Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1022: Raja Dhir- The Truth About Probiotics

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Raja Dhir, co-founder and co-CEO of Seed. His background and how he got into the field. (3:07) How science is more objective than any other discipline. (6:15) Meshing translational science with traditional science. (9:35) The state of affairs with consumer health today: Breaking the myths in the current space. (14:30) What got him excited about getting into the field of the microbiome? (20:45) Understanding the field of microbiome science. (30:11) How EVERYTHING affects the microbiome and why human intervention is a two-way street. (36:21) How we can potentially reverse food allergies. (47:09) Understanding the vaginal microbiome and the groundbreaking science in the field. (50:27) Are there things you can do to strengthen your gut lining permeability? (58:08) The importance of being critical when it comes to scientific research. (1:06:30) Can you inherit the microbiota of people you live in close quarters with?  (1:09:27) The common myths surrounding probiotics. (1:14:37) The critical work SeedLabs is currently doing. (1:27:05) The microbiome connection to sports performance. The fine line between hard work and overtraining. (1:31:44) The fascinating story of his dogs and their link to the woolly mammoth. (1:36:15) Why they believe in taking a hard science approach + their next big ventures. (1:54:00) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Seed (@seed)  Instagram Raja (@wildraja)  Instagram Dr. Michael Ruscio (@drruscio)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned seed.com/mindpump **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce brown adipose tissue Amyloid-β peptide protects against microbial infection in mouse and worm models of Alzheimer’s disease Harvard researchers unveil new Alzheimer's theory Altering mix of gut microbes prevents obesity, but diet remains key factor Human Microbiome Project Why Gene Editing Is the Next Food Revolution HOW WHAT YOU DO AS A NEW MOM IMPACTS YOUR BABY’S MICROBIOME FOR *LIFE* Close social relationships correlate with human gut microbiota composition Probiotics: Reiterating What They Are and What They Are Not Healthy Gut, Healthy You: The Personalized Plan to Transform Your Gut from the Inside Out – Book by Dr. Michael Ruscio SeedLabs SeedLabs is testing probiotics designed for honeybees - Fast Company De-Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth: U.S. and Korea in Race to Clone Extinct Beast  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. I have been waiting for us to release this episode. Yeah, this was a good one, man. This was a good one. This is the best episode we've done on probiotics, gut health, and the sciences that surround that. So for me, this was a very, very good educational and exciting episode.

And we recorded this a while ago and we couldn't release it because the company seed had to get up a stock. They had run out of stock. So I had to wait before we could release this so that you guys could have access to the products. But we interviewed Roger Dier, D-H-I-R. He's the co-founder and co-CEO of the company Seed. They are at the forefront of probiotic research. And this company, it's like an ecosystem of scientists and doctors and innovators. They, among them, some of the scientists that are on their team is Chief Scientist,

Dr. Gregor Reed. This guy is one of the pioneers of microbiome sciences. He actually chair the United Nations of World Health, World Health Organization panel that first authored the global definition of the term probiotics, and he's on their team. So this is like the company. It's the Michael Jordan.

It is probiotic. Now, Raja, who you're gonna hear in this episode is brilliant. Young dude too, absolutely brilliant. Very cool guy. Very, very cool guy. He serves on the editorial board for the scientific journal,

Microbiome and on the industry advisory committee for the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics. He's also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This dude is brilliant, obviously. You're gonna hear in this episode.

He's also a very good communicator. Yeah. So we really enjoyed this episode. And if you're interested in gut health and the science of probiotics and how they work. And a lot of the bullshit that you hear with a lot of the advertising out there, what's true with false, you're gonna love this episode.

So very, very informative episode. Now, this company seed, we are now working with them. They are the best probiotics that any of us have ever used. You can find them on Instagram at Seed. And you can find Raja Deer himself at Wild R-A-J-A. And if you go to Seed to get your probiotics, use the code MindPump. The site is Seed.com forward slash MindPump.

Use the code Mind mine pump without a space for 20% off your first month of the daily symbiotic. And again, we don't promote every single company that comes to us, but this one, by far the best probiotic company, they're the leaders in this industry. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Roger Deere.

Roger, I wanna hear about your background because you have a fascinating background as I'm reading about you. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself. You're obviously not from California, originally you said you're from where, Atlanta? Yeah, so I grew up in Atlanta. I went to high school there and you know,

that's where I was enrolled, but I spent almost every other weekend or every summer traveling around the country starting from the age of 13. So it was a very competitive national debater on the national debate circuit. I think I was on top two or three in the country by the end of my senior year.

You got a scholarship for that or something, right? Yeah, I did. College decision was really easy for me. I was offered a very large check by USC and recruited pretty much after my junior year. So kind of knew I was going to head to LA for undergrad. And then my senior year at that point, I'd completely checked out of academic,

or I was still enrolled in all my classes and getting good grades, but in completely checked out of academic, or I was still enrolled in all my classes and getting good grades, but in terms of what my interest lie, debate was taking the lion's share. And in fact, I think I credit probably the majority of my thinking style to competitive debate for two reasons. First is in tournaments, you have to do what's called switch side debate. So in any in tournaments, you have to do what's called switch side debate.

So in any one tournament, you have to argue two sides of the same resolution, which on one hand makes you very good at critical thinking. On the other hand, can make you borderline pathologic. You don't have any true convictions, or you can take an argument and separate any emotional attachment that one might have. It's interesting you say that

because a long time ago a friend of mine taught me to, if I wanted to know my side very well of an argument, I had to learn the other side just as well. And it did teach me to think differently. And it got me to really be able to argue my side because I would know the other side, and many times I would change my mind. I would actually end up finding truth in the other side that you know.

Yeah, and so there's even been some early testing on, I mean, of course, we come, we're in a political climate right now where people don't actually listen to what other people are saying. And what I think is really interesting is that if someone just is in a debate is required to repeat the other person's question to their satisfaction. So if I understand it correctly, your question is, and then you recap it, and make the other person agree that that is their question, that it eliminates kind of the anger and the emotional charge and tension, because in a way, to a certain extent, acknowledge the other person's position, even if it's done, you know, a little inadvertently.

So I think that, you know, those skills are really valuable, especially when you're looking at scientific, health-related research. It's, you know, it's one of those few areas where everyone has an opinion and people can look and cherry pick research in ways that in many cases support or confirm the argument that they're trying to make. And so it's even more important that I think people start to develop those skills. How politicized is science and scientific?

It's not supposed to be, right? It's supposed to be objective, but is it? It's not. And there's a couple reasons for that. And by the way, I want to caveat that by saying it's more objective than almost any other discipline. But my point is that even science has, so you want to get a good publication.

You need a cohesive narrative. You want to have high impact. You're finding it's need to be novel. And so there's humans behind scientific enterprises and personal careers and prestige. The peer-review process is a little bit variable, depending on the field and the journal, and also certainly the credibility of the author going into a publication matters a lot too. I only bring that up to say, I think that we just have to accept as a reality that not to cheapen the quality of scientific research in any way, but just that I think we have to take as a reality that not to cheapen the quality of scientific research

in any way, but just that I think we have to take a lot of findings with try to look for reproducibility of results, be very data-centric and data-heavy, really ask people if they've considered the statistical models that they're using, if they've used the best models that reflect that, or if they omitted models that somehow were giving contradictory information. And so I think that the whole, it is better than most fields, but there's certainly a little bit of bias, I think, as well.

Yeah, in our field of fitness and health, we're constantly bombarded with information that counters other information, and the whole fat hypothesis that the government based a lot of its food recommendations on for decades, which some people would say led to the obesity epidemic, although I think it's far more complex than that. It makes, I think we're at a point now where a lot of people aren't trusting science like they used to.

And maybe because maybe science isn't politicized in the sense of the scientists, but I think politicians will take science and then politicize it. Absolutely. You know, in those ways. So there's about three or four key levels of dilution. The first is in the initial publication itself for the narrative. You have to just check to make sure all that's fine.

And then God help us when we start getting to popular science and scientific press because for some reason, I think one of the areas that we're working and researching on is early infant health and maternal and prenatal health, too. It's one of our tracks and I think this is a fact that came up a couple of years ago that's still stuck with me. There's more PubMed articles on coffee and tomatoes than there are on human breast milk. And I just think that's very strange. I think that's a really bizarre fact. Why is that? Maybe we can't sell breast milk.

People... people love... Because everybody's drinking it. Coffee, dark chocolate, sex, and depression. Those studies seem to disproportionately get a lot more scientific press than a lot of other areas. So I don't know why I think they're kind of triggers for. That is true. You know, a wine, sorry I should say,

I should add wine to that list. Yeah. People love the going back and forth on the rationalization of alcohol being healthy. Oh, thank you. I'm so glad you said that. We get so mad when we get people messaging us like, hey, this study said that. Drinking glass of wine daily.

So about resverteral. Yeah, it's like doing 30 minutes of cardio, it's like now. Yeah. Same for you at all. Not at all. So how did you get into the sciences? You were in the debate.

You're like a debate champion. What led you down the center? So, and the last thing I'll say on debate is that from the ability to go gather information, self-educate, and synthesize that information and connect previously unconnected dots is what is the skill set that makes a good debater. And so, you think kind of you can apply that in any rigid discipline and taking it into the sciences and biological sciences in particular, I think is it's really interesting so

After that I studied biology and philosophy in undergrad. I continued debating for my first two years and my first kind of idea or Trail for a company actually happened when I was in undergrad and it's when I came across a study of a protein-producing plant that had very curious sensory effects on the tongue. And so it temporarily would bind to receptors that were responsible for bitterness, and it would alter that and acidity into the sensation of sweetness. And so I think that a lot of people would say, well, that's really cool, is either for diabetics or as a sweetener alternative. But I was particularly excited by a study that showed

that for cancer patients that had just finished chemotherapy, they report having a metallic aftertaste in their mouth. And so it would mitigate that effect and allow them to return back to somewhat of a normal appetite after undergoing chemotherapy. So, that was my first real kind of moment of what I call translational science or the applied sciences, where, you know, it's really nice when there's research that's mechanistic or speculative.

And then that's one side of the whole discipline. And on the other side, there's people that don't care about the science, but just want to get a push of product and get it out to market. But somehow that distance between those two areas is really vast. And my whole career has been spent bridging that disconnect. And doing so, and I think the first iteration of it, my, in my, my first company outwards was a company called Vitalamine and our, our thesis was, well, if you could isolate micronutrients and standardized micronutrients from organic plant material, possibly even plant material that's unused in human consumption. So not kind of the edible parts, but kind of

thinking about the whole biomass of the plant. And then you can create a really interesting kind of efficiency scale with food products and vegetation and biomass. But that was a pure translational science plate. Now I think what we're working on, which is even more exciting, is can you get the original scientists and the academic centers

that publish that mechanistic and breakthrough work and see them all the way through actually to the finished trial development and productization itself? How important do you think that is to have the original scientists be a part of taking those examples and move them all the way through the process. And how rare is that? Yeah, we can apply this now.

