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The Health Pulse
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Episode 146 | The Normal A1C Trap
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Your fasting glucose is normal. Your HbA1c is comfortably below the prediabetes threshold. Everything looks fine—but how much insulin is your pancreas producing to keep those numbers there?
In this episode of The Health Pulse, we explore one of the biggest blind spots in metabolic testing: insulin resistance can develop while conventional glucose markers remain normal. Instead of asking only whether glucose is elevated, we look at the metabolic effort required to control it.
We begin with the two tests most people know: fasting plasma glucose and HbA1c. HbA1c provides a useful estimate of average glycemic exposure over the preceding months, but an average can conceal very different glucose patterns. Fasting glucose has a different limitation: it's a single snapshot influenced by factors including sleep, stress, illness, hormones, and the dawn phenomenon.
Then we introduce the missing variable: insulin.
During the early stages of insulin resistance, skeletal muscle, liver, and other tissues may require increasingly larger insulin signals to manage glucose. Pancreatic beta cells can compensate by producing more insulin, creating a state of normoglycemic hyperinsulinemia—normal glucose maintained at the cost of elevated insulin.
This is why we examine fasting insulin and its limitations. Insulin assays and reference ranges aren't as standardized as glucose testing, and a single measurement still provides only a snapshot. We explain how HOMA-IR, which combines fasting glucose and fasting insulin, can provide additional information about basal insulin resistance while still requiring appropriate clinical context.
Next, we stress-test the system with the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). A conventional two-hour glucose result can miss important dynamics occurring earlier in the test. Adding insulin measurements can reveal how quickly and how aggressively the pancreas responds to the glucose challenge—including compensatory insulin responses that may precede overt glucose intolerance.
Finally, we explore continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). Research in people without diabetes is beginning to reveal meaningful differences in glucose exposure and variability even among individuals who would otherwise appear metabolically healthy. But CGMs can also create unnecessary anxiety when every transient rise is interpreted as damage.
A glucose reading of 145 mg/dL after a meal doesn't tell the entire story. How high glucose rises, how long it remains elevated, how frequently the pattern occurs, what caused it, and how efficiently glucose returns toward baseline all provide important context.
The goal isn't to chase a perfectly flat glucose line. It's to understand your metabolic response.
By combining tools such as HbA1c, fasting glucose, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, appropriately selected glucose-tolerance testing, and targeted CGM use, we can ask a much more informative question than “Is my blood sugar normal?”
How hard is my metabolism working to keep it normal?
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Welcome And The Hidden Engine
NicoletteWelcome to the Health Pulse, your go-to source for quick, actionable insights on health, wellness, and diagnostics. Whether you're looking to optimize your well-being or stay informed about the latest in-medical testing, we've got you covered. Join us as we break down key health topics in just minutes. Let's dive in.
RachelWelcome, learner, to the deep dive. So um imagine this scenario for a second. You go to your doctor, right?
MarkRight, for your annual checkup.
RachelExactly. And they give you a high five because your fasting blood sugar is, you know, a perfect 90.
MarkWhich feels great.
RachelIt feels amazing. You feel invincible, you just assume your internal engine is running flawlessly. But the thing is, beneath the surface, your pancreas could be secretly redlining.
MarkOh, absolutely. Just working in overdrive.
RachelRight. Pumping out just massive amounts of hormones just to maintain that illusion of health. Because we all just want to see those neat little numbers in the normal column and then move on with our lives.
MarkAaron Powell Yeah, we rely entirely on these static snapshots, you know, to gauge our metabolic health. And in doing that, we are completely missing the dynamic, hidden struggles that are actually happening at the cellular level.
NicoletteYeah.
MarkBy the time that dashboard light actually turns red, I mean the engine has been silently tearing itself apart for years.
RachelAaron Powell Which is really the core mission of our deep dive
Why Normal A1C Can Mislead
Racheltoday. We are unpacking this genuinely eye-opening September 2026 article from Quick Lab Mobile.
MarkSuch a good piece.
RachelIt really is. It's titled, Your A1C Can Be Normal While Your Glucose Metabolism Isn't. And we are going to look at how you, the listener, might get a completely clean bill of health on paper while your body is actually just quietly struggling to maintain equilibrium.
