The Rich Roll Podcast - You Are A Superorganism: Ara Katz & Raja Dhir On The Power Of Microbes

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

“We are, by definition, an ecosystem. The microbiome reveals a more connected biology, radically transforming our approach to medicine, hygiene, diet, and living.” Ara Katz & Raja Dhir Our bodies are comprised of about ten trillion cells. But our microbiome — all the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live in or on our bodies – outnumber human cells by a factor of 10. Indeed, we are far more microorganism than human. Moreover, rapidly developing science reveals the vast extent to which the nature of our personal microbiome drives not only our propensity for disease and digestive health, but also, quite surprisingly, can dictate our mental disposition, cognitive function, and even our specific food cravings. Today we take a magnifying glass to the mind-blowing netherworld of microbiota to illuminate their implications not just on human health, but the well-being of planet Earth at large. Our stewards for this fantastic voyage are Ara Katz and Raja Dhir, the co-founders of Seed, a venture backed microbiome company at the pioneering edge of bacteria science. Ara is a serial entrepreneur and fellow at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Storytelling and CCA’s DesignMBA program. She was named one of the “50 Most Influential Women in America” by Marie Claire, listed on Business Insider’s “Silicon Alley Top 100” and “36 Rockstar Women in NYC Tech”, and was recently included in Create + Cultivate’s 100 List for STEM. One of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met when it comes to our rapidly evolving understanding of the microbiome, Raja is a life sciences entrepreneur and a member of the Microbiome Think Tank at Mass General Hospital. He sits on the editorial board for the scientific journal Microbiome as well as the advisory committee for the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics. In addition, he is a director and co-chair of the scientific advisory board for Micropia, a $20MM microbial ecology and education platform as well as the world’s first museum dedicated to microbes. Today we cover it all. First, we define the microbiome. We discuss the difference between prebiotics and probiotics. And to cut through the consumer confusion fomented by gut health commodification, we separate fact from fiction by examining the difference between an effective priobiotic and the countless food and supplement products simply marketed as such. Most importantly, we explore what the latest science tells us about the power of microbes to heal our bodies, positively impact childhood development, reinvigorate the quality of our soil and improve the overall ecology of Planet Earth — including some amazing work Ara & Raja are doing with bee populations. Seed Offer: As a simple thanks for listening, Ara & Raja have a gift for you. Go to: seed.com/richroll to learn more. Disclosure: In my opinion, Seed's Daily Synbiotic it is the highest quality probiotic I have tested (which is one of the reasons I wanted to have them on the show). Rigorously evidence-based, I’ve been using this product for the last several months to great effect. However, I have zero financial involvement with the company. Seed is not a show sponsor. Ara & Raja did not pay me to appear on the podcast. (I have never accepted money for a guest to appear on the show and never will). Nor am I an affiliate of Seed. In other words, I get a big zero from you using the above-mentioned discount code other than the satisfaction of sharing a product I myself enjoy. Peace + Plants, Rich

You know, for the majority, all of human existence, the only levers that we've had to impact health are diet, lifestyle factors like exercise, cessation of negative behaviors like smoking or being sedentary, or drugs. And now we're finally at a stage where we can harness the power of microbes or bacteria to improve or to push that vector proactively in many different ways. And we design studies and tests that actually corroborate this for healthy individuals. I mean, probiotics have such potential to make a huge, huge impact, and not just because of their health impact, but also from the affordability compared to other medications, the lack of side effects compared to other medications or other complications. And I think we really feel that they're such an important part of our work,

it's not just the science and to create what we believe are some of the most sophisticated and effective products, but to really steward the translation of it and to really be able to call out evangelism over evidence. That's Raja Durr and Ara Katz. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? I see you. I see you and it is good. So nice to be back here with you guys again today. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast.

Welcome or welcome back. Oh man, I am jet lagged. I just got back home late last night after a couple of weeks in Europe. I woke up at 2.30 a.m. this morning, wide awake and thought, let me just get this show up and going. So here I am sitting in front of you,

talking to you in the middle of the night. In any event, I had an amazing experience in Italy at the Tuscan Farm hosting once again our Plant Power Italia retreat. And we had a really big group this year, 52 people total, I think, something like 45 retreaters, amazing humans. All of them had such a good time.

We ate incredible food. We went trail running. We did yoga. We practiced meditation. We did breath work, holotropic breathing, music. There were so many incredibly gifted people on this trip. We had like a talent show every night. Workshop intensives, Ayurveda, tea ceremony. The

happy pair of laddies came down from Ireland for a day. They brought their incredible energy. There might've been a few handstands involved. They did some cooking demos. We had the great Zach Bush join us with his wife, Jen, which was amazing. And I recorded a live podcast with Zach. That's very cool. You can look forward to that coming up at some point in the near future. Plus another podcast that I did with plant-based physician, Gemma Newman, which was really great as well. What else?

Well, I guess the thing that always amazes me, I mean, I never know how these things are going to go, but every year without fail, and this year was no exception, there were so many breakthroughs, so many meaningful experiences. Bonds were formed, not just for those who attended, but also for Julie and me personally. And just to be able to host, to hold that space for everybody for transformation is, it's such a gift. And I'm feeling super grateful.

So thank you to everybody who attended and facilitated. And I'm already looking forward to next year. Anyway, we followed that up with a little family trip to Malta after the retreat for some rest, which for me meant swimming and running all around the island. I hooked up with the local swim run crew, had a little bit of a jellyfish encounter. You might've seen that on Instagram. I got a free diving tutorial from world champion, free diver, Jesper Stechman, which was amazing. Getting me out of my comfort zone for sure. We got out on a boat and I just experienced a place that I'd never been to before.

And if you haven't visited Malta, it's really quite something. I mean, the history is so heavy. It's just laden with layer upon layer of history, being this port at the intersection between East and West and the beauty, it's such a gorgeous, rich experience being there. I loved it. Can't wait to revisit, go back there soon. I just want to thank John Shaw and Kurt Arrigo, my friends John and

Kurt and their beautiful families for being such great hosts. Anyway, here I am. I'm back in LA, a little bit jet lagged, like I said, but back in the saddle, getting another great show up for all of you guys, because my friends, the show must go on. My guests today are Aura Katz and Raja Durr. Together, they are the co-founders of Seed, which is a venture-backed microbiome company that is doing some pretty compelling and pioneering work in the application of bacteria science for both human and planetary health. Ara is a serial entrepreneur and fellow at the MIT Media Lab Center for Future Storytelling and CCA's Design MBA program. She was named one of the 50 most influential women in America by Marie Claire, was listed on Business Insider's Silicon Alley Top 100, as well as 36 Rockstar Women in

New York City Tech, and was recently included in Create and Cultivate's 100 list for STEM. Raja is a life sciences entrepreneur. He's really the scientific backbone of SEED, and truly one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met when it comes to our rapidly evolving understanding of the microbiome. He is a member of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met when it comes to our rapidly evolving understanding of the microbiome. He is a member of the Microbiome Think Tank at Mass General Hospital. He sits on both the editorial board for the scientific journal Microbiome and the advisory committee for the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics. In addition, he's also a director and co-chair

of the Scientific Advisory Board for something called Micropia, which is a $20 million microbial ecology and education platform, as well as the world's first museum dedicated to microbes, which in and of itself is fascinating. I have so many questions. In any event, it's a super fascinating deep dive. It's all coming up in a couple of few, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

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When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. So, our bodies are comprised of about 10 trillion cells, but our microbiome, all the bacteria, the viruses, the fungi, the single-celled organisms that live both in and on our bodies actually outnumber human cells by a factor of 10. Essentially, what I'm saying is that we are far more microorganism than human, which when you think about it, is kind of a mind blower. I was first introduced to the idea of microbiome health back in around, must have been around 2008 by way of my friend Compton Rom, who is a PhD in microbiology and just a font of incredible knowledge, who, if you read Finding Ultra, then you know, became kind of my nutrition guru when I was training for Ultraman. I'm still working on getting him on the podcast because he will be amazing. But not the least of which is this idea that we believe we are sentient beings, that we

are responsible for our health, our moods, our decision. But the more you learn about gut health and the microbiome, this crazy truth emerges that reveals this fact that to a large extent, our emotional state, our brain functionality, our propensity for disease, and even specific food cravings can all be tracked to the specific nature of our gut ecology, which is just so fascinating. So today, we're going to explore this notion, and we're also going to extrapolate on human health to how microorganisms provide the foundation for planetary health and ecological health. We define the microbiome, what does gut health actually mean? We talk about the gut-brain axis, this relationship that exists between the gut microbiome and things like digestive health and

memory and depression and cognitive function. And because there is so much misinformation surrounding probiotics, we try to cut through the confusion to separate truth from fiction. What is the difference between a truly effective probiotic and simply a food product labeled as such? In any event, the work that Ara and Raja are doing at Seed, not just in terms of human health and things like childhood development, but also with respect to ecosystem support, including some pretty amazing stuff that they're doing regarding bee populations is really interesting. And I think you guys are gonna really enjoy it.

On that note, R and Raja were kind enough to thank all of you for listening by giving you a discount offer. When you go to seed.com forward slash richroll and use the code richroll at checkout, you'll get 20% off your first month of their daily symbiotic probiotic product. This is a rigorously evidence-based product. I've been using it for the last several months at this point to great effect. And in my humble opinion, it is the highest quality probiotic that I've personally tested,

which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have them on the show. But again, as a disclaimer, I have zero financial involvement with ARA, Raja, or SEED. They're not a show sponsor. I'm not an affiliate. I don't get any kickback here. Just like Jesse with Picky Bars and Andy with One Year No Beer, I have zero entanglement here. This is just a worthy product. I think you guys will enjoy.

So check it out. All right, let's do this. This is me and Ara Katz and Raja Durr. Thanks for coming over, you guys. Excited to talk to you. Yes, I love the microbiome. Got health, all that good stuff. Excited to explore it with you guys today.

I really enjoyed meeting you guys recently. I was super impressed with the work that you're doing and how steeped and well-versed you are in this confusing terrain, this subject matter that is sort of all the rage at the moment. It's been interesting to kind of track the mainstream sort of acceptance and enthusiasm and interest in the microbiome and in gut health. But I also think, as you know, there's a lot of confusion out there about it, especially when it comes to informing consumer choices around products that are going to best serve

our gut health. So why don't we start with just defining our terms a little bit, like what is the microbiome? Yeah. So the microbiome is the collection of organisms that live in and on the human body. The majority of the microbial presence in the body is concentrated in the gut, the lower gut, but there are microbes present on every surface, internal and external, and now even implicated directly and indirectly with the majority of organ systems in the human body.

So it's kind of the dark internet of biology. The dark web of the human body. Yes, I like that. Well, as the adage goes, we're more microorganism than we are human. Something like, what is it, like 38 trillion microorganisms living? 50-50. 50-50? We're half human?

But if you don't count red blood cells, which who are we to eliminate from this equation, it's four to one. Wow. Yeah, it's freaky when you start to think that you're essentially a host working symbiotically with all of these life forms to help us function and thrive. We sometimes like to use, we almost say like you're an ecosystem.

