Is Your Favorite "Health Food" Disrupting Your Digestion?

Never before have humans really even had the choice of things like a processed food product in the way that they are today, even in seemingly healthy beverages or foods. Right. If you think about the differences between cultures where kids are exposed to just peanuts, for example, versus peanut butter, like Standard American, like heavily creamed emulsified peanut butter, one theory about a lot of these sensitivities is that while we give kids these processed food products from a very young age, if you induce an immune response, what's the immune system going to attribute to it? Not necessarily the emulsifier, but it's going to look at the peanut antigen. Right. Over time, maybe not in everyone, but enough that you start to see these things at the population level, you can start to see why allergies or sensitivities may be presenting themselves from something that could be as innocuous as these types of products. So I think that there's a lot that we don't know about things that we accept as healthy just because they don't have acute toxicity, but that they could be interacting with your environment in a very strange way.

Raja, welcome to the show.

Great to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me.

I'll tell you what, this has been a marinade of marinades. I have been so fascinated with this concept of how do we actually use different foods and real things that are out there in the world to make us healthy from the inside out. But I will also say this. Most people, when they think about the term gut health, they probably get it wrong. Now, I don't always juxtapose a podcast like this, but to start us off, like in your world of gut and gut health and really like the microbiome, is there an overarching thing that most people unfortunately get wrong? Let's start the conversation there.

A handful I'll stop with. I'll start with probably the ones I think are the biggest misconceptions and, and slowly move down from there. So the first is people think that the microbiome is because it's really individualized between people, that everybody needs something individualized for them, otherwise there's no hope of. Of changing it. And that's actually really not true. It's a very dynamic ecosystem and it is highly personalized. We've published on that subject both in and outside of the context of probiotics. But there's still dietary recommendations, for example, that we would have as the same for everyone, like our intake on what types of plant material to take, the intake of polyphenols, a rich diet of fiber, post Fermentative metabolites, things like, and none of these things have to be fancy. Like, even just like vinegar is $2 and it's 4% made up of acetic acid. And acetic acid is one of the most powerful regulators that you can have of the gastrointestinal system in terms of signaling. So a lot of these things aren't, aren't very expensive necessarily, but are conserved between people. Even though everyone has a very different microbiome. Your microbiome is shaped on how you were born, how you live, the foods you eat, your medical history, your lifestyle, your age, your other risk factors, and all of that will change your microbiome. But starting to think of this as a very dynamic ecosystem that can have these shared principles of optimization, I think, is a first right out of the gates. You know, some people dismiss the field altogether. They say, well, we're just not there yet. It's as well we've, we're, we're not there at the end, but we're on our way.

Yeah, and your background's very unique in this because just on a personal level and then also in doing the research about seed and talking to my friends from Mind Pump, shout out to the guys at Mind Pump and also just like seeing from a very high level this conversation about what actually impacts the microbiome. Raja, there are, so there are hundreds of specialists and thousands of reports, maybe even hundreds of thousands on what actually works when it comes to, quote, improving the microbiome. But I find that to be an interesting phrase, improving the microbiome. Is there a way that you would describe it that might be different, you know, a fresh perspective on the microbiome?

We use the term optimal a lot. And the best, the most illustrative example is actually if you look outside of the gut. So you can't, you can't necessarily improve everyone's oral microbiome in one specific way, but if you find certain bacteria there, you know that it's going to produce more acid and you're going to have a higher risk of cavities. Right? Or let's say the infant microbiome, if you can enrich it to break down the sugars that are found in breast milk. It, it, it doesn't mean that it's, it's bad before, but it's more optimal because now the whole cycle, the, the whole process of inducing a stable, diverse microbiome that starts from solid food introduction just goes much better. Pathogens have a way lower chance of colonizing and causing inflammation. Your barrier ends up being a lot more intact. And you also end up having a lot more tolerance. Right. So do things like sensitivities and later in life, but also other forms of allergy. Let's take those examples and pull it now into the gut where improve is kind of a vague term. And so I don't like to use that. But there's, there are definitely features that make a microbiome more optimal or more desirable than others. The most common one is diversity. People talk about a diverse microbiome, but I have my own thoughts about that. Diversity for the sake of diversity isn't good. Right? You actually find that actually people who, some of the unhealthiest people or even some of the lowest responders to things like probiotic therapy or even to things like cancer therapy actually have a lot of, have a very diverse microbiome. But that's the problem is that it's an ecology, so it needs to be diverse to the extent that that ecology requires diversity to be healthy. But if there's very low numbers of many different organisms that don't actually have, have comm interactions with each other's, it just means that you have an empty vessel with a lot of different bugs there that it's harboring, but it's not acting in an optimal way as that symbiotic organism. So there's many other things you want to look for. A few of them, I would say just right off the bat are what's your gut, how's your gut barrier? Are you, are you having permeability or are you generally keeping things within the tube? Right. Think of that as your ex. As outside of your body. From your mouth to your anus is outside of your body. That is an external environment. You want to keep things there. Except for a few things that are brought in. You want to be in control or at least have as much say on what crosses that barrier versus not. That's one huge thing that drives optimality of the microbiome and, and drives a lot of systemic consequences in the body. The other thing is the presence of pathogens. So typically you can find that a healthy microbiome can tolerate small amounts of bad bugs. But when you start to see the relative abundance of what are called opportunistic pathogens take hold, it usually means that there's something larger that's off. It means that it's not regulating well. It means the immune system might be slightly compromised. It means that the metabolites might not be as active. You know, there's, it's, it's, it's a clue to tell you that there's something else that, that needs to be worked on. Tolerability to foods. If you have a very tough time with, um, with resistant starches or other complex carbohydrates, the microbiome is the main vehicle for the fermentation of those food products. So you don't want to have a lot of sensitivities. Can mean that you're not having, not having very good tolerance. Um, you know the list, the list from there gets a little bit more specified. But optimal digestion generally is considered the ability to tolerate diverse amounts of food, have great labs and biomarkers that show that there's low amounts of permeability and that your metabolite load is controlled and consistent and that it's stable. So you want to see good long term stability of the microbiome over time and you don't want to actually see on the, on the symptom side, variable stools, intermittent constipation. I mean a perfect, a perfect stool really should be timed from the amount of, from, from the last meal that you had and should come out in one or two regular shaped, consistent, soft, fast bowel movements.