MarkYeah, we are going to connect the dots between, well, really the entire spectrum of metabolic tests. So from A1C and fasting glucose all the way to fasting insulin and continuous monitors.
RachelAaron Powell Because looking at them alone is dangerous.
MarkExactly. Looking at these tests in isolation creates massive blind spots. So to give you a complete picture of your metabolic engine, we really need to understand how they interact and you know, critically what they fundamentally fail to measure when they're just used
A1C And Fasting Glucose Blind Spots
Markall by themselves.
RachelAaron Powell Okay, so let's untack this. Let's start with the two most famous tests in the standard metabolic toolkit. The ones you almost certainly get at your yearly physical rate.
MarkAaron Powell The classics hemoglobin A1C and fasting plasma glucose.
RachelYeah, exactly. Let's look at A1C first. So this is the one that gives us a two to three month average of glucose exposure. And this is based on the glycation of red blood cells.
MarkAaron Powell Right. How much sugar is physically stuck to those cells.
RachelAaron Powell Right. And the standard says an A1C below 5.7% is normal. But an average is just well, it's just that. It's an average.
MarkAaron Powell Which can be really misleading.
RachelAaron Powell Totally. Think of a student taking a class, right? You have one student who quietly gets steady C's all semester on every single quiz. Okay. Then you have another student who completely bombs half the tests with wild F's, just terrible. But then they pull all nighters and ace the other half with perfect A's.
MarkA very stressful semester.
RachelExactly. But at the end of the semester, they both get a C on their report card, but their daily experiences of that class, you know, the sheer volatility of it, were wildly different. A1C is basically just giving us that final report card grade.
MarkThat is a perfect analogy. The averaging mechanism of the A1C inevitably masks glucose variability. I mean, it completely obscures the massive post-meal spikes that one person might be experiencing daily.
RachelAaron Powell So it just smooths it all out.
MarkAaron Powell Yeah. It cannot show the peak height of a post-meal rise or how long the glucose stays elevated or even how efficiently it returns to baseline. It just misses all of that. Wow. And beyond that, there are strict biological limitations to the test itself. Because it's tied to red blood cell turnover.
RachelAaron Powell Well, what does that mean exactly?
MarkAaron Powell Well, if someone has, say, subclinical anemia or altered iron states or even early stage kidney issues, the actual lifespan of their red blood cells changes.
RachelAaron Powell Oh, I didn't even think about that.
MarkRight. So if the red blood cells live longer than average, they're floating around longer, so they accumulate more sugar, that falsely elevates the A1C. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
RachelMaking you look worse than you are.
MarkExactly. And conversely, if they turn over too quickly, the A1C looks artificially perfect. It completely misrepresents the actual glucose exposure in your tissues.
RachelAaron Powell That is wild. Which I guess brings us to the other major test: fasting plasma glucose. This is the one where you wake up, you haven't eaten for at least eight hours, and they draw your blood to see how well your liver regulates glucose when you aren't eating.
MarkYes. The standard fasting test.
RachelAnd the standard cutoff for normal there is below 100 milligrams per deciliter. But I mean, if the A1C is a three-month average, fasting glucose is just like a single isolated frame of a very long movie.
MarkThat's exactly what it is. A snapshot. By the time that morning blood draw happens, your liver and pancreas have had eight, maybe ten hours to just restore your circulating glucose to an acceptable level.
RachelThey've been working all night.
MarkRight. During an overnight fast, your liver is actively engaged in gluconeogenesis. It's literally producing glucose to keep your brain and your tissues fueled.
RachelAnd insulin is involved here too, right?
MarkYep. Insulin is supposed to act as a break on the liver to keep this production within a tight, you know, physiological range. But taking a measurement at 8.0 am completely ignores the heavy lifting required to get there. It's just the end result. Exactly. And furthermore, fasting glucose is highly susceptible to acute non-metabolic variables.
RachelLike what? Stress.
MarkStress is a huge one. If your sleep architecture was fragmented, or say you're experiencing a heightened cortisol awakening response, which is often called the dawn phenomenon, your liver will actually dump extra glucose into the blood.
RachelJust to help you wake up and deal with the stress.
MarkRight. So you might go to the doctor and have a fasting glucose of 105, flagging you as pre-diabetic purely because of a stress response from a bad night of sleep.