So the notion that like you tell someone they're a coral reef or they're a rainforest, and it's a really nice way of kind of giving a visual of that you are this kind of like teaming ecosystem of these various species. And so it actually almost takes this notion of host, yes, in terms of the choices you make. And of course, you have a lot of agency over this ecosystem, but this idea that just like the natural world, like our bodies are no different. And this gut flora and these organisms

that live all over our bodies are incredibly diverse, right? We're talking about bacteria, viruses, fungi. What is the breakdown? Protozoans. Protozoans, right? They live in our eyelashes and stuff like that? They live in the gut. I learned very recently

that they're the predators of that ecosystem. So they go around feasting on bacteria. There's a whole universe happening that we're consciously unaware of, right? And so let's define our next term, which is gut health. What does that mean? I think the best place to start with gut health is microbial, your microbiome. So modulating the microbiome to have functional effects that improve your status of health. And the second is that before you even get to the microbes is

a long winding complex tissue system that both needs to ward off pathogens, but also selectively absorb nutrients. And so in terms of reconciling those two somewhat at odds skill sets requires a very specialized set of skills. And there's a number of ways where the integrity of those barriers, the inflammatory responses, the metabolites that are produced, the signaling, nerve signalings, I would put under the category of gut health as well. And I think it's important to your point about defining terms. So what people refer to, so there's what the public and consumers believe about gut health, which often gets conflated with the microbiome. So there's this idea that your gut is your microbiome, and that is where the majority of these microbes reside. But what has happened, I think a lot in like the public perception is that there's this notion that, you know, your gut is your microbiome and therefore

what have, what a lot of products have tried to do and what particularly a lot of like dietary recommendations have been like this notion that, you know, once you kind of understand that you're missing some bacteria from this, from this ecosystem, or you could kind of like balance or restore it and eating specific foods. And so there's been like kind of a lot of conflation between this idea of gut health and the microbiome versus what Raja said, which is if the microbiome is all the microbes

that consist of the different ecosystems of your body, which includes your skin and all these other external surfaces. And so it's an important distinction. Yeah, the gut biome. consist of the different ecosystems of your body, which includes your skin and all these other external surfaces. Right. And so it's an important distinction. Yeah, the gut biome. In the Venn diagram, the gut health is a subset of the microbiome,

which is the macro ecosystem of our bodies. And when you start to think of it in those terms, the permeation between human being and the environments that we navigate starts to kind of distillate a little bit, right? Like we are our environment and there is no like hard line that distinguishes us from these organisms that, you know, we host and the environments that we kind of navigate and inhabit. I'll give you another, really another way to say that. If you think about it, it's of course so obvious to everyone

that your skin is an external surface. But I think if you think about the fact that we are two-holed organisms, which means that the hole from our mouth to our anus is actually an external surface. Right, it's outward facing. Yes, it's actually outward facing. So if you think about the notion that like food or anything that you're putting into one hole is like the same way that you think about putting on skincare, right? Or putting on like moisturizer or sunscreen. So there's this

notion that it, you know, food is kind of information. It's an external factor the same way like any environmental factor is it's it's a form of information. And so it's an interesting way to kind of think about this internal system which is only separated to raja's point from the rest of your body by a very thin wall um which is why the integrity of that is so important and i feel like we're as a culture becoming more attuned and conscious of the foods that we're eating you know the idea that whatever we put in our body becomes us and we're more mindful of that connection. But I feel like we're only just starting to recognize

that same paradigm with respect to what goes on our skin. I mean, the world is rife with beauty products and all kinds of things that we lather our bodies with that we don't think twice about what's in them and what's happening to us biologically by their consistent use. Yeah, I would actually go a step further and say one of the things that has happened is that the evangelism has way outweighed the evidence. So the word microbiome, the word probiotic gets used so much more often than there is evidence for. And so skin is a great example because it is the next kind of skin and kind of oral health will probably be these next categories

where every aisle you walk down every page of Amazon, you're going to start to see, um, the word microbiome and or probiotics, either the idea that there's probiotics or prebiotics in the product, or that the product has been tested for your microbiome and to be good for and or what Dove calls microbiome gentle, even though there's really no science for many of those claims. And so we're still going to be in an era where the marketing is going to be way ahead of the science in most of those claims. And so we're still going to be in an era where the marketing is going to be way ahead of the science in most of these categories. Well, the FDA doesn't regulate it at all, right? So this is just another example of

capitalist interest co-opting what happens to be popular in the wellness vernacular at the moment for the sake of consumer interest, right? Like you could slap that label on it, just like you can slap on all natural or anything else. And it's essentially meaningless. It has become less meaningful, but we obviously think that there's a huge opportunity in creating a standard for what does constitute a probiotic and actually kind of stewarding,

through your point about definitions, what actually is the scientific definition of a probiotic, which Raja just wrote a paper on. Yeah, well, let's talk about that. We're defining our terms here, so let's define the term probiotic. So probiotics are live microorganisms which confer a health benefit on the host. There's a couple of key definitions that are sub-definitions within that. The first is, if it has not been tested in a human population for the claim that's being made, then it is not

a probiotic. So that means double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies scientifically looking to show that that organism has a probiotic effect. One popular trick that we see a lot of commercial interests and corporations use is they'll test a probiotic strain for one very specific or small or niche outcome, like let's say, I don't know, antibiotic-associated diarrhea, for example. But then they'll position the product as if it has utility for a wide audience preventively or proactively, and there's just no information to suggest that. So I think that we really want to see companies and researchers, this isn't even just a company's thing. This is the term and in the lexicon is used and thrown around to basically capture any organism which could have a benefit or that's theoretically could have a benefit

or even just anything that's been fermented. That's how broad this category has gone where all fermented foods are now being positioned as probiotic too. But- Or lysates, right? Like in skincare. Yeah, so lysates are organisms that are heat killed

and then ripped open and just the cell wall is being used and applied. And those are called probiotic all the time. So it's very, very important that the definition include the organisms being live, being delivered in the appropriate dosages and having testing done on the indication in the population that it's being marketed to.

Well, you're like, I don't know what his title is, chief science officer. This guy, Dr. Gregor Reed, he was one of the guys who basically co-founded how we define these terms, right? By way for the World Health Organization and the UN. Yeah, he chaired the panel that actually authored the scientific definition in 2001 for the UN and WHO. Dr. Reed's published more papers on probiotics than any other scientists in the world. He's, which he reminded me when we were co-authoring this paper together, that he's authored 527 more papers than me at one argument we had.

Well, you're like, what are you, how old are you? You're super young. Early 30s. Yeah, right, right. He's two of me. You're a very precocious early 30s and a very accomplished early 30s. I did not take any offense to it. I thought it was a very comical statement.

Raj doesn't take offense to almost anything. It's pretty hard to offend me, but I just thought it was right. But he does scientific establishment and people that are very prolific. You know, science is a field that is based off of your past work. And so it's not a moot point that somebody is a significant author and thought leader in the field. I mean, he did chair the panel that authored the definition. So I let that one slide. So he's written 500 some odd.

29 papers. 29 papers. 29 papers, okay. And counting. But there's thousands of studies out there right now on gut health, the microbiome, probiotics, prebiotics, all of that. And yet there's a huge problem or gap between fact and fiction and hype and reality.

So can we kind of dive into that and hopefully bridge that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it goes back again a little bit to the fact that the term itself is used so loosely, not just on products, but also from a dietary perspective, like Raja mentioned, like fermented foods and beverages are kind of, you know, a lot of people just say, I'll drink a kombucha and I don't need to take a probiotic. And I think that's

partially just because the term itself has become so diluted. Meanwhile, it's an entire area of inquiry, like, you know, within microbiome science. And I think it's especially important too, because in the future, particularly as we look at areas like, you know, fertility, too, because in the future, particularly as we look at areas like fertility, the treatment of pathology and disease, the way we're going to metabolize chemotherapy, the way we're going to think about vaginal health and preterm birth in the developing world. I mean, probiotics have such potential to make a huge, huge impact. And not just because of their health impact, but also from the affordability compared to other medications, the lack of side effects compared to other medications or other complications. And I think we really feel that there's such an

important part of our work is not just the science and to create what we believe are some of the most sophisticated and effective products, but to really steward the translation of it and to really be able to call out evangelism over evidence and to really start to make that distinction so that as they start to play an increasingly important role in our lives and in our health, by the way, not just, and we can get into this, not just for humans, but for the environment, whether it's soil or water, in our case, a probiotic for honeybees that we've been working on. If everyone thinks that every tortilla chip you can just throw probiotics on, or your shampoo is just throw some microbes in, it's a

probiotic, obviously those things are not going to get taken as seriously and and actually as a result you know when we've seen areas of science where public perception shapes and and hinders funding and the ability to move some of these areas forward um and so i think that's um for us like part of really big important part of the mission right and really a big call for something very simple specificity so what a particular trick that bothers me a lot is when companies reference abstractly the importance of the microbiome. Say it's been implicated with everything from autism to neurodegenerative disease to Alzheimer's

and your immune system. And they reference all of these appropriate scientific studies that show associations between the microbiome and those disease states. But then on the next tab, it tells you a product that's never been tested in any of those populations. And so I think that if companies and researchers are more specific and if we can educate consumers

to follow the trail, ask for the studies, ask for the research, what's been done. I mean, specifically, like for the studies, ask for the research, what's been done. I mean, specifically, like, it's not, it's not, it's hard to make those types of claims for specificity while, and dampen the enthusiasm at the same time, because it is very true. I mean, there will be microbial interventions for everything from, as Ara mentioned, cancer therapy, to the prevention and treatment of food allergies, to neurodegenerative disease. And we see our tracking and our research divisions in our company on all three of those areas.

So we know the research and we know the researchers doing the best work in those areas. None of the products that have ever made it to market or will in the next year or two have evidence for those indications. So I think that's really important to note. Yeah, my sense is that

this is just an unbelievably complicated science that we're only beginning to understand at a very base level. But on a consumer level, we wanna just think like, hey, I drink my kombucha and I have my Greek yogurt and I occasionally put kimchi on my food and like I'm dealing with my probiotics and I have my Greek yogurt and I occasionally put kimchi on my food and like,

I'm dealing with my probiotics and I'm like all good. So, you know, let's dispel, you know, misconceptions around kind of what the typical, you know, sort of thought pattern is or behaviors are around like the products that are currently available. So fermented foods definitionally are a very different category than a probiotic. It's a pre, it would be considered a prebiotic, yes. Unless it's been shown to modulate the microbiome, it's not even a prebiotic. It is just a fermented food.

That is the category. And I'll give you an example. So a study was done that did a deep metagenomic sequencing on a kimchi product. And of the 900 or so different strains that were found from the lots that were tested, only four are believed to have probiotic potential or were advanced into showing that it has probiotic potential. I think that a lot of the benefits in fermented foods come because the bacteria actually pre-digests a lot of the components and roughage that for some people are very difficult to handle. And they're fibrous.

They're fibrous and they're delicious. So this is not a PSA against fermented foods. We think they're great and certainly have been used in ancestral populations for the purposes of food preservation for a very, very long time. If I didn't have a refrigerator, my diet would be 70% fermented foods. But the fermentation process itself is bacterial growth right are these not like sort of you know uh positive organisms that we want to introduce into our microbiome they don't stay there very long they don't colonize uh and so in fact i would say

more than more important than the organisms that are used for fermentation are the organic acids and fermentation byproducts and some of those metabolites that we believe could be used by the human body to have a health benefit. But these studies are few and far between. And so the research is really, really lacking. And what about kombucha? So kombucha is a complex community that's part fungi, part bacteria. Interestingly enough, some studies show that non-commercial kombuchas can have a pretty interesting effect in the regulation of the inflammatory cytokine release profile that's resulted in the body. And so I think that, but again,

these non-commercially available, non-treated, non-pre-pasteurized are much more complex communities. And so I even heard one study where acromantia was found in an ancestral or indigenous kombucha culture from the far North of Canada. What is that? Acromantia is a very- The fountain of youth, didn't you read the articles? is found in an ancestral or indigenous kombucha culture from the far north of Canada. What is that?

Acromantia is a very, very- The fountain of youth. Didn't you read the articles? Acromantia is a very, very interesting bacteria, which lives in the- It sounds like it's from an Avatar movie or something. It's one of my favorite names. There's another bacteria, which is a really cool name. So the two in the most recent gut brain access paper

that were deficient in a thousand person trial in people with depression were Coprococcus and Dialyster. I think Dialyster sounds pretty nefarious too. For Game of Thrones. But acromancia is really interesting. It's a strict anaerobe. That means it hates oxygen

and it lives exclusively along what's called the mucosa. So that's the lining of the gut where the mucus layer is. And these organisms are what's called butyrate producers. So they produce this short chain fatty acid directly, which has two benefits. The first is that it's an actual fuel source for your human epithelial colon cells. So that was a really breakthrough finding when we see that actually human cells have evolved to use bacterial products as a primary fuel source for proliferation, for metabolic activity. So that just goes to show you how intimate the relationship between humans and bacteria in some ecosystems or body sites really are. And the second is butyrate,

And the second is butyrate, we believe, signals systemic processes in the body. So one of our research tracks is also looking at the role that butyrate has on regulating type 2 diabetes and actually making the body more effective at clearing glucose from the bloodstream with the same amount of insulin. So these are some really cool bugs. Right. So these are some really cool bugs. Right. And actually, the way Raj is describing it is like a really important distinction, just because you were talking about how to like break this down for like the general consumer looking at probiotics. So it's really important to think about that a microbe could be taken.