I love that you're going into details on the poop because my son has a book. It's called Everyone Poops. And I think it's an interesting phrase because we forget that we're human beings. And some of the stuff that people might shy away from, like defecation or like urination or just detoxification in general is something that like I'm excited to talk to you about because it is a normal part of being a human being on planet Earth. And I wonder, in your own life, you know, and I don't know this about you personally, do you have children or do you have family, like extended nuclear family that have actually like engaged in this conversation with you? This has been a fairly significant amount of your life. So I'm sure these conversations have come up at family gatherings and dinners and whatnot.

I mean, you'd be pretty surprised, I think what's. Once the ice gets broken, everyone seems to have an opinion on it. It's not really that unusual. It's unusual that we spend so much time talking about what we eat and no time talking about where it goes. So that's already a disconnect. But yeah, pretty much at some point or another, every conversation, and especially with kids, it's wildly fascinating. My co founder Ara actually wrote a children's book exactly on the subject of the microbiome and It's a really big part of educating children to understand that there's invisible organisms there. They regulate everything from digestion and. Yeah, let's, let's talk about this. And there really shouldn't be. I think that might be a Western thing too. I remember we had a venture fund that came to, came, came to meet us. They came from Australia and they just done a lot of diligence on Asia, specifically China, and how behavioral patterns there differ from, from that in the U.S. and there's, I would say, almost the opposite effect where there's such open dialogue and discourse about it that you actually see on social media, entire groups dedicated towards it, where people actually take pictures of it on their work breaks and share it amongst not even people in their, that close of their, their circle. So I think it really is a cultural thing partially as well.

That's, that's fascinating. I've never thought of that. This is why I love podcasting. You know, earlier you said about the opportunistic organisms. I think that's really important because even in the phrase that you said, you know, a pathogen or AKA a bug, it can only have space that's created for it to live. In other words, if somebody's in dysbiosis or their body is struggling with something else. Let's talk about that. Because most people might think of like a tick as a parasite, you know, where it might suck the blood and you don't know it, but we actually can have a lot of things going on in the body, which really sets up the bigger conversation for prebiotic, probiotic, and a phrase that I learned from your company, which to be honest, I hadn't heard before the synbiotic. So let's talk about, before we go there, the actual aspect of the opportunistic organism, which at first audible, it might make sense, but it's probably a lot deeper.

Well, the most common one we know is called Clostridium difficile. It's a really resistant infection which actually produces a toxin. And many people, this is actually how people knew that that fecal transplant was so powerful, because when someone had this infection and you treat it again with antibiotics, yeah, you kill the organism. But actually taking antibiotics is one of the biggest risk factors of getting it, because if the ecosystem was keeping it at bay and now you've knocked everything out, it's. It grows faster and it takes over faster than a lot of commensals are kind of good native bugs. So this field actually, this, this area of study actually found that just actually taking Stool from any healthy donor, regardless of what's in it. And putting that whole ecosystem in there can sometimes have 90 plus percent treatment rates of something that before was not able to be treated by, by resistant infections or not even be able to be treated. And then of course it's a spectrum. So those are ones that produce very acute toxins which are, are, can result in death. There's a lot of other opportunistic organisms which might be a little bit milder, but you start to see them associated a lot with functional disorders like, like Klebsiella is one organism that comes to mind. It's commonly found and picked up on microbiome sequencing tests. But there's, there's no reason you would ever want it, right? If it's there and you don't have any symptoms, that means you have a healthy microbiome that can tolerate it. But to date at least there's no case why that organism would be desirable. And there's a whole range of bugs that have been shown to be, either they directly compete against beneficial organisms or they're inflammatory, or they actually block any other bugs from, from inducing the right metabolism that they need. So it's a very complex ecosystem. But, but absolutely. I mean you can see in, in the, before a lot of the sequencing tools, before a lot of the technology that made microbiome a field of study, that's how people were doing classical discoveries that they would take some of these opportunistic organisms, they would screen different candidate probiotics against it and try to see for example, what is the rate of inhibition. I think again, another really illustrative example would be to go outside of the gut. So in the, in the vaginal microbiome, for example, there's almost everything other than the organisms that you want are opportunistic. So actually bacterial vaginosis, uti, all of these conditions originate from an opportunistic pathogen that can, that grows once your commensal organism is in a state of dysbiosis. So for, for BV, it's an organism called Gardnerella. For UTI, it's in 80% or more of the cases it's a type of E. Coli. But you find exactly the same dynamic take effect on, in people that have atopic dermatitis. Typically you find that there's a form of staph, which is, which is almost always found when someone has an eczemic psoriasis, eczema or dermatitis response. And then there's another type of stuff, several other types of stuff which you consider to be healthy, which are there and they maintain the ecosystem and they don't have that type of an inflammatory effect. And so it's important to get really specific. It's not that any one bug on its own is going to do something. That's the old model of infection. The new model is that it's a dynamic ecosystem and there's things which are optimal or opportunistic and measuring and tracking that depending on what you want to optimize for, is really the goal of microbiome modulation. That's where most of our research is focused.

