Leveraging Your Microbiome for Better Skin, Mood, and Brain Health Ft. Just Thrive Founder, Tina Anderson & Chief Microbiologist Kiran Krishnan | The Genius Life Podcast EPISODE (#252)

Welcome to episode 252 of The Genius Life.

Let's go.

What's going on, everybody?

Welcome back to another episode of The Genius Life.

I'm your host, Max Lugavere, a filmmaker, a health and science journalist, and New York Times bestselling author.

I've dedicated my life to unraveling the science behind our choices, including what we eat and how we live, affect our cognitive and physical performance, how we feel, and our health span and risk for disease.

This podcast is all about how to live in that optimal state, which I call living like a genius.

Guys, I have a treat for you today.

On the show, I welcome Tina Anderson and Kiran Krishnan.

They are both co-founders of the company Just Thrive.

Kiran specifically is the chief microbiologist at the company who has 17 years of experience in the dietary supplement and nutrition market.

He comes from a strict research background, having spent several years with hands-on research and development in the fields of molecular medicine and microbiology at the University of Iowa.

This episode is going to zoom in on all things microbiome.

And we have a wonderful science communicator here to break it all down for you and make it super simple and actionable.

I loved having this conversation with Kiran and Tina.

It was fascinating.

And I consider myself to be extremely well-versed in microbiome research, but Kiran really brought it.

And even I learned a plethora of new things and gained a variety of new perspectives on the topic.

So I'm really excited for you guys to be here.

Among other things, we are going to cover the potential benefits of probiotics and why 99% of microbes from traditional probiotics do not survive digestion.

We're gonna talk about the three main drivers of SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is a surprisingly common condition that could lead to symptoms like bloating and gas when you eat seemingly innocuous foods.

And we're gonna talk about why SIBO is not actually a condition itself, but a symptom of dysfunction and how to potentially fix your situation if you are experiencing SIBO.

We're gonna talk about the crucial role of metabolites like urolithin A that are derived when we eat certain foods.

Urolithin A in particular is a metabolite that helps to keep mitochondria healthy, which is super important as we get older.

And so much more.

Just to be super clear and transparent, Just Thrive is a sponsor of this show.

So in a way, I was compensated for this conversation, but I only bring you guys conversations that I genuinely personally derive value from and expect you to do the same.

So please listen through all the way to the end.

I genuinely feel like I could have kept going on for hours.

Kiran is a wonderful science communicator, as I mentioned earlier.

And I think you're really gonna love this episode of the show.

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All right guys, well, we're just seconds away from this illuminating chat with the microbiologist extraordinaire Kiran Krishnan and his partner, Tina Anderson.

I love this conversation.

But before we do, just checking in.

As you guys likely know, this past week has been a wild ride for me.

I was on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is an incredible podcast.

I've been such a big fan of Joe's and the opportunity to get to go to Austin and have a three hour long conversation with him, deep dive into my research and my background was just such a privilege.

So if you haven't yet listened to it, check out my conversation with Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience.

You can find it on Spotify exclusively.

I look forward to your feedback there.

And if that's how you discovered me, well, welcome to The Genius Life.

I hope you subscribe and I hope that you enjoy the show.

We work very hard on this podcast.

And I say we, it's me and my assistant, Sydney, but we're grateful to have you here.

And we've got lots of great episodes coming down the pike.

So stay tuned and yeah, grateful.

Hope you're doing well.

And now without further ado, here's my conversation covering all things probiotics, the microbiome, and much more with the founders of Just Thrive.

Let's go.

Tina and Kiran, what up?

Thanks for being here.

Oh, excited to be here.

Thanks for having us.

It's a pleasure.

I'm excited to talk about all things, gut microbiome, probiotics, everything in between.

Awesome.

But I guess let's first start at the top.

Give us a sense of your background.

Like what kinds of things do you study, career paths, et cetera?

Yeah, I had a pretty interesting career path.

I started out as an attorney in litigation and spent many years doing that and then pivoted into a family pharmaceutical business just to have more of like a work-life balance.

And I thought that was great.

I'm thinking, oh, I'm helping people, delivering life-saving medications.

And after being in the pharmaceutical field for a while, my husband and I were in business together and in the same business together.

And we were like, oh my God, there are so many abuses going on in the pharmaceutical industry.

We saw the overprescribing of drugs.

We saw even that with family members.

We'd see them be on one pharmaceutical and the next thing you know, they're on a dozen different medications and never getting better.

And we just thought, this is really not what we want to do.

We were pretty deep thinkers.

We read a lot of Norman Vincent Peale, Wayne Dyer, and realized that we weren't doing our life's work.

And so we decided to start delving into the world of natural health and focus on more of healing and maintenance of health rather than symptom treatment.

And so we did that and through, I always say being at the right place at the right time, we met Kiran and were able to get into the, we were able to license these really exclusive strains from London University.

And from there, Just Thrive was born.

So it's been the most gratifying career journey I've ever been on.

That's how it starts for so many of us, right?

Like just seeing a problem in the system and then wanting to will a different version of that, right?

Like one that's more productive of actual health as opposed to just putting band-aids on problems.

Exactly, exactly.

And that's what we've done.

I mean, it's just, it's been so fun seeing the impact that we've had on people's health.

That's amazing.

And so how did you guys meet?

Well, my husband was seeing a natural path, pathic doctor, and he called us into his office and said, you won't believe this, but we have the right, we have the opportunity to purchase these strains from one university through my partner, Kiran Krishnan.

And we have to all meet.

And so we met and there's a little bit of history in there.

Kiran and I didn't know we see eye to eye from the beginning, but we do now.

So yeah, that's where we met.

So it was awesome.

It's been an amazing partnership through the years.

Wow, okay.

So Kiran, you're a microbiologist.

I am, yeah.

And you had, when we're talking about these specific strains that you had access to, unpack that for us.

So I've been a big nerd all my life, right?

So going into microbiology was a perfect fit for me.

It was like the perfect mesh between biological medicine and physical science, like physics.

My dad was an engineer, microelectronics engineer, physicist, mathematician.

My mom's a medical doctor.

So I'm the perfect mold between the two of them.

Microbiology is that kind of esoteric science to a certain degree, because there's a lot that you can't see and know.

And there's a lot still to be discovered.

I mean, we're at the very, very tip of the iceberg in microbiology.

So that was a perfect fit for me.

And once I started doing academic research, what I came to realize is that what mostly happens in academic research is you do research for the sake of research, right?

And you just delve deeper and deeper and deeper into a topic.

Very little of it actually translates to anything that happens to help humanity, right?

There's a big what we call translational gap between all the billions of dollars worth of academic research going on and then things that actually impact humanity.

The purpose of doing research in academia is to initiate the next study, right?

Write the next grant to try to get the next piece of research going.

So I saw that as a big problem because to me, I wanted to go into science to impact people, to help people.

And if I stayed in academics, I would never be able to do that, right?

So then I jumped into industry.

And my first jump into industry was I built a clinical research organization to do really smart, low cost clinical trials for nutritional companies.

I was always a big fan of nutrition.

I was always a big fan of supplements and diet and all that.

And I found that there was a massive lacking of clinical research in the supplement world, right?

And when you ask most companies, the biggest reason is the cost of it.

Research is designed around the pharmaceutical model, the double-blind, multicentric, randomized control trials, looking at disease endpoints.

And that didn't make sense to me because if I had a peptide, for example, that could lower blood pressure, and I wanted to prove it through clinical research, it's a supplement, right?

I could spend $2 million and do a massive study and show that it works, but I can't say anything about it, right?

So what's the point of doing that kind of study, right?

What's the point of proving that this lowers blood pressure if I'm not allowed to say anything about it?

Why wouldn't you be able to?

Because then you'd have to go through FDA approval regulations.

Exactly.

Yeah, because as a supplement, you're tightly regulated around what you could say about it.

But what the FDA does allow you to say is what they call structure function claims, which is how does the compound alter the normal structure or function of the body that may lead to a health benefit?

So then my thinking was, why don't we study the structure function changes without studying the endpoint difference?

So on the way to lowering blood pressure, there's a number of mechanisms that have to occur, things like angiotensin and renin changes in the blood that lead to a lowering of blood pressure.

So my thinking was, why don't we do smaller studies, look at those molecular changes to understand what is the pathway that's being affected?

And so I could take and do a very well thought out blood pressure study with 25 people and make it one-tenth the cost and still give you enough science to talk about to know that there's likely a benefit around the product.

So that was a clinical research organization I started.

One of the things that occurred with that is a large multinational company had hired us to do a probiotic study, to try to figure out what's going on with probiotics.

People are going 100 billion, 200 billion, 300 billion, it's going crazy with the doses, 30 strains, 40 strains, refrigerated, some are like wrapped in seaweed and all kinds of crazy stuff people are doing, to try to claim that their product is better.

So they wanted us to investigate that and figure out what is a true probiotic?

What should we be formulating?

How do we take the approach on creating clinical relevance to a probiotic?

So we did that project for a couple years and we came back to them and we basically concluded that the vast majority of stuff that's out there is total nonsense.

It's mostly marketing driven.

All of this crazy megalomaniacal thinking around like 100 billion, 200 billion, 300 billion had no scientific basis at all.

In fact, could be harmful down the road if you choose the wrong strains.

And all this nonsense about refrigeration and all that just did not add up.

Because one of the first things I would do, I'd go to a health food store and I'd ask the clerks in this part of the study.

I'd say, what are your best probiotics?

They'd always point me to stuff in the refrigerator.

And I'd go, well, why are they in the refrigerator?

They'd say, well, because you want a live strain.