This is what we how we can use it. So there's a couple things that happen. So if you remember earlier, those levels of dilution, that's one of the biggest ones, at least when it comes to products and consumer health, right? A lot of liberties are taken. People reference public literature that's not on their dosage, that's not on their product, that's not on, for microbial sciences on the strain, but at the species instead, there's a lot of,

I think it's very important, and I think it's very rare. I think oftentimes scientists sort of either don't trust companies, they're not for the most part motivated by, you know, financial return, it's not what drew them into their field or area in the first place and and oftentimes there's a stigma attached to it Oh, well, you're a scientist and you you have a company or you're working with industry in some way It's not worth the perceived bias

You know or reputational risk that comes with that and so I think it's I think it's very rare in fact I know there's cases where companies will pay a lot of money to get kind of a scientific or medical endorsement, but I think it's very rare where incentives can be aligned and companies can be built with the right DNA. We're scientists actually not only feel comfortable but actually very inclined to see their work through. In fact, when you can strike the right balance, it's actually really gratifying for the scientists too, because they'll say, look,

we've been focused our whole career on this work, and we'd like to see it get to people. You know, if they're working on therapies that can impact a lot of people's health and previously unaddressed and unmet conditions, I think a lot of people are motivated by that. And scientists, doctors, of course, at some point, or another, the primary motivation

is helping people, helping people with their health. So one of the things you're saying is that, or what you're basically saying is that, you see a lot of cherry picking the science, right? Is that what's going on? In terms of companies that are product first, I think that is probably the biggest problem that I have with all the state of affairs and consumer health to date. It's that it's not really considered in a 360

way. It's really, you know, you pick something that supports the narrative that you're trying to try. Right, right. You have a desired outcome already. So you search all the PubMed, research, and go, oh, this looks close enough to what I'm trying to say. We're going to use this studies to support our claims for our business. Now, do you with that being said, are there certain things that really irritate you that you see right now? Like what's what comes top of mind right now? Oh gosh, I think we got a narrow that one down. No, I mean, there's got to be one that ruffles your feather the most, whether it's being your own space or something you see commonly cherry-picked. Yeah, so I have a really big problem with detoxification.

I think that there is, so there is a detoxification pathway in the body. It's activated by a protein and transcription factor that is in the non-nucleus of the cell and cytoplasm. And it's a transcription factor is just kind of, there's about 2,000 or 2,300 of them in the body. It's just a protein that turns on or turns off genes. So that's all transcription factor is. And there's one that regulates over 500 genes

that are all related to detoxification. And it's called NRF2. And they're very clear things that either induce its expression or that dampen it. And that's detoxification. That results in your body producing a series of antioxidants, of binding proteins. I mean, there's a very clear process by which compounds that are toxins or toxicants are eliminated from the body. And so I think it's not going to be solved by three-day cleanse. It's not going to be solved by

eliminating fibrous nutrient-rich foods from your body and shifting over to a sugar-rich juice. It's not going to be solved by supplements. It adds on bottom of my feet. It's not going to be solved by adsorbent pads. But they turn dark. It's dirty afterwards. Yeah. We can spend a whole thing on red herrings and health and science too. But even the biggest one that bothers me is people say, well, good a thion. That's your master antioxidant

So why don't you just take it exogenously? Why don't you consume it as a supplement? But that doesn't activate the whole pathway on the inducing the production of antioxidant and detoxification responses in the body and so again taking one endpoint or outcome of a system And assuming that just because that's the endpoint is it's going to have the same effect as activating that entire system, I think is probably the thing that bothers me the most in terms of popular health and science and you know in microbiome or you know more hardcore biological sciences, I think I have some other ones, but I think

that's probably the first big myth that I have a pretty big issue with. Such a good point. It reminds me of, for years, we were told that having high antioxidant levels will prevent cancer. So then they did studies with people who had cancer and they'd give them high doses of antibiotics, excuse me, antioxidants,

and it actually protected the cancer cells and they got much worse. It also reminds me of, we see this a lot with pharmaceutical drugs, where you have high cholesterol, take this drug lower to cholesterol, but the process by which your body's producing the higher cholesterol,

why your body's producing more cholesterol in the first place isn't being addressed, and so you still have a lot of these problems. So taking glutathione, yeah, that's the end result, but why the process by which your body's producing more glutathione, that's a very important, but why? The process by which your body's producing more glutathione that has a that's a very important piece Yeah, that we're missing there and if we ignore that then you might end up with something worse Yeah, well, I think you hit it on the head and I think it's worth spending a minute talking about

cholesterol and statins too, so Absolutely, I think that you the last thing you want to do, people talk about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, but there's only one cholesterol. It has a molecular formula that's very simple. The difference is how it's carried, and if there are markers for it that can either have a lot of downstream effects that increase your risk of a cardiovascular event or protective because of the size of those carriers, the lipoproteins. protective because of the size of those carriers, right? The lipoproteins. But really interesting, just to focus on that point you just made, a couple of weeks ago,

a really interesting study came out of Switzerland, and they found that cholesterol, lowering medications in particular statins. And again, this is another myth. It doesn't matter if it comes from red, rice, yeast extract, whether it comes from a commercial pharmaceutical statin. The mechanism is still the exact same.

And we can spend them after this talk about why a regano oil isn't good for you either because it works like an antibiotic. And if you have an high quantities, it's like you're taking antibiotic, whether it's synthetic or not. But with cholesterol, lowering medications that block the body's production of cholesterol

is a lot of other effects that happen. Of course, I think with humans, you can borrow them with the science, but the best way to get them is play on their vanity. And so in this case, they found that cholesterol lowering medications decrease brown adipose tissue, which is the good in air quotes, kind of fat. The thermogenic fat.

The thermogenic fat, which actually keeps you warm in the winter and doesn't increase your risk of metabolic syndrome and doesn't aggregate in adipose regions and results in obesity, right? And actually increased white adipose tissue. And so it stopped the, that same process of stopping cholesterol production also stopped the browning of white adipose tissue and white fat, which we know is a very

good thing, but also makes you physically less fat. I think that's something that can't motivate people then. We actually talked about that on the recent episode. I'm like, well, you're taking statins and over time, you're making yourself fat or not as healthy, plus muscle weakening and all that other stuff. Yep, so what got you into studying the, what I, in my opinion, to be one of the most fascinating and potentially most groundbreaking areas of the sciences for human health, the microbiome.

I mean, I think that the more, as we understand more and more about the microbiome, I think we're gonna be able to have breakthroughs and biology that are gonna be unparalleled in my personal opinion, especially with the types of diseases that we suffer from in modern Western societies which are the chronic variety. What brought you to that kind of study?

Yeah, so my co-founder, R.H.A. has a really good point on this where when people are really excited about the human genome project, that was kind of the first wave of science ever and said, okay, we locked in our genome, or the answers to health and sickness, and if we can understand that, then we can understand what our risk factors are, and we can change health. But, yes, there's CRISPR and Cas9 genome editing, but we're long ways away from being able to edit our genome. And of course, there's gonna be a lot of downstream effects because we don't know as of now what small changes can ripple

out across the lifespan of a human. But the reason the microbiome is so exciting is because you actually can modulate, manipulate, control, and seed and plant, a certain collection of bacteria from a very young age or edit and manipulate that very easily. In fact, we do on a day-to-day basis with antibiotics. So the fact that this is a field which is related

to nearly every organ system in the body, that patterns have been found between multiple serious disease states and changes in the microbiome, and the fact that it's relative ease of manipulation is that perfect storm that makes the science so exciting. But of course, as I hype the field, I want to take a moment to temper it, which is just because we can show that we don't know which way it works.

Does a disease result in a changed body conditions that allow different organisms to then therefore thrive or do the organisms cause a result in perpetuated disease state over time? It's too early to know that. And so something I always tell people is, yes, it's wildly exciting. It's probably one of the most exciting fields in science right now. And it's one of the most interdisciplinary fields of science. So you have gastroenterologists, you have immunologists, you have neurologists, I mean, cardiologists,

everybody from different fields where it can be impacted by microbial sciences, all storming the field to see how the microbes or their metabolites affect their organ system, the way that we've carved up the body in modern medicine. And that's just an incredible foundation for good science. If nothing else, I think the field is progressing because you're just getting such an influx of brilliant minds.

It's crossing so many different specializations. And I'm not a scientist, so I can speculate all day long. And I'll speculate that the relationship between the microbiome and the body and disease is a two-way street. I think that's my hunch. My hunch is your conditions, your even your thought processes,

the context of your life will affect your microbiome and then vice versa, microbiome. They're now connecting the bacteria to Parkinson's. There's a scientist who's offering a million dollars to find a bacterial connection to Alzheimer's. So I think this is a thing. So that's a really good story. There's a neurologist at Harvard Medical School by the name of Robert Moore and you know, stat just did a really nice long profile piece on him and for the longest time, people just, so the Alzheimer's theory of aging or the

amyloid plaque theory of Alzheimer's is that for some reason or the other, the body produces these beta amyloid plaques that then tangle up and cause neuronal death. And that's always a bad thing. You don't want production of these amyloid plaques in the brain, it's something that's gone wrong. And if we can stop the production, that you can prevent Alzheimer's disease. So that's kind of the, quote,

establishment position in Alzheimer's, right? Is that this beta amyloid theory of Alzheimer's. But his thesis is that, well, why are these, why are these amyloid plaques there in the first place? And if you look across all species in the evolutionary chain, you see that they're produced. And so usually what that means for evolutionary biologists is that there's some function that's described to it that if it's either not important, it's protective. It's certainly not something gone haywire, right? It's certainly not an anomaly or an aberration that this is happening.

So he took that as his founding principle and he went deep in and started to find connections. And for the longest time, I mean, the establishment, all of his grants were rejected. The NIH said this is absolutely not possible. And this is a Harvard neurologist. Finally, his thesis and two really high profile studies in 2011 and 2012 respectively came out

from his group that finally put him on the map. And they showed that their thesis, that these amyloid plaques are part of the brain's immune system that protects against microbes or bacterial metabolites. So some kind of an insult. There's some, so the thesis is that, and this is something that I think

that in the coming years we're gonna find when barriers break down in the body, I think that is the start of a cascade of a lot of degenerative effects. So whether it's the intestinal barrier, whether it's vasculature barriers for atherosclerosis or cardiovascular disease, or whether it's the blood brain barrier, whether it's vasculature barriers for atherosclerosis or cardiovascular disease, or whether it's a blood brain barrier for neurodegenerative conditions, I think a lot of problems start when barrier disintegrity begins.

And so certainly what prerequisite to microbes or bacteria in the brain or microbial metabolites are... It's a breakdown of the blood... Was it breakdown of the barrier? breakdown of the barrier, maybe. In other study, and so this was, this is a really interesting one that's just, was one of, one of our, we posted, our company posted at the end of last year that some of the 10 really, you know, most interesting things in science that we think happened that year. And one of them was actually, and it was a small poster at a brain conference in San Diego,

but a group in Alabama of all places did brain tissue electron microscopy. And they found a lot of these small little rod shaped organisms that they, little rod shaped dots on their scanning graph that they just ignored, or people have ignored it. But finally, they just, I guess people have ignored it, but finally, they just, I guess, looked at it with a fresh set of eyes and they believe that they've found bacteria colonizing the brain of healthy individuals that we actually don't have a sterile brain.