It's fascinating because like you said, there's an old term that's used where it's like, okay, you have to have perfect dysbiosis, get rid of all the quote, bad buz. But like you're saying, there's so much to address there. We can't reductionize that type of a statement. And I think maybe where we're going, as I guess you could say a collective, like a wellness collective, specifically in functional medicine, is there is some very powerful specific testing to what people can actually receive as far as being their own citizen scientist. You know, how accurate are the tests out there? If you look at the tests for these opportunistic organisms, like, I know we're not talking about exact medical tests here, this isn't medical advice, but are there a good range of tests that can actually give people support as to, you know, do their children have these opportunistic organisms, do they have it and what can they actually do about it?

I have not seen reliable peer reviewed consumer tests which I've built an opportunistic pathogen panel which is validated. So that's ours. Many, there's many sequencing tests. I, I mean I, I wish, I wish it were that simple or we would really be looking towards doing it. There's certainly companies in, in functional medicine which do give you a read, but there's a lot of dark matter and I use that term very specifically, that's not picked up on those tests. So for example, what our, what our own research has shown us is, is how deep you sequence really gives you a picture of the microbiome in a way that some of the earlier versions have not been able to do. And so like typically a shallow sequencing is doing like 3 million reads or maybe 5 million reads per sample. I think some of the more deeper sequenced cohorts are maybe going up to 15 or to 20 million reads. But now if you really want to understand diversity in a true sense so that means you need to know all the bugs that are there and not just what you're able to enrich for or you know, what you, what you got on that individual sample where we in our clinical studies are doing a hundred million reads. What does that mean?

Sorry to interrupt you, what does that mean reads?

So basically if you take a sample, you shotgun it, you crack it open into all the different genetic material that are there and you go to a depth of 100 million genes in that sample. Right. So that just tells you the depth of your sequencing. Like how deep are you really going? Now what people try to do is with shallower sequencing they try to map what they pick up and they say, okay, we can understand that these, this configuration can map to these strains that are already in the database in the literature, but you actually end up missing again a lot. So like in one of our platforms where we're doing deep sequencing, we've already found about 300 new species that just don't exist in other libraries. Two of our other strain isolation efforts have all found similar numbers of just new bugs. And these aren't in rare people. These are people that come into Mount Sinai in New York or Columbia University in New York or Tel Aviv Hospital in Israel and, and completely novel organisms, despite the field having been how many at this point? Probably millions of people having been sequenced in some capacity over the last 15 years. Right. So that we're still finding this diversity of novel organisms is quite fascinating. And so it brings up a really good point which is everyone's optimizing for something else. Everyone has different methods. And until everyone's looking at the same information set using the same methods, it's really hard to compare quality of different data sets. Now you can, if you know what you're looking for, you can find it. Or if you have a, if you're just going to start with a reference database, you can find it. But in terms of the question that you started is what is this going to tell us about a landscape of opportunism? We don't really have a full picture of that today. The better way to do it is to try to functionally understand what is your microbiome doing? Is it making a lot of organic acids? Right. Is it have a lot of organisms that have genes that we know are positive for like fiber degradation or converting dietary nutrients into other stuff, or are anti inflammatory or help to build, rebuild the gut barrier? This is kind of the level where we're at is we're looking at really clear features and Trying to look at the prevalence of those features in different people versus their absence and others. I think in the next few years that might change. But the truth is to really do deep sequencing, well, it costs about 300 to 500 bucks for a single sample. So it's still very cost prohibitive to do deep read sequencing. So a lot of the new technologies that are coming in are looking at a part of it. Hopefully those costs are going to fall more, but those are just the real raw numbers of what it costs to do microbiome sequencing and get a very accurate look at what's happening, especially inside of the gut.

You're mirroring what I've heard from a lot of different people and we've had a few functional medicine docs on the show and they've also echoed what you said, where if you go deep enough, you'll find what you're looking for, but you have to have the technology to actually get there. We'll talk about fecal transplant in a minute because you mentioned that before, which is a very interesting topic. I want to go back though, because there's some history here. When you and Ara founded this company, you came up with this term symbiotic. And I hadn't really understood what it was until I really got introduced to the company. How does that differ from prebiotic? Probiotic, an actual symbiotic. And did you come up with that together in like a late night somewhere in a hotel room? Like, how did that actually happen? Do you remember when you came across that term with her?

