Why ‘Preventing Disease’ Isn’t Enough for a Long, Healthy Life: Dr. Jeffrey Bland Explains

So we all live in a world of probability. So how do you maximize the probability of rolling the dice of life to come up a winner? And then what does being a winner mean? Then you have to start asking a different set of questions. And it's not just preventing disease. Preventing disease is not the aspiration to healthy living because that's not a well accepted concept that I just said now that has never, ever been understood in medicine until the last 10 years.

Where are we right now? And then we'll get into asking you some questions about functional medicine and how everyone that's watching or listening can hopefully be a lot healthier.

Yes, a lot. I just want to take a pause, maybe just a deep breath in what I've been blessed to experience the last 36 hours with you for. You know, life is complicated. It's got tortuosities. It's got valleys and peaks and flat terrain. And, you know, you never know exactly what's over the horizon. So, you know, as they say, life is what happens in between your plans. And so here we are, we bring these five people together. It's an experiment, uncontrolled in one experiment, to see how energies, perspectives, visions, philosophies, beliefs mesh or don't mesh. And then I'm blessed with this spiritual experience with the four of you. And it's the magic of life, right? It's the purposeful reason that somehow, with every beat of our heart, to use Salinger's Franning Zoe metaphor, life is worth living. So this has really been powerful. So I just thank the four of you for this chance to kind of share, open, and explore.

It's great to be here. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm really enjoying it. And we talked yesterday about joy and what I'd like to do. Before we get into it, let's let for people that don't know who I'm surrounded with. My name is Joe Polish. I have a group called Genius Network. I have an addiction recovery foundation. I own a ghost town. I interview all kinds of fascinating people. I've done over a thousand interviews, but that's enough about me. So let's go to you. Give a quick lowdown of who you are, Sachin, and what you do, and then we'll get into some really hopefully useful stuff.

Thank you, Joe, and thank you, Jeff, for this opportunity. My name is Sachin Patel and I run a mentorship program for functional medicine practitioners called Perfect Practice. And we also have a clinic called the Living Proof Institute, where we help people become their own Best doctors and facilitate their healing through self care, through their environment, through epigenetic modification, through supplements, through nutrition and building community and supporting them along their journey.

Deepa.

My name's Deepa and I'm Satchin's wife and we work together to make the.

World a better place, hopefully.

Yeah, yeah. And you do Dr. Siriang.

My name is Dr. Shiriang. I am a plastic surgeon. My office is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. And a big, big proponent of integrative health and really blessed to be with like the founder of functional medicine, some really amazing people on this table and you know, the voice for women to be able to express in terms of finding confidence and self esteem with themselves is what we do our practice. I'm a plastic surgeon and do a lot of vaginal cosmetic surgery, but really being able to help people find their internal confidence and become whole to using integrative technologies and practices. So this is going to be fun.

Awesome.

Awesome.

All right, well, so let's.

How would you describe who you are like at this stage you've been doing this? When did you first start?

Well, I started probably preconceptionally. If you want to talk it from a biological perspective, if you want to talk about it from a phenomenological perspective.

I was hoping past lives and whatnot.

Yeah. You know, my mother would say, God rest her soul, if she was here today and you asked her that question, she would say, well, Jeff was always asking questions about how people got sick. From the first time I remember him having conversations, it was always a driving force. Why do people get sick? Why are people healthy? Why do people have certain capabilities and others do not as it relates to their health patterns? And so it's been a driving force, you know, certainly for. Well, I'm 78 years old, so the greatest portion of those 78 years probably. Yeah.

I'm going to ask a couple questions that we're just going to go around. We're going to ask questions from each of us. So just the most basic one, which we even talked about yesterday, where did you come up with the name functional medicine? Why do you call it that? What does it mean?