But that's the old belief, right? That it's sterile. There's no bacteria in there whatsoever. And here's the point. You wouldn't, it defies everything that we think from a system's perspective about the body, right? Why would the body allow any,

I mean, bacteria can manipulate and change their function and their genome so quickly, that's something that's a lot more from an evolutionary perspective static, right? Like the human genome. Why would we permit bacteria, regardless of whether this particular organism has a history of being friendly, um, to colonize these highly sensitive environments, places like the heart, places like the brain, you wouldn't want it.

You know, I got it in a, I got in a really interesting discussion with one of the leading microbiome scientists last year when I said, I think that there's bacteria in breast milk. I think that bacteria migrate not prebiotic, not guikens and oligosacchar, or these base materials that grow bacteria in a developing infant, but actual organisms that migrate from the mother's gut into breast milk itself. And these are not organisms that have colonized kind of the nipple or the milk duct for instance.

It's actually in the milk. I think that that's, I mean, I'm actually, last year I started putting together a protocol to actually look and see this by actually using isotopes to tag specific bacteria so you can indisputably say it's this bacteria that migrated. I think I put it on hold, but I think that's a really interesting study, but it goes back to that point, which is why would the body allow, we know these organisms that hit your

ride or are opportunistic. By the way, even good bacteria are opportunistic. They're not good or symbiotes for us because they have good intentions. It's the right system that is working for both parties right now that over a series of evolutionary cycles is permissive. And so it allows them to be there and allows them to colonize.

It's no different than when you see the videos on national, like blue planet, where you see the shark swimming and there's the fish stuck inside of it. It's more right. Yeah. That. The more I get it, yeah. That are just eating, you know, often, they both help each other. When did that change in science?

Because when germ theory first came out, it was an all-out assault on these micro organisms that we had just discovered, kill them all, disinfect anything, everything. Antibiotics were given out like candy. When I was a kid, you know kid in the 80s and 90s, you go to the doctor with anything and they would just prescribe an antibiotic.

When did that start to shift where we started to look at it and go, oh, wait a minute, this is a mutually beneficial relationship. We shouldn't just destroy everything. Yeah, so I think that the first, so I think it's be helpful for people to even understand the field of microbiome science

where it began because it answers that question, I think really elegantly. No one believed that bacteria to this extent were beneficial or protective, even as recently as 2006. And so before that, the term microbiome is used in a couple of small circles, but it wasn't blue chip academics and it wasn't the kind of,

you know, gold mine of a field that it is today that's really attracting some of the world's top scientists. And in 2006, what happened was scientists at the Washington University in St. Louis and their medical school published kind of what I called the shot heard around the world, which was they took obese mice and lean mice, and they used antibiotics to knock out their microbiota, and then transplant the microbiota of the other organism.

And consistently, they found that after doing that, their whole phenotype changed. So obese mice became lean very quickly and lean mice adapted in obese phenotype very quickly too And so again kind of goes back to our point earlier about if you want people to listen just tell them just play to their vanity, but That was really interesting. That was the first idea that people said well look these aren't just Commensals these aren't just commensals. These aren't just kind of hanger-ons. These are really kind of systems affecting organisms that live intimately and closely with the human body. But if you go back to even literature and smaller literature

in the late 70s, early 80s, I mean 80s people in publications were talking about the fact that there's this community that it has a close relationship with the human body. I mean, people have been theorizing this for a long time, but the field really picked up traction, I would say, from 2006 onwards, that resulted in the human microbiome project, which was a NIH-funded, you know, $150 million research initiative that wanted to take five body sites in the body and characterize what is a healthy microbiome. Just one simple question, what is a healthy microbiome?

And if we take enough samples from a couple hundred people and deeply analyze and sequence it, we'll get to, we'll start to see enough patterns to know what one healthy microbiome is across all of these different types. We'll get back to that in a second, spoiler alert, there isn't one healthy microbiome is across all of these different types. We'll get back to that in a second, but spoiler alert, there isn't one healthy microbiome. It's just going to say, yeah. It's like a fingerprint, right? Yeah, there is not. And that's because there's what's called scientifically a high level of functional redundancy

in the microbiome. So one species or one genus isn't the only one that does that job. There's a lot of other ones that can do that job. And so you really have to look at function not kind of the identity or the genomic composition or even the transcription of those organisms. And so that initiative happened and then Human Microbiome Project 2 came shortly after.

And then it combined with both the cheapening of sequencing technologies and the number of researchers around the world that are starting to publish now and review each other's work, and then the field hit a typical tipping point, I think, in 2011. It got a hype cycle, it got a bus cycle, and now it's kind of somewhere in between where it's, with there's still no FDA approved drug or therapy. And we have three in our pipeline that we're targeting, that are going all the way through FDA-phased-free,

trialled, I mean, the highest level of rigor to make drug claims. But there's still to date is not a microbial, a bug as a drug that's been approved or made all the way through phase three. And there's a lot of people that approved or made all the way through phase three. And there's a lot of people that are kind of taking the term and making it a new buzzword, right? It's like what antioxidants were. It's like what detoxification was in some circles.

Or, you know, I think ketogenic is, again, I think you got, we all know that there's certain studies in some areas that are very beneficial. The question is always over long-term studies, has this been shown to not only be safe, but effective for a generally healthy person? And it's really hard to answer that question and to kind of go back to your question from earlier about things that bother me.

I have a real big issue also with longevity research because I don't think you can properly design and power a trial that is less than, you know, 50 or 80 years long and needs tens of thousands of people. And you can't control appropriately for every variable. So it has to overpower all the confounders, which doesn't really help. I mean, that's either makes people skeptical. And so they say, well, this field is just all pseudoscience,

or it makes people say, well, we don't need to do a properly designed trial because all we have to show is that we know the mechanisms. Yeah, it reminds me of how, you know, for all use in example, and maybe you can disagree or, or, you know, agree with me, but it reminds me of how we pass certain things to become legal, for example, or be able to be used on our food.

For example, glyphosate, how they're sprayed all over food. When we studied those, we didn't study their effects on bacteria or microbiome, mainly probably because we didn't really study those things at the time. We're not gonna see how it affects your microbiome because we don't know much about the microbiome, or maybe we don't study it at all at this point. And now we're at the point where people are saying, hold on a second, glyphosate

may have some effect on, if not the bacteria in your gut, at least the bacteria that's in the soil, and we don't know what that means, or it may be a bad thing. So it kind of reminds me of that. What are your thoughts on glyphosates, by the way? What is the research showing so far? Yeah, so I mean clearly, and so first to start off, everything affects the microbiome. Okay.

Even changing your diet and as little as 48 hours we'll have a noticeable detectable point on your microbiome. Can't your mood even change it, right? Your mood can generate, changes stress can change it, cortisol production can change it,

rigorous exercise, high intensity, interval training can change your microbiome, high fat diet can change your microbiome, the right different compositions of amino acids and proteins can change your microbiome. And that's just your gut microbiome. If you look at every, there's your oral microbiome that's in your mouth, there's your skin microbiome. Women have a vaginal microbiome which I think is incredibly important.

It's one of the one of the research tracks of our company on having systemic effects from everything from fertility to urinary tract infections to bacterial vaginosis to menopause. I mean you know this is a that's a primary line of defense. And so all of these, or these systems are intimately related to the body and they're constantly changing and evolving. So the first question, the first point I would make is, yes, things change your microbiome constantly. My theory on any particular toxicants in regard like preservatives or synthetic fertilizers

or foodborne agents is I don't think that there's enough longitudinal research to deem them safe. I think that concerns around their toxicity are usually at doses that are far higher than what's found residual on human foods. I think that the bigger problem or effect with it is on the plant and the soil itself rather than on the human body. But the point is, humans have a very rigorous and in place detoxification system. The few things that do overpower it are organic and inorganic metals, dioxins, and PCBs and dioxins that aggregate in tissue

over long periods of time and are very hard for the body to eliminate, and the excess minerals. Anything that aggregates and is stored in organ or is stored in tissue long-term that has systemic effects are my biggest concerns. I think that anything that doesn or stored in tissue long-term that has systemic effects are my biggest concerns. I think that anything that doesn't aggregate in tissue, and I don't know the research whether, glyphosate in particular aggregates in tissue,

but my hunch is that it along with the whole suite of compounds that work along that system are not good for the human body. I believe that there's probably worse. Things that you could add or spray onto foods, I think that of course the ideal is that don't replace it with something else that's also perverted.

That's worse. And I think that that's something that's missing a lot from the equation is, yeah, of course if you're looking at it compared to having no, you know, what is it, it's in microbiome science, we call it xenobiotic. So just any compounds that are foreign to the body that are interacted or detoxified first, but by the microbiota and then by the human host is better to have none. But then if don't look at it in a vacuum, look at what you're replacing it with. And so to the extent that the alternative to that and the food supply is something that aggregates even more in the body

Then that wouldn't be a good thing either, but of course the gold standard is try to eat food And it's original form with as much of its you know existing soil and microbial load as you would find from from a condition I think that's just that's fairly well validated. The way I explain it is, we co-evolved with these foods for a long time. And so we introduced new things, new products for how long?

50 years, 60 years, one or two generations at the most. We don't know what that's gonna look like down the line. And now we're learning that, and again, this is your field, so I'd love to hear more about this. How our we're learning that the, and again, this is your field. So I'd love to hear more about this. How are microbiomes are passed on to our children, especially from the mother to child. And I've read some studies that show that the diversity is less and less now through the generations. And people are trying to connect that to food allergies and autoimmune issues. When I was a kid, I don't remember a single kid in my school who had a food allergy.

And if there was, it was like really rare and they were like, oh, that's the kid over there with the, you know, with the food allergy. Yeah. Now, like entire classrooms are peanut free. At my kid's school, there's three entire benches and tables at the, in the lunch area that are allergen free. Like three huge. So this is just, it's grown exponentially and it's not, we didn't evolve this way,

there's something that's going on, do you think that has to do with cooking? There'd be two factors too, with not like breastfeeding, not being like as prevalent and also C-section, things like that. Yeah, so there's a lot of questions in there and so I'm gonna recap it just in case, so you can remind me, first is how food has changed.

Second is transmission of the microbiome from mother to infant and as relationship to allergies, and we'll go, we'll add anything else to there that you want, but I wanna just, the last point I wanna make on how food has changed is I certainly am a big proponent of eating food and as close of its natural form as possible, but you gotta look at those pictures

and the data on how humans just through selected breeding have changed food. Big time. Just through farming, I mean, look at what a carrot look like. It was this. or a banana. Or a banana. I mean, these were scrawny, little, primarily stock with very little edible components

that we've over time and generations of breeding, cultivated or picked for jeans that are better for size. I saw a painting from the 17 or 1800s of fruit, it's been in the 1700s or even 1600s, a fruit and the fruit was sliced in half and they were apples and they had massive seeds. And it was very little flesh. And it's like, oh yeah,

we've definitely turned these things into sugar bombs. Yeah, so that's one example of cherry picking. Yes, people that are proponents of natural paleoorganic as close to its natural form are absolutely correct. Yes, that is beneficial. But we've also made food a lot better. We've made it a lot more nutrient dense and rich. We've a carrot tripling in size and having higher levels of pigmentation as it has higher

carotenoid load, has more antioxidant value. These are the more room for minerals to aggregate. Human intervention in general, it's a two-way street. It doesn't always mean it's bad, it doesn't always mean it's good. We just need to take a step back and not politicize or charge it and just look at what we've done. Another really big, good example for me is wheat. And people look at genetic modification of foods, for example, I mean, every wheat plant and corn plant

to a certain extent, and actually every vegetable has been genetically modified. It's just been done non-specifically. So either it's been through selective reading or it's done through even a worse process of mutagenesis where you'll just hit the genome with something that results in large genome-wide changes that are uncontrolled. So that's crazy to me that you can be affecting hundreds of not thousands of genes spontaneously and then just watching and observing and saying, oh, well, this one looks like it's better. Let's move this one forward and advance it.