And in order to keep it alive, you have to keep it in the refrigerator.

So then I would say, okay, so if I took it home and put it on my counter in the room, they would die.

They say, yes.

So that's why I put them in the refrigerator, right?

Because you want them live.

And I say, my question always was, if it can't survive at 70 degrees on the shelf, how does it survive at 98.6 degrees in the body, right?

And going through a pH that's so low in your stomach that it could burn off your fingertips if you touch the stomach acid in your stomach, right?

They never had an answer for that.

So right away, it's like red flags, if you're looking at it from a microbiology perspective.

So we came across these spore strains as we were trying to think through what would be nature's probiotic, right?

There are clearly bacteria that have huge impact on your system, on your microbiome, your immunological system and all that.

Where are those bacteria?

How do we encounter them in nature, right?

Clearly, we wouldn't take them in a hundred billion CIFU capsule in between meals from your refrigerator and so on.

Our ancestors didn't do that.

So our whole investigation was what is the most natural way in which you encounter microbes?

What are those microbes?

And then what do they do in your system?

That's how we started working with Royal Holloway University of London on the spores.

And we developed these idea of a spore-based probiotics.

And we started taking it to different companies.

Most of them thought we were completely nuts.

They're like, we can't sell a three billion CIFU probiotic, our probiotic is 50 billion.

How are we gonna create value in three billion?

And of course, they couldn't understand the idea of it's not about the dose, it's about the quality of the strains and so on.

But fortunately, through my business partner, Tom Bain, who is Tina's husband's doctor, we got in connection with them.

And they were at the right time looking for something new, something innovative, and we were looking for the right partner to go, okay, take this to market, we'll do the science, we'll do the research and the education and all that.

You guys build a market for it.

That's fascinating.

That's how we came about.

So what actually, what is a spore probiotic?

Yeah.

What is a spore?

So a spore is a type of bacteria that can coat itself in a calcified protein-like coating, right?

It basically puts an armor around itself when its growth conditions aren't ideal.

This is, it does this naturally, we don't have to induce it to do that.

And in fact, spores are likely some of the oldest living organisms on earth.

There's this theory of pan-spermia, I don't know if you're familiar with it.

Right, so there's always been this idea of how did cellular life start on this planet, right?

The whole primordial soup thing.

But what has been known is that there's always been nucleic acids, there's always been the components of DNA, there's always been certain types of fatty acids, there's always been the components of protein, amino acids, for example.

You can find these on meteorites that crashed on an earth, right?

So you find those structures and those components coming in from outer space.

So the thinking is that in pan-spermia is that the earth was seeded with the building blocks of cellular life through the meteoric showers that occurred a few billion years ago, right?

So proteins, nucleic acids all existed.

And the question is if they exist and under the right conditions, do they coalesce into forming organelles and structures?

And there've been some awesome experiments that show that they do, right?

If you put phospholipids, if you put proteins, if you put nucleic acids into a soup, if you will, they do start forming cells.

Right?

And that's just nature and it's the randomness and the entropy and the things that drive these things together that start to form systems and structures.

And so the idea was the earliest life forms on Earth had to be microbes, right?

And are there still microbes today on Earth that could have survived interstellar journey on a meteorite, for example, to seed the building blocks on Earth?

Bacillus endospores, which are the types of probiotics we work with, were studied and were taken out into outer space for seven years and shown that their spore form can survive in outer space for up to seven years.

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So they were likely the building blocks of cellular life on Earth.

And these are anaerobic bacteria, right?

Because if they're surviving in outer space.

These are facultative.

That's what makes them so special.

So what that means is they can survive in an oxygen environment and non-oxygen environment.

So they adapt to almost any kind of environment.

The oldest living bacillus that they found was actually found here in Southern California.

Scientists have been going to caves recently because they're looking for new microbes, right?

Because we're trying to learn about new antibiotics and so on from microbes.

Most antibiotics are produced by microbes.

That's how we learned about them.

And so what they're doing is they're going into these caves where man has never gone into.

They're swabbing and looking for unique bacteria.

In these salt crystals in a cave in Southern California, they were able to dissolve out new bacillus bacteria.

These are spore-forming bacteria, same genus that we use, and they were able to carbon date them.

They were 450 million years old, and they were still alive.

They could still plate them, right?
450 million year old bacteria.

Plate that means you could put them in a petri dish and they come.

And they start growing.

They reanimate.

Yep.

They were in that suspended state, in that spore state, because given the environment that they were in, they go, this is not a great place to grow.

Let's go into this dormant state.

They wrap themselves with this armor-like coating.

They're metabolically inactive, so they shut off their metabolism, and they sit there, and they wait.

They have little probes sticking out of their spores, waiting for the right condition, and they will wait, upwards of 450 million years, for the right condition, and they'll pop on and start growing.

Wow.

So that's what makes spore-based probiotics shelf-stable.

Absolutely, yes.

Essentially, yeah.

Interesting, because when we were talking about the refrigerated probiotics, I was thinking, okay, maybe the cold is just slowing down their metabolic rates, and therefore preserving their lifespans or whatever, but this seems like a much more efficient way of keeping them in stasis.

It's not, yeah, it's absolutely efficient, but also it mimics nature most closely, right?

So when you think about the predominance of probiotics are made up of lactobacillus ambifidobacteria species.

These are clearly commensal organisms, important, but we don't actually encounter these organisms in nature.

It's not a natural way for us to gain them, right?

We gain our predominance of lactobacillus ambifidobacteria through the birthing process, through breastfeeding, close interaction, mom and dad, early on when you're coming out, and then in the first years or so of life.

Once you have them, then that's your stated microbiome with those species, right?

Now you can find unique species that have very unique functionality that you can utilize as bacterial therapy, right?

Which is kind of where probiotics are supposed to be.

And you can use certain types of bifida, you can use certain types of lactobacilli.

But the idea of using this kitchen sink formula, right?

With 25 strains or 30 strains and 200 billion CFUs, because that's supposed to go in and readjust your microbiome, that doesn't exist, right?

That doesn't happen in nature.

And so to us, it was more about what microbes do we encounter in nature?

How do we encounter them?

And then what will they end up doing in the system?

The bacterial spores are the most natural form of probiotics because they're ubiquitous in the environment.

They're found everywhere.

And in glacial ice core studies, they found that even three to five million years ago, we had a high abundance of these strains in the environment and they're up to 95% similar to the strains that we have today in the environment, right?

So they've been here, they've been stable, they haven't changed much.

So our ancestors inevitably consumed them because they ate off the land, they ate dirt, they drank waters out of rivers and streams, right?

So they got daily exposure as part of their diet to these organisms.

To me, one of the biggest things we're doing wrong today is we've divorced ourselves from those organisms, right?

We now live in concrete jungles and sterile environments.

We don't get microbes with our food anymore.

And that is a huge difference in how our microbiome works, right?

And it's led to all kinds of problems for us.

Yeah, is that sort of what underlies like the hygiene hypothesis that because we've become so much more sterile as a society, especially relative to our ancestors, we're seeing this incredible influx of conditions that were relatively rare in antiquity, right?

Like autoimmune conditions, severe allergies.

Yeah, absolutely.

So if you look at pediatric cases, right, allergies and asthma are becoming an epidemic.

In the US alone, we have over, I think, close to 10 million kids with severe asthma now.

I mean, it's actually mind-blowing if you think about, like, we didn't, you know, millions of years of evolution to be taken down by a peanut.

Exactly.

It doesn't make sense.

Yeah.

It doesn't, it's like completely dissonant with, you know, like, with the idea of natural selection.

Absolutely.

Because it indicates a deconstruction of the species and a degeneration rather than a continuous move towards higher fitness, right?

Which is exactly what biology is supposed to do, right?

But absolutely.

So the hygiene hypothesis, when you think about it, we do a lot of microbiome analysis.

So I've done, or our whole group and research team has done probably 6,000 microbiome samples of different kinds of people.

We also have components of our research team that works with the Papua New Guinea tribes, for example.

Here's what we see, that this is the stuff that keeps me up at night, right?

It's weird, nerdy nightmares.

Most people will be like, what the hell, you go to sleep, right?

So here's the thing about the microbiome.

The microbiome is our largest reservoir of genetic capability, right?

We have about 150 to 200 times more genetic material in our microbiome than we do in our own chromosomes.

In fact, our own chromosomes are absolutely pathetic when it comes to biological function, right?

We have about 22,000 functional genes in our chromosomes.

You compare that, and that sounds like a lot to anyone who doesn't know these numbers, but an earthworm has about 30,000 functional genes, right?

So we are less sophisticated than an earthworm.

Fascinating, right?

And you go, how the hell do we function the way we function?

This was a big question that came up during the Human Genome Project.

The Human Genome Project, which was developed in the early 90s, in fact, one of the labs that I was working with in the University of Iowa was one of the labs that was part of the Human Genome Project.

So I remember the excitement around it.

The estimation once we mapped the entire human genome was that we would have somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 genes to account for all the functionality that we have, right?

Turns out we look at it, our genetic material is mostly junk, right?

And then there's maybe 22,000 functional genes.

And then they go, how the hell are we functioning the way we function?

So that was in part what kicked off the Human Microbiome Project to go, what about the microbes that live in us?

Do they confer any genetic capabilities, right?

And as it turns out, we have about two and a half million microbial genes that are functional in our system.

So the vast majority of our capability to be human and to adapt to environments, to become resilient, right?

To be able to live in the Sahara Desert versus people that live closer to the North Pole versus people that live in Antarctica, right?

Humans can adapt to almost any environment on this earth.

No other animal species does that, right?