Yeah, so, you know, this journey that I've been on and shared with a lot of extraordinary thinkers and innovators kind of brought me to an interesting observation. And that was the observation that we can't address and understand everything that happens in our life, but there are certain kinds of probabilities that give rise to more likely outcomes. And so we all live in a world of probabilities. So how do you maximize the probability of rolling the dice of life to come up a winner? And then what does being a winner, meaning in the game of life? And so you start looking at all the variables that would be part of the definition of a winner. And it came down to me to recognize it. When you talk to lots of people, and I've had that privilege of talking to lots of people. I've traveled over 6 million miles all around the world. And what I have found is that it can distill down to everyone would like to aspire to have a long healthy life. There's very few people say, I'd like my life to be short and not healthy. And so that's a shared common human value. Then the question is, okay, what underlies that aspiration? What are the characteristics that would embody achievement of that goal? And I finally recognized that it wasn't the absence of disease. And our whole system, my whole system of education coming up through my medical training and my PhD training was all around understanding disease when the body's broken. And you know, we have a good system actually that does that, and the whole ontology that surrounds that is very well defined. But if you really wanted to talk about the thing that most people are concerned about, which is healthy living and long prosperous life, it wasn't encoded at all by any of the things that I learned from a histopathology disease perspective. So it shares the same anatomy and physiology, health with disease, but it's contextualized in a very different way. So then I started to say, well then why does healthcare always be the backseat, the weak partner, whereas the disease care is on the front seat and they're in the driver's position? Well, there are many reasons, one of which is disease can be quantified. If you start talking about early disease. You know, a bump on a person's body, they're bleeding, they fall over, they grab their chest. I mean, these are. It doesn't require a lot of wisdom to know something's going on. And so then we developed a technology around that became the differential diagnosis and then the reimbursement codes. And all of that is very logical if what you're looking for is the body broken. But if you're looking for the body, well then you have to start asking a different set of questions. And it's not just preventing disease. Preventing disease is not the aspiration to healthy living. I want to say that again because that's not a well accepted concept that I just said preventing disease is not the fulfillment of a Healthy living, you can prevent disease and not be healthy. And actually, you can have some disease and be healthy. The counterpoint. So what are the differences? The difference, I believe now this is Jeff plan speaking. I'm not sure the whole world would agree with me on this, is that to quantify the healthy part of the equation, you need metrics to do that. And those metrics are tied to your function. And so then you start to say, okay, what is it when a person says they're healthy, what are they really telling you? Well, they're doing things in their life that they want to do without restriction. That's healthy. And so what are those things? Well, I finally landed on the fact that I think it's function that can be divided into four different sectors. Now, again, this is just my thinking. It could be divided in other ways, in other people's thinking. But my four, I call them quadrants that relate to function are physical function. So you have to have your body moving, and it has to be flexible and has to have endurance and strength. So that's physical. Then you have your metabolic function. There are all these things in the gushing parts of our bodies working within cells, and all that interconnection between cells and all the molecules that are running around, giving messages to form metabolism and energy. And then the next is your cognitive function. Now, your cognitive function is obviously connecting to your physical and your metabolic. So all these are interconnected. But to make them kind of categorizable, I put cognitive function and your ability to use this spinal tumor called the brain to look forward and backward in time and create things that no one ever thought that they would be able to do as an animal. And then lastly, is your behavioral function and how you find your behavior matched to your environment? Now, if you rol all those four together, that becomes your overall body function. And that, to me, is a metric for wellness or health. Okay, so that's very different than anything I learned in school. And so it was a new model for me in my mind. Now I recognize that I'm borrowing principles from all sorts of people when I come up with this. This is not a de novo Jeff Bland in isolation invention. It was a combination of many, many different thoughtful individuals across different cultures, with different ethnic backgrounds, with different belief systems that kind of all come to this. We at Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine or Amazonian medicine or Native American medicine, they share these principles together. And so then I asked the question, okay, then how do you take these four quadrants and metricize them and these Are not the things that we generally learn in school when we learn about lab values to define a disease. So we have to start looking at other ways to assess physical function, other ways to assess cognitive function, other ways to assess metabolic function and behavioral function. And those tools are available now, and they're emerging now. Here is the paradigm shifting. Aha. I'm sorry, this is a long answer to your simple question, but I'm going to get to the answer. Here's the answer. To me, the answer is that if you start asking these questions about how you measure these functional quadrants, you are putting yourself in a situation where you are less concerned about what are the dramatic observables of disease and the subtle shading signs of function in a world of expectations where that person has certain performance criteria they've set in their mind to what they consider to be health. So for one person, maybe it's running an ultramarathon, another, maybe it's attending their grandchild's high school graduation, because that would be a big accomplishment. So I believe that we have to be very agnostic about how we define health and function to personalize it in the individual. And I think the other thing that is really important, and this, I believe, is a statement of truth, that in the years that we have been talking about this, in the years that has been on my mind, starting as an assistant professor in 1970 in my first real job, was that we didn't have a lot of the basic science to undergird these concepts. These were still speculative. We could kind of use animal studies or some cell biology, and we could, you know, speculate on what that might mean to humans. But the critics of this model that I'm describing would say, well, oh, there's no double blind placebo, randomized control trials. We don't have all the mechanism, we don't know all the piece parts of how the wires are connected. So, Jeff, you're just a really good talker with a lot of speculation, but until you can prove it, we're not that interested. Now, some 40 years or more later, we have huge advancements that have been made in understanding the basic science of how cells work and how they interconnect one to the other to make tissues, to make organs, to make organ systems and how that communicates with the universe and all these signals that we're taking in, some of which are atomistic and materialistic and others which are not like thoughts and attitudes, beliefs, loves attribution. These are just as powerful of signals that cells pick up and modulate their function as would being exposed to a medical molecular toxin or to a diet. So all these get woven together into a new science of biology. And it's this new science of biology. And I'm kind of proud to say that we were forecasting this pretty strongly. And my early writings, 40 or more years, actually, I wrote a book called Medical Applications of clinical nutrition in 1976 in which I made speculations on this. And people criticized the book because they said, well, you know, you're talking about things that haven't happened yet. Well, now if you read that book, most all those things have happened. And so I feel like my hit rate of some of these concepts is pretty good. It's not 100%, but it's certainly better than 80%. And so the hit rate is how do you forecast where the trajectory of the system is going? Because the system as we know it has run out of gas. It can't. This disease centric system cannot solve the problems that we have. So it'll be there fortunately, and it'll continue to evolve, but it's not going to address the 80% of the problems that are chronic in nature, that have much more complexity. They're social and biochemical and connected to function in ways that you don't get out of pathology. So I think that my very long winded answer to your very astute question is, is that I believe now we can start saying that this shadow dancing that we were doing with the functional medicine model is now starting to gain form and function to be quantified. And those that are really students of the art, that are reading the literature, following the breakthroughs, talking to the right people, see that the old model is going away and the new biology is emerging and it's going to be much more functionally related.

Okay, cool. So whoever wants to go next, I'm just going to pass the mic and then let's.

So that was a really good answer. I almost think when you mention the word functional medicine, I think about medicine as something I need to take when I'm sick. And so maybe the word, even the word medicine shouldn't be in the new future of this field. I mean, I love the work function. So what do you think would be based on where we are now? Like what do you think is the new, the new word? Or what is the new framework that we need to think about within the last 40 years and how the biology will change moving forward? How do you see that instead of the word functional medicine, what do you think will be the new term? And what are the things we need to kind of change our mindset?

Oh, man, that's a really great question. So disease is an endpoint, isn't it? It's binary. You either have a disease or you don't have a disease. It's an on, off, switch. So it's actually fairly simple. If you think of the medicine as medicine that we think of taking something for something is binary, whereas the concept that we're talking about is very analog. It's very graded in the way that it can be expressed from the complete presence of health to the absence of health in all these different shades. So I think that what you're saying, cherie, I think is really important because really, this is not maybe medicine as we have thought about, intervention to a set point. It's a process of guidance of a trajectory, of a person's pluripotential. That term pluripotential is a really interesting word because it means we have a lot of unexplored things that can happen if we do the right things right. We have many potentials. And so I think you're already taking this. Your answer is in your question. We're taking this from functional medicine to functional health. And functional health then is how do we then employ the proper guidance principles by assessing function to extend the trajectory of health that would go out a century or more and compress morbidity, compress illness, and rectangularize the survival curve and live to the limits of human life expectancy, which we don't fully understand, but probably more than 100 years, 130 or so from data that we know today.

Jeff, thank you for that, and thank you for this opportunity today. I'm curious. Yesterday we showed you the process of potentially cloning you. We showed you some of the amazing things you can do with AI and machine learning. So I'm curious how you see that impacting the trajectory of this vision and how you can see how you see that being utilized in bifunctional medicine practitioners in their practices.

Yeah. Thanks, Akjin. That was a real aha for me yesterday. And I felt like I was brought out of the dark ages yesterday by all of your guidance and your patience with me, because that was a concept I was really unfamiliar with. And I think what my aha that I took away from that and I was reflecting on it last night, is that we know that knowledge is power, and we know that knowledge doesn't always occur in a classroom reading a book and taking a test, that there is this transmogortive process where information can be Transferred in ways that you don't even fully understand, across continents, across time. And gee, did you go to a lecture? No. How do you know that? I'm not sure how I know that. It just came. So I think by categorizing knowledge in such a way that it can be made available in whatever the quanta, the packets of information transfer are to infect people with different ideas. And so this kind of concept of cloning knowledge is a very powerful social mover. It's a dynamic force of, I would think, positive change. I guess it could also be of negative change if the information you're cloning is detrimental to human survival. But if it's coming from the place of, I would call it coherent biology, it's coming from what we have learned from nature that has led this extraordinary planet to survive through all sorts of epic different periods, geological periods. And we can employ that and transmit it to people into survivability quotients. Now we have a real opportunity to clone survival, sustainability, maybe even goodness, maybe even kindness, you know, all these things that we value as human components of living in harmony with this planet. So what I came away Yesterday is I'm one individual. You could clone my 40 years at work. But that cloning put on the top of cloning of many, many other people who have been working in this process and forming an aggregate knowledge base of wisdom. Now we have the chance to really hopefully communicate and infect people who are not going to have 40 years or maybe spend the time of traveling 6 million miles to take advantage of that information and start finding what's useful for them in creating the new reality of our culture. Because we need it. We all know that. And you know, I look at my grandchildren now and I say we're trying to train them, to give them the tools to be resilient to a world that we don't even know what it's going to be. The, the occupations that will be available to them we haven't even defined yet. And the occupations that were the big deals for my generation don't even exist anymore. So I think that these are really powerful ways that knowledge will hopefully guide transformation and evolution of the culture. Thank you.