RachelNot because your actual baseline metabolic machinery is broken.
MarkExactly.
RachelOkay. So if fasting glucose is just the baseline after an eight-hour cleanup and A1C highs all those massive swings, neither test actually tells us how hard the body is working to achieve those numbers.
Fasting Insulin Shows The Effort
RachelNot at all. So if the blood sugar looks normal, but the body is exhausting itself to keep it there, we have to look at the hormone that's actually doing that heavy lifting. We have to look at insulin demand.
MarkYes. Insulin is the definitive measure of physiological effort. I mean, it is the hormone tasked with pushing circulating glucose out of the bloodstream and into your muscle and fat cells.
RachelSo it's the mover.
MarkRight. Consider two hypothetical people who both receive a highly celebrated fasting glucose result of 92 milligrams per deciliter.
RachelOkay, so they look identical on paper.
MarkExactly. Now person A maintains that 92 requiring a basal insulin level of, say, three microinternational units per milliliter. So they are highly insulin sensitive. It takes very little effort.
RachelBarely a whisper of insulin.
MarkYes.
RachelYeah.
MarkBut person B requires an insulin level of 18 to hold that exact same glucose level.
RachelWow. Okay. So person B is churning out six times as much insulin just to get the same 92 on the test.
MarkAaron Powell Exactly.
RachelAnd that's because person B's cells are basically full, right? We are talking about cellular energy toxicity. Like the muscle and liver tissues have accumulated ectopic fat, that lipid overflow, and they are essentially putting up a no-vacancy sign to the insulin signal. So the glucose just can't get in easily.
MarkThat's spot on. The pancreas detects that the glucose isn't clearing right. So it compensates by pumping out exponentially more insulin just to force the door open.
RachelJust shoving it in there.
MarkYeah. And this creates a deeply problematic state known as normoglycemic hyperinsulinemia.
RachelNormal sugar, high insulin.
MarkExactly. The glucose remains normal, but the insulin is chronically high. And the liver and the skeletal muscle often develop this resistance at different rates, which is interesting.
RachelOh, really? How does that work?
MarkWell, if the muscle becomes resistant first, postmeal carbohydrates get diverted to the liver. And the liver just converts them into fat, which then drives hepatic insulin resistance.
RachelThis vicious cycle.
MarkIt really is. And this immense compensatory effort by the pancreas can persist for a decade, a full decade before the beta cells finally exhaust themselves and glucose levels actually rise into the prediabetes range.
RachelOkay, wait. Stop. If this hidden strain precedes actual high blood sugar by 10 years and fasting insulin is like the canary in the coal mine, I really have to ask. Why isn't this just a standard diagnostic test for everyone? I mean, why are we waiting for the glucose to literally break before we measure the hormone that's trying to fix it?
MarkAaron Powell It's a great question, and it's incredibly frustrating. The clinical reluctance really stems from a lack of standardization.
RachelAaron Powell How so?
MarkAaron Powell Well, there is no universally agreed upon pathological cutoff for fasting insulin. And more importantly, the physical insulin assays, like the actual chemical tests used by different laboratories, they vary significantly in their calibration.
RachelAaron Powell So my 10 at one lab might be a 14 at another.
MarkAaron Powell Exactly. Additionally, insulin secretion is pulsatile and it's highly volatile. It has a half-life of just a few minutes in the blood.
RachelOh wow, that's fast.
MarkYeah. So your fasting level on a Tuesday can be vastly different from your level on a Thursday, depending on what you ate for dinner, your physical activity the day before, or even acute psychological stress. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
RachelSo it bounces around a lot.
MarkRight. And that volatility makes it difficult to use as a rigid diagnostic criteria the way we use glucose.
HOMA-IR Made Simple
RachelAaron Powell But, and the article points this out, there is a really powerful way to synthesize these two volatile numbers to get a much clearer picture of your baseline health, and that's HMAIR.
MarkAaron Powell Yes. The homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance.
RachelWhich is a mouthful.
MarkIt is. But it essentially maps the feedback loop between the liver's glucose production and the pancreas's insulin production.
RachelAnd the math here is actually incredibly simple if you have your lab results at home. You just take your fasting glucose in milligrams per deciliter, multiply it by your fasting insulin, and divide that total by 405.