You don't have polar bears living in the forest and you don't have lions living in the jungles of India, right?

They don't adapt to the environment well, but humans can.

And a large part of that is because of this mammalian fermentation structure that we created, which is a large bowel.

And the incorporation of millions of organisms into that large bowel and the ability and the functionality that the large bowel and the genetic elements confer to us, right?

So we have this massive nutrient genetic factory that we carry around that allows us to be human, that provides us resilience, that trains our immune system, that drives our metabolic processes, that affects our brain directly, all of those things.

But it depends on the pool of microbes in our system.

And so coming back to what keeps me up at night, right?

That was the whole setup for it.

What keeps me up at night is when you look at the microbiome of the Papua New Guinea tribes, they tend to have an alpha diversity, which is the number of functional species, right?

They are anywhere from three to 600 functional species in their microbiome.

Of the 6,000 or so tests that we've run on Americans, on North Americans, we are somewhere around 120 to 130 on average.

That's a much, much lower diversity.

Much lower.

We've lost a significant amount of microbes that we should naturally be harboring over the last several decades or maybe a century or two since we've divorced ourselves from that kind of living, right?

The more hunter-gatherer, forager type of living.

In the modern world, as we start to lose more species and we're seeing it go down, the tests that we ran in 2019 actually show higher averages than the tests we're running now, right?

So even over the last couple of years, well, what we've done through the pandemic and so on has probably impacted our diversity.

The problem with that is as we lose diversity, we lose genetic capability, we lose protein synthesis, we lose ability to be resilient and adapt to different environments, and we lose complete functionality.

It's equivalent if you understood this from a microbiology standpoint, it's equivalent to me saying, what if the next generation of kids, because of what we're doing, will be born without a spleen?

And their kids will be born without a spleen and only one kidney, right?

People would be like, holy crap, what are we doing?

Like, we can't have that.

It's that equivalent because the microbiome is such a major organ in our ability to function.

If we lose large components of it, we're absolutely losing functionality.

We get to a point then where a single peanut could kill us.

Wow.

Right?

No longer are we that resilient top of the food chain, top of the evolutionary ladder species.

We are this frail, vulnerable, band-aid covered species that could be killed by a single peanut.

Oh my God.

You know, it makes me think of the carnivore diet because there are so many people now, advocates for this, I think, evolutionarily quite dissonant diet where people are saying that dietary fiber is like the devil and plant compounds like polyphenols are.

It's not the fiber that's the problem.

It's not the polyphenols that are the problem.

It's not these plant phytochemicals that are the issue.

It's the fact that we have widespread gut dysbiosis that's impairing our ability to reap all of the benefits from these otherwise very healthful plant compounds.

Yeah.

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In fact, there's good evidence that a turning point for mammalian species, including humans, was the incorporation of a large fermentive base, which is all the microbes.

That actually allowed us to accelerate our evolution by utilizing a largely plant-based source of nutrients.

Because plants have lots of nutrients in them, but we can't get to them, right?

Just think about the fundamentals.

The plants are made up largely of cellulose.

That's the type of carbohydrate that plants use to build themselves, right?

We can't make the enzyme cellulase, which is required to break down plant material.

So we aren't naturally designed to break down plant material as well.

But once you incorporate a large fermentive base of microbes that make all the types of cellulases you need, right?

The alpha cellulase, the hemicellulase, they make all the different versions of it.

They break it down for us and extract the nutrients out, right?

Our ability to absorb polyphenols, for example, is really poor, but our microbiome's capability of metabolizing polyphenols to, say, urolithins, which are really important for mitochondrial function, cellular turnover, is really strong, right?

So our microbiome needs those things, those components.

They need the plants.

They need the diversity in food.

We, as a species, don't need that much diversity in macronutrients, right?

We can do okay on some fats, some proteins, some carbohydrates, but what we keep forgetting is we're not eating for ourselves.

We're eating in large part for the microbes.

And what they need as substrate to form the types of compounds and proteins that they will give us to survive, right?

You can't get butyrate, enough butyrate, out of just fats and meats, right?

Butter, for example.

A lot of people say that you can find butyrate in butter.

Yeah, and you can.

You could probably find some small amount, but it's still not clear whether we absorb that butyrate the same way, right?

Because a lot of the butyrate receptors are in the large bowel.

Right, and we absorb that probably high up in the small bowel.

We do.

And then not only butyrate, so what about propionate and acetate?

Those are equally important, right?

They're part of the short-chain fatty acid cascade.

They do many different things.

And when you can tweak those by tweaking the microbiome, you can create amazing effects, right?

We did that recently.

We completed the largest probiotic acne study using the spores in the Just Thrive probiotic.

And what we were able to show is that in a 12-week period, which is the standard for acne studies on all the antibiotics, we were able to reduce the acne lesion counts by 70%.

Right?

Massive reduction.

That's better than most of the antibiotics that have been studied.

With a certain strain of probiotic.

The exact strains that are in the Just Thrive, the probiotic.

Amazing.

Now, why can that happen, right?

This is where we get to go into how does a microbiome impact everything around you, right?

Whether it's a gut-skin access, the gut-brain access.

We realized early on from a previous study that we were doing that acetate levels, which is one of the types of short-chain fatty acids, tend to be low in people with acne.

The other thing is people with acne also tend to have leakier guts and have high levels of an endotoxin called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, right?

If you have LPS and you have low acetate, then you have a much higher risk of developing acne lesions.

So if you could stop LPS and increase acetate, you should be able to reverse the process, right?

And that's going to the root cause of the problem.

And so we did a pilot study using the spores because we know these spores.

Our first study showed that we seal up the gut, we reduce LPS by 60, 70% in 30 days.

So we said, okay, we know we can reduce LPS.

Can we also impact acetate production by changing the microbiome with the spores?

Sure enough, we did a separate study and showed, yes, we can increase butyrate by 50%, we can increase acetate by 35 or 40%, we can even increase propionate by a significant margin.

So we said, okay, those two combined functionalities should mean that we should be able to reduce acne lesions quite a bit just by taking the pill once a day.

And that's when we went into the two acne studies that we did, and we looked at the mechanisms of action, we saw that we're increasing acetate, we saw that we're cutting down LPS, and concurrently, the lesions go away.

And the best part about it is you could take an antibiotic to try to reduce your acne, your pimples, or you could take a probiotic, which actually reduces your acne by making you healthier.

Because the pathology that leads to the formation of pimple is the same pathology that leads to inflammation in the brain.

It's the same pathology that leads to inflammation in your joints, in your muscles, other types of inflammation.

They're all inflammatory conditions.

So it's absolutely exciting and fascinating when you start to really understand the microbiome and you can tweak things a little bit, you could see the physiological benefits like amazingly clear within a short period of time.

That's fascinating.

Also, drugs like Accutane put you at significantly increased risk for severe depression.

Absolutely, yeah.

Those are powerful drugs.

Not that, I mean, if it's helping you and it's working for you, I don't like to play stigma on drugs.

I mean, if you could, as a first line of defense, try something like a spore-based probiotic.

That's the key.

So that was our whole thinking, right?

One of the things, this is another kind of thing that keeps me up at night, is when you look at a dermatologist, they're prescribing on average 130 days of antibiotics, right?

And the thinking is, with everything we know and with where scientists, we should be able to do better than that, right?

We should be able to give people a better solution to reducing pimples than just decimating their gut and their microbiome for 130 days, which will have lifetime impact, likely in many people, right?

So that's exactly right, right?

The thinking is that, how can we find a better way to do some of these things?

Now, there's many reasons why you'll need an antibiotic and it'll probably save your life.

I've taken an antibiotic multiple times, you know, for things that you really should take an antibiotic for, so it's not to villainize it.

But in many cases, we could probably do better.

Yeah.

Walk me through what happens when you take a probiotic.

Like, you take a probiotic, swallow it, step by step.

Like, what's happening in the body?

Okay.

So, let's say your audience walks into a health food store and they pick any probiotic on the shelf, right?

Vast majority of them.

What is going to happen when they take one of those is 99.9% of all of those microbes are going to die in the stomach, and then you're going to get a bunch of cellular debris going through.

Now, in some cases, some of that cellular debris can upregulate some immune responses in the gut, which can be beneficial, right?

But it's what we call a metabolic response modifier.

It doesn't have a lasting effect.

It's just as the cellular debris is going through, whether it's the cell membrane structure or some proteins and peptides from the bacteria.

So, that exposure can have some benefits, but it depends on the types of strains that are in there.

That's the extent of the vast majority of probiotics.

Now, let's say you take a spore-based probiotic.

And if you have the right spores, because again, not all spores are created equal, right?

And people will start making those assumptions.

You have to study them.

You have to understand that they function in the gut.

What will happen is when you take the spore-based probiotic, the spores go in, the capsule dissolves in the stomach and the small intestine.

It releases the spores into the small intestine.

One of the first things they do is they have those little receptors.

I mentioned they're coming out of the spore, right?

They actually tumble around the lining of the gut, and then they actually encounter receptors that we have on our lining of the gut to actually welcome them in.

There's like a molecular handshake that occurs, right?

And so when that molecular handshake happens, they then know they're in the right place because these spores that we work with are commensal to the gut.

You can find spores in almost any environment that don't necessarily function in the gut well.

These are specifically adapted to the gut, right?

So they know they're in the gut, so they have that molecular handshake.

They go, okay, I'm in the right place.

Now the nutrients have to be adequate as well.

They have to have adequate protein and some carbon sources, carbohydrates.

There should be adequate liquid in there, but there usually is in the gut.

So once they sense all of those things, they come out of this spore state.

So they basically break through the shell, they release it, they become a metabolically active bacteria.