So you could actually consume bacteria to have a specific effect that it has been studied for, which is very different than the way probiotics are currently marketed, which is this idea that it's good bacteria, that you have some good bacteria, but that you're missing some in your gut and that you take a probiotic and it puts it back, which is two very different ways of thinking about them. But the scientific definition is the former, which is that you consume bacteria that has been demonstrated to have an effect in the human body. And so, and that's the difference, which is, and where the marketing is right now is this notion that you kind of like restore or put the good stuff back versus that it has an

effect in the body. And that by taking it continuously, because probiotics or Trent Raja was talking about colonization, which is another good myth to bust. And that there's a lot of people who think that a probiotic must colonize in order to quote unquote work. But in fact, probiotics are transient, which means that they do their work kind of on the road on their way through your body. And so that's an important distinction that I think a lot of people kind of don't understand. Yeah, that's new to me. Like I thought, okay, you take this, you sort of seed it to use your

phraseology and then you colonize it and you populate it and you feed it and you you're you're like a farmer to your own gut right but now you're saying well there's a different term for that and it's called a fecal transplant yeah i wrote that down that was one thing i wanted to talk to you guys about um i envision a future in which there are high-end Tony salons where you go in and get your artisanal fecal transplants to meet your every need. Biodynamic poop in a pill. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, so kombucha no bueno. But maybe if you make it yourself. If it's not pasteurized, flash pasteurized. If it is a low sugar or no sugar fermented beverage that has high polyphenolic content from teas, it could be a health promoting beverage. We just urge caution around calling it a probiotic

just because it has bacteria. Well, there's this sort of sense that we can universally you know claim certain probiotics to just be panaceas like i just take this pill whether it's vsl3 or whatever it is and i'm dealing with it but you know to take it back to what we were talking about a moment ago it's it's like it's just way more complicated than that right and and also like you And also another important distinction, and it's interesting, there aren't a lot of categories that get spoken about by their generic name. So we always say, saying I take probiotics is like saying I like books, or like I eat food.

And then someone asks you what food you eat, and you're like, no, no, I eat food. And there's thousands of strains of bacteria and so there's a there's also a lack of specificity in the strain a lot of people who take for example if you say i take supplements most people aren't like well which which ones you're like no i just take supplements and there's obviously a quite big difference between taking d3 and omega-3s so um there's no like currently we're at the place where what the marketing has done is instead of creating specificity around the strains, which is actually understandable because they're so hard to say, is that they've then gone to indication. store a pharmacy today and see like one for mood, one for digestion, one, because there's, there really is no, the consumer doesn't know the difference between all these strains.

And they think the category is just generally like, oh, it's the same reason that you can just drink a kombucha and think you're taking quote unquote probiotics. But actually, I mean, there's thousands of strains of bacteria and obviously it's very different to eat a French fry than an avocado. And it's kind of this, you know, the same, there's just no specificity to Raja's kind of earlier point. What is the difference between strain and species? Species are like dogs. Strains are like all the different breeds. And it's important for bacteria because some strains within the same, so a species is like Lactobacillus remnosus or Lactobacillus remnosus or lactobacillus acidophilus. Acidophilus is the species, lactobacillus is the genus. Strain is what comes next. And that's within the lactobacillus remnosus

or within the lactobacillus acidophilus. Those are strains within the acidophilus species. And for one particular species like lactobacillus reuteri, which a lot of people have really latched onto because MIT basically gave it to mice and their fur became very lustrous. And they started to exhibit signs of youth and vitality and reproductive behaviors of younger mice. And so everyone got really excited thinking that, you know, yogurt makes you young again. But there's some strains of, of roideri that are 70% genetically different from other strains of the same species. There's no other taxonomic species. There's no other category of the tree of life where you find such difference within a, at the species level. It's insane.

So specificity, again, at the strain level, some strains of the same species are shown to help IBS, other strains of the same species make it worse. So it's- Right. So when you buy a probiotic product and it says, I forget the acronym they use, but like 800 billion strains of this, that, and the other,

like how do we as consumers try to understand? So there's two main tricks that are used. The first is that they'll call out the... If you look at the back, they'll have two Latin words and not a strain designation. So they'll just take these generic species that have the highest yield because they're cheaper to manufacture

rather than discovering ones which are, rather than discovering and doing clinical work. I mean, it's a bit insulting to us because we're a pretty deep life sciences company that has multiple ongoing trials and human clinical support for all of our strains. And, you know, that's the first big trick. And the second is a large number on the front, which actually doesn't mean anything. That's just the number of colonies that those organisms find. So if a strain is very impotent, then sometimes brute force can be effective. Like the VSL-3 operates on the brute force approach.

But there have been some probiotic studies that show efficacy with as little as 2 billion. And there's even some studies that show that there's efficacy when the organisms are heat killed or they're dead. So there's no direct relationship between the number of organisms or the size of the car and the intelligence of the driver. So it's- Yeah, it sounds impressive though.

Yeah, I mean, and I think what has happened is that marketers realize that you could merchandise, you could have, it's kind of like many other categories where you have like maximum strength and regular. And they realized that the higher the CFU number, the consumer would believe the stronger the product and therefore more expensive. And one of the other loopholes that happens too is that they will reference some clinical studies or research. But if you go back to the research, the dosage that was used in the clinical study is not the dosage that's in the product. Or it wasn't their strain. Or it wasn't

their strain. They'll be referencing research at the species level, not at the strain level. And so there's a lot of tricks to the labels that, you know, we get asked all the time, well, then how the hell do you know what to buy? And the answer is why we started this company. So it's a hard, Raj always says, well, you got to ask the company, what are your studies? And he is, you are right. But the burden, part of the reason that we founded Seed and of course, in all the ways that we and what we've talked about in terms of where we see the future of um you know microbiome science going as it as as it can impact consumer health is important but a lot of why we started it was that there was no

specificity and precision and really no no no one to trust um because we don't think the burden should be on the consumer um it can't be it and it can't be because even if they got the study, they wouldn't know what to do with it. And I think we felt that there was a huge opportunity. And scientists as well, one of the reasons that many scientists don't put their name on consumer health companies is because they don't operate with the kind of, it's too easy to do those loopholes and to take those shortcuts.

But when you have scientists that have, um, tenure or academic standing or funded by, you know, government grants, you know, they can't take those risks. Um, and so one of the reasons that they do end up more involved in kind of, um, drug trials or drug companies or biotech companies is because they are going through FDA phase trials, which do have regulatory around them. Um, and so what we really wanted to do is say, well, what could we create that self-regulation? And what would that mean as we start to think about creating that new standard of bacteria? Right, so explain how it is that, you know, what it is that you're doing that's different.

So across our division as a company, we have everything from consumer health products to areas where we're engaging with the FDA to make prevention and treatment claims for disease. So we aren't, we put the product or the category in the box that is best suited for that area. Our first launch was to actually, to Aura's point, make a lot of, bring clarity to this consumer health world of bacteria that could be beneficial, not just in a way that's integrous to the science, but in ways that could benefit otherwise healthy individuals.

And so we don't think that probiotics should, or the ingestion of live bacteria, you know, one of the things that has resonated really well is that, you know, for the majority, all of human existence, the only levers that we've had to impact health are diet, lifestyle factors like exercise, cessation of negative behaviors like smoking or being sedentary or drugs. And now we're finally at a stage where we can harness the power of microbes or bacteria to improve or to push that vector proactively in many different ways. And we designed studies and tests that

actually corroborate this for a healthy individual. So I'll give you an example. We actually designed a test for our product where we take intestinal epithelial cells, which are the linings of the gut, and we apply an aggressor. So an aggressor in this case is lipopolysaccharide, which are endotoxins from negative bacteria that are in your gut. They're actually the most potent inducer of an inflammatory response. So in the clinic, they're used as to replicate a powerful or induce a powerful inflammatory cascade and a number of other different areas. And we tried coding them with our strains before

and then inducing the inflammatory response and then applying it afterwards. And in both cases, we found not only for, does this quickly down-regulate or dampen the inflammatory response in your gut that results in barrier breakdown or barrier disintegrity, but it also protects the severity of that response to begin with. So that's a really interesting way that people have never,

I mean, there's a number of things that on a day-to-day basis can cause a breakdown of barrier function. High-intensity interval exercise training is one of them. And normally people associate that with being good for health, alcohol, NSAIDs, antibiotic use, high fat diets, stress, low sleep. There's a number of conditions that are associated with,

and then of course- Crowded places. What is it? Crowded places. Crowding. Yeah, stress, anxiety. There's a number of, and so someone once asked me, well, can you hypothesize why something like high interval training

would cause an temporary opening of loosening of the gut barrier? And I said, well, there's no way to possibly design a test for this, but think about kind of in a primitive time, if you had severe exercise or were in pursuit of something, wouldn't it be a way for your body to get cues as to what you're ingesting or what you're pursuing? Or if there's some sort of exposure, environmental exposure that you'd want your immune system to come into very close contact with what's passing through that external surface. And so of course, there's no way to know it, but intuitively it makes a lot of sense. But that's something that a otherwise

healthy individual could benefit from on a day-to-day basis is maintaining a barrier integrity for the entire length or duration of that organ system. And so that's one area, but back to your question about how and what we approach and what makes, I think our research tracks different. So we assembled a collection of strains from top academic labs, from academic collaborations and commercial partners from all across the world. Our fermentation and our academic partners

are in Scandinavia, they're in Northern Italy, they're in Southern France, they're in Japan, they're in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And our core thesis is that we have mechanistic and human research for all of these strains. And so the study that I liked the best was published in 2010 in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology. And that shows that in a 300 person trial, that daily use of our strains results in improvements across five key areas of digestive health, namely intestinal transit time, stool consistency, stool hydration, ease of expulsion, and bloating slash flatulence. Right, and why are those factors important? Well, those are the core factors that you use to score and assess your digestive health.

So if you're having appropriate muscle contraction, so food's moving through at an adequate rate, if your stool is of the appropriate consistency, which means that microbial activity is sufficient to metabolize your food into appropriate stool. If you're not straining, which means that you don't have constipation or constipation associated effects, you don't increase your risk factors for hemorrhoids. There's kind of a constellation of effects that are downstream of poor digestive function with these being the physical parameters

that you can use to assess the score of your digestion. And so if you ask people, you know, and those are just the biophysical ones. If you look in terms of quality of life and you ask people, what are the things that change their quality of life almost instantly, it's affecting digestion or the way in which people process food or digest their food. And so we were pretty blown away when we found out that 68 million Americans have chronic constipation. Like this isn't just something that's on the coasts, right? This is-

Yeah, I was gonna say, what you know, of course, is related to, of course, the lack of fiber in our diets. I wonder how many of those people are taking some form of opiate. That's exacerbating- Or not eating fiber.

Or not eating fiber. Absolutely. Many things. I mean, one thing that is striking and kind of amazing is the extraordinary rise in gut disorders and gut permeability issues, everything from IBS to Crohn's, ulcerative colitis. Like when I was younger, I didn't know anybody that suffered from these problems. And now like it's, you know, you just hear it every single day. People are really having problems with this. So going back to this idea of us being, you know,

a micro organ, you know, us as humans being a microorganism and the macro organism, you know, this, my sense is that these problems are much larger than, hey, you should change your diet. Like it goes to, you know, deficiencies in our soil and the toxins that we breathe and what we're putting on our skin and the, you know, the processes that go into these foods that we're like, like all of these factors, anxiety and stress and all of this are creating a level of chronic oxidative stress

and a cascade, a domino effect of all other, any number of biological factors that are contributing to these chronic ailments that just weren't part and parcel of life in 1975. That emanates from directly from the hygiene hypothesis, which is as we've become cleaner and as we've become quicker and to treat, and we do so more frequently in some instances

where there's nothing to treat at all, that we remove the diversity of microbes that we're exposed to, particularly in these windows of development. So there's a couple of key windows. The first is the moment in first days of birth. The second is the duration up until you get to a steady state microbiome when you're an infant.

So the first six months, two to three years is when it reaches steady state, but that period of time between when you move from breast milk to solid food or that weaning process. And then of course, that's the microbiome that you have in its steady state for the majority of your life. So barring factors and how many people you know today that don't take, have never taken antibiotics.

I mean, it's few and far between. I was gonna say also like the decrease in, of course the overuse of antibiotics, say also the decrease in, of course, the overuse of antibiotics, but also the decrease in breastfeeding. Right. I mean, that's what brought you into this from the beginning, right? Can you share that story? Absolutely.

I met Raja actually when I was pregnant, when we started kind of thinking about what we were going to build. And I think that I've always been somebody who's been really curious about how, particularly with the rise of wellness, it seems like we've moved further from science in some ways and partially due to how powerful some of these marketing ideas are and I think how much agency they, the illusion of agency over our health in some cases with some products.

Amplified by, you know, a general distrust of, you know, that's out there based upon past experiences that people have had. And I think, you know, one of the things about science too is that it does get fairly conflated with like Western medicine and big pharma. fairly conflated with like Western medicine and big pharma. But there is this methodology of science that I've always found like really just intriguing and actually quite spiritual, which we can go into if you want to. The deeper you go, the more spiritual it gets. Yes, very much so. Yeah, I mean, well, it's a methodology of asking a question and running an experiment with no attachment to the outcome.

