who say is going on the virgin diet. They're not going on the virgin diet because they want to do an elimination diet. They're going on the virgin diet because they don't want their joints to hurt. And they don't want their joints to hurt. So they can then go do the things they like to do. Maybe they want to golf or play tennis or whatever they want to do. So like when you look at what's health mean to someone, it's really what is having great health allowing them to do? And then what are those metrics that you need to look at and that will allow you to have great health? You know, and.

Well, you, you brilliantly just said it. I mean, that is the basis underpinning of big bowl health. The only point of differentiation between the way that I'm describing that and the way you just described it is that you just talked about those things that people aspire to do, which are things that relate to what I call their function. And I think the only way that you can quantify health is not by the absence of disease, but by the presence of function. And then if you ask that question and you say, well, what is function? I believe that function is really broken down into four subgroups. And I think you can quantify all aspirations of health through those four subgroups of function. And those are physical function, how we move, act and behave. Secondly is metabolic function or physiological function, like our blood sugars and our hormones and so forth. Third is our cognitive function, how we think and our cognitive abilities. And lastly is our behavioral or psychological function. Those four quadrants of function can all be quantified. There are metrics that we can use. In fact, there are objective, documented, validated ways of getting information about each of those. If we were to be asking people on a quantitative basis how they perform in each of those four areas of function and we had a roll up score, we would now have a quantitative measurement for health that was totally separated from the disease model, but would be equally valid as it relates to quantitation to that of disease. That is my advocacy. Let's.

This makes so much sense. I was been. It's funny, as you were talking about, I was outlining, okay, what would these categories be and like, how do you be able to optimize for your best. Like, you know, obviously someone who, and I don't remember what you call the physical movement, the moving one, I call.

It, I just call it physical function.

Yeah. So I mean, you know, and it would really be how do you optimize for your best in each, each category along the way?

Exactly right. So, and then when you start surveying people and asking those questions that are validated around each of those four subtypes of function, you'll find that there's a whole variety of different ways that people, based on their own perception of health and their own sense of function, how they would answer those questions. So it's no longer generic. It's not health for the average, it's health for the individuals. Health is very personal. It's the most intimate thing that we have in our life and we have been genericizing it, looking at it from a population base and wondering why we don't get better.

This is, it's so fantastic. So you have these four, these quadrants. So someone coming in, then they would go through and is there, like where would they go from here? What's your vision with this? Because I know this is early days here, but you know, I'm looking at this, I'm looking at what you did with functional medicine and really bringing that on the mat. And I'm thinking now, all right, so we're going to have a new way of really being able to look at health. Is your vision now to create a new structure so that, you know, say over the next 10 years there's a healthcare type of system that people could go into to really be able to optimize each of these quadrants so they can live their best life? What's your plan?

Oh boy, do I love talking with you. You just cut through all the mustard and go right to the deal. And that's exactly my big, hairy, audacious goal. My hairy, audacious goal is to infect or incubate or catalyze whatever word is appropriate. Many, many good thinkers in the belief that we need to define a healthcare system separate from disease care and that here is possibly the structure upon which it can be done. I'd like everybody, all these young men and women who are bright thinkers to start bringing their intelligence into this. We're going to start off with an app that will be the big bold health app that will allow people to start self evaluating based on these four quadrants. But that's only the start of the story. If you thought that we could bring the bright minds into healthcare based on this model, informatics, biometrics, psychology, behavior mod, all the various tools that people need to really start quantifying function and then addressing it. So we personalize health to give personal objectives and ways of achieving those objectives. We now have started to create a health care system and an economy that will support it so that we move from a disease based economy to a health based economy. That's the big cariodatious goal.

You know what's so exciting about this is this actually I feel like we are at a point now because of tech where we can do this because it really requires an open source style where everybody is sharing ideas and you know, we are all benefiting from it. Let me give you just kind of one I've sort of noticed in the diet world because that's my world is my take in the diet world is that an author has a personal experience with a diet, it works for them. Then they put it out into the world believing that everybody should be on this thing, which is ridiculous. Like to me diets are used. We have to completely blow up the word diet. Diet should be something that we use short term therapeutically to achieve an outcome, make a transition, transition. Learn something to pull this into the way that we eat every day and that it's a constantly evolving thing if it takes you to a certain goal and then you might need to stabilize for a while and shift to the next. But I think if we could be all sharing these ideas. I know a lot of the stuff I started working on early on in weight loss resistance there weren't studies yet for. So I just started using. I could see things, working with clients. I started to talk about it and then started to look at what was coming through in the research. Right. And then you start to get more and more research about these different things. I feel like if we can start to crowdsource open source a lot of this information and start to look at what's working and who it's working for and why. Because the idea that we should all be on the same diet has never made any sense to me or the same exercise program or like that I should be on an exercise program in my 50s that would, that I was on in my 20s. Right. I mean these, all these all need to also share shift based on goals and age and all of this. But if we have an open source platform it would be. I think we could get there so much faster.