And this is one of the most fascinating things that they do that makes me just absolutely love spores, right?

They do something called quorum sensing, and they're amazing at it, right?

What is that, quorum?

Quorum with a Q, yeah.

Quorum.

What that means is they actually start reading the microbial signatures of all the bacteria in the area.

And for some reason, and I think it makes sense through evolution because they've been in us for millions of years, they know what should be and shouldn't be in your gut and in what proportions, right?

So they start to sense and read the chemical signatures of all the microbes in the area.

When they find microbes that are overgrown or shouldn't be there, they'll actually sit next to them and compete with those microbes in a number of different ways to bring down their numbers.

Then they start producing prebiotics and postbiotic compounds that start to feed the rest of your commensal organisms to bring their numbers up.

They can shift the microbiome by up to 30%, which is like a 20 to 30 trillion organism change in as little as a couple of weeks.

And they do that with...

If you gave me all the money in the world and the smartest microbiologists, we couldn't design an organism to do that.

That's nature at its best.

And we studied this in the case of C diff, for example, clostridium difficile.

We did a study with Cleveland Clinic that's published now.

It's out there.

People can read it.

What we were looking to see is how do our spores compete against clostridium difficile, right?

In a model where you have colonized clostridium difficile.

So we sent the spores in, and this was in an animal model study that has been well established and published.

They have infectious clostridium difficile in the GI tract of these animals, in the mice.

We send in through a gavage the spores, and then we can actually visualize what the spores are doing, right?

So here's what they do, which is crazy.

For many other pathogens, they'll sit next to them and produce antimicrobials to kill the pathogens, because most pathogens are quite weak compared to these spores.

But C diff is a spore itself, right?

So it has that resilience itself.

So the antimicrobials that our spores produce don't necessarily harm it.

So they found another way.

What they do is they surround the clostridium difficile, like circling wagons, right?

And they spit out a chelating agent to steal minerals away from C diff.

C diff needs iron.

That's a very important component of its metabolic process.

That's part of why if you have a C diff infection, you bleed through the GI tract, because the C diff is eating away at the lining of the gut to try to get to the blood supply, right?

So it causes these lesions that bleed.

And so it needs iron.

So our spores go in there, they secrete a chelating agent to chelate all the iron and minerals away from it, and starves it to death.

Fascinating.

Isn't that crazy?

I mean, like, how does it know how to do that?

And C diff kills, like, some odd number of people.

Insane.

It's like 30,000 people a year.

Something like four to six million people a year end up with infections and in hospitals, right?

It's a really egregious infection.

And the big problem with it is once you have it, the recurrence rate is pretty high, so you will keep having bouts of it throughout your life, right?

And the treatment for it is not great either.

The treatment for it is typically vancomycin, which is the antibiotic that they use.

The funny thing about it is that in that model I talked about that was developed at Cleveland Clinic that's well published, in order for them to be able to get the C diff to infect and stay, they actually pretreat the animals with vancomycin.

So they use the treatment for C diff as a way of setting up the stage so that C diff can actually infect.

Because the vancomycin damages the microbiome and the lining enough that actually allows C diff to colonize.

It's an opportunistic organism.

So when you think about that, you go, okay, the treatment, at least in this model, actually induces infection.

So of course, recurrence is going to happen.

So again, this is just another opportunity where it's like, okay, there may be a probiotic strategy or microbiome bacteriotherapy strategy to something that lots of people suffer from.

It's really hard to control if we could start just kind of pushing down that line.

And this goes back to my original work about lots of institutionalized research.

There's lots of good stuff that happens, of course.

It elevates our understanding of things.

But for me, it's all about doing research that impacts people right away, right?

I have no interest as a curious scientist to keep doing research just for my own curiosity, right?

And to publish papers and to get grants and all that.

There's people that do that and do a wonderful job of that.

But to me, it's more about translating the science to efficacy, right?

I love that.

And that's where products like this come in place.

No, it's amazing.

And everything that you're saying checks out with everything that I've encountered in my research.

So I'm really loving this conversation.

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What is the relationship between probiotics and SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth?

Because I've always sort of had this fear that you take probiotics in the wrong context, perhaps, because you said they activate in the small intestine, right?

So how do they know when it's time to flourish once they've reached...

Is it like a pH thing or what?

What's the relationship there?

Now, keep in mind that most of the probiotics you can buy are organisms that shouldn't really be in the small intestine, right?

Bifidobacteria and all that, for example, should really be in the large intestine, which is what you're hoping they'll get to.

But SIBO is an interesting problem.

This is something that I've lectured on for the last almost three or four years.

Even in the world of functional medicine, we've taken a completely wrong approach to it.

Because SIBO, of course, the most profound thing that most people see is the bloat.

That's the thing that they struggle with.

That's the thing that really impacts their quality of life, the fact that they eat foods that they love, and then they bloat, and they have this distension, and they're so uncomfortable.

So uncomfortable, yeah.

So uncomfortable, and they're embarrassed about it too, because you could be perfectly lean and fit and look like you have a gut just because you're bloated out by your lunch.

But that becomes the focus of people.

And then the whole focus of treatment becomes, how do we reduce the bloat?

That, unfortunately, is a very allopathic view on the problem.

It's the symptom and how do we reduce the symptom, not what is the root cause and the underlying problem.

When I dig into SIBO and I look at mechanisms, I'm a big guy on mechanisms, SIBO to me is not a condition of itself.

It shouldn't actually be called a condition.

SIBO is actually a symptom.

The entire system of SIBO is a symptom of a much bigger problem that's occurring in people.

A much scarier problem than bloat.

So I do this lecture for functional medicine doctors called Beyond the Bloat because I'm trying to get them to think about things differently.

So here's what occurs in SIBO.

And probiotics really shouldn't impact it in a negative way.

Some may impact it in a positive way.

We're doing some work around that.

But here's what's functionally happening in your gut in SIBO.

So in your small intestine, in a healthy small intestine, you should have a predominance of bacteria that are called gram-positive bacteria.

Every bacteria in the world can be divided into gram-positive or gram-negative.

Gram-negative bacteria have no cell wall structure, but in their cell membrane, so they have a cell membrane, no cell wall.

Gram-positive bacteria have cell membrane and then a cell wall that surrounds it.

But in gram-negative bacteria, they have an endotoxin called LPS, lipopolysaccharide.

And so gram-negative bacteria are in your gut.

They make up about 50% of the microbes in your gut, but most of them are in the large bowel.

They shouldn't be in the small bowel.

The small bowel should be predominant with gram-positive bacteria.

These bacteria don't ferment that much.

They don't do that metabolic fermentation.

They do very low levels of fermentation, but a lot of that is really controlled by the number of bacteria that are in your gut.

So if you look at the gut, it's really fascinating because the small intestine is a perfectly good place for microbes to grow.

It's warm, it's moist, it's constant food and liquid coming in.

There's mucosal layer the microbes can live in and all that.

But yet, the small intestine naturally has around 10 to the 5 or 10 to the 4 CFUs of bacteria.

To your audience, what that means is about a thousand or so bacteria cells per gram of, let's say, solid matter in the small intestine, about a thousand.

Then you look at the large intestine.

Your large intestine has around 10 to the 12, which we're talking about tens of billions, hundreds of billions per gram.

So the difference is thousands to hundreds of billions.

The reason there's this big difference, even though those two environments aren't that different, is because there are natural mechanisms in our system to prevent microbes from overgrowing in the small intestine.

That's what we really have to look at.

The two things that drive SIBO is a taxa shift.

You see in people with SIBO that their small intestine shifts from gram positive to gram negative bacteria.

Then all the mechanisms that are in place to reduce microbial growth, those things get compromised.

So we can talk to what those are.

Okay, so I'm going to guess two of them would be, one is low stomach acid.

Exactly.

Hypochlorhydria.

And then I'm fascinated by the migrating motor complex.

Does that have anything to do with this?

It does, yeah.

So the three or four major natural things that prevent bacteria from growing in your small intestine are number one, stomach acid like you said.

Stomach acid is supposed to kill most bacteria that are entering the system.

You also get some of that stomach acid bleeding into the small bowel which controls microbial growth to a certain degree.

The second one is bile.

Bile is extremely important.

Bile acts as a very strong antimicrobial.

It's also of course important to absorb fat soluble nutrients, absorb fat soluble toxins, take it to the liver for clearance and so on.

But it also is a very profound surfactant.

So it coats your digestive tract when you're eating.

You actually have upwards of 15 different cycles of bile release every time you eat.

So the idea is to coat your small intestine with bile.

And all the gram positive bacteria in your small intestine are sensitive to bile.

And so when they're coated with bile, they can't grow.

And that happens to be the time that food's coming in as well.

So they can't actually metabolize the food, because they're being suppressed by the bile.

And so that prevents the fermentation from occurring.

Here's the other thing that bile does.

So bile gets secreted by the gallbladder in the proximal part of the small intestine.

It moves through the small intestine and gets reabsorbed in the terminal end of the small intestine, goes back to the liver, the liver cleans it up, and then secretes it again.

Before it gets reabsorbed in the end of the small intestine, it activates a receptor called a nuclear FXR receptor.

What that does is it causes the intestinal epithelium, the lining cells, the gut lining cells in the small intestine to release a bunch of antimicrobials into the system.

Think about how smart that is from a biological perspective.

So bile is coding the small intestine, covering the bacteria going, you can't grow, you can't metabolize this food.

You stay at that low thousand cells per gram level.

Now as bile moves through and ends up at the end of the small intestine to get reabsorbed, there's no more bile up here.