So for the way that Raj and I kind of got to know each other was very much through, and particularly when you're pregnant, you're bombarded with, the internet knows you're pregnant. So every algorithm, every ad, I mean, the retargeting, I mean, it's incredible, just kind of the messages and not to mention

many people's unsolicited opinions of what you should and should not be doing and eating and taking and so I think it was really through our getting to know each other and and of course as you've heard today just I think Raja has such a unique ability to to kind of synthesize and be able to communicate and kind of really think about these ideas from a place that's actually not grounded in like well how do you make a lot of money from this but but actually kind of like what really best serves the human in development. And he, when we met already, was starting to think about this kind of critical window of development, particularly around the microbiome. And I had actually just

come out of, actually just before I got pregnant, a miscarriage, and I had resigned from my previous company. And I was really just thinking about what I wanted to create and use, use these, um, my skills for, and what I wanted to put out in the world. And a lot of what we started talking about and how we really bonded was around kind of, well, um, this translation, um, this translational piece. Well, what, what, who is going to build this bridge between, um, science and in our case, the microbiome and the science that was coming out of that and getting it to humans and consumer health. And so we were really building, but it wasn't really until after I had my child that I could only supply about a third

of his breast milk after about four months. And after you spend a year focused in the space and really understanding kind of this critical window that Raja just spoke about, it is quite actually heartbreaking when you know what you should be doing and what you would like to be doing. And that the only answer is that someone just says, get the expensive stuff from Europe, which is just not to an entrepreneur is like the last acceptable answer and to a mom is like unacceptable. And I think that was really like my inception point just from like an, I mean, obviously as many women know who are probably listening right now, uh, right when you have a child, it's not the first moment where you're

like, I'm going to start a new company. But it really was for me like an aha moment around, well, really who is creating this bridge? Because if that's the best answer, and I had access to great doctors, to people who were supposedly, quote-unquote, experts, there was no acceptable solution. And I think particularly when you look at how fast the understanding that infants developing microbiome is progressing in the scientific space and in academia especially, we really felt that we could at least start the company

from this notion of what could what would it mean to create the evolution of formula and supplementation options for women that couldn't breastfeed or who chose who made a choice to stop breastfeeding and so that was really where seed started seed seeding being the you know biological term for an infant's first exposure to microbes kind of the seeds of their microbiome. That was really where we began. And when we started building, we realized we were building this extraordinary bridge

between the academic science and some of the most cutting edge and leading researchers in the world and the space and the ability to, and especially through Raj's expertise and the translation and how that would make its way to a product, we realized that there was this huge opportunity to really take that platform and then start applying it to other areas where we felt the research, where a product would not reflect evangelism over evidence and where we felt that actually there was sufficient evidence to substantiate creating something that we thought could be really impactful in someone's life.

Yeah. I want to get into those downstream products that you're developing right now. It's super interesting. But while we're kind of here on childbirth, child rearing, you mentioned, Raja, a moment ago, that an infant's microbiome is essentially locked in at birth. Is that fair? No. So in fact, it's totally a blank slate at birth, going up to birth.

Okay. So if you want to hear a little bit of science drama. I love science drama. I love science drama. There's two opposing fields, and both are led by incredible female scientists that are very strong and opinionated. And at conferences, everyone knows it's uncomfortable when they give talks right after each other.

Do they fight on Twitter? Some version of that. Usually it's in the peer review sections of journals is where they go at it. Right, go after each other. But one believes that the infant is not born sterile. Sorry, in other words, that the mother's bacteria from her mouth migrates through the body into the developing infant

prior to the moment of birth. Through the canal? Through the canal. No, no, no. It migrates through the body. Like the ingestion of oral microbes migrates into the baby across the placenta while the baby is still, what is it, in utero?

Is that the term? And then the other camp says, absolutely not. Bacteria evolve too quickly. If one bacteria was able to do that, another would quickly learn that skillset and would go and hijack it and our infant mortality rate would be much higher. And then the other camp says, well, look at this 360 or so person data set that we found showing that that is the case. And the other group says, no, that's contamination. And so it goes back and forth a

little bit in that way. But then the other main school of thought says the infant doesn't have any organisms until the moment where it passes through the birth canal. And then that's where it picks up the mother's lactobacillus. And if you think about it, humans are the only mammals or certainly the only apes that give birth in a hospital on their back on a table. I mean, normally the way that the human posture would be designed to be something of a hunching or leaning over process. And you could imagine that alongside microbial exchange, there'd be other bodily substances and fluids that would be expulsed.

Is that the word? Sure. Is that a word? I think it is. It is right now. Yeah. At that period of time. Although I think a lot of women would argue

that there are many other bodily fluids that are still expelled, even in a hospital bed. Great. Well, then I think we should- But the infant is rushed away and cleaned off. And cleaned right off. We should do a study. are many other bodily fluids that are still expelled even in a hospital bed great well then i think the infant is rushed away and cleaned off and cleaned right up we should do a study i bet those infants have less allergies than ones that that are not yeah but but to get to the the point of it like those fluids during a vaginal birth are absolutely critical in forming the micro there's a trifecta of,

there's three core ways that you can impact the microbiome from infant that we believe that an infant should be exposed to. Vaginal birth and access to bodily fluids, breastfeeding and not consuming antibiotics or cessation of antibiotic use within that first six, six month window of time. And also there's a microbial transul

from the mother's nipple, areola. That is, it's where most of the bifidobacterium reside. And even again, there's strong evidence now to suggest that breast milk isn't sterile and that there's a micro, that you get beneficial organisms in breast milk itself. So why breastfeeding is so important? Of the three, the most important is breastfeeding.

If you breastfeed consistently and are able to, it generally would over, at least in terms of epidemiological studies, would overpower the risk factors of C-section or of early stage antibiotic use. So have there been long-term studies performed on children that were born through cesarean c-sections or children that were raised without breast milk and and the incidence of you know i don't know whether it's

gut disorders or other kinds of chronic autoimmune yeah that that relate to microbiome health not in a way where they're controlled so not an interventional study, but observational studies have shown a higher prevalence of allergic sensitizations and atopic disease and immune disorders in infants that were not breastfed. Or again, it's confusing because usually anti-caesarean or antibiotic use or not breastfeeding, it doesn't cluster neatly into three perfect categories because usually someone's missed one, missed two. Exactly, right. But your sense is that if a child is born via C-section, that whatever deficiency it might have coming out of the gate can be overcome through breastfeeding. And avoidance of antibiotics.

Skin-to-skin contact, contact with the mother's nipple, diverse exposure to microorganisms. Animals, pets. Animals in the house. And dietary products that have antibiotics in them, right? Of course. And pesticides and the like, I would imagine. We live in this Purell culture. I think we're getting hip to the antibiotic thing in a way

that we haven't previously. But I know people very well that have taken long-term courses of antibiotics over the years and now have all kinds of issues that are just debilitating for them. And no matter what health protocol they pursue, they always end up quite ill from time to time. And I think we're just gonna see more and more of this. So what are the larger kind of diseases, chronic ailments out there that you're seeing that are in your minds like a direct result

of poor gut health? Well, I want to start by saying that there are some antibiotics probably are responsible for extending human life more than any other intervention. So I just want to make very clear that if you need an antibiotic, if you have a bacterial infection, take it. Some studies are now showing that the majority or the bulk or at least 90 percent of the microbiome recovers maybe not in its full vigor as it was before but within a six-month period of time watchful waiting it's called is is still effective for it's not that there's an irreversible decimation that's gone forever and so there's um it's very bad uh and there's but irreversible decimation that's gone forever. And so it's very bad. And we don't know what other downstream effect, is my point.

We don't know what those periods of time do to cause risk factors for other conditions like the ones you just referenced. But in terms of a dysbiotic microbiome and what that can cause, I mean, again, you have to take into account that the whole field is just discovered for the most part in 2006. And so long-term illnesses were remaining to be seen. Mechanistically, we've established that there's a very interesting and clear link between conditions as severe as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, the whole window or cluster of neurodegenerative diseases.

Alzheimer's disease, the whole window or cluster of neurodegenerative diseases. There's a mediation of the gut liver access and the gut skin access. So atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, eczema, we have interventional studies showing that modulating or the administration of bacteria can dampen or reverse atopic skin conditions. Via the gut liver access, they can attenuate cholesterol or lipid levels or lipoprotein levels in ways that we believe are better for health. Your LDL cholesterol and your VLDL cholesterol stay a little bit low, the particle number two, not just the count and the particle size. What else? What about autism? Oh boy.

I mean, that's a really, really loaded question. I can tell you that I know the perfect bacteria to decrease the risk of autism in mice. I know two bacteria that'd be very good at decreasing the risk of autism or- You can diagnose autism in mice. Oh, mice can be bred for autism, autism spectrum disorder.

They stick to themselves. They don't socialize well. They don't engage in community dynamics. There's a very, very good animal model in mice for autism and autism spectrum disorder. Look, these things are very multifactorial. And I will tell you that I've even seen, I don't think this data is published yet, but some data showing that probiotics work on alleviating the

symptoms of autism disorder. But again, the question is, GI issues are one of the most common comorbidities with autism. So the question is, if you relieve the GI distress, does that then in turn end up reversing some of the, you know, behavioral expressions of that disorder in the form of, you know, violent or self-violence or behavioral extremes or swings. So these things are very complex and multifactorial. I do think there's been two very, very good studies showing that not only that when you knock out the microbiome completely, you increase the risk of autism spectrum disorder.

So that shows that bacteria are involved. That much I can tell you is true. In terms of what bacteria, please nobody go and buy a probiotic that has the word autism on their website because there's no published studies that show that any commercially available probiotics have any effect at all. And in fact, the organisms that are most involved in the presence of those neuroactive metabolites or the gut-brain axis, GBA, are actually not bifidobacterium or not lactobacilli.

But to Raj's point about the digestive relief. More science needed. Yeah, more science needed. What is the impact in your mind of basically our just decreasing, the decreasing diversity of our biosphere in general, through our soil, through the, our increasingly toxic environment, the way we raise animals for food, et cetera,

all of these things playing into species extinction, all the way down to single cell organisms and smaller and the like, how does this play into gut health and how we think about? Yeah, I mean, well, Raja kind of alluded to this earlier when he spoke a little bit about the hygiene hypothesis. One of the ways that like we try and kind of paint this picture for our community is, you know, we talk a little bit about this notion of like the climate change of

our insides, right? It's kind of like, you know, you learned about like the lack of diversity or what's happening to like our rainforest. Or you look at the way people like learn about what's happening to a coral reef in some ways. A reflection. Yes, it's very much. Yeah, exactly. And so sometimes those are really good kind of analogs for kind of starting to understand like how what's happening in the environment as actually like analogous with what's happening in our body um and as a result obviously many of the things that raja just uh spoke about um and so you know one of the things that we are are looking at um from a seed perspective and we have a division of our of our company called seed labs which is

where we start to look at the way in which microbes could be a part of a solution. So like honeybees are like a really awesome example. Yeah, you guys are doing something amazing. Yes, and actually about to, there'll be a paper published actually this summer about some of the first field trials for honeybees, but this looks specifically at the impact on the impact, um, on the honeybee gut, um, of neonicotinoid pesticides. Um, and so, you know, what the, the, the ways, and we have

other projects that looking to your point, you, you brought up soil, um, and, uh, and, and of course in our, in our world, we're looking at, you know, other ecosystems and also even how microbes, um, could play a role in, in, uh, the a role in the cleansing of water, for example, and even the creation of more sustainable materials like bioplastics. But on the honeybees, I'll let Raja. Raja can speak a little bit more about the science. I'll start by answering your question. The two most dense microbial communities on Earth are soil and the human gut.

So it goes to show you, I mean, just- We're depleting both right now. Both. That's to start with the definitions or a truism about, I think that that's a really, really interesting place to start. Getting dirty is good. The healthiest, the sexiest microbiome out is the Amish microbiome. I mean, these guys don't get sick. They don't have allergic sensitization. They don't have chronic degenerative diseases. There's even been studies that are published and peer reviewed in scientific journals showing the inverse relationship of the all modern diseases in Amish populations and its relationship with microbial communities that are found in those areas. So I never thought I'd say those words, but the Amish really are leading the way.

The more I learn about the Amish, the more convinced I am that they've really figured out life in a way that we haven't. They keep coming up on the podcast. Was it, Blake, was it Cal Newport who was talking about the Amish? And basically we were talking about their relationship with technology and how they think about innovation in terms of its usefulness to the community. They're not totally Luddite.