I mean, that is the history. Please go research the history of selective breeding and immunogenesis of foods in the last 50, 60 years. And so, to then just, it's almost like, at the very last step you then say, oh, well, now I don't want something that, because some company, I wonder what this did.

And changed one gene, one gene out of thousands that literally made it reduce kind of the production of a toxic component or that prolonged its freshness or that made it naturally unattractive to insects instead of having to use preservatives or spray on agents like glyphosate. So usually this whole story is a lot more complicated than that. In many ways, selective genome editing solves the issue of having to use synthetic spray

on preservatives or insect repellents because you just do it with the change of addition of one specific gene. So I really wanna, I know that this is like, kind of blasphemous to go into this territory, at least for a lot of people, but before everyone lashes out, I just wanna say, whether we changed it or whether it's indiscriminately changed, there's been a lot, everything we eat today has been changed. And so I just wanna, I think that one thing that helps people

put a lot of the politics around food and health and perspective is taking a longer view. Don't look back in the last five years and the last 10 years. Look at things across the last 100 years or last couple thousand years and these patterns and certain communities evoke Paleolithic or ancestral eating habits. But then again, this is an example of then turning a blind eye when it comes to, like one of the, another thing, and since you gave me permission to talk about things that bother me, I'll keep going back to it.

Like in the paleo community, you can turn on things that are paleolithic, but how about things like mattresses or hot showers? I mean, you can't cherry pick what you want. Either the whole system itself works or you have to say the food that we have today has been changed. Let's use science as a lens to mitigate those changes

and select for ones that are actually beneficial. All of the foods that people love today in the health community are part of the brosicogenis. When brosica first came about, it was this small little green, pathetic little leaf, right? So mustard, cauliflower, kale, broccoli. All these are part of the same brosicogenis, right?

So I think that you know, you can't, good luck for a panelotic person getting to eat any of this stuff, which is now cited as kind of the gold standard, is like the dark leafy greens. There was never dark leafy greens. There was one dark green leaf at some point. So anyways, that's the, we'll put a pin in the food stuff. To your next question about allergies. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's it's

an we have a research track in our company. And one of our most recent hires is from the immunology one of the world's leading immunology labs at Harvard Medical School. And what their recent patent and publications actually coming out in a couple months in nature medicine is on the mechanism by which we can now show food allergies are caused and reversed. Oh, wow. And so this is, and I'll give you a hint, it's microbe, microbiome and microbe mediated.

And so I will tell you absolutely that there's, there may be a microbe, there may be a microbiome transplantation, there may be the avoidance of antibiotics, or there may be a small molecule or a drug or a metabolite. But if we can protect that specific pathway that alters the inflammatory profile of T regulatory cells, T helper cells, through one specific pathway. We can, in animal models, now we can not only prevent the occurrence of food allergies, but we can totally reverse it.

Wow. And mature. Wow. Wow. That's fascinating. It's huge research. Stay tuned. 2019.

We're our group researchers and scientists at our company and areas and IP that we are working on are going to be making a lot of announcements in 2019 particularly around food allergies. I think it's One of these areas that might if you ask microbiome science. It's sensationalized or it's not sensationalized This is one way I can tell you in the next two or three years. We will make dramatic shifts and changes in our understanding of specific food-borne antigens and the body's immunological response to those food antigens, or just food-based components, and hopefully get beyond track for therapy.

I think prevention is the first, if you can take developing infants and monitor, these systems have a new diagnostic tool to look for that, especially if someone's at risk, or if someone was born through cesarean section, or given a lot of antibiotics, then you can pro-phylactically administer or give first the earliest and most primitive version as you give a consortia of microbes, which that just means a community of them. The next version is you can do aia of microbes, which that just means a community of them. The next version is you can do a specific probiotic. If you think about it is just one organism that induces that pathway.

And the third is what if you could just take the microbes out of it all together and just make microbes ferment and produce these compounds that you purify out and that's all you end up needing. So you don't need them. So it's reproducible and it's purified. Interesting. And that's I think a really interesting area but to take it home absolutely allergies in particular without a doubt have a microbiome component to them. It's fascinating because it's

like a first world problem. You don't see a lot of these issues in underdeveloped nations. It's like this is what's happening in Western society and it's exploding and it's crazy and it's scary. And the good news is, I think there's a lot of money behind trying to solve this problem because, I mean, how much money goes into producing certain foods. You don't want a whole swath of the population who can't eat your product because they're allergic to peanuts or they're allergic to wheat or whatever.

So, you know, very good. Right, let's go back to your vagina studies. Yes. This is some of my vagina. Yeah. Other. This is Justin's favorite topic right here. So, what are you finding out about the bacteria

in the vagina? Like, what do you know about that from your research? Yeah, so unlike the gut, which is a very diverse ecosystem, and understandably so, so there's the majority of the microbial, the majority of the microbes that are found in the human body are in the gut. It's a complex community, as we talked about earlier, it has high functional redundancies, a lot of organisms in there that many of which can do the same role

Contrary to that ecosystem the vaginal microbiome is actually very Nero has a narrow spectrum of microbes and no matter what population Where in the world you are Or how you were raised the vaginal microbiome is dominated by lactobacillus In particular underneath that there are four species that are dominant types. So the first and most protective is a species called lactobacillus chrispatus. After that, there's gastroi, gentsenai, and then the fourth is called a type four, which is just a mixed community. And that's not dominated by one particular organism, but you actually find a high

crossover and coexistence of all of these kind of communities together. And that's particularly found or has a higher prevalence in people that either have bacterial vaginosis or a disrupted vaginal ecosystem, or in, and it's very interesting when you start thinking about personalized medicine or how you can cluster people based off of, you know, kind of ethnicity or race, African Americans have, are able to have a type four population that doesn't have any negative health effects.

So they have a more permissive ecosystem for more diversity without it having any negative health effects. So they have a more permissive ecosystem for more diversity without it having any downstream health effects. So in general, you'll find an ecosystem that's dominated by lactobacillus and for the majority of the world, it's a type one or a type two. So Chris Spattis or Gastroid dominated ecosystem.

And our studies are really interesting. So a lot of the acidity, of course, the acidity in the vagina comes from lactic acid production. These organisms utilize glycogen, which is provided in close proximity with the vaginal epithelium. They lower the pH, they shuttle sperm towards the egg to aid in fertility. That's something that no one's really discussed, I think.

Or it's not a very common fact, is that lactobacillus, I actually are prerequisite for sperm to colonize to enter into an egg. Do we even look at the microbiome of the vagina in the terms of fertility? Do they, when you go to a fertility doctor, is that one of the things that they look at? Nope.

Wow. You would think that that would be so important. It's a very new research. Interesting, very interesting. It's very, very new research. And then most importantly is there's kind of a bad guy that's called Gardenerella vaginalis. And this is a, this organism induces an inflammatory response.

It produces a fishy odor. It displaces lactobacillus, and it also can increase your risk of sexually transmitted infections. And so that whole constellation of symptoms is called BV, or non-specific bacterial vaginosis. And about a third to a fourth of all women have at any given point in time. And so it's a really big issue. But of course women's health issues aren't discussed publicly.

Of course, there's a lot of stigma historically around that. And it's a new field. So I think the confluence of those three factors means that this is very under-discussed research. I got a question around that. The use of feminine hygiene products like tampons, which many times have maybe chlorine in them or chlorine residues because they're supposed to be made in a particular way. Does that can that theoretically then affect the microbiota of the vagina?

Yeah, absolutely. And the answer is yes. So do antibiotics. Antibiotics that enter into circulation, change the vaginal microbiota pretty dramatically. That's my, the bullish side of the answer. My caveat to that answer is that soda's menstruation. So when a woman is in men's seas, you oftentimes find lactobacilli levels drop and go down

because that changing ecosystem, the influx of all of the new biological fluids are not a system which is generally favorable for lactobacilli. So you see in the graphs, a drop goes down during menstruation and then about three to four days afterwards, if you have a good profiler or dominant and strong and resilient lactobacilli,

then it spikes back up and it goes back up. So actually in our treatment, in our research track, the primary screen, one of the three screens that we use to pick protective organisms, specific strains within these species. And these are strains that were observed over 10 years of research. And what's interesting about our research is that we've actually seen these women come back in the clinic time and time again.

Our chief scientist in that track of our company was actually the leader of the vaginal microbiome site for the human microbiome project for the NIH. So with the, starting with the HMP human microbiome project all the way through, his lab has done and published more work on vaginal microbiome than I think the next couple combined. And so what we screened for primarily was, these are women that dis, even during menstruation, even when these women are on their period, the lactobacillus levels remain high.

So these organisms are so resilient and hardy that they can stay in elevated levels and colonize, even during that period of time, which we think is a fascinating attribute, which you don't find across a population. Have you been able to correlate that with their fertility, or have you been able to correlate the rise in lactobacillate bacteria with ovulation when a woman is obviously... We've been able to correlate by looking at the medical over following these women over

10 years. We know that these women are... The last part that makes this so interesting is that these women had every risk factor that you would look for for vaginal disruption, low income communities, high antibiotic use, alcohol consumption, multiple sexual partners, having unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners each year. I mean, poor diet, everything that you would look for and despite that have a metabolic readout

of this vaginal microbiota, that's pretty, pretty incredible. In terms of every marker you'd look for, every attribute you'd look for in a protective organism. So I think fertility was one part of it, but this study was focused more on, and the last is they did not get over that whole period of time a single sexually transmitted infection.

Wow. So you and they didn't get bacterial vaginosis. So the frontline defense certainly against bacterial sexually transmitted infections is your that vaginal microbiota. And now we're starting to think that there's even mechanisms by which they protect against viral sexually transmitted infections, namely HPV. Holy cow. I want to take you back to,

when you're talking about the barriers, like in the gut lining and amyloid plaque, and are there ways that we can benefit that and things we can do with our diet or stress wise, whatever it is to sort of benefit that? So I can't comment on it for blood brain barriers because I think that that field is really very new. Very new.