So bile triggers your intestinal epithelial cells to release an antimicrobial to maintain that low level while it goes and gets recycled and comes back up.

So that's just a beautiful biological mechanism.

All that is happening just to keep the bacteria from growing.

So that's the other mechanism.

It's a bile stomach acid.

Then you have the migrating motor complex, which is this electrical sweeping of the bowels to move food particles through and substrates that the microbes could potentially metabolize.

And here's why that's important.

So when you leave food out on the table, it doesn't spoil within two hours or three hours.

You can come back and eat it six hours later and it's probably fine.

It's not till about eight, nine hours later that it maybe starts to ferment and grow microbes on it.

So microbes, even when presented with nutrients, have a lag phase in their growth.

It takes them a little while to start metabolizing the nutrients and really start reproducing.

Our biology takes advantage of that lag phase, where we move the food out of the small intestine within a couple hour period so that it doesn't give enough time to the microbes to actually consume it.

And now whatever may be left there will actually get swept out by the migrating mortar complex, which kicks on about three, four hours after you eat.

So all of these things are designed to keep microbes from entering in a viable state into the small intestine, to keep microbes from being able to grow and ferment when food is present, and to continuously clean the small intestine out so that when you're not actively eating, no food particles are left there for microbes to ferment.

I'm assuming it happens every night as we sleep, because it's like seven to nine hours where we're not ingesting anything.

But is this a rationale as to why occasional fasting could be beneficial, or is that not really as significant as what we get inevitably when we sleep every night?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I've been doing intermittent fasting myself for five, six years at least straight.

It's a very common and natural thing to go for periods of time where you're not eating.

The microbiome is called a diurinal system, which means it has a 24-hour clock similar to our own circadian rhythm.

There are certain microbes that only proliferate after a period of no eating.

And as it turns out, many of these microbes are the housekeeping microbes.

They turn on things like autophagy.

They turn on things like mitophagy.

They regenerate the mucosal layer and so on.

So they're rebuilding, repairing, they're cleaning things up.

But they're only functioning when you've gone through a certain period of non-feeding.

And it turns out around 12 hours or so is an important timeline, right?

So if you can fast somewhere between 12 to 14 hours on a somewhat regular basis, most of that overnight is fine.

Then you're really kicking on a lot of those mechanisms in the microbiome.

The microbiome is layered in terms of the microbes and how they function.

So you have primary fermenters or digesters that break down the biggest macromolecules that come in.

And then in their process of breaking that down, they produce all these byproducts that feed the next layer of microbes.

They metabolize that and produce new byproducts that feed the next layer of microbes, right?

So there's this real important hierarchy.

Pecking order.

Pecking order, if you will.

And only when you go through that full pecking order do you end up with all the nutrients and byproducts that you need out of the microbiome.

If only the primary fermenters are active, you only get their set of byproducts, right?

And they are active every time food is coming in.

So if you're constantly feeding yourself and not going through periods of no food coming in, you don't activate the other layers of fermentation in the gut, right?

So you actually miss out on a huge host of nutrients that your body needs in order to function.

So we need that period of rest.

And it becomes extremely important for just normal functionality, right?

Keep in mind that most of our nutrients that we require to function as humans come from the microbiome.

We don't get most of it from food, right?

They come from a fermentive process that occurs in the microbiome.

At any given time, if you pulled out your blood sample and you looked at all the active compounds in there, at least 50% of them are compounds we cannot get from food that are synthesized by the microbiome based on consuming food.

So what are some examples of those nutrients?

Because I'm thinking like essential nutrients, you get them in meat, you get them in low residue foods that are absorbed high up in the small intestine.

Yeah.

So a lot of them like peptides, for example, right?

The microbiome produces all kinds of peptides.

One of the best examples of this are urolithins.

So urolithins are critically important for cellular function for us, right?

It activates things like mitophagy, cellular turnover, mitochondrial repair, all of these things.

Urolithin A, I've been reading quite a bit about.

Urolithin A in particular, right?

But there isn't a food that has high levels of urolithin A.

Urolithin A is made by microbes metabolizing polyphenols in the gut.

And keep in mind, if you get no urolithins, cellularly you don't function the same way.

You age much faster.

You can't repair, right?

So if you induce damage, whether it's through infection or working out or whatever activity, you can't repair.

Your mitochondria shrink and die over time.

You can't regenerate mitochondria effectively.

Mitochondrial dysfunction is the definition of aging, right?

There's the whole mitochondrial free radical theory of aging, right?

Which the way they look at, this is an aside, and I apologize for all the asides.

My nerdy brain taps into all this research, right?

We're freaking honored.

So looking at the mitochondria, there was this fascinating study where they took cellular samples from a five-year-old and then from a 90-year-old, right?

And they sent these samples blind to pathologists to grade and rate the samples and try to discern a difference between the samples, right?

The only difference that was discovered between these two samples was that in the five-year-old, he had 100% functioning mitochondria.

The 90-year-old had more than 95% of the mitochondria dysfunctional, right?

That was the only cellular difference.

We know that because we know that mitochondria, as they do their respiration, produce noxious things like free radicals that in fact kill them.

So we need to quench those free radicals and we need to regenerate the mitochondria.

If we don't, we will age very fast, we'll be more susceptible for disease, and we can't recover, right?

All of that really critical cellular function is driven by a compound called urolithin A that we can't get from our diet and we can't produce ourselves, right?

We count on bacteria to make that for us.

So imagine in future generations if we start losing microbes that produce urolithin A, right?

What is the consequence of that for our future generations?

And it's up to us.

So we've had millions of years of evolution.

Our ancestors have gone through hell and back, really, to harbor these microbes, right?

And they are the stewards of this important treasure trove of genetic elements and capabilities that they've passed on to us.

We are one of the first generations that are squandering that.

Because we are living in one of the most toxic environments.

We're living in an environment that is the most divorced from nature than previous generations, right?

So we're losing these at an alarming rate.

And we're not doing our job as a human to preserve these to pass them on to the next generation.

That to me is one of the most important roles that we can play as a human on Earth today is honoring the millions of years of biological evolution and the microbiome population that has accumulated.

We have to enhance it, preserve it, optimize it, and then pass it on to the next generation.

If not, we're not doing our job.

We're really creating a tangent in the evolutionary timeline of the human species.

Couldn't agree more.

How do we cultivate bacterial species that can then produce these urolithans most effectively?

Number one, most people will probably have them at some level.

Part of the simple answer to that is just feeding more polyphenols into the system.

Where do you find polyphenols?

What are the best foods to feed?

It's really colored fruits and vegetables.

The types of polyphenols that feed these organisms are found in things like cherries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries.

Berries that are colored tend to have very functional polyphenols for this type of organism.

So red wine, for example.

So it's a good reason to drink some red wine.

Healthy red wine.

Does it outweigh the downside that you're ingesting ethanol, which is a neurotoxin?

It can.

Again, part of it is resilience.

People always ask me, what are your health goals?

With all the information I have about health and microbiology and microbiome and all that, I have one very simple health goal, and that's to be resilient.

I don't want to be healthy by having to be 100% perfect in my choices.

I want to be able to have that 80-20 rule.

You want to cultivate anti-fragility.

Yes.

I love that.

That to me is living.
20% of the time, I want to make the bad decision.

I want to eat the wrong thing.

I want to drink the wrong thing, but still be fine.

And that's really the human condition.

We are resilient species.

We have never had the luxury of making 100% the right choices.

And yet here we are today.

You can't confine yourself to a bubble.

You cannot.

You want to make yourself harder to kill.

And exposing yourself at times to making choices that are perhaps less healthy are actually going to be quite effective at cultivating resilience.

It's stress.

That kind of stress is important to the system.

Hormetic stress.

Exactly.

So polyphenols from berries is a great way of upregulating that.

We've also found that we've done a study where we published with the spores, the Just Thrive spores, increased the growth of acromansia and other organisms that increase urolithins.

And so that's a fascinating thing about the spores.

We actually see an increase, about 30% increase in the diversity of the microbiome when you add spores in your system.

And the big question is, where did those organisms come from?

They're not in the probiotic, so how did you increase them and their increase of presence?

Well, the interesting thing about diversity is that with microbes, you can have a single cell of a species sitting there just hanging on for dear life.

And it's hard to kill off any bacteria 100%.

That's why all those antimicrobial agents say kills 99.9% of bacteria.

Because it's always that 0.001%.

It's always that 0.001%, right?

It's very hard to kill 100% of bacteria.

And it's hard to measure that you've killed 100% of bacteria as well, right?

So even within the gut, you might have, let's say you have 120 species that are at relatively good amounts that are functional.

But then you might have another 30 species that are there, but at such low levels where they have no functionality, right?

So you still have poor diversity in that case.

But you take something like the spores.

I described earlier their ability to do quorum sensing and lift other organisms.

They bring some of those species back up and they bring down some of the opportunists.

Then you've actually frankly increased diversity and you've increased the capability that your microbiome now has.

Now you are a super functioning human rather than just a barely functioning human, right?

We've activated millions of more genes in our systems.

We've increased our epigenetic capabilities just by making 20 or 30 more species more viable in the gut.

This is fascinating.

Let's talk a little bit about the JustCom product that you guys do because I was fascinated by this.

Obviously you guys came on board sponsoring the show and when I was reading the ad, I always go into PubMed and I always have to have studies to tag a claim to, right?

And I was like, okay, what am I going to find on this probiotic?

And there's actually really good science in there, like clinical literature on the ability of a specific strain to reduce signs associated with stress and anxiety, which I thought was fascinating.

Yeah.

It is a gut brain modulator, right?

So I could give you the history of where this came from.

And there is, so we worked with the APC.