They run an evaluation of purpose, utility versus distraction, and they've been able to kind of maintain the integrity of community. And I don't know, man, I think there's a lot to be learned. And the community of their microbiomes too, apparently. Now we can just look at people's microbiomes and make a determination of how they're living, right? A scientific approach to that would be to compare that to other agrarian societies that have daily exposure with soil and farm animals, which are great exposures of means to microbial diversity. And I'd bet that their microbiome is just as healthy too.

so in such close proximity um with the built environment um and within and and so close to uh societies that are organized so fundamentally differently which is that and which is so so interesting because they they truly are this kind of counter culture um and and i mean if you look at areas of pennsylvania actually yeah i mean it's it's incredible It's the original. Yeah, exactly. More rock than punk, maybe. But they, that, I mean, if you look at like in Pennsylvania, like the proximity to New York City is, I mean, it's extraordinary. What's ironic is that, you know, you have all these women, you know, there's like an underground like breast milk ring that you can buy, like breast milk, and you can buy all these like culture dairy products from like the Amish, but it's illegal in New York. So you have buy like breast milk and you can buy all these like um culture dairy products

from like the amish but it's illegal in new york so you have to like buy them they have like these churches so like try that moms yeah exactly amish hookup seriously it's incredible yeah because when i was looking for supplementation options um a lot of people were telling me that you could buy we're so dysfunctional it's hilarious it's Society is so dysfunctional. It's incredible. That's amazing. Wow. But honeybees. Yeah, go.

Is that where we are? Yeah, we're talking about the bees. Amish honeybees. Amish bees. So we found that we- The Amish bee, yes. The most prized honeybee. So the honeybee, most people here would know

or have heard of this phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, which is for unexplained reasons in the last 10 years or so, mass, mass communities of honeybees are just dying off indiscriminately. We don't know why the populations are- Do we really not know why?

We're starting, so that's the hook. The answer is the two leading causes or the three leading causes are habitat loss. And that doesn't just mean the wild is being less wild. It means monoculture of plants too. So the streamlining. That's a word. Of agriculture.

The lack of diversity that exists now in these places. The second is a pathogen called fallibrood disease. It's a nasty pathogen that kills honeybee babies in the first three days of life. And the third are neonicotinoid pesticides, which the EU had banned last year, but the US still allows. And they're called because they operate

in the nicotinoid and nicotinic receptor sites in the brain, which etymologically are related to what's found in the tobacco plant. So much so that if you put a suspension of water with glucose and water with neonicotinoid pesticides, honeybees will pick the pesticide water over the sugar water. And that's a completely crazy finding.

And so what it does is it slowly disorients bees. And when it compounds in aggregates in their bodies, they forget, they just get so disoriented that they just lose their, they forget where their hive is. It's kind of, it's really morbid in some ways. Isn't there some indication that cell phone signals and Wi-Fi

is contributing to this? Or is that woo? I haven't done, it is, if it is contributing to it, is that woo i haven't done um it is if it is contributing to it it is not a uh i mean we see this we see this happening in communities that have low uh in in sites where there's low wi-fi and low cell signal but there's high pesticide use so it certainly would be less um it make it makes my woo radar go off um but i'm not sure. I don't think that they access these communities. But the point is that a new factor is we, so this thesis was when these environmental changes happen,

the first thing that changes is the microbiome. And so there's a lot of sequencing work that was done. Our chief scientists and our first seed fellow are the ones that are leading these field trials. And we actually found that by reintroducing three probiotic organisms back into the bee gut, you can A, detoxify neonicotinoid pesticides before they're absorbed into the body. So it binds and releases these common pesticides and dampens or protects the immune response as a result of it. But perhaps more impressively in early, early

bee communities, you know, so bees are becoming something like Japan right now, where there's a lot of old bees, but very few young bees. And they dramatically and significantly protect these young bees from crowding out this pathogen, which is so powerful that if it's found, beekeepers are supposed to go and burn and scorched earth the entire hive

to make sure that it doesn't- Within days of its discovery. Because it can spread very quickly. Even one spore can spread and result in an epidemic in a neighboring hive. So we published about this. The first paper came out in scientific reports in nature using a Drosophila model.

That's a model organism for honeybee populations. Field trials just concluded last year. We made our announcement at the end of last year and we patented this, but then opened up royalty-free the patent to honeybee farmers around the world. Um, and then we hope at some point this real year to roll out bio patties and bio sprays that are based off these, uh, species after our UC Davis trial commences.

And so this is a field, a large scale field trial in almond farms, which is kicking off in a couple of months. So essentially it's a probiotic. Right now it's a patty. It it's a patty it's like almost like it's like a pancake and so they eat it okay so they eat it in the hive and yes and that populates their gut flora with something that um helps them uh avoid the negative impacts of these nicotinamide of nicotinoid pesticides and of the foul brood disease. So two out of the three leading causes

of colony collapse disorder. Right. And just for people that don't know, like paint the picture of colony collapse disorder, you know, at its ultimate? Yeah, bees are the most efficient pollinators that have or ever will be discovered or invented. If we lose bee populations,

we lose nearly every single blooming crop or fruiting crop that you find. Maybe some in small quantities, root vegetables would persist, but a lot of the diversity that you see from above ground pollination are virtually gone. I mean, models that predict it say that the supermarket, the fruits and vegetables aisles of the supermarket

would be decreased by over 90% if we lost so many bees. Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to say it is whatever you ate for breakfast this morning probably won't be here. And there's also other implications like cotton, for example, that have, of course, other implications for other industries and other uses. Right, so it really broadens the aperture

on the work that you're doing. This is not just, hey, you know, like we wanna create a probiotic to make people healthy. Like, it's really an effort to address the declining biodiversity of the planet at large and the implications or the sort of applications of this science that you're developing are really limitless. And I think also the applications of science that's really often stays kind of guarded behind, you know, in academic institutions, or for many reasons,

often doesn't make its way to humans or for other applications that can be immediately kind of put to use and to make an impact. So that's part of kind of the bridge we've built and very proud of. Yeah, one of the things that really blows my mind about the microbiome in the human body is this developing science and awareness

around the connection between the gut and the brain. And my first introduction to this was through these studies that were done on cravings. And essentially in my most layman ability to describe this, what I took from that was that your microbiome can literally essentially hijack your nervous system and signal your brain to crave certain foods that feed the, you know, whatever it is that that flora actually needs to feed on. Is that accurate? Can we like talk about like that?

Cause that's crazy. We think of ourselves as sentient human beings. We're making decisions where we have self-will and you know, all this sort of thing. We have free will. And yet the idea that these microorganisms that live within our body are actually dictating what we crave and what we end up putting in our mouth

is kind of a mind blower. Well, I- Am I exaggerating here? No, so high fat consumption increases the prevalence of organisms that are lipophilic that just love are fat loving and it's unordinary most of the organisms that have evolved for uh generations in humans are carbohydrate loving um or fiber complex carbohydrate loving organisms and so um the community does change um it's unclear whether the microbes are driving that

or because your love of fat is changing your microbes. And so it's hard to establish causation, but certainly we find that at least at a macronutrient level, you see these things cluster really neatly based off of what you can have an impact in the organisms. And then it creates a feedback loop, right? So I think that there's,

digestion and cravings are complex. Sometimes the foods that you had when you were, there's developmental inputs, there's physiological inputs, like some people have certain taste buds. Some people can't eat Brussels sprouts or cilantro or stevia. It just, the bitterness isn't tolerated very well, which strangely enough is a defense mechanism from potentially poisonous plants.

But there's, we do see very clearly that based off of preference for food source and diet and what constitutes a diet, a very clear clustering of organisms that are in response to that. So yeah. I think the study, if I'm recalling correctly, had to do with chocolate.

Like there was, they cultured the microbiome of somebody who was like super into chocolate and like addicted, a chocoholic or whatever, and then implanted it in somebody else who was neutral about chocolate and suddenly they started craving chocolate so i don't know if that's good science or not but just anecdotally it's you know well yeah that's true right but but for somebody who is like could take or leave chocolate to suddenly be like i need chocolate now like maybe they had overbearing parents and never let them have chocolate no no but the idea the person who was then implanted with the chocoholics microbiome

suddenly having a spontaneous what i will tell you is that if that if those results were in a large enough sample size um that that is the proper design for to evaluate that that is that is an elegant trial design um and i will look into the chocolate story and we could put it yeah i have no idea i just it's i'm very i'm very i'm particularly curious there was a fairly like long press cycle after the appetite and microbes um press came out that was even outside of the chocolate study. There have been some others where they do talk a lot about the connection, and we get asked about it actually quite a bit.

But a lot of it, I have not heard the chocolate one yet, but we'll get back to you on that. Well, really the best trial design would be if you knocked out the microbiome of the new person and then put the existing person's microbiome in there if they not if you gave them chocolate because that could affect your sensory that could have a lot of confounders but if you just gave somebody antibiotics and an fmt of the chocolate lovers uh-huh gut all right design that study raja i'm just saying if that would be the perfect trial design. Right, right, cool. Let's talk about the impact of the microbiome on some of the chronic ailments

that are really our biggest epidemics of our culture, like heart disease. Basically chronic ailments that are a result of chronic inflammation. Yeah. I know you guys have done some work around cardiovascular disease and the relationship between. Yeah. So the three big ones that I think are worth starting with are heart disease or atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, particularly type two diabetes and obesity, which one could argue

is part of metabolic syndrome, but we'll make it its own thing. So heart disease, one of the leading most recent triggers of heart disease. So there's two, I don't want to get into the nutrition warriors that go back and forth on whether cholesterol is good or bad. And that's neither here nor there for this debate, for this discussion. But we believe or there's enough wealth of evidence to show correlation between elevated low density lipoproteins or LDL and atherosclerosis or risk factors for heart disease. And so most people don't realize that

actually that cholesterol is produced by the liver. It is very little, if any, in some people, dietary cholesterol actually enters into systemic recycled. And it can, when it's also released in the form of digestion with bile salts or bile acids, it's, they're carriers of it. So then it's reabsorbed back up in your colon. And so this, there's a strong recycling process or shuttling and recycling process for cholesterol uptake. And so there's a strong recycling process or shuttling and recycling process for cholesterol uptake. And so bacteria actually, many of them can bind to cholesterol, assimilate it in their cell wall and prevent its reuptake to maintain homeostatic cholesterol conditions.

And so that's what we call mediating the gut-liver axis, but in a way that could, without any changes in your diet, or even if you have a genetic risk factor, maintain your cholesterol levels. And so we think that's, of course, very interesting. In other ones, a lot of people have heard about choline, which is converted by gut bacteria into a compound which enters into circulation, which is believed to be the inflammatory trigger for an atherosclerotic event. So, you know, these are really two interesting ways where modulation of either the microbiome or modulation of the microbiome

can decrease your risk factor of heart disease. Obesity was the first time that people actually cared about the microbiome because humans are pretty vain. And in 2006, they took the microbiome of an obese mouse and transplanted it in a lean mouse and vice versa. And their entire profile changed. And so that's when we learned

that the microbiomes involved in obesity. Antibiotics are given prophylactically to farm animals to get them fatter for slaughter. Because it regulates metabolic processes or what is the mechanism? Because energy utilization. And so it extracts more nutrients out of food, whereas fibrous compounds bind to bulking matter

for elimination. Right. So yeah, it's really interesting. And so, again again i don't know which which is responsible for the other but obese people can cluster with a microbiome that's very different than those that are lean and it's i'm very conflicted about this because if i were living in a pre-modern time i would want the obese person's microbiome. It's way better at scavenging nutrient, extra energy utilization from things that other, ordinarily people like you or I wouldn't.

Right, it's more resourceful and efficient. Yeah. Right? It's like a sponge. In times of scarcity, an obese microbiome is a good microbiome. The problem is now we just live in a time of abundance. And so it's complicated. It's-

Yeah, that trait could have been passed down as a survival mechanism. Absolutely, and so I, another example of that is- You wanna run away from a very large animal. Well, you wouldn't get obese. Yeah, but, oh yeah, I mean, you become very tasty. So is it possible that you can then develop specific probiotic strains that are meant to address specific conditions? that's happening now. We have several of these research tracks even within our company.

And certainly the scientific community is looking at targeted probiotics for the prevention and treatment of serious conditions that are contributing to all cause mortality, but also affect a very large number of human population, a large percentage of the human population. Is there an application for your work that can apply to soil diversity,

biodiversity of soil? Yep. So soil diversity is one of those things that as it progressively becomes less diverse, it's very hard to add back in diversity that was lost. And so it's prevention is the best for maintaining diversity, but there's a number of ways where bacteria and microbes can dramatically increase the health of our soil and the health of our crops. So I'll give you two examples. So legumes rely on a relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria. Otherwise they wouldn't get or absorb nitrogen, whether it's artificial or used from a synthetic source or whether it's naturally occurring in the soil, they wouldn't be able to unlock and metabolize it for growth of the plant and so i think we don't know all the how many plants have a microbial component that are responsible for either nutrient

uptake or their nutritional density or even legumes are an extreme circumstance because it's the ability for those plants to exist in the first place. And so modulating or protecting or augmenting those soil communities to allow crops to flourish. And the second is a really interesting way where you can look at a lot of different physical parameters of a plant and what determines its health.