Well, you are absolutely championing the reason why in my 70s I've decided to give this a whirl with big bold health because that's my advocacy. You know, I'm in a kind of a very privileged situation. My kids have all gone through school. My grandkids, you know, have their college tuition in a trust fund. Put aside my Wife and I have our house paid for and we're basically in a situation that's what are we going to do? What are our legacy contributions to really pay back for the wonderful experiences we've had over the last years. And I think what you just said is our advocacy that we would like to put an environment together where health becomes the dominant focus and it becomes big and bold. It's not apologetic, it's not trying to be kind of find excuses for why the disease care system owns the, the privileged position. What we're really trying to do is to say health care and disease care need to have equal positions at the table. And to do that, we need to reform and reframe health to be personal because health is a very intimate thing that's individual to that person. And let's provide new tools that come out of the technology of today. We're all wearing, putting wearables on. We're having various analyses done, including our genes. We're looking at how we eat in different ways, sustainable eating and, you know, the whole nature of organic. All these things are part of a ecological sea change that's occurring that puts the person at the center of their own health. And that's where we want to be. We want to be kind of the meeting ground for this new transformation and thinking of health as a measurement of our function.

What I think is super critical here is that distinction between healthcare and disease care. I mean, obviously the more that you focus on healthcare, the more you leave disease care for like where it really should be, which is a situation like, you know, my son getting hit by, by a car and having a traumatic brain injury and 13 fractures in it and, you know, an aorta that's going to rupture. That's when you want that. You don't want it for someone who's got lifestyle issues that they could have corrected by having healthcare to begin with and never have to go there. So we put both things in their right buckets. And I feel like the issue with healthcare up to date, you said it so well. Talking about prevention, I've never understood prevention because I couldn't see anyone being motivated because there was no way to track it measured or anything else. So the fact that we can actually make this measurable and monitor, because I love the what you measure and monitor you can improve is so key here. But then also that you can link it to the transformation that people are looking for. I mean, the reason diets can work so well is people come in, they want a very specific transformation. You've got specific, actionable steps that they can measure. Right. You know, it's like it follows all those rules, which are now the rules you're putting in place here, which is how this makes it work. So it is going to be a very exciting time. And it's, it's the fact that we now have wearables that we can track, that we can. We can say, here are the things that you need to do to change these different four quadrants. It just makes a ton of sense.

Yeah.

I think that, you know, when we moved over that threshold in the rose Garden in 2000, with the sequence of the human genome being both deciphered and then described, a lot of people have felt in the pharma world very disillusioned because they thought all sorts of new drugs were going to come out of this discovery. And now they said, well, hold it. This wasn't as simple as we thought, that we have the gene structure and we suddenly have a revolution in pharmaceuticals. What we have learned through that extraordinary discovery is a threshold will never go back over. And that is our genes are there. They're locked in when the sperm at the egg. But the way that the genes are expressed into our function is extraordinarily variable depending upon the environment in which a person finds themselves. So the genes that we have are not diseases of disease, they're diseases of function. And what they do is they create a response to the environment in which we find ourselves. So if we really define genes as being the most important legacy things that we have as tools to create blissful health, and what we just need to do is find the environment to match our genetic needs so that in fact, we become personal in our relationship with our food, lifestyle and environment. Now we have not only beat back disease, but we have done the most important thing. We have rectangularized our functional curve for the case of maybe a century or more of high level living. That is what most people are aspiring for. And that's what big bowl health is all about.

So I want to start getting people hooked into big, bold health because I think it's definitely something everyone's going to want to be a part of as it grows and builds as a source for great information. Really the cutting edge of what's going on here. I know you have an amazing podcast. We're going to link to all of this in the show notes@jjvirgin.com Bigbold Health and I know we are talking offline about some of the different videos that you have. So there's a lot that's going to be coming out with this. And plus my. I'm very, very excited to be working on this project with you. But I know that you also have a very cool food plan, a 30 day food plan that we're going to be giving all the listeners. Can you tell them about this?

Yes, thank you. You know, I so appreciate what you said earlier about diet that, you know, we have kind of banished that word from our vocabulary because diet, you know, is a four letter word that has such a, its negative connotation.