The APC is this research consortium in Cork, Ireland.

They're probably the largest microbiome research institute in the world.

So they're top of the top, right?

They're like the Harvard and Yale of microbiome research, if you will.

So they're called the APC.

That's where all the best researchers try to go and do fellowships and so on.

So we worked with them on the development of this strain and the clinical research around the product.

It's bifidobacterium longum something something?
1714.
1714.

Very unique strain, right?

So here's the fascinating thing.

When we started looking at what are the microbiome differences between people who manage stress really well, didn't really report anxiety throughout the day, and then age match individuals and health match as well, meaning health match means that you don't look at one group of people that are all lean and happy and eating well and then another that's obese.

Health match meaning that in general, they have similar health characteristics and their similar age.

The only difference is one group has really poor stress management, reports anxious feelings throughout the day, reports sleeplessness at night, the very common type of symptomology.

So we compare two groups, one that didn't have those problems and one that did have those problems.

And we're looking at the microbiome to go, what are the microbiome differences?

Because we know there's this gut brain axis that controls a lot of this.

What we tend to find out is that in the people that tend to be resilient, have low stress, sleep well, and so on, they tend to have high levels of this organism that looks like a bifidolongom.

So then we start isolating that bifidolongom species, and we're trying to figure out what's special about it.

And as it turns out, this is a very unique bifidolongom that has something called an exopolysaccharide.

So similar to how the spores have the spore covering, this particular species produces a carbohydrate that it covers itself with.

You can look at it under electron microscope, and you see all these millions of little tentacles sticking out of the bacteria that covers the bacteria.

And as it turns out, it's this exopolysaccharide that it makes that actually induces an adaptive capability of dealing with stress and reducing cortisol response, and also induces sleep response at night.

Then we could dig into that a little bit more as to how it does that.

But that was the first definitive thing we saw.

We're like, wow, okay, that's a clear difference between these two groups.

Then we took this bacteria out, isolated it, and then put it in mice models of inflammation, anxiety, depression, and so on.

We started seeing all of these improvements in these mice that are bred to be anxious, depressed, and so on.

We saw very clear improvements, and we saw very clear improvements in their inflammatory responses.

Because anxiety and depression are inflammatory conditions as well.

Inflammation is a big driver of it.

And so this strain in particular was shown to be able to modulate brain and central nervous system related inflammation.

On top of that, when it binds to the lining of the gut, it causes the release of a neurotransmitter that shifts your brain wave function.

People who do meditation and all that are trying to get to a theta wave band.

In that theta wave, you're in that flow state.

You're in a very calm.

You're doing things automatically that your body, that you know how to do.

This microbe actually shifts you into theta wave, which is crazy when you think about it.

A bacteria in your gut changing your brain wave function within a relatively short amount of time.

So we started seeing all this effect and we go, okay, let's start studying this in humans.

I think we have four published studies in humans.

We have about six published in animals.

We have four more studies going on right now, including a study in Antarctica, in the Concordia.

That was just the most remote research facility or any living facility close to the South Pole.

And the reason we're doing a study there is because what they're finding out is the researchers that live there very quickly because of lack of sunlight for long periods of time and isolation from other humans and they also have a very sterile environment because they can't afford to get sick out there, they can't afford to catch a virus, right?

There's no medical help for a very long period of time.

And so they sterilized that research facility quite a bit.

But they find that that has a huge impact on their brain.

It shifts their brainwaves, it creates anxiety, it creates depression, creates all kinds of sleeplessness and all that.

So we've been doing a study now for almost a year where we're dosing up these researchers with this particular strain to see if we can modulate some of those negative effects of no sunlight, the isolation, sterilization and so on.

So we're doing a whole bunch of studies in that respect.

We're doing anxiety, depression studies.

But so far, here's what we've shown that this strain does.

It allows your body to come down from the flight or fight response that we get when something makes us anxious.

The flight or fight response is a very important response.

Evolutionarily, it's protected our species.

And we need it.

We need to be able to walk down, and if we sense danger, get ready to fight or flee from it.

Biologically, what's happening when we experience a flight or fight response is two main things.

One is your sympathetic nervous system activates.

And the sympathetic nervous system's goal in the flight or fight response is to increase perfusion of blood to your brain and to your heart and to your muscles, because that's where you need the nutrients right now.

It does that through the immune system.

It does that by releasing catecholamines, which are compounds that basically kind of irritate the immune system and recruit the immune system.

It does that by releasing those in the central nervous system and the brain.

What that does is it activates macrophages, which are part of the immune system, and microglia cells, which are the macrophages in the brain, to start releasing inflammatory compounds.

Inflammation creates perfusion, right?

So we know that when you have inflammation anywhere, it's red because you're getting more perfusion.

So your neurological system, your sympathetic nervous system, is trying to increase perfusion of blood to your brain and your central nervous system by increasing inflammation in your brain and central nervous system, right?

Now, the other side of it, cortisol, is now being released because your HPA axis is being activated.

Part of what cortisol's job is, is two mainfolds.

Cortisol does a lot of things, but two big things in the fly to fight response is, number one, cortisol gets dumped into the gut as the levels increase.

In the gut, there's a microbe that metabolizes cortisol and breaks it down to byproducts.

The byproducts of cortisol metabolization go to the kidneys, and it affects sodium potassium pumps in the kidneys, increasing the amount of sodium that enters into your blood, thereby pushing more liquid into your blood to increase blood pressure, right?

So that helps perfusion as well.

The inflammation and the increase in blood pressure is what drives perfusion to the muscles and the brain.

So here you are.

You're experiencing a stressor.

Back in the day, it was probably a real stressor, right?

Something that was going to eat you.

Now it's a stupid tweet or something, a text that you got, right?

Something trivial.

Story of my life, yeah.

Exactly, right?

It's something trivial, but it's the same biological response as something as dangerous as a predator that's stalking you, right?

So now here we are.

We're in this fight-to-fight state.

Our brain is inflamed.

Our sympathetic nervous system is upregulated.

Our respiratory rate and heart rate is increased, right?

And our immune system is completely compromised, but you're only supposed to be in the state for a relatively short amount of time, right?

But here's where everything goes wrong in the modern world.

What's supposed to happen as cortisol dumps into the gut?

Some of it, as I mentioned, gets metabolized to increase blood pressure.

What else happens is cortisol starts binding glucocorticoid receptors.

As it binds glucocorticoid receptors and it binds enough of them, it sends a negative feedback signal to the central nervous system to go, shut this whole thing down, right?

That's the feedback loop that you need to experience a fly-to-fight response.

Fight or flee, once you get out of danger, you come back down, right?

Inflammation goes down, your metabolic system goes back to normal and so on.

But what happens in the modern world because our guts are so messed up is when cortisol dumps into the gut, it actually makes the gut super leaky in a very short amount of time.

We're talking about in minutes, right?

When your gut becomes leaky because you're missing the types of microbes to manage cortisol in the gut, it makes your gut leaky.

One of the things that increases when your gut becomes leaky is a compound called inelucin-6, right?

When inelucin-6 elevates, what it does is it goes to the brain and it reactivates the HPA axis again, causing release of more cortisol, causing this whole fly-to-fight cycle to happen again.

More cortisol dumps in the gut, more IL-6 goes up, reactivates the HPA axis again, right?

So a single thing that we may have experienced in the morning, whether it's a message or something that activates this fly-to-fight response in the HPA axis, will cause a reactivation of the HPA axis throughout the day, which keeps us in a basal fly-to-fight state, which means your brain is inflamed, your heart is inflamed, your muscles are inflamed, you can't digest because the parasympathetic, the other side of the neurological system is what you need to rest and digest, right?

You can't break down and assimilate nutrients, and your immune system is compromised.

That's the state of the vast majority of people walking around today, right?

And that's because of chronic stress or is that because, what's the reason for that?

The big thing is because they're missing certain microbial components in the gut to manage what happens to cortisol when cortisol gets dumped in the gut, right?

This is where we found this bifidolongom becomes extremely important.

So remember, I mentioned that peptidoglycan layer that it has, right?

This, what we call exopolysaccharide.

That peptidoglycan layer that it has actually is the key ingredient to stopping cortisol from making the gut leaky.

That's the key thing.

Fascinating.

Don't people's guts become temporarily permeable when, like before public speaking?

From the stress response.

And that's again because of the cortisol epinephrine, norepinephrine release, right?

So anytime you're undergoing stress, your gut's going to become leaky.

And it becomes profoundly leaky, right?

Which means inflammation goes up almost immediately.

IL-6, TNF-alpha, all of these things.

And again, it re-triggers more cortisol release, right?

So what we find is that in people that have this microbe in their gut and this peptidoglycan that the microbe produces, the peptidoglycan shunts the intestinal permeability impact of cortisol.

And it stops the elevation of IL-6, right?

So that is the protective mechanism that we have in our gut that goes, we can experience the fly-to-fight response totally fine, but we can come down from it when we don't need it, right?

What's happening in the modern age is we experience it, we can't come down from it because we're missing this component from the gut.

That's one of the dangers of losing microbial functionality in your microbiome.

A basic component of our physiology, fly-to-fight response, can kill us.

Right?

The side effects of it, not the actual danger that's triggering it, which in this case, it's a tweet or a message or somebody cuts you off in traffic, right?

It's the long-term impact of that in your system, right?

Which is an inflammatory, profoundly inflammatory response.

Well, it sounds like it helps the occasional stressor be better contained within the acute timeframe.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And disallow it essentially from becoming a chronic protracted phenomena.

That's the exact key, because what we saw in our studies when we induce stressors in people after you dose them up on the product is that their cortisol curve is much more blunted.