I, I, I wish we came up with it. It's, we were maybe one of the first to popularize it, but the term itself had been defined in the literature as and now there's a position paper on it which is, which sets the definitions or the criteria for, for what is a symbiotic. So there's two types. There's a synergistic and a non synergistic symbiotic. And all that really means is a synergistic. Symbiotic is the prebiotic that's in there is giving an advantage to the probiotic or the bacteria which are in your formulation. So let's say for example, that we wanted to make a symbiotic for infants. We would have bacteria, typically Bifidobacterium, those are dominant in infants. But then we'd want prebiotics that those organisms have a first pass at using over any other bacteria that are in your gut. So it gives a little bit of an advantage. Right. So These organisms can grow faster, you know that they can start to engage in metabolic activity. It's a way to boost the numbers of your bacteria in a, in a biological system. The other type is when you have a prebiotic, still a prebiotic and a probiotic, but together they have some positive benefit that you can, that you can show on the host. Right? So we, we built a, we built this symbiotic. The symbiotic is a, is, is, is, is non synergistic and it's because the prebiotic that we use is actually a polyphenol. And what is this polyphenol? What is a polyphenol? Polyphenol is a plant compound. It's closely related to flavonoids and other non nutritive plant materials of the, of that, of that nature. It's typically found, it's, it's found very commonly in like berries and anything that gives pigment are, are, are, are heavily polyphenolic. And so ours actually comes from both the skin, the rind and the seed of the pomegranate. And this is very interesting because actually our, our, our research showed that the gut bacteria, the, the bacteria in your gu. Polyphenol, the specific types into what's called a secondary metabolite and a tertiary metabolite. So basically they, they biotransform them into other things. So this is very interesting because you think about the nutrition of, of food coming just from what you absorb from it, right? Or what your body is able to immediately utilize. But you don't realize that you get a second and a third pass at all of these nutrients. Like I think only about 5%. I think it's less than 5% of the polyphenols that you, that you take of that size are actually absorbed into your bloodstream. The rest of them, they just pass down through and then your bacteria get a chance to break, to convert them and get a second quote bite at the apple. So this is really, really interesting. It's, it's a, it's a really interesting concept and I think it's really changed since we launched DSO1. It's changed the way that people think about or have expanded the concept of prebiotics. Now less from like fibers which are more like classical, classical prebiotics and more now into things that are not absorbed by the body. But that bacteria have a really good, has a really good effect. Another one are these, these, a lot of these compounds that are found in teas are fantastic for these secondary and tertiary conversion. So I remember this One paper came out that said, well, no kombucha. Like, look at what kombucha does, right? Kombucha is a fermented tea. And they showed this chart where the, they showed that all of the T polyphenols and flavonoids dropped to zero. And all of these acetates and these different types of metabolites, they, they completely grew and, and burst up in their numbers. But okay, so that's good, that's interesting, that's fine. But the question that then is, is begging to be answered is, but if you just took those T metabolites, what's your gut bacteria going to do to those that might even be equal or more biologically relevant than what the kombucha culture did, right? You're just giving it to other bacteria. So it's a combination. But this is another big misconception is that fermented foods can just be a substitute, a substitute for the prebiotics that you can get in your diet or the probiotics that you can use for these types of conversions. Because you definitely need both.

It's fascinating because a lot of people might think, well, Raja, why can't I just get everything that I need from food? Why can't I just get it from the food? Why do I need to take something that's different than just the food? Really what I see when I look at the different compounds that are in seed, this actually is food. You mentioned it was from pomegranate. Is there something special about the pomegranate that allows the system to take it in and metabolize it in such an efficient way? What is it about the pomegranate?

Well, you'd have to eat a lot of pomegranates to replicate that. It's just something that most people aren't, aren't willing to do on a day to day basis. Also, people don't really eat the skin or the rinds. They typically concentrate on the fruit. And actually most consumptions of pomegranate in the west at least spit out the seed then after its consumption. So a lot of it's the whole fruit which is really important. Um, is what, what makes this, this isolate a little bit different. But I, that's, that's me now to, to say, I, I would not even use that information to discourage the consumption of pomegranate. The only real problem is that pomegranate is very high in sugar. And so if you try to juice it, you're taking a lot of fast sugars, which I Think probably give you other problems down the road. And so to take, to take most of the, the biologically relevant parts, um, in high quantities that you'd need to, to rub and, and also pomegranate's quite expensive. And so to, to it would, it would be about, I don't know, 10, 15 bucks just per day to take that amount of consumption or to get the same polyphenolic load from the same material. So there certainly there's some efficiency there. Certainly it's the avoidance of those simple sugars. But please don't let that, don't let this recommendation stop anyone from. If you want to eat three, four or five, I, I don't think that there's an upper limit that's been established. I think that it's one of the foods of that nature are some of the best things that you can eat in as abundant quantities as, as your lifestyle and budget permit.

You're totally right on the juice aspect. I think that's where most Americans get it wrong is they go right for the juice on honestly most of the plant compounds like getting the polyphenols from the, the fruit you mentioned. And also just like all the things that are out there, even orange juice. Like look at all that's going on in the Western world. I remember being a kid and just drinking juices all the time. I just simply didn't know it was a, it was a big blind spot for me. When you look at people who are in most need of gut health and just improving and really optimizing, like we talked about earlier, for their gut, are there a couple things that they should be looking out for? In other words, symptoms of discomfort, ways that they're showing up, digestive issues. Is there a specific one, two or three things that people should really look for?

Yeah, and the most obvious one is if you don't wake up every day feeling excellent about your bowel movement, that's that most people just learn over life to cope and just assume that it's an irregular, unpredictable and, and you know, it's. And even potentially something that requires force or, or just dealing with it, I think that's just completely wrong. If you look back at many other cultures that actually have some somewhat of an obsessive, obsessive view towards this data set and they watch it and they track it. Most of their diet patterns are around optimizing for this excretion. And so I think that's the most obvious one. And again, the hallmarks of like a regular bowel movement are you should have little to no strain. You should have an ease of expulsion. You should have very manageable to no amounts of persistent gas. You shouldn't have bloating which is a hallmark which is marked by a distension of the upper gut after consumption of food. And you shouldn't have many sensitivities to diverse plant matters, especially roughage. And so if you just go through that simple checklist and then screen look, compare that to a Bristol stool chart and the are still quality coming out. The color, the shape, the texture, the hydration, those are their, those are your best indicators. Anything that you do beyond that is is a little bit more intellectual. It's about optimizing right? But that's the first kind of day to day thing you should ask yourself because that's your your first signal for for for how the whole the system.