And so we have an area, a track that we're researching on three key factors of plant health. So this is thicker stems, earlier rooting, um, and more dense crop or fruit yield. So higher yield. So all three of these things can be altered based off of the application of microbes or introduction of specific microbes back into soil crop communities. And so, um, there's a couple of companies, there's a lot of academic labs that are doing great work in this. There's a couple of companies now that are really, really trying to think about this thing for mass market, mass crop farmer applications, working with farmers to get this out there,

sometimes cheaper or at cost with pesticides. And I'd also really, especially important, because one of the areas that they're seeing that you can apply microbes is to increase the drought resistance to a lot of these plants, which of course is going to become increasingly important in specific geographical areas. Which is different from genetically modifying them. Oh, absolutely. There's no gene alterations here. Oh, absolutely.

There's no gene alterations here. You're restoring or fixing. Optimizing. Optimizing is a good word. The microbial community, the microbiome of the plant. Right. Other than the Amish, what other communities? The Amish.

Where are we seeing the healthiest guts Guts? Guts in the world? Yeah, Denmark has a really healthy gut. Yeah, why? I mean, there are risks, there are diverse, there's a lot of life science, microbiome, bioinformatics research that's done in Copenhagen. We have a lot of research tracks and that based out of Denmark.

I mean, the diversity and its inverse relationship with the things like lifespan and degenerative diseases are- They're pretty high on lifespan and general happiness. My thesis is there's probably a very high correlation between the no homework rule and a good microbiome. But actually, one thing that we didn't define at the very beginning that just your question does bring up, which is what is the definition of a healthy

microbiome? Because I think that there's a lot of misinformation around like what this notion and what we love to do, particularly in the US is create a goal we'll never reach so we can just live in stress and scarcity. Right, we're really good at that. We enjoy suffering. We love to suffer. So if we put healthy microbiome out beyond the field at the end, we'll just never reach it.

And I think, so one of the things that happens when we talk about that is that there's this notion that there's like kind of an unhealthy and healthy as if there's kind of one definition of that. And one of the interesting things, and many of our scientists were primary investigators in the human microbiome project that was, you know, a hundred plus million dollar research project that was initiated by the NIH under the Obama administration and, you know, a hundred plus million dollars. And the answer was there is not one healthy microbiome. There are markers of a healthy microbiome. Not surprisingly, one of them is diversity and what they call alpha richness.

So, but the diversity is really one of the markers, but it's important because many, and going back to your very original question about like, what is, how are people hearing about, you know, microbiome and probiotics, this idea that you should have a specific ratio of one strain to another, or it has to be these specific types of strains is it's very hard for us to grasp that like all three of us sitting here could have quote unquote healthy microbiomes, but actually have quite different composition of them. And I think that's really, it is really important

because there are a number of companies and a number of kind of content pieces that I've read online, books even, particularly about like microbiome diets and kind of eating for your microbiome. About personalization or take this test and this is the right microbiome. Super customizing.

Yeah, exactly. As if there's this kind of like one picture. When in reality what these companies are doing is trying to gather as much data as they can and hitting snooze on actually answering the question of what a healthy microbiome is. So they're trying to cluster people and say, this is an Alzheimer's microbiome. This is a, this, and it's, we think that it's very, very dangerous to start going down that, that road. And, um, I mean, look, but we understand why it's, I mean, it's of course, incredibly compelling, particularly, and you, and you know this really well. Like I think we're in this era where we, we, um, we believe that data is agency. And so,

um, in the quant self movement where you can measure everything and then therefore know everything and know what to do, it appeals to everybody like I want to know what's in there so that I can put back what's missing or so that I know what's like where I should

like what I should improve. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, I want to be able to take a sample and send it to a lab and have an app on my phone that's going to break it down and tell me where I'm deficient and what I need to do to fix it so I can completely optimize it. Right. But that's not the way it works.

Not today. Yeah. Look, the Amazonian Indians have never heard of the term microbiome, yet they have a pretty damn good one. So contrary to everything that we've spent the last hour and a half or so talking about, there's also another recommendation, which is don't overcomplicate it. It's a lot simpler than we might think. I have a diversity or an input of more than 30 different fruits and vegetables in any given week.

That's been the highest correlator of a diverse microbiome. Avoid excessive antibiotic use, avoid alcohol intake, which rips up your gut barrier. Don't be too clean. White sugar. Yeah. Minimize. You guys take showers? Huh?

Do you guys take showers? I take showers. I had, I mean, it's been a long time, but I had Dr. Robin Shuttkamp, right? I had her on the show, it was many years ago, but yeah, her whole thing is like, be dirty and we wash our hair too. I basically stopped washing my hair

after I wash it like once a month or something like that. And like, I don't use soap like I used to. And it really changed how I think about, you know, cleanliness in the sense that, you know, being dirty is the new clean and trying to cultivate, you know, a healthier microflora. The problem isn't with showers or water. It's with soaps. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, right, right, right.

What are the other things while we're kind of on this subject that people commonly do that they shouldn't do or habits that they can easily adopt that would be beneficial? I mean, I would also say, I mean, Raja alluded to it earlier, you know, the NSAIDs, so the overuse, you know, antibiotics, of course, I think, as you said earlier, kind of people are starting to kind of be more wary and taking them only when they need to. But I think we're very happy to pop Advil or Motrin or Ibuprofen like pretty easily.

And I think that's something that, you know, it kind of is like that new lens, right? Where, you know, as all these things we've always taken and just kind of just put in our bodies weren't tested for our microbial selves. And so things like NSAIDs, for example, are a great area to say kind of like antibiotics, like as needed.

A lot of, I think people take them much very promiscuously and very prophylactically, right? So like, oh, you're about to get your period. You're like, oh, I don't want to get cramps. I'll take 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. So, you know, areas like that, I think you can make a really, just like the simple changes

that you can kind of start to think about before you take specific medicines. Having a dog or a pet, for example, spending time in nature. I mean, things that are probably fairly intuitive, but actually can make an impact. Good sleep. Eating more fiber.

Avoid crowding. The microbiome has its own circadian rhythm, which is interesting too. Yeah, avoid crowded spaces. Spend, balance your time in the built environment with the unbuilt environment. It's funny how nature seems to have rigged everything to get us to live like the Amish.

Yes, exactly. Look, the same thing that is contributing to depression and anxiety and stress and early mortality and obesity. The answers often come back to very basic things that intellectually we know, and yet we have such difficulty building back into our daily experience. I mean, you know, the most interesting thing, and as is probably self-evident from this, you know, this last hour or so is, is, you know, I, I am an outsider in my, in this world, right? Because I am not a scientist, but what's so fascinating is, you know, you, you really, you, you learn so quickly that you can know lots of things,

no matter what philosophy you ascribe to. But science can know many things. But at the end of the day, so much of this is human decisions and human behavior. There are decisions that get made in industry. There's decisions that get made around conference room tables about marketing. And there's also decisions that get made every conference room tables about marketing. And there's also decisions that get made every day by humans in that moment where you open a menu, you stand in a grocery store, you put something on your fork, and there is a space, probably about 14 inches, between what

you're deciding to do and what goes inside of you. And or other decisions you make as what time to go to bed, for example, whether or not to sit on your phone for an hour and a half in bed before you go to sleep. I mean, there are things and yet we know these things and it's the compliance of them that is actually sometimes the most challenging. It's not that there aren't any good products out there or that you can't get a plant to eat. In some cases, of course, in some places, it is more difficult to get good food. But for the most part, it comes down very much to human behavior.

And the effects go past your own lifetime. So the Sonnenberg Lab at Stanford designed a really elegant trial where they looked at three progressive generations in an animal model and put them on a low fiber diet and found that by the third generation, even if you switch them back to a high fiber diet, the extinction has had happened and you couldn't resurrect or bring back the diversity from two, three generations ago. So it's really interesting. I mean, these are delicate ecosystems that co-evolved with us for hundreds of thousands of years.

They're also very versatile and they're very responsive and they evolve very quickly. So what's inside of us also wasn't inside a Paleolithic era human. Which is a really beautiful idea. One of the scientists that we work with wrote a paper called moving from ego system to eco system ego to eco and i think that you know when you asked us we were talking about the the bees and you ask us kind of like what seeds about you know there is this stewardship there's this you know it is not just about you um when you're a mother of course you understand this deeply in some ways but when you start to get into the biology, particularly of microbes, you start to understand breastfeeding.

You start to understand what Raja just said, right? Like the choices that you make in your food, in the things that you eat. And of course, then beyond your body, beyond your children's bodies, but to this planet. This idea that it's like us and the planet or like we need to save the planet. I mean, you know, a lot of scientists will say the planet's gonna be just fine. It's us that's not gonna be okay. And so I think that that sense and Raja said earlier,

the dark matter, the dark internet of our bodies, but really bacteria are the invisible internet of everything. And so we really try and human health and planetary health or in some ways, if we've done our job and, you know, in five years, it's like health is health. Yeah. It's not a dualistic bifurcated thing. No. We like to otherize, which, by the way, we did to bacteria for a really long time and look where it got us. RSA has something really compelling about how when astronauts describe the overview effect of going

and seeing earth, they feel a sense of ownership or of commitment or belonging that stewardship, they, they need to take care of this. It's, it's shared. And if we can induce that same, if we can use microbes to induce that same effect for human health, I think it's a systems shift that would really go wide and far. One of our scientists said, you know, I wish we had a star chart for our insights because if we could get people to care about their bodies, the way they are obsessed and in awe of the cosmos, what would they choose, right?

Like what would you do every day? If you could just be like absolutely in awe of what happens every day inside this body. And then of course, when you start to think about its connection much- Like biology is so spiritual. 200 years ago, we had no clue what's happening and now it's all Googleable and no one cares.

Now we can know all of it. That's the title of this podcast. That's right. Just came up with the title for it that's fascinating and it's true you know but i think it it to bridge that gap um it's about storytelling right like if if you can harness the power of story to get people interested in that and find a way in for them to emotionally connect with it then it opens the door to you know an exploration that could be revolutionary

for everybody. Yeah. And I mean, we, we like, we like to say there's a few things that we think need a good publicist science, fiber, bacteria. And so we, we very much try, you know, in the, in the. Bacteria needs rebranding. Oh, we rebrand. Yes. Yes. But in the rebrand, you need a publicist. Although bacteria is doing okay as probiotics are the fastest growing consumer health category in the world. So in some ways, they're making a comeback. But we think science has a huge communication problem.

And there's this notion that it's cold and it's clinical and it's too complex. And therefore, of course, if you see an Instagram with like, you know, Or results keep getting overturned. Yeah. That's science. Yeah. And so, you know, it's, you know, look, we, as humans,

we don't tolerate nuance very well. And, and I think that, you know, to, to our, to our detriment, I think a lot of the time, but I think we, we really believe that, you know, and when you look at the brand, but I think we really believe that, and when you look at the brand, which is hard to articulate on a podcast, but when you look at the aesthetic and the words that we use, I mean, so much of it, we like to say we're a version 30 Google Doc kind of brand, which means that we do obsess and pour over not just the scientific integrity of what we say, but actually how can someone hear this?

What are the words, what is the image that someone could actually hear this and that we don't just also create an echo chamber of people who are already believing in this and therefore we're just confirming what they already believe, but how do you actually shift perspective? Which is really what that overview effect is

that astronauts report and what we try and induce with the interview effect. But shifting perspective is very, very, very challenging. One that we obsess over, but one that we do believe that this kind of, you know, like you said at the beginning, you know, wait, so I'm half human. Well, when you tell people they're half human, we think that you have a little permission to hopefully give them a new lens. Well, the aesthetics of what you guys have created are amazing. Like the website and the Instagram account. I mean, it's beautiful.

So even if you're not interested in the microbiome or you don't care about science, it's visually stunning and you're lured into this kind of world that's new and different for a lot of people and scary and intimidating. When you think of science, you do think of PubMed and you think of really dry people that you're scared to talk to at a cocktail party or something like that. And so it is about storytelling. I always think they're right. Yeah, the intentionality behind how you've branded this thing I think is very cool and effective. And at the same time, I think there's a populist interest in science that I haven't seen in my lifetime. And a lot of it is being driven by social media. Like when you see, like I always complain about, you know, the vitriol and the diet

wars on Twitter and things like that, but at least people are talking about it. You know, they're picking sides and they feel very strongly. It's like they're arguing about science. People, you know, so, you know, if we telescope out, I think ultimately that's a good thing. I absolutely agree. I think we just like, what I think that what we try and induce is just this incessant life of questioning, which is really how you can ultimately, and also this methodology of experimentation, right? I think what happens though in those arguments is that they are echo chambers. One of the things that I talk a lot about is how confirmation bias is actually the greatest communicable disease of our time.