So they don't need as much cortisol to experience the level of stress that they need to experience.

Their perception of the stress is much lower.

Their levels of interleukin 6 and other inflammatory cytokines that increase when you experience stress are much more reduced.

And then their brainwave function changes faster as well to put them back towards that theta brainwave so that they can be more relaxed and actually function normally.

Because when you're in that stress state, you're kind of in this anxious state all throughout the day.

And here's a really phenomenal thing or not phenomenal, really the double whammy in all of this.

So here's what happens when I said interleukin 6 goes up because cortisol makes your gut leaky.

And as a consequence, the leaky gut interleukin 6 goes up, so it reactivates HPA access.

The other thing it does, which is so egregious, is that it reduces the expression of brain-derived neurotropic factor, BDNF, which is what you need at night when you go to sleep to repair your brain from all of the inflammatory damage that occurred during the day.

That's how we reset.

BDNF expression is so important for the repair phase.

So not only does the elevated interleukin 6, because cortisol is dumping into an unhealthy gut, reactivate the HPA access throughout the day, keeping you inflamed.

It also reduces the expression of BDNF, so you can't repair that damaged brain.

Fascinating.

So that is a lack of resilience.

That would impair neuroplasticity, and we see that BDNF is reduced in the setting of depression, in the setting of Alzheimer's disease.

Is there a best time of day to take probiotics?

No.

In fact, the way we look at it is, you take it along with your food at any time of the day.

With food.

With food, yeah.

This whole crazy idea of taking it in between meals and all that, that was a way of trying to reduce the stomach acid exposure.

Because when you eat, you start releasing more stomach acid, and these strains that most people use in probiotics are going to die in the presence of stomach acids.

They're sneaking it in between meals, as if our ancestors did that.

They're like, we should get our bacteria in between our meals.

That didn't happen.

We got our bacteria with food.

And it's really important, because if you have a true functional probiotic, it's supposed to help with metabolization of the food as well, which is what the spores do.

They increase butyrate and all that because they metabolize the food that you're consuming them with.

So take it with food any meal of the day.

Any meal of the day.

That's good to know.

Morning, night, because you mentioned that there's this diurinal aspect to our gut bacteria.

Most of the microbes that function well as a probiotic are really daytime microbes.

Because again, you're supposed to get exposure to them with food.

Then they slow down their effect when you go into sleep and fasted state than the other microbes in your commensal flora take over.

Got it.

I'm super excited to try the Just Calm product.

I think it's super cool that you guys have this strain and that you have all this clinical literature to back it.

And I feel like this is probably just the beginning.

As you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

For microbiome science.

It is, absolutely.

What we're coming to find out now is that through modulating the microbiome, you can make profound changes in people's outcomes, right?

We saw that early on with fecal transplants, which is a very profound way of modulating a microbiome.

It's not a feasible way necessarily for most people.

But there was a famous case, for example, of a guy who had this palsy-like gait in the way he walked, right?

But he also had something like Crohn's or colitis.

He had a really bad inflammatory bowel condition.

And so they did a fecal transplant to try to alleviate the Crohn's or colitis.

And it helped that, but it also changed the way he walked.

So the microbes controlling how his nervous system function, after 30 years of walking in this particular way, the very next day he's walking differently, right?

So the ability to impact our outcomes is really mind-boggling.

When we think about it, some of it is almost like it seems supernatural, because microbes work in ways that we still don't understand how they work, right?

We're talking all the way down to quantum biology, stuff that we are barely scratching the surface on, right?

I'll give you another example of that.

And this was kind of highlighted during this whole COVID pandemic.

We know now that when you get an infection in your lungs, one of the first things that detects the infection are the microbes in your lungs, right?

They detect the presence of a new virus or bacteria that's causing an infection.

Then the way they recruit the immune system is they send a signal to the microbes in your gut.

And then the microbes in the gut, which are surrounded by all the immune tissue, activate your immune system to go to the lungs, right?

The question is, how in the hell does a microbe in the lung communicate with a microbe in the gut, right?

We don't know.

We don't know what that biology is, right?

We don't know what kind of communication that is.

There are microbes in places previously thought sterile.

I mean, we're full of bacteria, right?

There's microbes in the pancreas, there's microbes in the mammary tissue.

Everywhere, your eyeballs.

Skin.

Your cerebral spinal fluid is full of viruses, including papilloma viruses and all kinds of crazy stuff.

Your brain is full of microbes.

There's one area, though, that is relatively devoid of microbes.

And this is our central focus in health and wellness.

That is the mucosal layer, called the mucin 2 layer, sitting just above the intestinal epithelial cells.

So your mucus, the mucus layer that sits on top of the intestinal lining, has two distinct layers to it.

There's a mucin 1 layer, which is a top layer, and then the mucin 2 layer, which is an inner layer, and then the intestinal epithelial cells are there.

That mucin 2 layer is virtually devoid of microbes.

There are trillions of microbes living a tenth of a millimeter above it in the mucin 1 layer, but they don't encroach in the mucin 2 layer.

You can see this in electron micrographs.

It's fascinating.

You've got trillions of microbes here, a millimeter below, there's no microbes, and then your intestinal cells.

How is that regulated?

That's the beauty of it.

So now what we're coming to find out, and I do a two-hour painstaking lecture on this to doctors, to beat this into them, that this is the ground zero of most health disorders.

I can show you through research how the compromisation of that layer is the start of the vast majority of chronic illnesses, things that are seemingly unrelated, like reflux disease and diabetes and dementia and psoriasis.

Most cases you'd go, those things have nothing in common, right?

Like my reflux and psoriasis have nothing in common.

Yes, they do.

They all start when you encroach upon that sterile layer, right?

So here's a quick aside on how that is maintained.

The sterile part of the layer is made up of that mucin-2, which is a different type of glycoprotein, which is a sugar and amino acids combined.

It's a thicker layer.

It's more like jello-like structure, right?

It's produced by goblet cells in the intestinal epithelium.

The signals for the production of that come from the microbiome.

They come from acromansia, from fecal and bacteria, all of these what we call keystone species, right?

Butyrate is a primary fuel to make that layer.

And that layer is being made from the intestinal epithelium on up.

And then as the layer moves up, the microbes at the top start metabolizing the topmost layer of the mucin-2, making it more liquid and more fluid-like area, right?

But they don't encroach on the inner part in a healthy system.

What you see in an unhealthy system is that mucin-2 layer has been eaten away, and the microbes in the top mucin layer now are right adjacent to the intestinal epithelium.

And they've broken that proximity barrier, right?

There's this really fascinating relationship between your immune system and the trillions of microbes that live in the body where they have that demilitarized zone, I call it, right?

When your intestinal epithelium has that space above it before the microbes, it's very comfortable.

When that space is encroached upon, the intestinal epithelium freaks out because it thinks there's an influx of bacteria coming.

It thinks you're going to go under sepsis, right?

So it starts recruiting all of these immune cells to that area to start carpet bombing and blasting everything in that area, including your own intestinal epithelium.

So you completely damage the lining.

That is the onset of the vast majority of chronic illnesses.

And there's all of the signs to show it.

The pathophysiology of how that encroachment and disruption of that mucin-2 layer leads to virtually every chronic illness we deal with is so clear.

And I walk doctors through it all the time.

The question becomes, why does that encroachment even start to happen?

How do we keep it healthy?

So this is a balance that we call dysbiosis when you end up with an imbalance of microbes.

Dysbiosis is a term that's thrown around a lot.

The best way of defining dysbiosis is an imbalance between microbes that eat the mucin layer versus microbes that rebuild it.

You need both, right?

Because the eating away at it is a trigger for producing more of it, right?

But the moment you have more microbes that eat away than microbes that reproduce it, then you get this net reduction in the mucin layer.

You get that what we call translocation of the top part of the mucin layer, very close to the intestinal epithelium.

You get your intestinal epithelial cells freaking out.

Recruitment of immune cells.

Now you've got massive inflammation in the lining of your gut, which then leads to profound leakiness in the gut, right?

And that becomes the foundation for disease, right?

There was a 2015 publication in the Frontiers of Immunology, which was a meta-analysis paper that reviewed a lot of the science at the time on this topic.

They concluded that that intestinal permeability, the results from that compromisation of that layer, a lot of it induced by things like stress, for example, was the number one cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide.

Just that encroachment on that few millimeters of demilitarized zone.

It's all about balance between microbes that eat away at it and microbes that rebuild it.

How do you increase the microbes that rebuild it?

That's the big question.

Well, number one, you have to increase diversity.

Alpha diversity, the more species you have, the more microbes you have that rebuild that layer.

Number two is the keystone species.

Achromantium usinophila, Ficillum bacteriposinacei, Bifidolongum.

These are organisms that metabolize non-digestible carbohydrates and produce butyrate, propionate, and acetate and other compounds to rebuild that structure.

They are the ones that are responsible for rebuilding and maintaining that structure.

So you have to take in soluble, non-soluble fibers, prebiotics and so on, resistant starches.

Those become critical to feed those microbes.

You also have to get proper utilization of those.

The spores increase the utilization of those non-digestible carbohydrates by 50 to 100%.

And then you also have to have amino acids in order to provide the building blocks for the mucin layer.

So these are four different amino acids like leucine and so on that maybe people don't get enough in the diet.

If they can supplement it, that's great.

My listeners probably do.

They probably eat enough protein.

So that's really the key to it, is increasing diversity, increasing the growth of keystone species, feeding them the right blend of protein and the right blend of prebiotics, prebiotics and fiber.

Resistant starches, prebiotics, soluble and insoluble fibers.