MarkRight. The utility of home I is that it makes that invisible relationship visible.
RachelBut why 405? That seems super random.
MarkIt does seem random, but that constant denominator of 405 was derived mathematically by the original researchers back in the 1980s. Okay. They analyzed healthy, young, highly insulin-sensitive subjects and found that if you multiply a normal fasting glucose by a normal fasting insulin, it reliably yielded a product right around 405.
RachelOh, I see. So dividing by 405 normalizes the index to a baseline of one.
MarkExactly. So a person with a glucose of 90 and an insulin of four has a HOMA IR of 0.88, which means they are highly sensitive.
RachelBut someone with that same glucose of 90 but an insulin of 16, they have a HOMA IR of 3.5, which indicates significant baseline insulin resistance.
MarkAaron Powell Precisely. It reveals what the glucose alone hides.
RachelOkay, so what does this all mean for us? Because we've only really mapped the baseline
OGTT And The Missing Peak
Rachelhere. We've basically figured out how much fuel the car burns while it's just idling in the driveway.
MarkYeah, that's a good way to put it.
RachelBut a fasting state doesn't tell us if the engine can actually handle the highway. Like to see how the system processes fuel, we have to actually stress the system.
MarkWhich is the explicit purpose of the oral glucose tolerance test or OGTT.
RachelThe dreaded sugary drink test.
MarkThat's the one. You fast overnight, you take a baseline blood draw, and then you consume a standardized solution containing exactly 75 grams of pure glucose. Yeah, not fun. Then the clinic waits two hours and checks your blood again. The diagnostic standard dictates that a normal result at that two-hour mark is below 140 milligrams per deciliter.
RachelBut okay, I feel like this two-hour window creates a massive blind spot too. I mean, if you only check at hour zero and hour two, you are completely missing the climax of the metabolic result.
MarkYou're missing the whole show.
RachelRight. Because I imagine the danger isn't just whether you successfully hit 140 at the end, it's the total area under the curve, right? Like how high you spiked and how long you stayed there. Because the longer the glucose lingers in the blood at high concentrations, the more time it has to, you know, glycate proteins, induce oxidative stress, and cause endothelial damage to the blood vessels. Right.
MarkThe area under the curve is precisely what dictates the vascular damage. Glucose might rocket up to 200 during that first hour and then just crash back down to 120 by the time the second hour hits.
RachelAnd the doctor just says, hey, 120, you're fine.
MarkExactly. That two-hour snapshot completely misses that massive excursion. And if we look at the insulin response during this test like actually measuring insulin at 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes, we see an even deeper pathology.
RachelWhat do we see?
MarkWell, a healthy metabolism features a really robust first phase insulin response. Okay. The pancreas releases pre-stored insulin immediately upon sensing the glucose, capping the spike early. But in early metabolic dysfunction, this first phase response blunts or it disappears entirely.
RachelOh wow. So the body just misses the initial window to control the glucose, the blood sugar skyrockets, and then the pancreas panics. It panics.
MarkIt relies entirely on a delayed, sluggish second phase response where it has to synthesize new insulin from scratch.
RachelThat sounds exhausting.
MarkIt is. It floods the system with a massive prolonged insulin dump just to wrangle that glucose back down by the two-hour mark.
RachelAaron Powell So again, two people might both register a perfectly healthy 120 at the two-hour mark, but one accomplished it with a swift, efficient hormonal whisper, and the other required a chaotic, damaging hormonal scream.
MarkAaron Powell A scream is exactly right.
RachelI mean, I understand the clinical utility of standardizing a stress test, but I have to push back on the methodology of the OGTT a little bit. Sure. Drinking 75 grams of pure liquid glucose in a sterile clinic while sitting perfectly still in a waiting room chair is deeply artificial.
MarkIt's completely unapproved.
RachelRight. No one as daily life involves chugging medical grade syrup in a vacuum. We eat complex mixed meals, right? With fats that delay gastric emptying and fibers that blunt absorption. We eat while we're stressed, we eat before walking the dog. The OGTT isolates the variable, but it strips away the reality of how we live.
MarkI agree completely. The artificiality of the OGTT is its greatest weakness. It cannot account for the rate of digestion of a mixed meal or the impact of the gut microbiome on nutrient extraction.