So speaking of children, I guess what wisdom can you offer to parents when you know, we're surrounded by these ultra processed foods? There's more children obese now than ever before. So what wisdom can you offer to parents of young children who are now exposed to this?

Yeah. Thank you, Deepa. I think that we are all burdened by the feeling that our Society is weighted down. It's become heavy with trauma, with challenges, with anxiety, with fear. But then if I go back and I read Sapiens or I read books about the history of the human species, going back to Jacob Furnowski, who was a very powerful author of When I was a Professor in the 70s, it really changed my thinking structure, even the structure of scientific revolutions. We, we see that things do not change within human experience. In smooth curves, they come up to points of the nexus of change. You come to these pinch points where culture has to respond to a certain set of principles. And if it doesn't, then the species is imperiled. And so far the human species has found ways to navigate through those things. And I think that's where we are right now. We are at a point I am hopeful and it's my raison d', etre, I guess, is to continue to shine the hope that my grandchildren's generation will find solutions that we don't know about. These old dudes, of which I'm one, don't have the foggiest notion. We just sit and wring our hands and are worried about because the solutions that we would offer are a product of a time that's already gone and passed. The book has already been written and. But the future is unknown and the skills that the human being have are extraordinary if we can find the right ways to mobilize them. So to me, that is my optimistic message to parents. You need to continue to enrich your children. Give them confidence, give them a sense of esteem, give them the ability to see themselves in the future as really powerful assets in creating the new culture. And give them the feeling that you're learning from them so that they have the confidence to say, oh, why I'm not just like working under the thumb of a past society. I've got the opportunity to really create something great in myself and I'm capable of doing it now. That's certainly the ways we've tried to raise our grandchildren, their friends, it seems like, share that same in value proposition. So to me it's turning the negativity into a positivity.

So if you could just. If you only had five minutes to share a message to every doctor in the world, not that that will happen, but let's just say it did, and let's say it happens to a few thousand, what would you say to them? If you could advise them or say anything to them that you think would be most helpful and useful not only for their own careers, for their own ability to make a Living and for their patients and for humanity, what would you say to them?

Oh boy. So doctors out there, health practitioners out there, providers of care to others, you're living in the golden age. This is the golden age. It's never been better than it is right now. Never. Now why am I saying that? Because up until the last 10 years, all of what we thought about the trajectory of disease or health was deterministic. We had little to control. It was just an outcome of the bad or good luck of the draw when the sperm met the egg. And Mendel's laws in genetics kicked in. And if we had the genes for whatever of the 15,000 ICD codes, we got it. And that deterministic model is a very heavy, heavy philosophy. It doesn't take you anywhere other than heaviness. Now you can be reimbursed and you can be financially successful with that model. I'm not saying it doesn't lead to kind of an ability to make a living, but it doesn't lead to the personal satisfaction that you are really helping a person to actually achieve at a level that's consistent with their maybe personal objectives, which is not just the absence of disease. So this time in which we now see what has been renamed epigenetics, which when I went to school it was called embryology. Then it became developmental biology. Now it's be called epigenetics. Now let me just explain that quickly what I mean by that. So everyone knows that we are all formed from a single fertilized egg, every one of us from a single fertilized egg. 23 chapters, half of each chapter written by our biological mother, half by our biological father. In those chapters are thousands of stories that we genes. So that model is true. We're not going to dismiss that as true. But what we then recognize that. Hold it, that fertilized egg, that single egg now starts doing something in utero and out of it come hundreds of different cell types from the same genetic information, from the same book of life. Now how does that happen? I mean, come on, you've got the same story, but you've got all these cell types, you got the neural crest and you got all the different developmental stages of that that eventually becomes nine months later, oxygen breathing organism. So that we learned as embryology it was a magic box when I went to school and it was a magic process. But we didn't really understand exactly how that worked. Then with more progress, Waddington and others took it to say it's part of developmental biology that cells are developing from. The same genes, they develop, they develop their own unique personalities, their own unique characteristics, and they don't even look the same, even though they have the same library books inside their genes. Now how does that happen? Well, then we start to get into the piece parts of studying that and we find that there are ways that certain messages in our book of life are blocked and others are read. I call them paper clips and sticky notes. So you put paper clips on certain parts of your book of life. So in the liver cell, you're not going to read the chapters that are on the heart cell, you're only going to read the liver cells because you don't want your liver being the heart. And so you have all these messages that are being transcribed. I'm not going to get into the details of what we, how we know this works. It's still emerging, but we start to develop these differentiated cells and tissues and organs. Now that's all really exciting developmental biology. Now here's where the story really gets valuable for us today. This is the revolution, this is the new biology. This is why it's so great to be in this time. Because now we find actually that throughout all of your life, once you become an oxygen breathing organism outside the womb, that still some of that process is going on, that you're taking up signals from your environment, what you eat, who you interact with, environmental exposures, sleep, circadian rhythms, all these things are signals that are changing how your book is marked. So it's going to change the way that the book is read. And now you say, well, does that mean that you can take a book that has bad marks and take those bad marks off and put new marks on that gives you better reading? And the answer is yes. Now that has never, ever, and I'm emphasizing you notice with my voice, ever been understood in medicine until the last 10 years? So I was raised, educated in a time where if I would have said to my mentors what I've just said in that moment, at my high areas of education with world renowned leaders that were educating me, they would have said I either need a brain transplant or I need to drop out and go somewhere else. Because that was absolutely heretically not true. Not true. Not just partially not true, just not true. Don't even consider it. There's no changes that will occur to the way genes are expressed when you get older, after infancy. And now we know, whoa, how about Holocaust victims? How about the fact that these are even transgenerational that can be passed on these marks to the next generation? What about Then the exploration of autism and atopic disorders in children that we're seeing, asthma and so forth, respiratory diseases that are becoming such more prevalent now. We didn't change our genes. So how did that happen? How did we start developing these characteristics? Because we're imprinting our genes with different experiences that then has the epigenetic effect to modulate our phenotype, how we look, act and feel. But this road of life is two way. One way is the way to generation degeneration. The other way is for regeneration. And those pathways are available to all of us that are encoded within this epigenetic symphony. So now we're learning, all of us in healthcare, what we should be, our therapists, learning how to get people off the off ramp of degeneration and back on the on ramp of regeneration or rejuvenation or whatever word you want that are available in our biochemistry and our biology. We just have to turn those processes on. And how do you do it? Well, it's not necessarily with miracle drugs. It's with everyday stuff about relationships, eating, habit patterns, behaviors, belief systems, how we hang out, what we're exposed to, all these things, how we move, how we sleep. These are signals. They're small modulators that affect over long periods of time, systems that relate to the signaling of our genes that tell us how we look, act and feel. So when people talk about obesity genes, that's ridiculous. There are no obesity genes. They're genes that relate to the response to our environment that the body will try to protect itself from a hostile environment by gaining that energy to preserve what it might think is a threat that we then call obesity. So it's a multiphasic thing. It's all sorts of factors that are interwoven to give rise. All of which, by the way, if identified, can be modified without becoming a new person. We can recreate ourselves. Yeah.