Polyphenols also fit into that, because acromansia, which is a key organism in this process, really loves polyphenols.

Fasting is also a part of that, because during the fastest state is when your microbes rebuild that structure.

Throughout the day, as you're digesting and eating and all that, it's a horrific mess going on in there.

It's a mess in the digestive tract.

Microbes are dying, inflammation is happening, guts becoming leaky temporarily, all kinds of structures are getting dismantled.

But at night, then the housekeeping genes turn on and you repair and rebuild all of that.

If you're not fasting enough, if you're not giving enough time for non-feeding, you're not rebuilding the structures.

The key thing is, what we loved about the spores is what we see is the spores enhance all of those steps.

In fact, they seal up the lining of the gut, they rebuild the mucosa, they increase the growth of those important keystone species, they increase the production of short-chain fatty acids, they rebuild the mucosal structures and reduce inflammation in the mucosa, they seal up the tight junctions, the proteins in between the intestinal epithelial cells, they increase the expression of those proteins.

So their whole goal of improving our health is managing that structure.

And that's how we have done studies on elevated triglycerides and published.

We've done studies on acne and published.

We've done studies on autoimmune conditions and published them.

Why is it that this same set of bacteria can impact all of those conditions?

It's because it's working on this ground zero of health dysfunction, which is the intestinal epithelium, right?

If you fix that, everything else becomes profoundly better.

And we have all the tools to fix it.

Fascinating.

When it comes to fiber, how many grams of fiber would you say is a good goal for the day?

I would say you'd want to be over 20, at least.

Our ancestors consumed upwards of 60, 80 grams of fiber a day.

But that's reasonable.

I was expecting you to say something like 100 grams, which I'm like, okay, you're walking around bloated all day long.

But here's a key to fiber, right?

If you're somebody that maybe consumes four or five grams a day, which a typical American probably does, you don't want to go to 20 the next day, right?

You want to slowly step it up because you will compromise the utilization of the fiber.

When you throw too much in, not all of it gets utilized, and some of it may get utilized by dysfunctional microbes as well.

I feel like that's what people don't understand.

You need to cultivate the bowel flora, right?

For any incremental increase in fiber.

You do.

Before that, so that you're able to utilize it.

Yeah, exactly.

And I would increase it by maybe a gram a week or so, or maybe a little bit more.

You can go one to three grams a week, increasing it.

But you also should be taking a probiotic that increases diversity.

You should also be getting exposure to outside environments, right?

Natural environments, so you can gain more exposure to bacteria.

You could be consuming some fermented foods, if you wish, if those agree with your system.

So there should be other things you should be doing to improve the microbiome itself, while you're stepwise introducing more fiber into the system.

I love it.

Super fascinating.

I feel like I could talk to you for hours, man.

You're a very good communicator.

Well, thank you.

This is a great pairing.

Well, yeah, I just could listen to him forever, too.

So that's why I just let him roll today.

Yeah, it's amazing.

What's next for you guys and Just Thrive?

Well, I think one of the things we're really focusing on is our Just Calm product is to really get it out there.

I mean, we sold out immediately.

It's had such profound effects on so many people, so many of our customers, and it's been awesome.

So I think the mental health space and the mood health space is really a focus.

Unfortunately, it's a very relevant topic right now, so that's really where we've been focusing a lot of our attention on.

And really just getting the word out there about gut health and how important it is and how it dictates, as Kiran so eloquently said, it just is dictating every aspect of our overall health.

And I just think getting that word out there even more and letting the lay person out there know that, obviously your audience already knows that, but just getting it out there to the masses.

And then working on some other formulations on women's health, we're looking into some women's health products as well.

But really the mental health and the mood health is really so important.

And getting the word out there about that gut brain access and how they're so tied together that the brain is constantly sending signals to the gut, the gut is constantly sending signals to the brain, and that we have to protect both of those organs and support them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you're right.

I mean, you said it's unfortunate, but it's true that so many people today are struggling with issues related to mental health, whether it's anxiety, depression.

They are.

And, you know, if you look at statistics, it's fascinating.

When you look at IBS, people with IBS, somewhere around 52% of people with IBS also have confirmed anxiety.

Compared to age-matched people who don't have IBS, it's less than 20%, right?

So just having irritated bowels more than two and a half times increases your risk for anxiety.

And to me, why the Just Comm is so important is that, you know, we're not talking about helping people who are on the extremes of the condition, right?

Who are so anxious they can't get out of bed or who are so depressed they can't get out of bed, right?

That's actually a relatively small percent of the total population.

The vast majority of the population has some level of chronic basal anxiety throughout the day, right?

And they're self-medicating typically, right?

They're downloading every app they can get for improving meditation, and they're either medicating through wine.

There's this whole phenomenon of stay-at-home moms are just drinking all day long.

I can't remember what it's called, but there's so many articles on it because they're stressed.

They have households and kids and all this stuff that they're managing, and they're not resilient enough to deal with the stress because of all the physiological and biological and microbiological impact that we're having in the toxic world.

And so they're self-medicating by drinking throughout the day.

And then just think about all the people with all the recreational drug use and all that.

All that is self-medication.

And there's still a stigma with going to a doctor and getting diagnosed with anxiety, getting diagnosed with depression, so most people don't want to do it.

And even if you go and get diagnosed, the medications that they have to treat those haven't changed for 50 years.

We're still using the same types of compounds for depression, anxiety, same SSRI, same anti-anxiety meds that we were using 50, 60 years ago.

So the paradigm hasn't shifted yet at all.

And this mental dysfunction, the cognitive dysfunction, is likely the most common thing that we see within the population, along with gut health.

And they go hand in hand.

So to us, can we give people some relief?

Can we give them a leg up on dealing with these issues while improving their gut and improving their overall health?

We truly believe we can through all the research and all that we've done, and that's the most exciting thing.

That's the stuff that wakes me up in the morning excited, especially since I didn't sleep the night before because of all the other nerdy worries that I had.

Also these anti-anxiety drugs, they're not without side effects and real risks.

Chronic use of drugs like Xanax coincide with a massive increased risk of the development of dementia and things like that.

I always say that side effects of taking Just Thrive are increased energy levels, better sleep, better mood.

Where in the pharmaceutical world, it's like side effects include suicidal thoughts and bloody stools, all these awful things.

So we see that all the time.

We see people start taking the probiotic, and they'll call and they'll say, am I supposed to lose a little bit of weight?

Well, certainly not a weight loss drug, but we do know that, or a weight loss supplement, we do know that when your microbiome is dictating how you metabolize food and how you manage your weight.

So it's fun to see that, people having more energy and better sleep just from maybe taking it because they had some gas or bloating.

And that's been really exciting.

Super, super exciting.

Well, I'm super glad that my good friend Crosby Taylor connected us.

He's a huge fan of the work that you guys do and Just Thrive.

And I know that you guys have a discount code for my audience.

You guys should go and check out Just Thrive at justthrivehealth.com.

I believe the code is Genius.

It is Genius.
justthrivehealth.com.

Genius.
15% off.

Check out the JustCom and all the other amazing products that you guys have.

I know you guys have a whole lineup of really cool and innovative things.

So definitely go and check that out.

Check it out.

And then where can people connect with you guys on social media?

Do you do like...

Brilliant.

Instagram, Just Thrive Health is our handle.

And Facebook, Just Thrive Health also.

And Twitter, all of that.

And then our website, of course, justthrivehealth.com.

We have great blogs.

We invest a lot in research, as you can tell.

And we really want to empower our customers.

And the world, just to start understanding gut health better.

And so, just like Kiran has done so eloquently today.

Yeah, seriously.

That was like a master class.

I mean, honestly, I feel like we could have kept going.

But awesome stuff, man.

The last question that gets asked everybody on the show, what does it mean to you to live a genius life?

You guys could tag team it and answer together.

Mine is probably is being grateful for every day.

I'm a big fan of gratitude.

It's a theme in our company, in my life, in my personal life.

But just just trying to remember to be grateful for the small things in life.

My husband and I have done a lot of bike riding this summer.

And just we ride our bikes and sometimes we'll stop for some yogurt, frozen yogurt, my guilty pleasure.

And just being grateful for those little simple things in life.

Love it.

Couldn't agree more.

Yeah.

For me, it's about understanding your innate capabilities and then honing your innate capabilities towards helping people, right?

If you're existing in this world, in this earth, in this society, if you're lucky enough to have been born, right?

You're one in the, how many trillion that made it to the egg, right?

And you got the chance to be born.

And if you have certain innate capabilities, you should be using that to improve people's lives, right?

And impact human condition.

We all have unique talents.

My one talent, I have no other talents, right?

If I were to go on a talent show, I would do nothing but stand up there and talk.

My one talent is taking very complex science and making it digestible for people.

No pun intended.

Make it very easily digestible, right?

And so I have to use that to try to empower people with knowledge.

I have to use my capabilities of doing research and advancing the science, but then also translating that to people to make it important to them and relevant to them, right?

So I have to do that.

That's what I do.

I can't do what you do.

You've obviously have honed in your talents to communicating and creating a platform where people can learn and be empowered, right?

So to me, that's The Genius Life, right?

You understand what your skill set is, and then you use that skill set for the betterment of people.

I so relate to that.

I love that.

Awesome, you guys.

Well, again, this was such a blast.

So fun.

Learned a ton.

I'm sure my listeners did too.

To all you guys out there, please share this episode of the show.

Check out Just Thrive at justthrivehealth.com again.

You get 15% off if you use the code genius.

Leave a rating and review for the show on the Apple Podcast app if you enjoyed this episode, and I will catch you on the next one.

Peace everybody.