RachelOh, right.
MarkOr even how physical movement changes skeletal muscle glucose uptake completely independent of insulin.
RachelAaron Powell Right, because muscles can take in glucose without insulin if you're exercising.
MarkExactly. So to understand how the body actually handles metabolic stress, we have to observe the physiology in the wild. We need continuous data.
CGMs In Real Life Data
RachelAnd here's where it gets really interesting. Because the article dives into a major piece of new science published in Diabetes Care on September 17th, 2026.
MarkAaron Powell Such a landmark study.
RachelYeah. The researchers utilized continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, which are those sensors that measure glucose in the interstitial fluid between the cells every few minutes. And they put them on 1,356 participants from the famous Framingham Heart study. Yes. And the crucial detail here for you listening none of these people had diabetes. And none of them had cardiovascular disease. By all standard medical definitions, this was a totally healthy cohort.
MarkThe methodology of this study is what makes it a genuine breakthrough. The researchers use blinded CGMs.
RachelMeaning the patients couldn't see the number.
MarkRight. The participants wore the sensors, but they couldn't see the real-time data on their phones. This is critical because it prevented the Hawthorne effect.
RachelThe Hawthorne effect.
MarkYeah, the phenomenon where people change their behavior because they know they're being watched. They didn't alter their eating habits or take an extra walk just because they saw their glucose rising. Oh, that makes so much sense. So the researchers captured their absolute natural baseline in the wild. And the findings really dismantled our reliance on fasting tests.
RachelWhat did they find?
MarkParticipants who spent a greater percentage of time with their interstitial glucose above 140 milligrams per deciliter had a statistically significant direct association with a higher burden of hypertension and hypercholesterolemia.
RachelWait, let's dig into the mechanics of that. Why does a lingering glucose spike directly correlate with high blood pressure and high cholesterol in people who don't even have diabetes?
MarkIt comes right back to that invisible hormone. Insulin.
RachelOkay.
MarkIf you are spending significant time above 140 after eating, your body is churning out massive amounts of insulin to bring it down. And hyperinsulinemia has direct pathological effects on the kidneys.
RachelThe kidneys. How does insulin affect the kidneys?
MarkIt actually stimulates them to reabsorb sodium, which increases blood volume and literally drives up your blood pressure.
RachelOh, wow.
MarkYeah. And simultaneously, high insulin levels overstimulate the sympathetic nervous system.
RachelSo you're stressed and retaining water.
MarkExactly. As for the cholesterol, that acronic insulin load drives something called de novolipogenesis in the liver. The liver literally turns the excess carbohydrates into triglycerides and VLDL cholesterol.
RachelOkay. That perfectly explains the
Spikes Need Context Not Panic
Rachelcascade. But you know, looking at that 140 number immediately makes me think of the panic I see online.
MarkOh, the CGM panic.
RachelYes. People wearing CGMs, you know, they eat an apple or a bowl of lentils, their glucose hits 145 for a minute, and they completely freak out. They think they are causing permanent vascular damage. So does this Framingham data mean that any spike over 140 is a toxic threshold and we should just panic every time we eat a carbohydrate?
MarkNo, absolutely not. We have to firmly contextualize the physiology here. 140 milligrams per deciliter is not a universal magical threshold separating healthy from pathological.
RachelThank goodness.
MarkRight. I mean, the human body is designed to process energy, and processing energy naturally creates a temporary rise in glucose. The context of a spike matters immensely.
RachelWhat kind of context?
MarkSpecifically the starting point, the duration, and the frequency. A rise from a baseline of 80 up to 135 is a completely different metabolic event than a rise from a baseline of 115 up to 170.
RachelRight. And the duration speaks to that area under the curve we talked about earlier. Like a fast spike and a rapid recovery after an intense weightlifting session is actually a sign of metabolic flexibility, isn't it?
MarkYes, exactly.
RachelThe glucose elevates, the muscles pull it right back out, and you return to baseline in 45 minutes. But prolonged elevation, where the glucose lingers at 145 for three hours while you just sit on the couch, that indicates impaired muscle glucose disposal.
MarkExactly. And the 2026 American Diabetes Association Standards of Care clearly state that evidence is still insufficient to use CGMs to formally screen or diagnose prediabetes. Excursions happen to everyone.