What you just said is a completely complete paradigm shift. Because now we're thinking that every single interaction, every single day, every moment, with every energy source, every human being and everything that we consume on a daily basis is not a blueprint that we grew up with, where it's a one way street. So that, do you remember the time or the moment when that happened? When that realization, what were you doing? What came through your head when that realization came?

And you're like, wow, yeah, I think I can shiri. So I've always had this view that there was more plasticity in our body to reform itself than we were taking into account in medicine. But then one morning I read it was 2003. Yes, 2003. This article in an esoteric journal from a radiation biologist at. Let's see, it was Baylor, in which he and his postdoc were talking about the fact that they had taken an agouti mouse, a little mouse type that I had used in some of my studies. It is used for studying diabetes and obesity in an animal model. And they had given the pregnant agouti mouse, which is a small, fat, kind of brownish colored mouse, they had given it the mother, high doses of the B vitamins, folic acid, vitamin B12, pyridoxine, vitamin B6 and betaine. And I recall reading this article and just going, okay, here it is. This is the start of a new whole field of science. Because what happened was the litter of that mother that was supplemented with those nutrients in her first phase of pregnancy. The litter for the first time did not produce mice that looked like any other agouti mouse. They became called pseudo agouti mice. And the color of their fur was very different. You could see it immediately. But more interestingly, they didn't get fat and they lived 35% longer than their parents. So it was like, whoa. Now hold it just a second. Some signal went in at the right time to modulate how those genes were going to be expressed that gave rise to this outcome now, that gave rise to what we now call nutritional epigenomics. And this is Randy Girdle as the gentleman, and we eventually awarded him a Linus Pauling Award at the Institute for Functional Medicine for that discovery. It started the whole field rolling because it gave permission for other people in science to say, okay, well, I'm observing some of this too, but I didn't want to say it because I didn't want to be weird. But now it's out there. Now I feel comfortable in bringing this up now. There are thousands of studies that are being published since 2003. We see studies that are being done on post traumatic stress showing epigenetic modulation. So it's not just B vitamins. There are all these factors that relate now to signals that the body picks up. It could be environmental chemicals, it could be plasticizers. Those studies have been done. It could be soy isoflavones that influence epigenomics. I mean, we can go down the laundry list now. Literally thousands of things that have been shown to modulate not just in pregnancy, but postpartum in the adult animals and in now in humans. And now we have for the first time. And I knew this was eventually, as a laboratorian guy, I knew eventually we were going to come up with a convenient way of assessing these, what are called metastable EPI alleles, these ability of the genes to still take messages and to make epigenetic modification in the adult. And so now the tests are available for the first time. This so called biological sulfite methylation analyses. That's only one of the epigenetic processes, but it is a pretty important one and that can be conveniently measured now. And there are actually commercial laboratories that are providing that direct to consumer to start measuring epigenetic tags and then looking at the effect of making lifestyle changes and how you change your biological age based upon your methylation tags. So this is a revolutionary paradigm shift that's occurring in real time, that's not just esoteric and in the labs of a few weirdos like me, but it's in the culture now that we're seeing this dramatic change.

Yeah, I mean, I want to repeat that because I think there's a lot of very big words that are being used there. But I think for the consumer, they're not looking at, hey, I'm taking my vitamins. I'm actually changing my relationship with my genetics. I'm actually, when I'm taking my B vitamin supplement that I'm taking or vitamin C or my, you know, all the supplements I'm taking, I'm actually making a change in the way that my genetics are being expressed and that's what's going to change everything else. So that's huge.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I bet my answer will be very consistent if each one of us were asked that question. And I think my answer is that the perfect day is a day that we feel we're in rhythm, we're in sync, we're in harmony. And how do you quantify these things? My answer is every human being knows when that happens, but we can't put a metric exactly, but we know when we're in rhythm. It's those magic moments in which you just feel like every cell is pulsing in synchrony around your existence as in that time and space. And I think that the perfect day is able to extend that through the different components of the Day, different times, the circadian rhythms. And you have just like the seasons of the year, you've got the phases of the day and so you go through that rhythm and you, I guess you find that you've reintroduced yourself in a very real way to the joy of living. So I have a little. I know this sounds corny, but it's real, so I'm going to say it anyway. So boating is a hobby that my wife and I have enjoyed for many years because we live in the Pacific Northwest. There's beautiful waters to boat all the way up in Alaska. And so we've done a considerable amount of boating, like over 35,000 miles together in our boat. Often just us together and our animals, cat and dog on our boat somewhere. And we'll go for days, sometimes even weeks without seeing another boat or person. It's really being isolated. And so how does that relate to human emotion? Well, I use the term it's like falling in love every day because you get into the economy of language. You don't have to have a lot of lengthy discussions because you're in such synchrony and in such rhythm that you are expressing some kind of non verbal connection. That is the joy of living. You are just present for the moment. And that's one of the reasons I like boats, because it forces you into a smaller space and you get into that rhythm if you're with a person that you both want to enjoy your company. But I think it's an example of how one gets to the perfect day. You don't have to do it in boating, you can do it in anything. But it's finding that point where you are totally in bliss. You're in harmony and you know it's. And you're not working at it. You're in entropy, positive energy.

I just want to make an observation right now, like the sun is just shining on you.

Uh oh, and you too at the moment.

So I guess my question is, yesterday we were talking a lot about your travels. I know you said you've traveled over 6 million miles, is that correct?

Yeah.

So I guess in terms of healthcare models that you've observed in other countries, what would you say the main differences between those models versus what you see in the US and North America?