Yeah, it's huge. And so you're looking for information that just confirms what you already want to, what you already believe and what you want to believe about a specific area of the world, nutrition, diet, avocados, fat, cholesterol, ketogenic diet, whatever it is. And so what's missing in all of those arguments is any sense that you could change your mind.

And the way the algorithms work of social media is that it's not, you know, algorithms don't work to serve you up the opposite of what you're interested in or another opinion. They work to only continue to give you the information. And so if you're on. And so if you're on Apple News, if you're on social, when you follow people, you're training it to say, and the way that we create these technologies is that we train it to say, this is what I believe and therefore give me more of what I already believe. And of course, that is antithetical to science. And so that is that the only thing I would say, you right, that of course, yes, I'm happy that people talk and care about these things.

Then the next layer is, well, what does it take to just ask questions, not change your mind entirely, but to be open to the idea that what you believe could iterate and evolve? There's something inherently ironic about that scientific cacophony because science is about allegiance to truth in the most universal sense without an emotional attachment to outcome. And these dialogues are very emotional and they are very result in confirmation bias oriented and driven.

And look, you have to be somewhat empathic, which is science, know, science, a science and any scientist will admit this, although the perception of science doesn't admit this, which is that science doesn't know everything. And there is this space between what science knows and how people feel. And of course, where people feel is incredibly emotional.

And so one of the things that, and we're kind of working towards this, is how do you reconcile that space and how do those two areas have a dialogue that can be really productive and empathic? Because I think that's partially what has happened. And the reason a lot of that rhetoric exists is because someone gets sick,

they go to a Western doctor or somebody from, let's say more traditional methodology or training, they don't get answers and they end up in more of an Eastern or alternative functional modality and they feel that they get better answers and, or they get to a solution. And so, and then therefore this whole other, you know, the original kind of methodology is otherwise, and you end up in a really interesting cycle. And it's one that we see all the time. We have plenty of people who are in our community who have all kinds of autoimmune disease and weren't getting answers in one area and go, of course, to, again, typically more Eastern-like alternative.

And they all of a sudden kind of feel heard and listen to you and get more answers. It's the being heard part that I think is the thing that really connects. They just, because they don't feel heard by their Western medicine practitioner. So it's not that the solution that's being given by the Eastern practitioner is better. It's just that that person feels safe and like there's a two way communication

happening. Mediums the message. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In thinking about this, like thinking about like the magic of the unseen and talking about like space and, you know, how we're fascinated with exploring, you know, uncharted terrain and worlds and, you know, how we still haven't like mapped the ocean. But there is this whole universe in the microbiome that, like you said, 2006 is when science really started taking this seriously for the very first time.

We're not even out of the starting gate in trying to understand what's happening here. And there is a spirituality to it. I mean, the vastness of it is both intimidating but but also, you know, fantastical and beautiful. Yeah. And actually the, what you said about both sides hearing each other is, is one of the reasons, you know, there's never been an area of science like microbiome science that's kind of progressed at the velocity that microbiome science in really traditional science, academia, leading research institutions around the world has has that's been met with consumer awareness and um and spending and um kind of over indexing of interest in their in their own lives and in their own health and that has all mean i always

say raj and i always talk about this like you you know we sequence the human genome you go to whole foods and you can't buy anything for your genome right know, we sequence the human genome, you go to Whole Foods and you can't buy anything for your genome. You know, you sequence the human microbiome and you have the fastest consumer, you know, you have the fastest growing, you know, consumer health category in the world in the form of probiotics. And of course, if you start adding in all things related to gut health and now of course, skincare and oral health and other categories. And so what one of my hypothesis or one of the confounding factors that I, I think, um, is leading to and has, and has kind of gotten us here is because, um, Eastern modalities have talked about the gut for so long and the rise of those

modalities. And of course the over-indexing of, of kind of interest in the, of those modalities and, of course, the over-indexing of kind of interest in those areas combined with the fact that very mainstream science and now more increasingly more traditional doctors are starting to kind of – it's one of the first areas where they actually kind of have almost like a Switzerland. Like they actually meet in the middle and there's some agreement. And, of course, people from more Eastern alternative functional practice will say, well, we've known this for thousands of years. And then of course the scientists or the more traditional medical doctors are like, yeah, but you didn't know what was in it. You didn't know what to do with it. You know, you weren't looking at like microbes to, you know, change the reuptake of cholesterol into the body. But so I, so I think it's interesting because it's all of a sudden created like kind of very, there's really never been an area where they come at it from both sides.

And there's like this kind of in the Venn diagram of kind of east and west that kind of sits right in the middle in terms of now having a place to kind of speak to where there's overlap. Is this science making its way into medical school curriculum? I mean they teach gastroenterology, right? But that's- I wish nutrition would first. Yeah, exactly. Nutrition isn't even part of it. So there's no, it hasn't,

certainly not introductory curriculums or during medical school, but now in some specializations. What's very unique is that more research oriented doctors are ones that go into publishing or teaching are finding an area like a blue sky ahead. So immunologists, gastroenterologists, neurologists, all these different disciplines are storming it

because the gut sits at the center. Oncologists. Oncologists, yeah. Sits at the center of a lot of these biological processes. And so it's very attractive. It's a hot new field in science, but more academic science than in medical practice. As an athlete, I'm always interested in performance. So what is the relationship between gut health, the quality of your microbiome and athletic

performance? Yep. So a good friend of mine came out of the church lab at Harvard that's exclusively looking at organisms that are found in the gut of elite athletes that are involved in breaking down lactate for muscle recovery, for performance and recovery. And at this point, he sequenced marathon runners, NBA players, and there's this common function that's conserved, which might give, even if it's a 2% edge, might give athletes a little bit of an edge. There's another study that we've actually, it was a small study, but it was a crossover trial. So those are very powerfully designed, showing that specific probiotic consumption actually, when you max out muscles,

increases the speed by which you regain function or full extension of those muscles again by modulating the cytokine profiles in the body. So those are inflammatory inflammasome response profiles. And then of course, there's the barrier integrity. There's a whole thesis around exercise rips up your gut barrier. There's ways where your microbiome, you could want it to be more efficient

for energy utilization. So it's oftentimes a phenomenon that you see why elite athletes, when they stop training, become really fat because now they have developed a microbiome which is very efficient at additional extra energy utilization, but they don't have the same energy expenditure anymore. Well, also they keep eating the way that they were.

Yes, yes, I was gonna say. Somebody who's done that. What about increasing the body's ability to recover more expeditiously as a result of exercise induced stress? Yeah, small studies, but they're pretty convincing, showing that there's about a 15 to 20% increase in recovery time, which when you are at that elite level

can make a really big difference. And so are these gut flora endemic to these athletes or are there things that somebody who's listening who can do to move their gut biome in that direction? Yep, so the two strains that I, probiotic strains that I mentioned, we acquired. So there are strains that are in our male formulation for increase in recovery time in response to max out strength and changing the cytokine profiles. The Harvard strains, which are found in marathon runners,

there's some early, early work that's happening, but the regulatory process for getting those into humans is gonna take quite a bit of some time. And so those aren't available, but conceivably you could. Maybe the Amish will start a black market. Maybe the Amish will, you could acquire some from the Amish. I mean, I think at this point we should just do

an Amish microbiome study. I think we should. We should just all become. I think we should become Amish. Or is there a way to recreate? We'll sequence your gut before adopting an Amish lifestyle for six months, and then we'll sequence it afterwards,

and we'll publish the results. That's an interesting study. And if you want to grab some friends to increase our statistical power. But it's still an N of one. No, that's what I'm saying. And if you want to grab some friends to increase our statistical power. Yeah, but it's still an N of one. No, that's what I'm saying. Not if you grab some friends. Get 20 or so people who want to do it with you.

We'll all go live in the Amish community. Do I have to move? Do I hear a sweepstakes coming on for your community? I think that is a binding offer. We're going to hold you to that. I will think about that. Well, so you have these, right now you guys have these,

you have two products basically. You have a male daily and a female daily. Yes, symbiotic. And you call it a symbiotic, which basically means it's a combination of probiotic and prebiotic. Yes. So I wanna give you the opportunity to explain

more about the product itself, but this is just, really this is the beginning of a whole, like when we met the other day, but this is just really, this is the beginning of a whole, like when we met the other day, you were telling me about all these interesting things that you're developing right now. Exactly. Do you want to,

why don't you tell us about the first product? Yeah, this is where we started because our whole thesis was to build a strain bank, strain specific bank that has defined effects in the body. And so there's over 20 published, all available on PubMed, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials on these strains. There's a number of categories from those five markers of digestion to down-regulating the inflammatory response in the gut

to improving oxidative profiles related to oxidative stress, to dampening, to mitigating gut barrier permeability. So preventing the transfer or the crossing of microbial endotoxins into serum circulation, into the bloodstream. There's the exercise cocktails that are male formulation, but not in the female formulation because the trial was only done on men. So we're very specific about aligning the clinical work to the products. And in our female

formulation, we have an additional cocktail of strains, which down-regulated the inflammatory response at the surface of the skin. So the SCORAD score, which is a marker of disruptions in the skin related to dryness, scabbing, dermatitis, eczema, psoriasis, and dermatological health is uniquely found in the female population, so in the female product. And so really we took an approach for this flagship product of, you know, it's over-engineered. It has, in some instances, it has three or four strains of the same species. There's not a single product on the market that has that. And all with this, with mechanistic or human efficacy data supporting it. And so I think that's a core differentiator for this product. And oftentimes you'll see most people take probiotics

if you ask them, well, why do you take a probiotic? It's because they have digestive issues or because they think that it would be good for them. And so both would benefit from this collection of strains because the specificity of these strains are designed for that type of an individual. And how is it distinct from say, you know, VSL-3? Yeah, VSL-3 is an eight species probiotic

and the majority of their, well, barring the most recent lawsuit about how all the VSL-3 commercially is a departure from the original clinically tested formulation, it's a eight species high load product where most of the efficacy data is on things like pouchitis or I think they have a couple ulcerative colitis,

but it's really like looking at- Very specific pathologies. Using a brute force approach with high, high levels of generic species to have some sort of believed effect, but all their tests are on disease models, right? So they don't have any reason. I mean, I haven't seen any barrier integrity

or any functional biophysical measurements in terms of digestive function that have been conducted by that product. But to their credit, it is one of the few products that- Yeah, I mean, that's the one that's always come up in Rhonda Patrick talks. It's sort of like the one that, you know, if, that's the one that's always come up when Rhonda Patrick talks. It's sort of like the one that, you know, if you want to get like, oh, this is the kind,

like that's the name that is recurring. So that's why I wanted to ask. Yeah, and a lot of this too, in terms of this first product was also to really also, you know, start to tell this narrative that microbes are not, you know, probiotics aren't just like, oh, I have some weird digestion or I just took antibiotics. I'll just take a probiotic

that, that, that microbes actually can have and impart benefits on, on various organ systems of the body. And that was, that was part of the, of course, the most important thing being that it can really make an impact in people's health. Of course, we hear this every day from our community, but beyond that, to really start to, to move the narrative away from just being like, oh, I have bad digestion. Right. And can you talk a little bit about some of the things you're working on? Absolutely. Depends when this is going to come out. Yeah. Well, it can be a while. Depends. I don't know. We can figure that out. a while. It depends. I don't know. We can figure that out. So they're, they are worthy of, um,

I think that each of the big announcements should be, have, have their own, we could, we could have really kind of in-depth on it, um, moments on each one of them. Um, but as we kind of started, you know, we're not just interested in, uh, in, in supplementation or on cursory, uh, or, or not life-threatening conditions like digestion, but really food ingredients. So ways in which replacing some of the biggest aggressors in our food supply with functional beneficial prebiotic fibrous compounds could improve human health. And so very soon we'll be able to make a big announcement around there. Also, I would say, particularly when you look at areas like allergies, for example, we're working on a line of probiotics that will be very targeted

and very clear applications of clinical work that, in some cases, is coming out of 500, 600-person studies. With a trial that just concluded on a 600-person cohort. And these are self-funded trials that you guys are... It's coming out of five, 600 person studies. With a trial that just concluded on a 600 person cohort. I mean. And these are self-funded trials that you guys are. Some of them are in partnership. Some of them are self-funded. So this trial that I mentioned, it's entirely with 11 different sites and academic collaborators that were, because the data was so compelling enough.