If you can figure that out. This word, Jeff, because you're so good, you are like the uber wordsmith. You're always making up these words. So the word I need you to figure out is I think there's absolutely a role for diet. It's just not how we like. There's two separate words and we only have one. There's, you know, there's. And if you look in the dictionary, they have two separate definitions. And one is, I think that we should have something that we use therapeutically and then we should learn from that and put it into how we eat every day. We need those two ways. Just let me know when you have them. Okay.

Well, as a placeholder, we're using the term food plan because I think food plan then connotes to the individual that they're going to have a plan that's going to be personal to their need. It's not going to be a prescriptive, it's going to be something that can be modified to the individual need to optimize their function. And so, so our 30 day food plan has the ability to be kind of customized or modified. It has certain principles, just as you have used in your approach. You give certain unalienable principles. And those principles are related to the constructs that we've learned kind of ancient wisdom, which I call the Mediterranean approach. You'll notice I've kind of conjoined two words, the Mediterranean and the Asian approach. Because if you start looking at history and ethnography, what you start seeing is that there are certain principles that go back time immorium that are associated with good health, with various cultures around the world. And those principles incorporate characteristics that we would both ascribe to the Mediterranean diet, the Mediterranean diet and to the Asian diet. So we have kind of conjoined those into what we call the Mediterranean diet. One of the principles that we're really exploring are certain kinds of principles that were found in the traditional diets of these individuals that are probably lost superfoods. And as we Go back and study this. I think people are going to really enjoy following our Big Bold health podcast because we are going to be unfolding a whole array of ancient wisdom that has kind of been lost that we would call reappropriating it as superfoods for the 21st century. So I would encourage people to stay tuned because we've got our food lab group and our basic science group pretty heavily involved at Big Bowl Health in really unearthing and re exploiting some of the ancient wisdom that I think people will find is kind of back to the future new stuff that's really going to be interesting for application in our Mediterranean food plan.

I love the Mediterranean so you will be able to grab that@jjvirgin.com Big Bold Health and again, that's a 30 day food plan. And you know, I just that whole way of looking at food so you can really connect the dots and customize it for yourself. You know, that's my whole jam here. So I love that and I'm excited to see what you guys come up with ongoing. So again at the show notes, we'll have that food plan. We're going to link over to your podcast and over to your website and you'll definitely want to go and jump in on that website so you know everything coming up. Lots of exciting stuff ahead. Thank you so much for your time today. I so appreciate you, Jeff.

Well, it goes both ways. This has been such a privilege for me to be part of your evolving story and what you've done to create health globally. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the time.

Well, you, you opened the door for me to be able to do it.

So I super appreciate it. Now after the break, I am going to take what we just went through and give you a couple action steps and a challenge. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. All right. I like to make sure that with every podcast I give you an action item because all this amazing information. Hey, information without any action is like information. I want information with action, with change, with transformation. I want to make sure that I give you things you go, okay, I got it. I'm going to go do something with it. And I think there was something. There's a lot of interesting, provocative new ways of thinking here, which Jeff is known for, but there's a piece in here that I want you to really start thinking about for yourself, because, you know, I've spent years. I was lucky at the age of 30 to have an amazing mentor who really helped me in, like, Law of Attraction, the secret, all of that type of stuff. Before it was. Before any of that stuff was anything. She really taught me how to manage my mindset, that if you could, could. If you could believe it, if you could see it in your mind's eye, because that's where everything is created, you could go and then. And create it in reality. And so my challenge for you today is that very thing. What is. What does your health goal? What does having amazing health look like for you? Because again, you have to see it in your mind's eye first before you can go out and create it. Because as you could tell, once we look at this and we go, okay, we have these quadrants, and then we can look at how do we optimize each one? To me, that's just once we have the vision, we just have our strategies, those four quadrants and tactics within each one. Not hard. The first part is that vision of where you want to be, and I'm just going to put it to you this way. Like my son in the hospital when he's in a coma and he's got this crushed heel where they're telling me he'll never walk again, and they're not sure if he's going to wake up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I looked and I said, you know what, if this was the best thing that ever happened to him and he was going to be 110%. And in my mind's eye, I saw him already there. I saw him speaking on stages, talking about his experience, using it to help other people. I saw him showing people what was possible and giving people hope. Okay? So I put it so clearly, I put it my mind's eye because I knew that I had to see it there first before I could help him make it a reality, which today he is 110%. So that is my. As the gauntlet, what I'm throwing down for you is let's think about what does. What does amazing health look like for you? That's the challenge. And then go over to JJ vi.com big bold health. You're going to get the show notes, you'll be able to go to the website and put it in there. Answer the question. It's on the website. All righty. Awesome. And one more shout out. Subscribe to JJ if you haven't yet, subscribe to JJ.com so you don't miss any of these delicious episodes and I will see you next time. Bye.

Foreigners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.