So unfortunately, as we were talking yesterday, I haven't had a chance to personally visit India. It's really my one kind of major bucket list deficiency that I haven't done. But I have done extensive travel in Asian countries and a lot of time in China over the years. And I had an experience in Beijing. This was about 15 years ago. I was invited to do a lecture tour in Chinese science research stations. So we started in Shenzhen, southern China, and we worked through these research stations. We ended up in Beijing. I had a whole entourage that were guiding me with media people. And when we got to Beijing, I was invited to give a lecture at the Beijing University Medical School and Medical center, which is arguably considered the top medical center in China. It's where foreign dignitaries, if they were ill, would go there. And so the chief of staff invited me to his office to have a meeting with his staff. It was funny, they served me a Coca Cola, which I thought was symbolic. It was very, very interesting. And so in this conversation, I was talking a little bit about the philosophy of functional medicine and so forth. I had obviously a translator, I don't speak Mandarin. And he became, I think, interested. So he then said through his interpreter to me that he would like his staff to come to a lecture, a three hour lecture that I was going to deliver tomorrow to his senior staff of the hospital and medical center. I thought, wow, okay, now the pressure's on. And so here we were the next day, several hundred people in there, and I started down this discussion about functional medicine and blah, blah, blah. Then we finished that up and then there was an awards ceremony after. And I had a gift. I gave him a gift and a little talk, and he graciously accepted it. And then he gave me a gift and he started to talk to me, obviously in Mandarin. My translator was standing there, but it went on and on and on. He actually went on for like five minutes. And I'm just listening and listening. I don't know what he's saying. And I'm thinking, I don't know what this is. I hope it's good. And then finally when he finished, I said to the interpreter, I said, so what did he say? He said, well, simply he said, you're the first person from the west he's ever seen that seems to understand traditional Chinese medicine. Because the models all build together, right? They share common features. You can get into the piece, parts of the mechanisms and the language and the vocabularies. But the conceptual framework of systems is shared among all traditional healing arts. And so when we built the architecture of functional medicine, it was around systems thinking, systems biology, and that's a universal conceptual framework, comes back to cultures that have had their own forms of healthcare for a lot longer than we have in the United States. So I think that my learnings over these travels is to seek out the places that are the universal truths. And there are these universal truths that go through time and history and culture and different lenses of perspectives, but they are ostensibly the same. They're the common denominators of what is truth. So that's kind of how I've tried to resonate and then translating it through my Western lens, right. Which my mechanistic background, but trying to always remember the context upon which that information is being delivered.

So what I want to ask you is so with Genius Recovery, my addiction recovery foundation, my tagline is, I want to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment, and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share it with the world. So I want to ask you about what do you know that has efficacy that has been proven to work for the craving state for people that are struggling with addiction? And I'll preface it with saying, you know, Johann Hari is kind of popularized the term, you know, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but it's connection. And in that context, I believe he meant, like, we both have a mutual friend, Gabor Mate, who talked about addiction and being very much a response to trauma. When I talk with you, though, and what we were talking about before we were filming was about connection with neurotransmitters, connection with the gut, connection with the human body. So there's the social connection, but there's also this, who we are as humans and what is going on internally with our health. And if we're very disconnected, it's very hard to feel joy, feel happiness. And so therefore, addiction becomes a solution to pain. And so I wanted to get your perspective, your insights. This could be all of you related to addiction, what can be done?

So I think first, you said it beautifully in your writings and your advocacy. How are you addicted to life? Let's start with that. How do you get addicted to life and life purpose and life's value and life's joy? So if you're not connected there, you will always find a connection. Right? So the connection could be a chemical, and that may. And there's any number of options of chemicals, right? And so. And some of those chemicals are reimbursed by insurance and given out to treat the lack of connection of life. So you start asking a question. What is the path that allows your body to get to a resting state? We often in medicine call it homeostasis. But homeostasis is a little bit of a misleading term because the most healthy and resilient person who's on center is not static. They're dynamic, they're homeodynamic, they're highly resilient. So they pick up stuff that doesn't fit well, but they can manage it by resilience versus being very brittle. And if you say stasis, meaning locked in, now, something comes from the outside, there's no capacity, no headspace to manage it. So now you seek out a remedy for that that will fill the gap somehow in search of a remediation of what is generally pain.

Right, Right, absolutely.

Either emotional or physical. So I think that the construct of remediation, of addiction, going from addiction to a chemical to addiction to life, has to do with how does the body find a homeodynamic state allows you to accommodate the uncertainties in your world without being so brittle that it breaks you. And this is why I think when I think of function, I've always used in my mind the metaphor of a hummingbird. We think of the hummingbird going to a flower to get the nectar. It looks like it's stationary at that flower. But if you actually do the time lapse photography, its wings are working really hard to keep it stationary. And if that hummingbird doesn't have the functional capability of fluttering its wings, it dies. It can't make its way. So it's not resilient. So I think our physiology is like a fluttering hummingbird. And I think of like what happens when you eat a candy bar. So I've given this for years as a little analogy in my doctor lectures. I said, so a candy bar is about an ounce, let's say about 30 grams of simple carbohydrate sugar. So let's say, just to make the argument simple, that it's 30 grams of glucose that will be absorbed into your bloodstream in 15 minutes. Okay, so that's all fine. Now, how much blood volume does a person have and what is the level of sugar in their blood? Under normal healthy conditions, it's about 100 milligrams per tenth of a liter. You have about two liters. And so you start saying, well, that means that the blood system has in the whole of the body something like 5 grams of sugar floating around. And now you've introduced in 15 minutes, 30 grams of sugar. Now your body doesn't like 30 grams of sugar floating around the blood. That wasn't designed to work that way. So what does it try to do? It tries to put it everywhere it can to get rid of it. So it pushes it into places that would normally not even be operational because there are exit emergency doors. We call them non insulin dependent tissues. Now it pushes them into the eyes, it pushes them into the kidneys, it pushes them into places in your brain that don't require insulin. And now you have glucose overload. Now it's the malnutrition of too much. And so we are living those kind of things. And now we say, well then the compensation I have for that, I'm going to take a chemical that will help to regulate that process so it will help get things put away more quickly. And so now we're on a diabetic drug, but we're not going to change our sugar. So that's an analogy to so much as it relates to addiction I think because now we have all these other things. It's not just glucose and insulin. We've got the neurotransmitters, the serotonin, the epinephrine, the dopaminergic neurons, we've got the gaba, we've got the. All these things that are regulating our mood and our actions and thoughts and memories and, and feeling of joy. And now we're trying to find holes to be plugged for those things that are unplugged. So we are looking around what are the molecule of choice? And that's why I'm a little bit, even with the nutritional psychopharmacology, I'm a little bit apprehensive to start there because I think you start there with where the person is disconnected and try to find how to get that. Because then you can start filling the holes. Because if you start filling the. Trying to fill the holes in a situation that's so disturbed you never can fill them all. It's an elusive game. Yeah.

And I will just say this too because there's. I've interviewed some very smart people in the field of addiction recovery. And many who were lives were completely out of control. And they're not doctors, they're not therapists, they're just humans that had to go through the struggles of their pains, their trauma, their disconnection. And they were in a state of reaction and, and destroying their lives. And then they somehow changed it and they got better and they became an example to other people. And I've never yet sat down in a few minutes or even a few hours and found the answer. I think the best we can do at a state like this, if there's anyone that's watching that is struggling is we can leave breadcrumbs, we can give explanations. But you know, when I'm trying to think of who Said it. When someone goes to a therapist seeking help, they're not looking for an explanation, they're looking for an experience. Right? When someone goes to a doctor seeking help, they're not looking for an explanation, they're seeking an experience. And so I think this conversation today is to lead people with ways to think about it and how to resource themselves, but to know that. And I think, yeah, if you just say, here's the one thing you do, it's not just one thing. There's a series of the ways that you set up your life. Just like eating a good meal doesn't make you healthy, having one good workout doesn't all of a sudden put you in great physical. It is a way of living. And so I think the reason that we're sitting here talking with you is to give people direct confidence, capability, clarity. I got those terms from my buddy Dan Sullivan, by the way, and how to think about approaching this. And what I take away from what you just said, and I really appreciate it, is that as smart as and intelligent as you are on supplementation and the human body and everything, that may not be the place to start. The point is, it's identifying where you're at, being aware that there is this pain. And I think pain is a messenger, and I think people will do anything to avoid it. If you're depressed, if you're lonely, if you're sad, if you're anxious, if you're addicted, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be out of that state. It's how you go about scratching the itch. That's the analogy I use. And take a look at what are ways that you can expand yourself, not continue to contract yourself. And we live in a world where we're constantly tempted with, like you were talking, sugar. As far as I know, sugar is the number one killer of people when it comes to substances, of things that result from it. And the second is tobacco, the third is alcohol, and the fourth is opiates in terms of substances that actually kill people. So there is no easy, simple answer for this. But the point is, that's why I call it an educational platform, because I want to find the things that work and have efficacy and share it with the world. So this will be definitely a continuing conversation, But I greatly appreciate the framework that you gave and the insight that you gave.