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It's powerful because it's a new take on how we can actually feel good about our lives by looking in the toilet. And I liked how simple you Made it. Because, honestly, Raja, a lot of people, and myself included, when they start their wellness journey. I remember when I was a personal trainer in, like, 2005, I never was taught about the color of my poop, the smell of my poop, the ease in which it comes out of my body. It wasn't until I found Paul Check, who was a massive mentor, who. Where he mentioned the Bristol stool chart, and I think he had like a. Like a lineup of how your poop should smell and float and actually, like, look in the toilet. And I think that's really interesting because everybody can do that right now. Like, take a stock for all y' all out there if you feel like it's really hard to pass a bowel movement. It's probably something definitely going on with the microbiome. Is it the microbiome? Is it the motility aspect? Because I think about the way that motility actually moves the food and peristalsis through the body. Talk to us about the motility because you already gave us a good starting place to go, like, look in the toilet. Duh. I wonder why they don't teach that in. In most schools. But, but when it comes to motility, what exactly is that for somebody that's never heard of it? And how does seed and the symbiotic help in motility?

Yeah, so motility is basically how the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract move food material through. So there's a contraction phase, then there's a relaxation phase. It's applicable to food, to liquids, to waste. Sometimes it's called gut motility or intestinal motility. And actually it's. It's regulated by the nervous system. So when you've heard people talk about, like, the second brain or the relationship between the vagus nerve, it's. It's. That's the nervous system that they're now referring to. It's. It, it's. It's. What, what makes it enteric or what makes it so important is actually this can function independently of the central nervous system in your body. So it really shows how important the system is, is that it was conserved to have its own set of regulation which is not dependent on central nervous system activity. And so the other thing that it. That this part of the nervous system does is it really regulates the secretion of digestive enzymes and hormones and more of what you call like a localized digestive response. And so that's very dynamic. That's very responsive to the foods that you eat. It's very responsive to the time of day it's very responsive to your stress patterns, to your sleep. So it's a very accurate and variable part of digestion. And so when people hear about disorders of intestinal motility, you can think about really a variety of digestive problems is things like constipation, diarrhea, bloating and abdominal pain is one really good marker of that as well. And in the more clinical side, it, it, it manifests itself also sometimes into things like IBS and other, like obstructive disorders. And so we don't really know. There's not one size fits all in terms of if you have issues with motility, what, how that's gonna. How that would manifest. But typically you see the outcome is the same where there's a series of disruptions that just make your, your digestive system and your tractor suboptimal.

I believe I've seen this, and don't quote me on this if it's true, we'll put it in the show notes. I'm just pontificating here, and I wonder how you feel about this, Raja. I've seen in cadavers where they've actually been able to pull out the entire core aspects of the enteric nervous system and show its relationship to the vagus nerve, how it's totally separate from the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. And I know that, like you said, it functions on its own. That feeling we get that gut feeling. When I'm talking to you right now, I'm looking at all the micro muscles in your face, you're looking at mine. That, that term gut feeling. It's very interesting because if somebody's enteric nervous system isn't functioning optimally, there's no homeostasis in that system. Could essentially their gut feeling, quote, quote be wrong?

It could be, but I don't think we have enough information to say, you know, so much of that is behavioral, so much of that is learned. The best research that I can steer that into is typically you find that people with, with behavioral dysregulation that can present itself in what are called a behavioral disorder. Sometimes things like, like even autism spectrum has been put on in that area. Typically that you find there's a very high comorbidity of GI distress, which is a very big. It's a comorbidity. So it's often found. Now that led to the hypothesis that could you lower the severity of some of those present manifestations if you solve some of the distress that might be originating abdominally? And some early proof of concept studies have actually shown that to be. Have a lot of potential. And so I think that is. There's a lot of dysregulation. But dysregulation can have a big impact on how you feel. That's very well known. But we're just starting to unravel how exactly between people that presents itself and what some of those drivers might be.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me because, you know, the brain and the body, they cannot live without one another. So I know in science, and you yourself as a scientist, it might be challenging sometimes because there's conversations of why do we actually act the way we act. Right. We try to anthropomorphosize a lot of things in life and we try to make understandings of things. We try to intellectualize how the body works. Do you ever find that in science? Because your world is so filled with science, do you ever find that there are people that are at odds with science and spirituality, or do you feel like we can blend those through some of what you're doing with seed?