And it's very invasive, so it's really hard to test. And we don't really know much about the brain to begin with. So that part's really hard. I think in five years, I'll probably have the same answer. In 10 years, my answer will probably be different. But to the extent that the first, I mean, nothing's entering into your passing your blood brain barrier through absorption through your skin, right? It's the only source of entering into circulation is usually

what's the front, the first barrier, which is your intestinal barrier. And that's something that, you know, in more nutrition communities, they call it leaky gut or barrier, in more mainstream scientific communities, they call it intestinal permeability or barrier disintegrity, but it's all really speaking to the same premise, which is that you have a temporary or non-temperary breakdown of epithelial cells, and in particular, these tight junction proteins that sit in between them. So imagine your gut lining is a series of,

you know, non-perfectly meshed shapes so like think of like a pentagon or hexagon or something. And those intracellular spaces filled with these tight junction proteins. A lot of things, if everything from alcohol use to high intensity interval training to antibiotics also in some cases, to certain foods have a loosening of that barrier, a temporary loosening of that barrier.

In some cases, it could be good. So the question someone, from an evolutionary perspective, someone say, well, why would high intensity interval training be bad for me? We know exercise is so protective. I mean, one could hypothesize that if you were doing something in that intensity that perhaps it's advantageous for the body to temporarily get clues as to what's happening, what you're ingesting, what the foods are, what's happening in your external environment. So it would allow for a access to that system to your immune system

for a very short period of time, right? So that's the furthest you'll hear me hypothesize. There's no scientific research to support that. I wonder if it speeds up the assimilation and absorption of just nutrients. Your body may want to improve the speed by which it's recovering. Yeah, that's a good, that's, I never thought about that, but that's a really good theory But but I think one of the biggest perturbation like NSAIDs have an effect on your barrier integrity synthetic sweeteners do

Certainly a lot of pharmaceutical and xenobiotics do I would hypothesize that in sector sides of all varieties including glyphosate do that insecticides of all varieties, including glyphosate do. And in fact, in some instances, you know that they do because you can find it circulating in serum, animal models, and human tests. Afterwards, you can find it circulating in blood serum. But there are things, the good news is that there are things you can do, and this is still an early field.

And so, again, I don't like when people just say this is for leaky gut, I don't like when people just say this is for leaky gut. We don't know that. But we know that there are things that organisms and compounds that you can induce which have a noticeable and detectable effect on strengthening barrier integrity. And there's a couple of biomarkers you want to look for. You want to look at Zonulin, you want to look at lipopolysaccharide and LPS binding protein. In some cases, if it's an animal model, you can do a biopsy and look at the structure of the tissue itself. The gold standard still continues to be these large molecule sugar tests where you give them a manitol or lactulose and see how much of it seeps into the bloodstream

because that's something that normally shouldn't be entering into the bloodstream. But we know there's things that have now come out of double-blind controlled trials that have an effect on this. What that's one of the our first product is a consortia of probiotic bacteria. And that's one of the tests that we ran is can we induce the expression of these tight junction proteins to help actually

mechanistically stitch up that gut lining? So in some instances, bacteria can do it. Very specific bacteria can do it as well. So I remember maybe 10 years ago, it was people from the wellness industry who were talking about leaky gut syndrome and people from the medical industry were laughing at them. Yeah. And then they came out with their own term, which was intestinal hyperpermobility. Yeah. That's the same thing. So, you see it a lot. I think it's something, especially if you sit in between the two communities, which oftentimes can feel like they have our ships passing

in the night, you see that there's, I mean, people try to use the lexicon and the words that make the most sense to them that intuitively try to grasp at something. I'm not giving that a pass because I think that that's, you know, people should move towards more, in general, more scientific. You should push themselves, kind of understand what a trial is and what a control is. Now, what I think that happens is it gets observed by people who work with a lot of people, you know, like wellness coaches or health coaches or trainers or, and they work with a lot of people and over time they notice patterns and they'll say, okay, this is, here's the symptoms of that I'm seeing in all these people and all these people are high stress, all

these people over work, don't get much sleep and this is what ends up happening to them, and I'm gonna call it adrenal fatigue, because it looks like their adrenals are getting fatigued. And then later on, science looks at it and says, well, no, that's not what's really happening, it's HPA axis dysfunction. But that doesn't mean the first guy was wrong, it just means that they were throwing it like you said,

they're trying to name it something to make sense. And so... Yeah, I mean, look, there's a certain playbook. It's have some undiagnosable or have some undiagnosable or multifactorial condition, health problem at a young age, some personal story, or be really, really obese and fat, then go and scour the literature and make systems changes to your body. You start eating health, you start exercising more, you start eliminating toxicants, you start observing and doing a whole suite of upgrades to your existence and then going back

and trying to find the things that made the most sense to you and attribute causality to it. Like that, you see that in every health story. It's the same narrative, right? I'm not knocking it. You see that in every health story, it's the same narrative, right? I'm not knocking it. I mean, at the end of the day, if it, whatever someone's journey is to make them, that makes them healthier at the end of the day, that's the most important thing. I mean, you could say the same thing with religions. I mean, people use different stories and narratives

to try to access and attain the same level of understanding about our role or our significance in meaning. I think that biology, in terms of its spirituality, is far more beautiful than any of the myths and stories that we've come up with, but that's the story for another day. But it gets everyone to the same place. It makes them comforted. It gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. They can attribute some sort of, they become,

they get agency, they get to be the actor, the protagonist in their own story. And I don't mean that that's good or bad. I just think that objectively, if you look at the life cycle of any and most people that have a theory about what happened in their health or what didn't, it usually follows that same path. There's a personal event that triggers a renewed understand or as a catalyst for you to

go and learn and absorb and synthesize the research or something that happened to a family member or loved one. And then you go and you flood the system with a lot of information. And then however, your modality of learning is that you've acquired over the course of your lifetime, you end up, it settles in and then you build a theory and you build a belief system around the parts that end up resonating the most with you. And that whole journey can take anywhere between one and 20 years and can result in people coming out on the other side with, you know, and name any one of the popular interventional

periods, but they all kind of take you to the same place. Again, just like I think most mainstream religions all kind of take you to the same place. Again, just like I think most mainstream religions do, they take you to the same place. And a lot of it drives science. And what I like to see, what I mean by drive science is it leads to research then, because when there's enough anecdote, I think then scientists will say,

okay, we need to look at this. What I get excited about now is, with technology like the internet, anecdote now can get pulled in such massive ways. I'll give you an example. I have a cousin who has Crohn's disease. When he first got diagnosed with Crohn's disease, there really wasn't any information on

diet. What kind of diet is going to help him? There wasn't much at all. My aunt, being a very intelligent woman, went online and scoured the internet and found these forums with tens of thousands of members, which normally you would not be able to run into that many people who have crones. But because the internet allows them to come together,

there was all this anecdote about a diet called the carbohydrate-specific diet, and which now has become part of the protocol, but it would drove it was all this anecdote from all these people who are observing and talking about it together. And so that's why I get excited about today. now has become part of the protocol, but it would drove it was all this anecdote from all these people who are observing and talking about it together. And so that's why I get excited about today.

And just to clarify, in case it sounds like, for me that comes from a place of knocking it or thinking that science knows better or I know more, I mean, I think that what you're just describing is actually citizen science. It's the process of observation. Something has to hit critical mass in order for, I mean, science isn't just this kind of top down agenda,

which says, okay, this year we're gonna address this, this, this, this, and this. A lot of these things, in many ways, a lot of breakthrough research, I can point to a number of examples, surface and come as a result of this process of building a hypothesis, testing it, observing the data.

At the end of the day, that's all sciences. So there's nothing wrong with... If someone doesn't feel well or if someone is sick, oftentimes the medical system doesn't have, isn't equipped to deal with or discounts it or says, well, it's either in your head, or it has to get worse before we'll treat it. And there's that whole middle ground, which is underserved, and there's a good and a bad. The good for that is that it allows people,

gives people agency to go and find the solution that works best for them. The bad is that it creates an environment where, often where, the infrastructure is such that some bad actors can slip through. So many. So many can slip through.

And so that's all I wanna say is that it emphasizes the importance of being critical and giving people agency and the tools they need and education they need to understand what or the right resources, what's legit and what isn't. It's literally that saying in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. I think with the access of all this information,

you have to become more responsible with how you sift through it. I mean, the use of CBD to treat epilepsy. That was driven by lots of people's anecdote on the internet, and then you got former companies now looking and making drugs. Well, it's past a phase three trial. Right, EpidialX, right?

It was from GW Pharmaceutical. So I find that all fascinating. I did want to go back for a second. When you were talking about the importance of the microbiota of the vagina, I started to think about how obviously, you know, when a woman having sex with a man, how much of our microbiome is transmitted or between partners? Yeah. Do they start to match each other? Because we live in the same house. How much of our microbiome is transmitted or between partners? Do they start to match each other because we live in the same house. We have sex with each other.

So I will say that one of the understudied areas of microbiome science is the penile microbiome. So I can't point to a lot of those studies, but if you go back to my earlier point about the things that get a lot of press, the know, the coffees and the wines and the sex and stuff, I think we should do that study because I think the whole world will be talking about it, but it's... You know, the point is, is that in any ecosystem you want resilience, and so while there

might be a temporary disruption or transmission between those ecosystems. My hypothesis and what I know about the longitudinal studies in the vaginal microbiota is that once you have one, it tends to remain pretty stable. So the ecosystem is such, and there's a reason why every vaginal microbiota across the world is dominated by lactobacilli because that is the organism that best serves

and protects that ecosystem. Because it works. It works. And so, you know, if a foreign agent, you know, all these sexually transmitted infections are hangar on pathogens that come through, have hijacked that system to allow permissiveness or just through brute force able to persist. So my, the research suggests that a healthy vaginal microbiota is fairly resilient and stable, that it would rebound after a certain period of time, back to somewhat of its original

state. And you can see that because through various life stages, it changes during adolescence. Once menstruation starts, it changes completely. And then when menopause starts, that ecosystem begins to change. So there's life stages that impact that ecosystem. But in terms of transmissibility, I mean. Yeah, like you have a roommate. It doesn't even have to be someone you have sex with,

but you live with someone. You share the same bathroom, and sometimes you drink from some cup and stuff like that. Is there any evidence that, like, oh, this guy's got a bad, you know, he's got bad gut issues because maybe his microbiomes are a little off. Am I going to maybe inherit some of that because we're. Yeah, so there was a study that looked at people that lived in close quarters and they shared

similarities to their microbiota. I think it was more focused on couples and family members that lived together. And couples that lived together, I think that it wasn't the vaginal, or it wasn't the sex organs, and it wasn't even I think the face and the mouth. I think it was something random, like the inner thigh, where areas where there was convergence. But the answer is that absolutely,

we live in a dynamic and fluid environment. So even just getting a dog in your house increases the similarity of microbiome between all family members that live in that house, or all roommates that might live in that house. So there's certainly colonization that occurs that's shared from people that you live in tight shared spaces, particularly when it's a built environment, when it's not out in the wild, and there's a lot of other, there's either diffuse nature, or it's, you know,

other microbial exposure, but in built environments, you do see this. In fact, there's a whole field right now, there's a company right now that's looking at the fingerprint of food, the micr, looking at the microbial fingerprints on food, and you can trace it back to a particular country,

or a source of an origin, or... Like tomatoes from Mexico, so you know. Interesting. So their first track is actually looking at the traceability of food by doing a microbial sequence. So you can know if your food actually did come from here, if it's just a knockoff version of something else, I think it's a raw food, I'm sure it changes.