Well, let me respond if I can. I think you said many, many things that are very important and are deep. But one of the implications that I believe my takeaway from what you said is starts with a sense of worthiness, Because I think there are a lot of people who don't feel worthy actually of being in a state of bliss or joy or in rhythm, in harmony with the world. And because they have placed themselves in a situation of feeling a victim, or are they feeling injured or flawed or imperfect or they don't measure up or just like all sorts of vocabulary you could throw at this. But the first thing is for an individual to recognize that actually they're pretty magic. And in my life, I've never actually, I think, found a person that, as I got to know them, I wasn't really amazed at the inherent talents they had. They did something that I go, oh, man, I wish I could do that. That is really incredible. The problem is that we diminish and we marginalize so many of those things, and then we put other things is really important. And if that person doesn't have those, then their value has been depreciated. And so I think it starts with somehow recognizing that's one of the reasons that I have liked nutrition and lifestyle. Because here's a place a person can actually do something for themselves and they take charge. They feel that, once again, they're not a victim, that they can be an owner of their body. That's one of the reasons we did Big Bold Health is I wanted to teach people how to own their immune system rather than being a victim of their immune system. And so that concept of body ownership and then saying I'm worthy of really having a function, that's going to express it the way that I would like to be living the rest of my life. And then what do I need to get there? And then who do I need to hang out to make this happen? Because if I'm hanging out, maybe with the same people who are reinforcing these bad habits, maybe that's never going to get me there. Right, right.

You said a lot. And I'll just. I'll have to say this to put a kind of a cherry on top of that is I think for so many addicts, myself included, just living in a life of shame is. Shame is the term you're sick. As your secrets or silent battles is the hardest battles to fight when someone is in deep shame. Like guilt is I feel bad. Shame is I am bad. And when you have that fundamental belief about yourself, how do you take care of a person that you think is bad? And so to esteem yourself or to identify the things that you're worthy to get to that state of bliss, because you talk about, you know, say, Being the blissful state. Well, the opposite of addiction is connection. Well, the best place to get to is the state of flow, like would refer to or is that blissful state. And I think, you know, absolute despair and destruction and just, you know, there was a member of the band Guns N Roses.

Oh yeah.

So their first album that made them famous was Appetite for Destruction. And I've thought about those three words where you have an appetite for destruction. And when the addict mind is totally hooked into that, they have an appetite for destruction. And so they will eat things that are bad for them, they will do behaviors that are bad for them. And so to your other point, you know, the appetite for just loving your life and joy and bliss and connection, I mean, I think that's, that's a place to aspire to. So those things that even get you a little bit of it in the beginning, you may not feel it. Just like with working out. I often say to people, addicts, starting out just like working out, you got to work through the burn. You're going to be sore in the beginning. You're completely changing a life. That addiction is a solution. It's the solution to pain. It works in the moment. Getting drunk, watching porn, gambling, gaming, work, food. I mean, all of the different ways that people can, you know, seek more woo and less ah, but the woo that they seek gives them ah, you know, so it's finding other forms of woo that don't have the ah along with it. And so anyway, that's. That's some stuff to think about. But I will now pass it on to my other very smart friends sitting around.

I would like to change the topic a little bit. You mentioned a little bit about Big Bold Health, which is your company that focus on a different way of thinking about, you know, changing longevity. So the two things I want to touch on is you mentioned a little bit about stress, and I think stress is a big word because people think about stress as a bad thing. But I think stress can be looked at as a way to adapt. And the word adaptation and resiliency that you discuss, and I think it ties in very well to the concept of, of immune health and how you're changing. I think you mentioned yesterday of a really huge study that you found out recently about how we can change longevity and what is really impacting the way our body is able to adapt to stress and create some really amazing ways of balance. So maybe you can really talk a little bit about that.

Oh boy, that's a fun one. That. Yeah, that's got a Lot of stuff to unpack on that. So if we really look at stress as Hans Selye brought it over from physics to physiology, as a term, it was defined as a series of variables. It influenced the physiology of an animal in such a way as it modified the function of its neuroendocrine system, right? So it changed its hormones, it changed how the animal was responding to its environment. We call it flight or fright. And so you get into this situation where the body is on either an orange or red light, it's on alarm, it's poised for defense. Now the concept of stress in that process is a graded thing because you can go from an impending mortal injury that is terminal, that would really be stressful. Or it may be just kind of like, I'm gonna have to give a talk and I don't like standing up in front of an audience. But once I get up there and get going, that stress actually made me better because it cleared my mind. So there is, there's a gradation of how stress, or those hormones that are associated with stress influence your physiology. And this is the case with almost all hormones. They have a curvilinear effect. At a low level, they may be agonistic and produce positive, and at a high level, they're antagonistic, they may produce an adverse effect. So stress as a phenomenon is actually a positive thing until it moves into distress. And so this really relates to, I notice many of us are wearing devices, an OURA ring. And so our OURA ring, one of the things it measures is what's called heart rate variability. Now, heart rate variability is a surrogate marker for looking at the balance between the activation to the sympathetic nervous system to stress versus the deactivation. Because life is a two way street. For every activation, you got a deactivation. So the deactivation is to the parasynthetic nervous system. And when those are balanced, you have high resilience. You take on the excitement of giving the talk, you give the better talk. And then you come off the stage and you feel really good about yourself and you relax. That's really good. Resilience and parasympathetic sympathetic balance versus working yourself up all night with a sympathetic overload. You can't sleep, you get into the talk and you're just wired. And then you come out and you're exhausted. That's a different type of stress. It's the same hormones, but played out under a different set of circumstances. So when we use the OURA ring or other devices, we're measuring HRV heart rate variability, which is a surrogate marker for measuring the balance between that sympathetic activity and the parasympathetic other road on the highway. And when it's really in balance, we have a high HRV and when it's imbalanced we have a low hrv. So it's like a guidepost. It's not a definitive like you were taking blood samples and measuring hormones all day long, but it gives you some guideposts about where you're living your life. Are you living your life in the fast lane all the time and you don't have a slow lane or are you capable of balancing those? Now that HRV as a measure from the oura ring coupled with other things like pulse rate and oxygen levels and so forth are tied, believe it or not, to your immunological function. We were the first people to actually do a little clinical, I would say observational study with oura ring looking at the effect, this was in early stages of COVID of what happens when a person starts having an immunological challenge. And I think I put the first video on social media, using myself as an example, showing what happens when you get into an immunological challenge to your HRV and your other variables that we would say, well, this is a fitness ring. Yes, it's an immune fitness ring because your immune system is regulating all those functions. I often ask the question what. What organ in your body is in every other organ and it's only the immune system? Well, actually the nervous system as well, those two. And they are intercommunicating the nervous and immune system. The heart is not in the lungs and the kidney's not in the pancreas, but the immune system is everywhere. It's in the muscles, it's in the brain. And why? Because the immune system is the principal sentinel system that's assessing what's going on outside the body and communicating inside the body and direct communication with the nervous system. And it's going to tell the body how it should respond to the situation you find yourself bliss or non bliss. So the immune system is a guide, is a gateway into understanding how your whole body is going to respond to the environment you find yourself. And so when we look now I'm kind of departing a little bit from the theme, but when we look at the Americans response to SARS CoV2 virus, we had the worst outcome of any developed country in the world going into COVID 19 and into intubation and even death. Why, when we are the medically most sophisticated country, because we had the poorest immune systems. And that was an aha. Only now are the medical experts saying, well, you know, there was something about our culture that it wasn't just that we were older, but, no, we were not older than other countries in terms of mean average life age. It was that our immune systems, particularly the first line of defense, which is our innate immune system, was just not up to snuff. And why is the innate immune system so important? Because it's on all of our barrier tissues. It's on the lungs, it's on the respiratory tract, it's on our gut. The microbiome is direct communication with it all the time. So if you have a disturbed diet with a disturbed microbiome, you have a disturbed innate immune system. And now you're less able to have your immune system doing the work. It has no headspace to manage and accommodate these other things. All these fit together in a different model. And that's the model that we've been working on, because it's not like, well, you seem to be fine. We did a blood test and we don't see anything. Well, no, you weren't asking the right questions about the function of your immune system. So, yeah, that's great.