I think the terms are really frightening to most people that don't have a hard scientific education. And so if you look at how people that don't approach health from a purely scientific standpoint, how those recommendations end up converging with, with those that do, you typically see that a lot of times they're talking past each other. But I'm notorious for saying that the, the basic, actually overthinking about the inputs isn't good either. And so I think simple stuff like monitoring what, what we take for granted or what we oftentimes forget is that this is a modern problem. Right? Is that never before have humans really had much choice or actually been even had the choice of things like a processed food product in the way that they are today, or many of the compounds even, even in seemingly healthy, healthy beverages or foods. Right? So I'll give you one example. Like some of our research right now is looking at dietary emulsifiers which are used to blend to, to make fats a little bit more soluble. So if you look at, at the first wave of pushback against cow's milk, a lot of the alternatives that presented were, you know, sound good in theory because they're like almonds are a very healthy food. So it people just assume that an almond milk is a good alternative to a cow's dairy milk. But the amount of emulsifier that you need to actually make it not chalky or to make it not subtle and to be a consumable product, even at Very, very expensive price points and in very premium, healthy, healthy grocery stores is remarkable. And what is the emulsifier? An emulsifier is something that binds two things together. And so what we find is that actually when you. In passage through the gut, the emulsifiers have a very similar effect on cell, on, on cells of your, of your gastrointestinal tract as they move through. So they kind of distress them and pull them off of their normal state. And that creates an opening and that creates an initial opportunity for a immune response. And you could actually see a, a very negative effect from that. Right. So I mean, can you imagine like this is. What I'm about to say next is just. Is one of our hypotheses. So I'm. Don't be alarmed by this. It's not fact yet. But if you think about the differences between cultures where kids are exposed to just peanuts, for example, versus peanut butter, like standard American, like heavily creamed emulsified peanut butter. One, One theory about a lot of these sensitivities is that while we give kids these processed food products from a very young age, if you induce an immune response, what's the immune system gonna attribute to it? Not necessarily the emulsifier, but it's gonna look at the peanut antigen. Right. And it's gonna, over time if it. It maybe not in everyone, but enough that you start to see these things at the population level, you can start to see why. Why allergies or sensitivities may be presenting themselves from something that could be as innocuous as these, these, these types of products. So I think that there's a lot that we don't know about things that we accept as healthy just because they don't have acute toxicity, but that they could be interacting with your environment in a very strange way. I mean, another really counter, provocative point that I heard in the, in the field about this subject is actually some people think that we were. Our immune system was made to tolerate a lot more opportunistic organisms, pathogens. Our drinking water wasn't always clear. Maybe we'd have parasites, maybe we'd have worms. And so some people that have really suffer from, from inflammation in the gut, they really have a very active immune system that now doesn't have, have anything to attack. But at the same time, it was never taught to be, to, to, to tolerate. And that's, that's the main. One of the most provocative things I ever heard in immunology was every, every baby is born inflamed. The process of immune maturation is Teaching it to be tolerant instead of the other way around. We think we're all born tolerant, and then the immune system is teaching it what to be inflamed by. No, a baby is just learning. So the immune system is responding to everything. And then over time, you sense and you learn what's good versus what's bad. And it's just, it's a slight reframe of reference, but it tells you it's a good framework for thinking about how actually our. Our goal is to teach the immune system tolerance and not provoke it in the wrong way, instead of. What's the word that they use in wellness a lot to activate your immune system like that. I, I don't know if that's something that you want to do.

It's fascinating. I have actually never heard that in almost 10 years of having conversations like this. And I think what's most fascinating is that term that you said earlier, emulsifiers, where it can actually cause damage in the system. Is that the carnegian or a Carnegiean that's in almond milk?

Carrageenan, I believe. Carrageenan, yes, is one such emulsifier. Right. Now, our initial proof of concept work was on a class called polysorbates, which are found in ice creams and, and bakery. A lot of. Basically, these are some of the strongest things. So if you think about an ice cream, right, and you want to take the ice cream and you want it to hold a flavor, or you want it to hold a piece of fruit, you need a very high load of an emulsifier. And in the US at least, these polysorbates are allowed up to 1.1%. And we have a paper right now that we're submitting for review, which actually shows acute toxicity and barrier degradation of these emulsifiers at 0.1%. So much lower. And there's some effects that are even seen at.01%. So the dose matters, how it's taken, what it's with when a child, when someone's exposed to it, and the overall health of the, of the, of the host and also of the microbiome are big drivers that can determine the response.

That is a huge delta, the, the 01 or 01 to 1. I mean, there's probably a deeper discussion there that we can't have publicly. But y' all know, probably what that points towards is policy, right? People that make policies. I wonder, in your career, have you seen this? Have you seen someone come to you after trying all these different, I guess you could say supplements now this, what you're doing at seed, it's not necessarily a supplement at all. How would you describe it? It's not a supplement. It's a symbiotic. But for people that think it might be a supplement, what would you tell them?

I mean, technically it is. I mean, the term supplement usually refers to dietary supplements and so that's like a regulatory class. But I just think of the term as anything that you, that you take, that you cannot get from, from diet. In that sense, I would say that DSO1 would qualify in the set just in the sense that a lot of these organisms are native to humans and so you don't really find them in foods or in fermented foods or just from licking dirt or playing outside. Right. So a lot of the organisms that me specifically in DSO1 are very specialized. They're very pure, they're isolated, they're genomically defined. They have to be all grown and scaled up with specific growth media and isolation and then assembled. They need to not compete with each other. And so there's a lot of factors that really go into making it optimal. But generally I don't think people should think of live bacteria in the same class as they might think of as something like a vitamin, a vitamin supplement. Right. Because vitamins you can get from food and abundantly and in sufficient quantities. Fibers or even polyphenols you can. But outside of a few fermented foods, you don't really get this. So I, I'll, I'll tell you another interesting fact. So for probiotics at least, people have always really, in the medical community thought that, that VSL3 is like the medical grade probiotic. Right. So that's the, considered to be the gold standard. But that, I mean, I, I know very intimately that formulation because it was made about 30 or so years ago and it formed like 90 plus percent just a single yogurt starter culture. It just basically yogurt, Streptococcus thermophilis in a powder. That's it. That's all that it is. And then every other organism that they lit is in such small quantities. It actually was originally because of, they couldn't get it out, not because they wanted to put it in there, but because there was always going to be a little bit of contamination or you know, the way that it was processed. And so they said, well, let's just put everything on the label. But that's really interesting is like, you know, people say when they're looking to buy a probiotic, they say, oh yeah, this one has a lot of strains, or this one has this, this and this. But, but do you really know how much of each strain they're in there? Because technically in the US you can label something and if you put it at 0.001%, you can list it on a label, but it's not going to have any significant effects unless you have kind of a dose, dose response or some sort of rationale. And so that in, in pharmacology there's this whole field that's only on establishing dose. And so that's very, very important is like, and, and I, and I feel tough kind of pushing that on a consumer because it's a lot of work for them to do and a lot of questions for them to really ask and it's not necessarily fair and it lets some, some people, you know, kind of take advantage of that misinformation. But ultimately, I think asking those types of questions on, you know, what are, what are really is the rationale and what is the amount and what studies are there, are there to support it and what endpoints are significant and most valuable. Those are really the types of questions that you have to ask because in the US at least, you have to evaluate every product on a case by case basis.