It doesn't persist once it's being mixed and cooked, but yeah, I mean, this idea of traceability, I mean, we leave a microbial fingerprint everywhere we go, and it persists for a short period of time. I mean, people should even look up this idea of an exosome. It's this microbial cloud that is admitted off into the air around us that's unique and like a fingerprint to each person. Oh my God, I've never heard of this before.

Yeah. So you're like, you're walking around with your aura of this microbiome that's unique to you. Yep. And then another one that's kind of disgusting is if you go to public bathrooms and you look at the microbial dispersion based on a paper towel versus an air dryer system.

You're better off using paper towels, right? Oh, those any bathroom that has an air dryer is just filthy. Oh, man. Because it just blows shit blasts in all of it. You think it's cleaner because you don't actually touch or engage or touch in a particular surface. But, oh, microbes are being aerosolized.

I mean, they're entering into your nasal cat, like they're going everywhere. I didn't even think about that. It's super disgusting. That's hilarious. So, you know, before you came on our show, you know, your company had sent some information to us and one of the things that it said were myths,

common myths surrounding, like probiotics. And one of them I had heard originally from, we have a good friend of ours, Dr. Michael Ruscio, he's author of the book, Healthy Gut, Healthy You. And we had him on the show and he's the first time I ever heard this that he said, when you take a probiotic, you're not colonizing your gut with it. Which is a lot of probiotic companies will say, take this to colonize your gut with it, which is a lot of a lot of probiotic companies will say take this to colonize your gut and you guys sent the same information like no, it's not you're not creating a new colony a vector that's different You benefit from the probiotics through different mechanisms. Yeah, so you'll so you'll see and it goes there's two points of that story So the first is yes, you wouldn't expect to see

Maybe you'll see temporary colonization, but you won't more more importantly, you won't expect to see long-term shifts in the community structure of your microbiome, right? So if it's there, it's there on continuous consumption. I think some studies show that after they persist for three weeks, for five weeks, for six weeks, but then they'll wash out after you stop taking them, there's a lot of mechanisms by which they work, probiotic organisms work, and I don't of mechanisms by which they work, probiotic organisms work.

And I don't want to defend all probiotics, products that call themselves probiotic on the market because I think most of them are not do nothing. Most of them are relics out of the dairy and fermentation and dietary supplements industry. They're very limited species and they don't have randomized controlled trials in their strains. So when I use the term probiotics, I want to just say I'm not defending anything that claims to be probiotic. I'm defending specific strains and species of bacteria, which when you ingest can have

a therapeutic effect on the body. And we know this. This has been tested in multiple trials. I'll go into some more of the research in a second. But yes, of all the mechanisms by which probiotics or the consumption of bacteria can improve health, colonization is one of them. It's only one of them. And that's only temporary colonization.

So there's signaling with your immune system. There's the displacement of pathogens. There's a production of metabolites. There's changing the transcription patterns of the microbiota or the gut. I mean, there's neurotransmitter production, there's stimulation of, you know, kind of motility. So there's a lot of different ways by which these organisms can work. And by the way, I'm only talking right now on the species that have marketed themselves or exist today on the market as probiotics,

that's like your lactobacillus and your bifurobacterium, of which probably 95%, the best they'll do is if they survive, they'll produce a little bit of lactic acid on the incredible side of things, they can do a lot, they can, some specific strains can interact with the gut liver, heart access. We have an area in our pipeline of a strain

which actually was published in a randomized controlled trial which had an, on average across the board and people with moderate to slightly elevated cholesterol, 14% reduction, LDL cholesterol. And in people that had cholesterol over 230, which is a high cholesterol group, 39% reduction LDL cholesterol and in people that had cholesterol over 230 which is a high cholesterol group 39% reduction. Wow. That's competitive with statins without changing host physiology Right, so this is a mechanical mechanism. This is deconjugating bile acid. So your body does not it doesn't stop production of cholesterol Or it doesn't affect the systemic pathways, right?

You said gut you said gut liver and heart axis? Yeah, so what is that? So by that I just mean those are the organ systems that it can affect. Okay. So the liver produces cholesterol and bile salts. And so those then get reabsorbed by the body in the end of the intestines. At the end of the small intestines those gets absorbed back up by the body in the end of the intestines. At the end of the small intestines, those get absorbed back up by the body

for enter back into circulation. So the thesis here as well, while those are out in the lumen, if these microbes can go to work mechanically and either absorb some of that cholesterol, into the membrane of that organism or change it. So it makes it more soluble. So less of it is absorbed back into systemic circulation.

Then you can decrease LDL cholesterol, which by the way, I know some people say that high LDL cholesterol isn't bad. High LDL cholesterol is still the number one risk factor for atro-sclerotic events. So it absolutely is the structure of it, the oxidation potential of it, and the effect that it has particularly if you're at risk of a cardiovascular event in multiple long-term epidemiological and intervention studies shows that it's better you want to reign in non-HDL cholesterol, so LDL and VLDL, and then also LDLP, which is the particle size. Okay.

Particle number, sorry. So, but my point is that just to go back to the point, yeah, there's a number of mechanisms that have nothing to do with colonization. The signaling to the epithelium to increase the expression of tight junction proteins, which is the mechanism by which it affects your barrier, that has nothing to do with colonization. In fact, if it's just already colonized in your colon, it won't have that effect because it's not in transit through the GI tract, interacting with the epithelium, right? So there's a number of mechanisms that actually have nothing to do with. And it changes as it goes down through the body. Yeah, absolutely. And you want, another thing that you guys told us

is you want them to survive through the body until it gets to the colon. Well, you want them to survive. I mean, you want them to be metabolically active, right? I mean, there are some studies that show that inactivated or even heat-shocked or sterilized organisms still have an effect in the body from a signaling perspective,

because these toll-like receptors, they capture the membrane and they recognize it. And then that results in kind of the body starting a cascade of events. But that's mostly immunological, right? All the non-immun system-based effects are usually based on the survivability or viability of the organism.

And how do you guys ensure that, because it's not refrigerated or anything like that, how do you guys ensure that it stays alive through the... So I love talking about this refrigeration myth because it's regardless of whether a probiotic product is refrigerated or not, it undergoes the exact same production manufacturing process. The exact same... So refrigerating it afterwards, is it making me think? Oh, my point is that refriger, like,

yes, some organisms or production methods are less sensitive to acute heat exposure, but across the board, you'll see that that's well above ambient temperature. And it's usually well above kind of acute heat. I'm talking over a hundred degrees. I mean, there's some acute tests that even on our strains have been done that show exposure over 100 degrees

for a couple hours at a time has a negligible impact on the availability of the organism once it's produced. But for people that are interested, so what happens is you put strains into a biofermenter and then you give it a medium and a broth that it starts entering into fermentation and a hyper growth phase. Then you once you've achieved multiplication of the organisms, you stop it, you stop the growth process. Usually there's a curve where you want to stop it before it kind of gets too high of a yield because then it has an inverse effect on

viability. So there's part of the fermentation art is getting it to the part where you have viability but no alteration of the structure of the organism or of the semi long term viability of the organism. Then you freeze it, put it through sublimation which is getting the water out of the frozen organism but from ice straight to a gas form. So you skip the liquid phase. put it through sublimation, which is getting the water out of the frozen organism, but from ice straight to a gas form, so you skip the liquid phase. So you sublimate the water out of it, and then you put it, you basically dry it, and that puts in a state of suspended animation. Okay. So more than heat, the biggest aggressor for organisms is water activity, because even trace amounts of water and humidity in the air

can repopulate these organisms. So they become alive and kicking, and they're like, hey, where's some food or substrate? We're ready to get to work, but they're sitting inside of a capsule, and then they die off really quickly. So that is the life cycle of any consumer or commercial available bacteria, no matter whether it's refrigerator or not. Why people say to refrigerator is because they

either haven't done the stability testing or as a safety precaution, but this idea that somehow it's more fresh or it's higher quality is a very kind of convenient truth or a convenient truism because yes, it's true that these organisms will, there's no harm in refrigeration unless your refrigerator has a higher water activity level, in which case you want to make sure it's in a ziplock bag or in some container that mitigates water exposure as much as possible, but it's not going to have any material effect. And in fact, the process is the same. In fact, I would say, I mean, very intuitively, you can think about the, it's kind of obvious

when people think about this. They're mindset changes a little bit. But organisms aren't going to die from exposure because the temperature of the body is slightly a couple degrees warmer than what's circulating human temperature, 98.6 or so. So if it can't survive in room temperature, how's it going to survive? In fact, the temperature that you use for growth conditions, optimal growth conditions, if it's too cold, the organism won't grow. If it's too hot, the organism is too comfortable or it dies off from acute heat.

So even in the fermentation process, there's a very narrow temperature band that's somewhere close to between 37 and 39 degrees centigrade depending on the organism. And that's something that you do in bio fermentation and scale up testing. You try to narrow down on. So yeah, the process is the exact same irrespective of whether it's refrigerated or not. So I honestly don't get it. What's your thoughts on the kombucha friends you were in right now? Yeah, I think kombucha is a delicious beverage. When it's low sugar, I think that there's not any studies that show that it's harmful for the body. I mean, it's a complex and sestual symbiotic relationship between bacteria and yeast.

And I think it's delicious. And if you like the taste of a fuzzy fermented tea, the fact that it was fermented from tea, if it actually is of the original type, probably has some phenolic and tannic compounds that are beneficial for the body from a micronutrient perspective. There's a lot of acids that are produced that are pretty good,

but it's not probiotic because they're, for an order for something to qualify under the scientific definition of probiotic the the Product or the formulation or the strain needs to be tested in a double-blind randomized controlled human trial That is the definition and that was authored by our chief scientist In 2001 for the United Nations and World Health Organization So the global definition of probiotics was actually authored by our chief scientific our chief scientist in 2001 for the United Nations and World Health Organization. So the global definition of probiotics was actually authored by our chief scientist.

And so one of his pet peeves is anything that has a microbial presence or is fermented calls itself probiotic because it's a marketing term. When the scientific definition is a microbe, a live organism that's shown to confer a health benefit to the human host and implicit in that means that you have to show it in a randomized controlled trial. So that's my other pet peeve with kind of people that say, oh, probiotics or bullshit, probiotics don't work. I mean, kind of by definition, you have to have a trial.

They have to be shown to work. That shows that it does something in a randomized controlled setting in the human body. Otherwise, it's not a probiotic. So what these people are saying are fermented foods or bacterial products that don't have clinical trials can't claim clinical benefits. And we agree with that. Yeah.

Yeah, you guys are definitely on the cutting edge. I think you guys have some of the leading scientists in all these areas of research. And you're also working on things that don't have to do with humans as well, right? Are you guys working on research for B-Call any collapse or? Yeah, so, you know, we have a division of our company called seed labs, which is our ecosystems, ecosystem and planetary health division. And I mean, if you think about the human body as having microbial or microbiome in the Earth's one too, soil communities, in fact, the most two most complex

microbial communities on Earth are in the gut, in the human gut and in soil. Those are the most complex, concentrated, microbially diverse and microbially rich communities of microbes, you know, on the planet. And so we are very interested in the application of live or of bacteria and probiotics for a number of different areas. So we think human health, of course, is very important. But a fast company wrote an article upon us when we announced our honeybee program in the fall of 2018. And this is really, really interesting research. So unlike the human gut, the honeybee gut is

very simple. There's five species that dominate it, right? Human gutter can be over 180. And we showed that a couple of things happen. So first, honey bees are dying all over the world. So it's a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder and we think that it's happening from pesticides. Neonicotenoid pesticides in particular. So as the structure, as the name might suggest, these activate the nicotinoid pathway in the honey bee system, which of course

is the same way by which the reward pathway is activated in tobacco consumption. And honey bees will go back to water that has a neonicotinoid pesticide in it, more than they'll go back to water that has glucose in it. So these are incredibly disruptive to the physiology of the honeybee. It goes back in and they continue to go back.