It took over a year to enroll all the people to measure allergic response. And so this was conducted in northern Italy where there was a big demand from the medical centers themselves to conduct and organize and design and fund and develop the trial. And so these strains were just what were offered up as the intervention. How many scientists do you guys currently have on staff that you're contracted with? Many of the scientists that we work with actually directly, particularly with their academic labs, actually to maintain their academic standing aren't full-time employees with us,

but actually more collaborators. Keep their lab. We want them to keep their lab. Exactly, mostly because we need to work with their labs. Depending on the, I mean, we have probably- We're pushing over 20 now. And if you include some of our more recent division or newer divisions, over 30.

And where do you do the manufacturing and the packaging and all of that? Yeah, so I can speak for the manufacturing. So bacteria are very fragile and some of our strains are very So I can speak for the manufacturing. So bacteria are very fragile and some of our strains are very, very picky anaerobes. So they hate oxygen. They really hate oxygen. So for those types of processes, you need to use a lot of like a nitrogen flush or ways to keep oxygen out from the entire fermentation development process. And so actually, strangely enough, when you think of fermentation,

you probably think of French cheese, but as a result of that cultural, having that so deeply steeped in their culture, they have some of the largest scale up facilities of bio-fermentation facilities in the world. So the majority of all of our fermentation happens in Southern France and Northern Italy with a little bit in Japan,

and then some of it happens here in the States. And the strains come from all over. And then some of our packaging, we've scoured the world looking for sustainable options. We work with some really interesting companies. One, we grow some of our trays from mycelium. And so it's actually compacted agricultural waste that then grows its own skin. So we use that in place of other kind of less sustainable options

for how we pack our product. A corn foam, which has insulating property, but also you can eat it or just dissolve it in water. And then all of our labels and all of our pouches, um, are, uh, are compostable. Yeah. And actually, and actually we only ship one, the system itself, particularly for this first product, um, we only ship a jar once. Um, and then every subsequent month you just get this, um, this, uh, pouch that's compostable that you refill your jar. So, right. Yeah. It's really cool. You have this beautiful glass jar and then the refill packaging, recyclable and the initial compostable.

And I love that about it. Like how you've put like sustainability at the forefront and creating story around like those materials themselves. Like literally the packing material is a mycelium, right? It's like crazy, which is really cool. But look, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you how you think about transparency in a post-Elizabeth Holmes Theranos world, right? Like you've done a great job of storytelling around what you're doing

and creating these initiatives and these products. But there is – I watch the documentary. I listen to the Six Bart podcast. I'm obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes. And it's like I think it's incumbent upon founders, anybody who's running a company, to prioritize transparency in a new and honest way to kind of overcome that. Like, I just feel a resistance, like, well, what do I know? You know, how do I know that this is real or true? Or, you know, these guys tell a great story, but like, I don't know what's inside of any of this and it's not regulated.

And how can you foment, you know, consumer trust in what you're doing? Yeah. So the first part that I think I'm also fascinated by the Elizabeth Holmes story. I think that it was the perfect, in some ways, all of her quirks are so unoriginal. It's like they're borrowed from different quirky icons that she had. Except the no blinking thing.

Oh boy. It's like watching a car crash in an incredibly slow motion. And yeah, some deep thinkers and certainly founders are a little awkward. And I could have said, you could have seen that coming from the very beginning. And certainly I think it's a cautionary tale

for a lot of companies that are leveraging the magic of technology to give solutions that science has never been able to acquire before. I think it's a very important cautionary tale. And I think that I'm very grateful that that has happened to encourage people to publish. Don't hide behind a cloak of transparency. Certainly, if you want to, that's fine

because trade secrets also we recognize are in some instances important, but if you're selling products for humans, then you shouldn't hide behind that cloak anymore. So in many ways, science, the recipe of the Theranos of the world are hide behind a magical technology. Don't publish or disclose it to the world. Raise money and balloon to a massive valuation. Stay private as long as you can and don't engage academia or the system of peer review.

Or Wall Street journalists. And pack your board with super powerful people. Super powerful people instead of scientists, by the way. Regulators instead of scientists. I mean, it's the hallmark of close-up magic. I don't know if you know anything about magic, but it is actually what close-up magicians are the best at. I think what we can't,

the nice thing about peer review and the methodology and the way that science has evolved is that it has put self-regulation in place, which is that you can't publish these things. And in fact, most companies say that they do studies and then they don't publish or they put them on their website, but they're not published anywhere that's a respected peer review journal. And I think that that is certainly one area where we really try to. And then of course, or where we do, but I think where a lot of companies kind of don't, even though they use the word science pretty liberally, I think, both in marketing and certainly the way they talk

about their company. I think the other aspect, you know, is that in the translation of it, I think there are many, and I'm sure you and I both know many people who have built pretty substantial direct-to-consumer supplement companies. And there are many, many tactics that we could be employing that we don't. And I think-

I mean, that's just the wild west of- Correct, yes. There's a lot of criminal activity going on there. And increasingly, Facebook and various, you know, platforms have certainly started to at least really try to crack down a little bit on that. The FTC has started to send letters to specific influencers, particularly for Instagram influencers who aren't using the appropriate methodologies around like how you promote or are transparent with your audience around whether something is an ad and or whether or not your experience is not a generalized experience that someone everybody

has of the product. One of the areas I think in some ways, it's not just what we do. And of course, we put our testing on the website, we put the studies on the website. We will do more and more as we move. We're very early. So of course, as we move through our pipeline, we'll continue to increase the number of things that we can disclose when they're ready and obviously when we're ready to publish. Of course, the other way of looking at it is what we don't do. And so a lot of it are the tactics. Like, for example, one of the things we've really tried to reconcile is that we get testimonials every single day from people saying

that basically you've saved their life or changed their life, or they can't live without your product. And they make all kinds of claims and say, and of course it's flattering and you're happy that you've created something that has made an impact, particularly with people who've suffered for a long time, very often with some sort of autoimmune conditions. But what we don't do is take quotes from those and then just slap them all over ads and or long form landing pages and then try and get people to buy it

and believe that that would have the same impact for them. So one of the things that we're working on, two things we're working on, one is for affiliate marketers. So we're working on, two things we're working on, one is for affiliate marketers. So we're working on an educational program that you actually cannot get your affiliate links until you go through a course with us that is actually not very minimally about our product,

but actually more about the underlying science, about the microbiome, about actually even the FTC regulation before you're actually able to even access those links to be able to work with us in any kind of performance marketing way. So that's kind of one, one, at least first expression of it. And then the next is starting to think about how could we use people's experiences of our product in a way that is integrous that is very clear when

the science does not support what they are saying but does allow community to build and to share with each other in a way that we don't want to necessarily stand in the way of people who can share. Because we do see that there are some reasons why people who have specific conditions or have experiences want to connect with one another. The question is, how can we do that integrously, yet also steward what we were talking about with regards to transparency. What's the long-term view here? Like what's the utopian, you know-

Being Amish. Yeah, I guess we're all gonna be Amish, right? And have amazing gut health. But paint the picture of, you know, the world you wanna see and, you know, the mission that you're aiming for. I'll start. Okay.

So I think it's understated the importance of microbes for a lot of areas of the human body. And what we've just talked about in this podcast is just scratching the surface. I think that you can design life in a way that's very microbially centric or that's microbially considerate and that you can, I don't want to say prevent or treat conditions except for the areas where we're playing by the rules and engaging

with the FDA to make claims to show that we could prevent or treat conditions. You know, but there's kind of a future where we look at our bodies, we look at the earth, we modulate this microbial community and we can have a dramatic and profound and measurable impact on human health in a way that I think is wholly different or has been lost from the way that we've designed our societies today.

And so it's along the lines of get dirty, but a little bit more scientifically. I'd say it really is truly a shift perspective. We totally undo and to actually live in almost this, like these micro moments of our lives in a way that fundamentally like feels like you were given new eyes. Like we always say,

we wish we could have minority report goggles where moms are like, don't touch that, that's dirty. Don't put your hands on that. Don't eat that that was on the floor. There's so many moments that you don't even realize have been kind of embedded in our lives and our wiring around whether something is good or not

good for you. And in the instance where we actually interrupt some of that wiring and rewire in a way that makes us conscious of many of the things we basically spoke about today. I mean, I think that's where we win. And that's regardless of whether someone buys our products or not, because the truth is you can make huge impact in your life just by changing things like nutrition or some of the other areas. And so it is that, it's that perspective shift. I think that to me is where we will have one in the sense that you undo many of the things that you held to be true, which I think would benefit our planet also. And we start to look through that lens because we'll make decisions from that lens. We'll sit around boardrooms and tables for marketing campaigns and packaging conversations. And

you'll say, well, what is the most sustainable from a more holistic sense that includes thinking about microbes, not thinks about how you eradicate them. Right. I like that. I think that's a good place to land this plane. For people that are listening that want to learn more, go to seed.com. And what's cool about the website is you got time. I mean, you can read forever. You got so much information up there. So it really is a great place to start

to expand your horizon, your knowledge base on gut health and the microbiome. So I would start there, check out their product. And let's leave people with, we kind of alluded to it a couple of minutes ago, but a couple of things that they can, like if somebody is listening to this and this is all brand new to them, like, what are some simple things, you know, besides just not using soap so much that people can develop and work into their own daily routines that can enhance their microbiome health?

I would say one of the things I find that in particularly people who are already trying to eat healthy, they end up getting into like a routine or a rhythm so that they eat the same, like a lot of the same things every day. And to kind of rewire that a little up to at least 30 different plants, fruits and vegetables each week. It's like one very easy diversity of plants be the first one I would say. We can go back and forth. Okay. So I'll give a provocative one, which is be mindful of sexual intercourse unprotected with a new partner,

because that can have... That will enhance the diversity of... There is a vaginal microbiome we have a whole research track focused on it and there's very few native vaginal communities which can there is a disruption let's say or it shouldn't be done flippantly

I should say that's it for other wise words yeah what's something that like all the dudes just tuned you just walk through your day and you see people doing something and you're like, why are they doing that?

Don't they know? I mean, one of the more obvious ones is just how much I see people still use like all the sanitizers, which I kind of think maybe we live a little bit in a bubble in LA, but I kind of didn't realize how much that was, how pervasive. Yeah. Those Purell things are everywhere. Yep. I think liquid sugar. If you're in a hospital, that's great. But sorry, go ahead.

Sugar in liquids, sugar in an unbound carbohydrate form, which is used as a sweetener in liquid beverages and even healthy ones. A lot of things in whole foods that are marketed as healthy have really high sugar content too. Yeah. I second that. And go out in nature and roll around in the dirt. Get a dog. Right.

Get a dog. You didn't bring your dog today. What's your dog's name again? Two of them. Luke and Sasha. They're wild dogs from northern Russia uh huh yeah they're really cool they should have brought them

they probably have good microbiomes alright next time next time thanks you guys so seed.com at seed on Instagram those two best places

to direct people to go yes check out their stuff read up thank you so much you're welcome really enjoyed talking to you thank you

a lot of fun let's talk more if you guys want to come back okay we'd love to thank you peace peace plants the microbiome microbes for thought my friends microbes for thought hope you guys enjoyed that you can learn more about ara and raja's work at seed.com and on instagram at seed And be sure to check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for copious links to extend your learning curve beyond the earbuds. Once again, Ara and Raja were kind enough

to offer a discount code on their daily symbiotic probiotic. Simply go to seed.com forward slash richroll and use the code richroll at checkout and you'll get 20% off your first month's supply. And once again, I have no financial entanglement here other than the simple satisfaction of introducing you to a worthy product.

If you are struggling with your diet, if you are truly desiring of mastering your plate but lack the skill in the kitchen or the time or the culinary acumen you believe you require, I cannot stress enough how much I know for a fact our Plant Power Meal Planner can help you. It truly is an amazing product that we worked very hard to create, and it solves a very basic problem, making nutritious eating convenient. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you'll get access to thousands of delicious, nutritious, and easy to prepare

plant-based recipes, completely customized based on your personal preferences. You get things like unlimited grocery lists, you get grocery delivery integrated into the product in most metropolitan areas, and access to a team of amazing nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week. And you get all of it for just $1. ninety a week when you sign up for a year, literally the price of a cup of coffee. To learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu on my website. I appreciate all you guys listening. If you would like to support the work we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about your favorite episode. Take a screen grab, share it on social media, or grab a audio clip, subscribe to

the show on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts. That's the most important thing, subscribing or getting a friend to subscribe. That would be super helpful. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts is very helpful. And you can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. Thank you very much to everybody who has done that. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today because I do not do this alone. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing today's show and editing it so beautifully. You can find that on YouTube, youtube.com forward slash richroll. Jessica Miranda for her graphics, wizardry.

DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Annalema. Thank you for the love, you guys. I will see you back here later this week with a fun and informative exchange with my friend, the great Sanjay Gupta. All right, we did it. Dude, I'm so jet lagged. All right, peace, it. Dude, I'm so jet lagged. All right. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.