What is it about this work? I mean, it comes from you very effortlessly, like all the phrases, all the, the memory of the scientific research that you've done. Like you could talk about this, it seems like all day long and still want to talk about it more. What is the fire inside of you that makes you so fascinated with the immune, the gut, the human being as a whole? Like, what is that for you?

Well, I mean, I think the immune system is, is the most interesting thing in the world, just full stop. The way that we think about it is probably nowhere near how we're going to think about it. It's still, I think immunology is still a iceberg type of a field. And so I try to follow that research very closely. Actually my first interest was really in genetics. I was fascinated. I remember back in the late 90s when we started to be able to understand our genome, we really had this big promise that if you can understand your genome, you can understand what makes you you. And it's like, yeah, partially, but how your lifestyle, your diet, all your controllable risk factors, that's an uncontrollable risk factor, right? That's what you, that, that's what you got. Those are the cards you have. You could try to optimize for it if you want but that's can't really do much there for some rare diseases. I think that changing the, you know, gene therapy and stuff like that could be really interesting. But mostly it's just a nice to know have, but a kind of a companion feel to that is this community of organisms. The microbiome is your outsourced genome. It is the other part of it. Right. I, I think I remember seeing some data a while back that after course of antibiotics you now taking the same person's blood and if you sequence it, let's say you do a meth back and you look at all the different compounds that are in your blood, you can't even match your blood back to your original sample for a certain period of time until your microbiome recovers as a result of that antibiotic. So you literally for a period of time are a different person biologically or from like a chemistry standpoint, you are literally a different person. And I just, I just think that's fascinating. I think it's, it's really important actually to think about how we age. Aging is really a. We have a big paper that we're in development right now actually on building these, on updating our biological clocks based on microbiome. That's the premise of the paper. And what you find here is that actually some people have a very different biological age than their chronological age. So someone could have been born 50 years ago, but their microbiome resembles that of let's say a 25 year old or a 30 year old. And it's true, you can see age related differences over time. Similarly, you can find people that might be 20 and have a microbiome that resembles that of a 70 year old. And so what we actually did in these analysis with tens of thousands of people is we trained these clocks and we actually started to build and we built one and then for each system for 14 different. So a liver clock, a heart clock, this and looking at all the relevant biomarkers from urine, from stool, from blood, you name it. I mean we put strength parameters, medical history, we screened them against dietary logs like we really are. Took a, took a systems biology approach here and actually found that the microbiome for example can predict very, very relevant things that affect the entire aging process. Beyond aging. It can also predict things like your, like obesity, like your body mass, like how you respond to different foods. And so a lot of these things have been discussed in a popular science standpoint, but no one's really come out and said this is an optimal microbiome or a probiotic for preventing age related weight gain. Now we have data where we can say without, without a shadow of a doubt, if these five bugs are there, you will not progress with age related weight gain at a, at a, at a, at a rate that you see at a population level. And I think that's fascinating.

It's fascinating. You said earlier that the bacteria outsources the genome. How exactly does that happen?

Well, they just, they can, they can, they're very biologically active. So they have, microbes, have their own genes. And so that your microbiome is its own genome. It is its own. It's not part of your, your, your DNA, but it's driving your biology. And so it is, it is a companion to your own genome, it's gene, but just microbial gene that, that you can modify and that, to answer, go back to your question. What got me fascinated. This is like, that really is, it's a once in a lifetime type of, type of field now. Yeah, where people go off the rails on that or they say, okay, so now give me your stool, let me sequence it and then I'll tell you what to do to live forever. It's like, no, no, no, hang on, let's study this for the next 10 years and then we'll see what we can do. Right. So the field is still, all, most of the breakthroughs still remain ahead in this field. Well, all the big stuff remains ahead.

It's a good thing that you care about your health and you've created a roadmap where potentially with the new medical technology, you could live for 150 years. What are your thoughts on that? You know, you said you can look at the microbiome. You can actually see a mirror of how long we can live for longevity. Have you seen this in your own life where you've done that specific testing and you've seen maybe the age relation of your own microbiome?

I have purposefully not introduced my microbiome into the clock model yet. There's thousands of people that have done it. I'm gonna wait for the vital work to get out and then I'm gonna kind of peel back the wrapper. Luckily, you know, I've taken a few courses of antibiotics, I eat exceptionally healthy, I exercise, diet and lifestyle are, are still the biggest drivers of your microbiome. And so everything else, you have to wait for an intervention. Right. So we actually now need to go isolate those bugs, stabilize them, grow them up, put them in a capsule, and then show that they can colonize and that's the work that we're doing. And so while all that's happening in parallel, I will be the first to take them once we've rolled them up, and we'll have sequenced everything before that. But the way that the models has been built right now is really actually on big data. So thousands and thousands of people blinded. We don't know. There's no personal information attached to them. We're just studying them there. It's been de identified. We don't want to introduce any bias into the data set right now.