Let's talk about that study, the study that you recently found for Big both health.

Yeah. So what we did, and I want to emphasize the pilot study, it's only 50 individuals that were apparently healthy when we recruited them in the study, they were between ages of 32 and 76, half women and half men. And we wanted to know what the age of their immune system was when they started off. And we knew their age and birthdays that could be even if they cheated, we could find it out, but we didn't know the age of their immune system. But we have tools that allow us to actually determine the age of a person's immune system. We use special chip that was developed for us by the Illumina company that measures 850,000 different gene sites in the immune system that relate to how the immune system has been epigenetically tagged to function in response to its environment. So we did a study of all those people to begin with baseline. This is what is called an N of one study. Or the person is going to compare themselves to themselves, which for doing studies on lifestyle, is a pretty good methodology because it's hard unless you put a person in a metabolic ward to do controlled studies on people. And so it's better to do studies on a person against themselves and then aggregate the data using machine learning. To see what it tells you than doing controlled studies that everybody does the exact same thing. That's not real life. So this was an N of one study. We didn't change a person's diet or lifestyle. Whatever they were doing, they should do it. No departure. Only thing is that we wanted to take four capsules a day of this high polyphenol containing supplement that comes from this ancient food called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. That's a 4,000 year old food that we knew has a lot of positive impact on the immune system. So we wanted to see what impact that would have on their immune system aging over 90 days of consuming that product. Very simple. And so we knew exactly what the composition of the product was, we knew the food it came from, and we knew the starting point of that individual's immune system. So three months they took that daily. We did pill counts, measured compliance and all that kind of stuff. And 47 of the 50 people successfully completed the trial. And when we then did the machine learning, we had over a terabyte of data. So it was a lot of data from this study. But when we analyzed the data, lo and behold, we found out that those people that started off with an immune system that was already aged, which was about a third of the group relative to their age and birthdays, their immune system was older than their age and birthdays, that they had a 47% reduction in the rate of aging of their immune system after 90 days by sending different signals to their immune cells. Because what people don't understand is our immune system. The cells we have today will not be the cells we have in our body 90 or 120 days from now. Our immune system is constantly turning over. So the question is, when the immune system is turning over and being replaced by new cells, are they as good, better or worse than the cells they're replacing? And most often, as people go through lives, their immune cells are worse. They're carrying bad messages, they're carrying bad experiences. There are things like zombie cells that we've heard about that are inflammatory producing cells. Cells. So we want to get rid of those. That's what we call immunorejuvenation. We want to replace them with these naive cells that are waiting for good new messages. And that is speaking into the bone marrow, because the bone marrow is what produces those cells. And they go out in the body and they develop now this new young personality that can be more resilient and more capable of managing daily living. Awesome.

Amazing. Thank you for that. This meeting or interview is the intersection of two very important worlds for me. So I'm sitting with two people I admire and have learned a lot from. So I can't help but ask this question on behalf of the practitioners that are watching this and us that are here is I don't think functional medicine has a clinical challenge. I think we've proven or the years and decades that what we do works. However, what I'd love to know from both of you is how do we solve the marketing and messaging challenge so that people are breaking down our doors wanting to work with us because we do have a solution that can create not only an immediate impact, but a multi generational impact and change the trajectory of healthcare?

I think that's a really, really important question. And you know, maybe I'm the proverbial optimist and the proverbial, you know, cuff half full individual, but I feel that that is really starting to happen, that that shift in the paradigm is really starting to happen. It's a consumer driven phenomenon. It's going to be bottom up, it's not top down. And I think you can really see it happening so strongly now with the kind of disenfranchisement with traditional medicine that's occurring and where people are having backups and seeking out Internet guidance and looking for other experts with other skill levels. So my feeling is that this is a very, very remarkable time where I think some seismic changes are going to occur just because we've kind of filled up the model and we're not, it's diminishing returns. We're spending more and more in the traditional disease model for less and less on the return. And then we see this new biology that's coming out is really saying, well, hold up that biology that we grew up on, all around pathology, it's useful, but that's really not where the future is taking us. The new biology has much more, greater opportunities for people to be more in charge, to be more in control. So I think we are witnessing this change right now. Sometimes we just have to stay the course. And I think that's what's happening right now.