RachelSo it's normal to go over sometimes.
MarkCompletely normal. The pathology lies in the accumulation of time spent in that elevated state, not the momentary peak itself. We should be using this continuous data to observe broader patterns, not to pathologize individual meals.
Using CGMs Without Food Anxiety
RachelOkay, so let's synthesize all of this for the listener. The core philosophy of this Quick Lab mobile article is that these tests don't compete with each other, right? They complete the diagnostic picture.
MarkThey're puzzle pieces.
RachelRight. So if you have a perfectly normal A1C and a normal fasting glucose, but your fasting insulin and your HOMA IR are high, that points directly to early compensated insulin resistance. Your pancreas is just working overtime to maintain the illusion of health.
MarkExactly.
RachelBut conversely, if all your fasting tests are totally normal, but a CGM reveals massive prolonged spikes after mixed meals, that points to impaired skeletal muscle disposal. The muscles simply aren't acting as an effective sink for the energy.
MarkThat's a perfect summary. And having that data allows for incredibly targeted, structured experimentation.
RachelHow so? Who really needs a CGM then?
MarkWell, if you have a family history of type 2 diabetes, or a history of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or even rising triglycerides, seeing your glucose dynamics outside the fasting state is profoundly informative. Right. You can use a CGM to test specific behavioral hypotheses. Like, does a 15-minute walk after lunch blunt your postprandial curve compared to just sitting at your desk?
RachelI bet it does.
MarkOh, significantly. Or does shifting your carbohydrate intake too earlier in the day change your overnight baseline? You can actually see the data in real time.
RachelBut there is a massive psychological risk here that I really think we cannot ignore. I see people developing intense food anxiety, almost like an orthorexia, by obsessing over getting a perfectly flat line on their CGM app.
MarkThis is a real problem.
RachelThey start avoiding deeply nutritious, fiber-rich foods like legumes, root vegetables, or whole fruits simply because they produce a temporary, completely normal physiological rise in glucose.
MarkI'm so glad you brought that up. Constantly monitoring a biological metric can so easily shift from empowering to neurotic. A perfectly flat glucose line is the metabolic profile of a corpse, not a thriving human being.
RachelWow, okay. That puts it in perspective.
MarkNormal physiological variation is healthy. The most productive use of a CGM for an individual without diabetes is often strictly time limited.
RachelLike just wearing it for a month.
MarkExactly. Wear it for a few weeks, identify your repeatable patterns, run some behavioral experiments, correlate that data with your fasting laboratory markers, and then just take the sensor off.
RachelTake it off and live your life.
The Metabolic Iceberg Takeaway
RachelI love that. So to recap our journey today, getting an A1C or a fasting glucose test that comes back in the normal range is excellent news. It is a necessary starting point. Yes. But remember, it is just the tip of the metabolic iceberg taken when the body is at rest. To truly understand the health of your internal engine, you have to look at the insulin effort required to maintain that baseline. And you have to look at how your system handles the dynamic stress of processing fuel in the real world.
MarkIt is entirely about moving from the illusion of the static snapshot to understanding the reality of the dynamic system. And that leads to one final, really lingering thought I want you, the listener, to mull over as we wrap up today.
RachelOh, let's hear it.
MarkAaron Powell We spend a tremendous amount of mental energy worrying about the sugar in our food, right?
RachelOkay.
MarkTracking carbohydrates and stressing over macronutrients.
RachelConstantly.
MarkBut if a continuous monitor is actually measuring the body's holistic stress response, how much of our hidden metabolic strain is actually coming from the non-food stressors in our modern environment?
RachelOh, that's interesting.
MarkHow much of that invisible insulin demand is being driven by fragmented sleep architecture or chronic psychological anxiety or just the sedentary way we structure our days?
RachelJust silently redlining our metabolic engine.
MarkExactly. Silently redlining the engine, even when our plates look perfectly healthy.
RachelThat is something to think about. Keep asking those questions and keep looking beneath the surface of your health data. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive.
Subscribe Share And Learn More
NicoletteThanks for tuning into the health post. If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe and share it with someone who might benefit. For more health insights and diagnostics, visit us online at www.quicklabmobile.com. Stay informed, stay healthy, and we'll catch you in the next episode.
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