Almost like they're addicted to it or what? Yeah, sure. So it has a couple of effects. So the first is it disrupts their normal foraging patterns. And the second is it disorients them. So they have a hard time foraging and looking for food and then coming back to their hive. So that's the first part, right?

Is that we, and this was a nature publication, that our chief scientists group published. So the first one was actually in a model organism that showed that our organism, our honeybee probiotic, activates the detoxification pathways specifically for the detoxification of neonicotinoid pesticides. So we, our organism, will go and serve as a buffer between those pesticides that may exist and the honeybee's immune system to detoxify prior to exposure interaction with the honeybees system.

So that's the first mechanism by which these works and that was a really, really interesting publication. And then the second research, which is currently unpublished, and this was done by the lab of Archie scientist Dr. Greger Reed. And here we show that the second aggressor for honey bees is a pathogen called penibacillus larvae, P larvae for short. So this is the bacteria that causes American and European fowl-brue disease, which is such a nasty pathogen because its mortality rates are really high. But even more kind of emotionally heart-wrenching is it only affects baby bees in the first three days of life. So it kills off these young bees in large droves when they're

first born. And so the second effect that our cocktail of probiotic bacteria have shown to do, and now this is in honey bee trials, is protect hives from that pathogen more so than a controlled hive. So there's two mechanisms by which our research track and our probiotics and honeybees work the first is detoxification of neonicatenoid pesticides. And the second is in these pathogens that kill off young bees that can give a significant higher protective effect against, which fundamentally changes the population dynamics of the whole hive.

Fascinating. How much are you getting a lot of interest I'm assuming in this because this could impact us in massive ways if we don't figure out how to remedy this? Yeah, so honeybee, if we lose the honeybee, we lose humans. Humans. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Fascinating. What are we learning about microbiome and sports performance? I mean, you guys do a lot of research in that area at all. Yeah. So there's, so the first, I think, most immediate, well, there's, I'll answer it in three ways. So the first is that to the extent that there's a temporary or persistent gut barrier disruptions and performance athletes, which we know exists. And also, you Also, GI issues are complained by elite performance athletes constantly, whether it's rigorous

or intense training or disruptive travel schedules. It's one of the dominant areas. So, kind of the lowest hanging fruit is the normalization of GI function. It's something that we think is very compelling. That's one of those kind of comorbidities we talked about earlier. The second is we talked about these detoxification pathways, particularly around oxidative stress. And as you know, exercise is a pro-oxidant.

One of the reasons why it's protective is because by temporarily or hermetically inducing this oxidative stress or this form of tissue-specific stress because by temporarily or hermetically inducing this oxidative stress or this form of tissue specific stress in the body, you then result in the activation of a lot of antioxidative pathways and detoxification pathways, which then systemically benefit the human body.

So we know that that's one of the ways that exercise is protective, even in the short term, if it's not so good. To that point, I want to stop you right there. that that's one of the ways that exercise is protective, even in the short term if it's not so good. To that point, I want to stop you right there. Do you think that there is a fine line of the intensity and the frequency that we train our bodies? Absolutely.

There's got to be a sweet spot, right? Absolutely. I think that this idea that harder is better. I mean, there's a number of ways where we could debunk that. Like we know that heavy weight, certain styles of weightlifting, they just rip up your shoulders, they rip up your knees. I mean, the effect that it has on cartilage and these tissues that's in between bones. I mean, that you guys could comment on that better than me because that's not really my field, but I think that it's known for some time that there's a fine line

between beefing up and the type of mechanical, particularly mechanical stress that you want to put on specific systems versus kind of a more sustained, balanced, even distribution. You want to put muscle, but you also want to look at tissue integrity. Yeah, in order to benefit from a a hermetic response, you can't overcome your body's ability to adapt and become stronger. So you'll throw too much at it, you can't adapt to it, it's just going to overcome your body.

So that's on the host tissue side on the microbial side or from the microbiome perspective, I think, of course, you see these large scale disruptions. And then given the permission to hypothesize, and I always, you've got all the permission. I always stop myself before then. I mean, so that's, if you do look at the evolutionary biology, I mean, there's very few in humans wouldn't be expected to kind of rip up or engage in this type of extreme chronic

physiological stress for extended and chronic exposure in periods of time. I mean, you just wouldn't expect that, right? You'd have these periods of feast and famine. You'd have long, long cycles of rest. I mean, I think that part of the reason that humans are so lazy is because laziness is a protective mechanism from an evolutionary perspective.

I mean, it doesn't make sense to just be, you know, chasing everything. Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of my theories around why athletes have so many gut issues is you talked about earlier how high intensity exercise opens the gaps between the, you know, some of the cells of your gut

or makes it more permeable. And athletes have been taught for a long time to eat as much food as possible post exercise because it does accelerate recovery. But I feel like that's a perfect storm for developing immune, you know, antibodies for food. Because you get certain things into your bloodstream, your body's gonna eventually identify it as a foreign invader,

and you start to develop antibodies and now you've got food intolerances or issues. Throw on top of that highly, or easily digestible or pre-digested process things like protein powders, right after a hard intense workout, I think you have kind of this perfect storm of potential issues.

Yeah, so intuitively that makes sense to me. I think that probably the research would support it too if you dig for it, but from an evolutionary perspective that certainly makes sense to me. Yeah, interesting. So, one other thing before we sign off, because you're a very fascinating guy, you wanted us to bring up your dogs, because you just got some nude, but they're not normal dogs. They're like wolves. They are what's called, well, I mean, to the extent that people want to hear the story,

I think I can give you guys the whole version. I don't even think we've talked about it yet, so you guys will really appreciate this. I mean, you joked about giving them woolly mammoth bones earlier back, but I have a story that involves woolly mammoth fossils and these dogs. Of course you do. So I was in August, I was in the cold North Russian tundra. So this is north of the Arctic Circle. It's basically, people don't realize exactly how big Russia is. It dwarfs China. It starts basically touches up against Europe, and then goes all the way over, right across, and looks over at Korea.

So it's an incredible landmass. And it took just as long, if not longer, to get from LA to Moscow, as it did from Moscow to the other side of Russia. Wow. So I broke my journey in Moscow and I was there with the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School. So I'm doing a lot of work with them right now. And one of my mentors and advisors is George Church,

who's kind of an iconic biologist. He invented a lot of the gene sequencing tools and kind of the father of modern genomics and has his own lab at Harvard Medical School in the genomics department there. I spent a lot of time there. And so he's working on a project that you guys might have heard about recently because it's crazy. This is the Jurassic Park one. We're bringing them back.

Yep, it's the, what could go wrong? The extinction of particularly the Wolliamamoth. And so when the first question people always ask me is they will say, so are you saying Jurassic Park is possible? No, DNA degrades after around 500,000 years. So it doesn't matter if it's preserved in amber or resin,

that's the first kind of, not to ruin everyone's childhood dream. That's cool. That's cool. That's the first thing. I want to pet raptor. Yeah. Yeah. But we can make estimations as to what the genome of those,

or traits that would be found in existing animals that would reconstitute that genome. Oh, I'll cross-predate. You can never bring it back, but you could rebuild from scratch what you think. That's what synthetic biology is, right? It's the idea that you can use genomics and use the genome as a platform for biology. And so I was there doing some work with them because

it started when I was just in George's office. And I found out that for the month of August, for three weeks, his admin said that, oh, George isn't taking any meetings, he's going to be gone. And that's a really ominous thing. I was like, where is he going? Well, it's a really top secret, but you know, he's going with a camera crew and, you know, the Koreans, there's kind of a race right now. So there's two ways people are using to bring back the Wollimammoth. One is through finding the genes that are found in the mammoth

and then editing the genome of the Asian elephant and then transplanting that edited embryo back into an Asian elephant to make that elephant give birth to a wooly mammoth. That is the first path, and I think that's probably the easier and better path, right? And the second is what the Koreans are doing, and if you remember, there was a huge scandal

with the Korean, all the cloning research or most of the cloning research in the world is happening in Korea right now, where they've heard like a hundred thousand bucks they'll clone your dog, right? Oh yeah, for real. And there's a lot of ethical concerns with that because the efficacy rates really low,

I think one and two out of eight, for instance, work. And cloning is a much different process than genome reconstitution. So those are the two ways that people are targeting it. And while we were there, the Koreans were there doing their research at the same time. So the space is heating up right now. But we went because there's, this isn't just a let's play god, or we want to just, you know, use biology as a platform for magic or to do things just because we can.

There's a really interesting theory to this. The theory is that there used to be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of mammoths that used to roam the earth, not just the woolly mammoth. That was just one variety. There's the Colombian mammoth. There's the Northian mammoth, there's the North American mammoth. I mean, these big, related relatives of the elephant were all around the earth. I mean, and one thing about this kind of to tie it back to the comment you said earlier about how food and fruits used to have these big seeds on the inside,

there's a study, no one could figure out from an evolutionary perspective what the avocado was made for. We all love it because of its fat content, but with that big pit, The study, no one could figure out from an evolutionary perspective what the avocado was made for. We all love it because of its fat content, but with that big pit that's indigestible to most animals. And if you think about the thesis of these foods as they want to then be excreted out, to then grow again. And I mean, what could eat that, right? And so they said it's some relative or some closely related ancestor of bridge species

between the elephant and the mammoth. That absolutely loved it. And so that's a funny backstory for avocados. But yeah, these mammoths used to be all over, and particularly on the mammoth step. And so that's that region, which is up in the northern area of the Tundra. And the Tundra used to not be this barren ecosystem. It actually used to be a grasslands. And so the Russian group there that's been doing research on this area for that

temperature, soil temperature and ice temperatures for over 30 years, they find that in the summertime, these Pleistocene era grazers. So this is these reindeer, these giant mousse. And of course, So this is these reindeer, these giant mousse, and of course the best and boldest of them all was the mammoth would punch through the top, allow these grasses to temporarily poke through, which have twofold effect. The first is that tilling of the top soil keeps the, lets that cold air come down

and keep the surface temperature cool instead of packing it in. And the second is they prevent trees from growing, which how counterintuitive is that? That trees are actually bad because they absorb heat and they are what's called unproductive in that ecosystem. They don't have any nutritional value and they take resources, whereas grasslands are the most productive ecosystem on Earth. And so the thesis was if you can reintroduce these areas, you can make this ecosystem flourish again.

I mean, we glorify it saying, oh, well, the tundra should be icy, because that's what we grew up thinking. But this should be a rich grass, this ecosystem deserves and should and was, at least seasonally, a grassland. So they're thinking, we're gonna make woolly mammoths so we can put them out in the tundra and make it.