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, well, since you brought up a marketing question, and I always have to preface this with saying that I learned marketing when I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards starting in 1990. So I had to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy. And when you have to figure out how to sell something nobody really wants, it's like, well, I can't wait till the cat pees in the corner so I can call a carpet cleaner. You have to figure out how do you frame it. And so what I learned, even going back, I eventually wrote a book called what's In It For Them. Whereas you can't make it about yourself, you can't make it about how smart you are. Even though people want to know you're qualified, people want to know you care, you have to make it about them. And so to Jeff's point about personalized medicine, that's where the messaging comes in. You have to make it not about you, you have to make it about them. And that's where people are. Like personal branding. Well, personal branding is usually about you. It's not about the patient, it's not about the client. It's not about the customer. And so what is marketing? Marketing is anything you put in front of somebody is marketing. And only the hungriest fish are going to snap at the crappiest bait. You have to use something that piques their interest. The interest has to be there. Of course, you can't evoke someone to care about something they don't care about. However, if you focus on what is the problem and you have a solution, because most money is made transforming other people's bad news into good news. So if you feel bad, you're going to seek out someone that says, hey, I've got a solution to this. So there's this line that people don't buy from you because they understand what you do. People buy from you because they feel understood. So there's a lot of stuff that Jeff could say, me not being a doctor, that I would have no clue on, I don't have the depth of knowledge. So if he was speaking in a way that you guys as doctors would understand, to me as a layman, I'd be like, what are they even talking about? But when it's presented to me in a way to where it's like, I understand it and it's focused on what Joe is looking for or what Deepa's looking for or what Cherie's looking for, when anything's. Because all day long, we all buy things from people that we don't know anything about their expertise, but they present it to us in a way. Why do we choose this over that? Right. Because the one we chose somehow resonated with us and they framed it in a particular way or they just happened to be the first person there when we were struggling with the problem. So sometimes proximity helps. But void of that, to all the practitioners, to all the doctors that really have a better option, a better solution. You need to message that. And one of the best ways to message that is through the success of your own clients, the success of your own patients. And if they say something or share something that is valuable, then capture that, reiterate that, tell the stories, show the evidence of success. Like my friend, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Social proof. If you have social proof, you should be. This is going to sound so funny because I got this years ago and my brain remembers dirty jokes and quotes. So it was a sugar packet of all things, which the substance is not the point, because sugar is not good for you. So it said advertising. There was a caption that said, he who has something to sell and whispers in a well is not as apt to make the shiny dollar as a guy who climbs the tree and hollers. So, you know, I remember that was.

On a sugar packet.

It was on a sugar packet. The caption said that. And I remember, remember that.

Cotelean sugar.

Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like a weird form of a fortune cookie, right? This thing was on there. I was like, yeah, if you've got something to say, you got to share it. So we're doing an interview here, we're doing a podcast. Why? Because we're putting information in front of people. So if this leads to some domino in your life, if this leads to some trajectory, how do you package and how do you share the story? Some people are very anti marketing, mainly because there's a lot of scumbag marketers. There's a lot of people that take advantage and rip people off of that sort of stuff. So the key is that think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling. And if you tell a better story, you're going to enroll people and things like that. So that's. Learn about it. The main reason most people don't do well with marketing is they underestimate the value and importance of it. But if you got married, if. If you have any friends, you did something that attracted them to you. So that's how I would think about it.

So, Joe, thanks for that. I'm curious if there's any resource or tool that you can direct practitioners to. To become better messengers. Because that's not something we're taught in school. It's not something we get in any of the trainings that we do. And I find that people continue to accumulate knowledge and training, but it dies inside of them if they can't articulate the better that they can provide to their potential clients. So I'd love to know if there's any tools or resources that you can direct people to that might be helpful.

Well, thank you. And you totally set this up for me to share. I would say for my own things that I've done for people. I've had the I Love marketing podcast since 2010. So if you want just education for free, just listen to the ilovemarketing.com my book, what's in it for Them? Is a great book that really focuses on that. And here's the other thing. I would say look at people that are ethical, that are doing good work in the world, that are helping their patients, that you admire, and become friends with them and find out what they're doing and get together with other smart people that are putting good information out to the world, that are having success with it and collaborate. And collaboration is different than a joint venture. Collaborate means you create something together and it becomes something better that you can't do on your own. That doesn't mean just promote someone else's stuff. So I'm all for promotion. I'm all for selling things. But it's doing it ethically. It's doing it in a way that totally creates value. And there's great resources out there. So those are some of mine. So thank you for that. Appreciate it. Okay, well, first off, it's been awesome just having this conversation with all of you and I wanted to just get from you any final suggestions. Famous last words about. And I know that this goes. So let's think of this as part one. I know you're going to come to my Genius Network annual event. We're going to do another interview and if anyone's watching this, you'll meet all of us there. So what didn't we ask you that we should have that you'd like to mention? And I'd love for you to share resources on how people could find out more about you and continue on this journey of just embedderment.

Yeah, I think that you didn't ask it directly. Maybe it was implied. And that is why would one want to spend the last portion of their professional career on understanding how to personalize the immune system and make it available to people? You know, there's many other things one could do at 78 years of age. And why that? For me, it's the technology is really changing to understand the immune system. In part, it's related to the impetus that came out of SARS cov2. Everyone suddenly got re engaged in understanding better about the immune system. It's like what happened during HIV aids. I was involved with that whole period of time too, in the 80s and that was a big revolution in immunity. And then it kind of went quiet for a couple of decades and then it now has resurged as a area where we're learning all sorts of new things, but we're not translating those new things over into consumers. So there's a real interesting opportunity, I think, to make more consumer available the things that we're learning out of understanding how to own the immune system and not become a victim of it. So that's a. And because the immune system has its primary place, it's kind of as a root cause of so many downstream things because we say inflammation. Well, where does inflammation come from? It comes from the immune system that's not at home. It's feeling under threat. So all this to me ties together with what is probably the final chapter of my professional career and then to pass this baton forward because I think if we can personalize immune health in such a way that people can have recipes and programs that they can employ in their lives, it will really give them much more immune resilience. They're going to sleep better, think better, act better, not get sick as frequently, have lower inflammation, have more energy. I mean, it cuts across so many different organ system functions as well as live longer. So that's probably the question you didn't ask, but it was important applied probably in the question.

So if people want to find more about Jeff Bland, Big Bold Health, some of your supplements, all the things you've created, where do they go?

Yeah, they can go to bigboldhealth.com obviously or they can go to jeffbland.com or they can go to plminstitute.org which is. We have hundreds of videos of all sorts of topics from topic leaders. This is more health practitioner focused, but a lot of good content over the last 10 years and so any one of those places. But I would really encourage people to take a look at what's going on now with Big Bold Health as it relates to the development of this Himalayan tartery, buckwheat agriculture, this regenerative agriculture that we brought back to the United States for the first time, actually producing regenerative approved product and reintroducing this crop and food back into the American culture. It's probably the most immune packed food we can get today and give it a whirl. I think it's fun. There's many different things our food lab has pulled together in terms of recipes, menu guides, savory foods, dessert foods, putting in shakes, all sorts of different applications and feedback we're getting from people is, man, oh man, it really makes a difference in the way that I feel. So give it a whirlwind.

Awesome. And we will put the show notes and links to where you can find out more information about Jeff and all of these fine doctors that are here today. And then you'll have those resources. And before we wrap, how do people find out more about you?

The ong institute.com is the website and I have Instagram. Dr. Cherie Ong.

You can learn more about the work that Deepa and I do at become free proof.com for the clinical side. And if you're interested in mentorship or coaching, you can go to perfectpracticementorship.com and online, you can find me at the Satchin Patel on Instagram and on Facebook you can search Satchin Patel.

So can I just say quickly, Deepa Sachin, Joe Shiri, this has been such a privilege to share this time with you. And this is a life worth living when you can hang out with people like you. So thanks. Really been fun. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here.

Do it now.

Come on. Thank you. Watch them.