So they're saying if we can, we introduce these Pleistocene-era grazers and very efficient ones onto that system, we can decrease the surface level and they've done these two studies. I mean, I've seen the data where there's as much of a 17 degrees Celsius in difference from the areas where there's, they've reintroduced Grasslands versus the ones that exist today.

And the temperatures are remaining stable there, whereas they're getting warmer and warmer in the Tundra, right? Interesting. And so why is that important? Well, of course, any good movie needs a save the world story and so locked under the tundra is more carbon than an aggregate all of the impact that humans have had with our carbon utilization and methane production over the last 100 years in the fossil fuel era. So the idea that it's a ticking time bomb that's under there is that that carbon and that

methane becomes, enters into, it becomes aerosolized, bi-bacteria, if we melt it enough where those organisms can become, out of their dormant state and become active again, become metabolically active. And so, not good for the climate. Not good for the climate. I mean, we don't know what that type of a shift would do.

It could, it could catalyze our, let's put it this way. In the most extreme circumstance, it could, you know, all the other stuff we're talking about right now, two degrees here and there is absolutely nothing compared to what would happen if all that carbon gets unlocked. So that's the motive behind it, you know, and the idea is that it's an elegant story. It's a way that we can use, I'm very interested in de-extinction personally. I think that it's one of the areas that I want to spend the rest of my scientific career

in. So here's a story with the dogs. So we landed in Yakudia. That's on the eastern side of Russia. Then we took another six-hour flight and we, at this point, we're all the way up in a polar town called Chersky. And this is right on the rim of the Arctic Circle. I mean, it's so close to Korea,

it's almost looking at Alaska. And then we got on our river barge, and went 18 hours up the mouth of the Kolyma River into the Arctic Tundra. And that's where we were gathering sediment samples, mammoth bones. I mean, I came back, I have a woolly mammoth jaw that I found and uncovered and I smuggled back overseas

with these. Nice. Hopefully there's no Russian authorities listening to this. But I brought these, and it was so rich. I mean, after a rain, you'll see these 40,000 year old fossils washing up onto the beach. I mean, you can walk up and down the beach

and just pick them up. Wow, that's crazy. So that shows you the biomass that existed at that time of these animals, and how much of it is under and unearthed. And when a storm or an event occurs, it literally just washes up. I mean, we were digging a little bit,

but primarily we were just walking on these hot beds in Devani Yare, right? That's the area that we're at. So we go to that trip, we come back to the science station. It's called Ness, it's the Northeast Science Station. It's the northernmost science station in the entire world. It has a Soviet outpost during the Cold War. And abandoned, and there's no other town. I I mean the closest town is tens of miles away.

I mean there's nothing around here. And abandoned under that science station were two, between three and five week old puppies. And they had borrowed and tunneled in underneath the and tunneled in underneath the, the, the, underneath the science station, and they were living amongst like, cinder blocks and nails, and just all of the excess kind of waste from building this giant satellite dish. So you just found them there.

So, these are wild dogs. These are our, I mean, primitive dogs. And the only dogs, so primitive dogs is a term that describes dogs that existed prior to human domestication. So people will say like, oh, so I have two of them now, their name, one, their names are Luca and Sasha. People say, oh, well, Sasha looks like a German shepherd. She must be a German shepherd. I'll say, yo, Sasha predates German shepherds as a species, know as a as a strain of dog if you will so if it's pre It's if it's pre dog. It's like pre pre Germany. Yeah

So these so we don't know the history of these of these wild dogs, right? They don't have a traditional domestication They certainly don't live in a house in Los Angeles or never lived in a residential community. Usually what you get to see with them are these types of relationships. Why, I mean, it's like looking back in time, it's why these dogs are so special to me, because you see the kind of innate bond

that this animal has and co-evolution with the human species. That's incredible. So they act like normal dogs, are they different? I mean, they, so I've raised a wolf dog before, so I had to use some very non-tr... I mean, I had to use every training trick in the book that works with them.

At first, they don't respond to negative incentives at all. Punishment just does not work. Everything has to be incentive based. If you punish them, then they start to associate you with those feelings of punishment, at all, punishment just does not work. Everything has to be incentive based. If you punish them, then they start to associate you with those feelings of punishment because they don't have an innate understanding of whatever you're punishing them for

as being the catalyst for that negative reaction. So they end up expressing overall levels of fear around you. If you punish them. And unpredictable fear. And maybe they'll associate it with the action that they've done, but not enough to change the behavior. Unless you catch them in the act.

So if you're potty training them, and you grab them, and you stick their nose into poop, and punish them, they're gonna have no clue what you're trying to say to them. But if you give them a negative reinforcement, when you catch them in the act indoors, for example, so you have to kind of keep them on 24-hour surveillance and catch them every time while they're doing it. Otherwise, they'll never understand.

You can't do it after the fact. And I think that persists to more breeds of dogs than people think. They are very hierarchical. And so they don't have a willingness to please humans in general, but they will respond to authentic and strong leadership. And so you can't ever be,

I know it sounds very kind of like Russian bravado, but you can't be show weakness in some areas around them. Like you have to lead by example. So when you're sad, get me a true alpha. Well, that term is just, I think so commoditized and used, but I think that they win your respect as a leader and then they orient themselves around that role or have no expectation that they're gonna listen to you.

So you can't have it both ways, right? So I would have to do some things like, you know, like when I was pouring their food out, like hold them back by the collar and and and make them and pretend to eat out of their dog bowl and make them watch for a certain period of time that, you know, I get to go first. You never give the one rule with them is you never give them anything for free. So anytime you give a reward or incentive, you have to make them work or reinforce commands or reinforce tricks. But I bring that up to say, I mean, now they're perfectly trained.

The whole suite of, I mean, they'll do anything. The only thing that they won't do or what oftentimes you find with dogs are the way that they rank dogs or based off of their responsiveness to a command and willingness to please. And so some of these really intelligent dogs, they'll eventually do what you're telling them, but you either need an incentive or you have to tell them three, four, five times. So they'll never really respond unsolicited to the first time you give them a command. That's just something that you got to deal with when you get an intelligent dog. But I mean, in terms of domestication, now they act really domestic.

The first time I was interviewing a dog sitter, somehow in the middle of Venice, Los Angeles, in an art lofts community, on a six foot leash, Sasha and found a mouse. I don't know how. And I was like, oh yeah, I didn't want to tell any dogs that there's a true story because I thought I'd scare them all away.

And so Sasha comes back with a mouse and her mouth super excited. And just like, where did you get that? Where did you find that? Apparently it was under the couch or under the sofa. I got evicted from my residence because I live in the side property on a horse ranch that has a couple of horses and a pony and a couple chickens. And I got evicted, ended up getting unevicted because Lucas snuck in there and just totally snagged a chicken.

Like she went for it. There was nothing that could have stopped her for weeks. She was eyeing it from the outside of the coop in the minute the the horse keeper left the gate open She knew what she wanted to do. She got in there. She Fucked with it for a little bit and then it slowly bled out and died over a short period of time You have to eat the chicken in front of him to show him we bought you If I were to reinforce that behavior I would say yes, but I can't reinforce that behavior. How are they around other dogs?

They are very curious. They're of course excited that it's closer to them than a human and they're eager to go and explore it, but they'll lose interest very quickly. Interesting. That's very fascinating story, man. So, the good news is I have them for life now. So, I'll send you guys a picture you can put it up in the show notes, but they're super, I mean, they don't look like domesticated.

They don't look like normal dogs, yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Well, awesome. It's been a pleasure interviewing, man. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. This'm really really great conversation. Very fascinating individual. I think what you guys are doing is you guys are on the cutting edge. That's what got me excited about meeting with you and working with you guys is that you guys are literally some of the leaders in this in the field of research in the

microbiome and I think personally, like I said earlier, that the, what we're gonna learn about the microbiome and how to alter it and how to supplement it is probably gonna be some of the biggest breakthroughs that we're gonna see in biology in the next 10 to 20 years. Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying that. For anyone that's listened all the way to the end, I think that one of the reasons why I get up every day and why I'm really, really excited

and certainly all of our scientists, many of which have never attached themselves to a consumer health or a life sciences company before ever are working with us is because, you know, we really take a hard science approach and we try to do it across a number of different organ systems in the body. So of course, our first product is a collection of strains

which have really, really robust clinical data behind them. So, for a number of different organ systems in the body, so whether it's digestive, the first thing you'll expect to experience from our first product are noticeable in visible improvements in digestion, from a number of weekly bowel movements, to barrier integrity, to stool consistency, intestinal motility, ease of expulsion, anal itching. I know it's very graphic, but these are the end points that were studied in clinical trials.

But as a company, we have a lot of research areas and tracks that over the next couple of years, you guys should really hopefully are interested enough to follow along with. So our next big research track is in how we can make sugar healthy. And that's kind of a really big idea, but you can use microbial enzymes to make fiber

have the sweetness profile of sugar. So there's nothing inherently wrong with sweetness. The problem is just that it's too easily available and accessible to the body. And then when there's too much circulating glucose or there's too much of an insulin response, long-term, you know, that's really bad for the body. But what if you could have a fiber that had the sweetness profile of sugar? Interesting.

That's, we're going to have a lot of big announcements this year about that. Protein bar companies will be all over that. Yeah, so I think everyone's going to be all over it, but we want to be really thoughtful about how we bring it out and do it in a controlled way. Excellent. And of course, you guys got some glimpses on some of the other stuff that's, you know, for women listeners. Next year is going to be our year of the woman.

We have a lot of technologies that are based on, directly based on and developed by $10 million, 10 plus years of research, $20 million of NIH funded research from a specific lab, the scientists that led this site for the Human Microbiome Project, for the vaginal microbiome, and then we have some really exciting stuff working on skin, both from the microbe standpoint but also a host response, aging of that tissue and how specific microbes can address and prevent that tissue specific aging. And so, you know, I think that if people almost ask me, how would you want to describe seed to your friends or how would you describe seed to other people?

I would say that in the future microbial sciences and microbes are going to change and disrupt a number of categories, certainly related to products that we buy today. And then the breakthroughs are not going to come from a company. They're not going to come from a Pfizer or a J&J. They're going to come from popping up at different labs that have domain expertise in that one skill set, and have been doing it for the entire lifecycle of that lab.

And so what we've built is an organization, an ecosystem of scientists, doctors, academics, lab leaders, government employees, and... Yeah, you guys have an amazing... A huge roster, yeah. That brings that research integrously from bench, all the way to shelf. And so, yeah, I think, you know,

it's the next couple years going to be really exciting. And we have yeah, I think, you know, it's the next couple of years is going to be really exciting. And we have a lot of really big stories that we want to tell too. So if you like the content, if you like the products, a lot of people have tried our first product and they said it's fundamentally changed the way that they're a lot of digestive complications have gone away, but just fundamentally changed digestion. I think most people don't understand that 68 million Americans have chronic constipation. That's like 10X all digestive diseases combined, right? And so certainly a lot of people that turn to health

for the first part, that's one of the areas that they feel it so visibly. So yeah, that's what we're working on. And we're really excited about the years ahead. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you guys. Thank you, man. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

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