I love the very scientific, pragmatic approach because one could be, and I'm sure you've seen this with colleagues, maybe you could test all the things to get as much data as humanly possible, but there's actually a sequencing order of how you should be taking tests in. And that's where I think the pragmatism is being lost right now. There's. We're kind of in an ocean of information. I'm sure you feel this way at times where you could be studying literally everything. You could spend your entire day studying and going over research. At some point, somebody just has to start looking for what are the things that actually build me to make me feel well. That's really the conversation. So let's take someone, for example, that's taken a lot of antibiotics. When I was a young baby and all throughout my adolescence, I took a lot of Augmentin and different antibiotics like that. I had chronic sinusitis when I was growing up. And even still today, with all the different supplementation and, you know, the gut flora that I take and different things that allows me to feel like I'm healthy. I still think there's room to go. I still think there's a lot of room for improvement. So if somebody's taken a lot of antibiotics, how does seed help them replenish? How does seed help them support.

We did a study on taking seed during and after a course in antibiotics, which we're actually analyzing the data right now. We have many exciting findings. The most exciting was actually that it's protective of the gut barrier during a course of antibiotics, which to my knowledge hasn't been shown before. And potentially we're still waiting for the final statistics to come back on this. You're going to see metabolic activity, which kind of jump starts the microbiome on its path to recovery afterwards. But for that point specifically, I think we're gonna have to wait for the paper.

Okay, what are some. I'm sure you have hundreds and hundreds of case studies of people that have written in because the company started in what year?

DSO1, I believe was first out at the end of 2018.

Okay. So since 2018 there's been a pretty large cohort, a lot of people that have taken the product. Is there one story that comes to mind that really inspires you about someone improving their, their entire body essentially?

Look, I, it's, it's the, it's dozens daily, dozens of comments daily which speak to something different. You know, I think people's, people struggle in different ways and the feedback is very positive. We don't really share testimonials as a company because I think that they sometimes can be misleading or used for other purposes. But yeah, I mean people from titans in the field of microbiome who have been skeptical of probiotics all the way to just your average customer have stated many different versions of something to the extent of this quite literally changed my life.

That's got to make you feel absolutely incredible with how much work you pour into Seed is.

It's very great to see because essentially.

That'S why you're here. I mean obviously if, if money was no object, we would just operate in the world and we would just do everything that we loved. But in your position, like having a business that you know is a true business of reciprocity where you're giving something to people that will truly help them them to come back on a large scale. You said literally dozens per day. That's got to make you have even more fire to continue.

Well, we're continuing and very grateful to have this opportunity and really happy to see that at least this is a response rate which seems quite reproducible and quite strong.

Well, look, I can't let you go without a topic we have explored many times, but I would love your scientific vantage point on this. And it is the ultimate question of what exactly is the gut brain axis? For somebody that doesn't know how would you describe the gut brain axis? And really how does seed go in there to optimize that to support that?

Yeah, the gut brain axis is kind of a catch all term that refers to the role that the microbiome plays in stress response, anxiety and potentially other neurological or regulated impacting the brain as an organ system in some way type of conditions. And so I, I've been following this field for a very long time. You know, one of our, our biggest scientific advisors is the, is a professor at Caltech and was one of the first to publish on the field and has shown really just dramatic stuff in, in all these different areas of behavioral dysregulation and an impact by changing the microbiome. So we've been following this field for a very long time. There's probably two studies in the past few years that were, I think, the ones that really blew my mind. So the first was a cohort, a Belgian study that looked at a cohort of about a thousand people that all had depression and it found that there was, that you could actually find different classes. And there's a follow up to that that just came out a few months ago that found a list of organisms that are found in people with depression versus those that do not after even controlling for things like medication use. Which is, which is incredibly exciting. Bugs like coprococcus and dialyster and you know, there's a big list of these different organisms that are found there. So I think that's super interesting. The second was actually a paper that came out in the journal, I believe Science Translational Medicine. And it was a study that tried to see if you could predict if you just took glide samples. And to me I think this is the gold standard, right? Like when Grail was validating their cancer diagnostic early cancer cell free DNA test. The way that they did it is you give them 10 blood samples, liquid biopsy, and they had to come back and tell you which ones had cancer and most importantly which ones didn't because you didn't want a high false positive rate either. And just some of their earliest versions of it were finding stage two, stage three and beyond with quite strong accuracy. And that was enough to say, okay, this is a technology which is very exciting now they need to make it better. But this is a real field. And so this was a study where they tried to actually do that. So they said, let's take someone's stool and let's see if we can predict which ones were non depressive and which ones came from a patient with a major depressive disorder. And actually they found that about 60, a little over 60% of the time you could do that with the microbiome, which is, which is, which is interesting, but not a slam dunk. What made this paper very interesting is that then when you combine that with a blood test, analyzing the bacterial metabolites in blood and also the microbiome metabolites in urine, that now went up to over 95%. And so just by looking at stool is one part of it, but, but the microbiome in your stool also can send you off in the many wrong directions, right? Because you need big, big data. And also everyone does have a very different microbiome. But when you now map that to what back what the microbiome does, which you can pick up in the blood and that is excreted out in urine, you're honing in on a very clear set of data and that's showing you patterns which are strong, far stronger than we've ever been able to to see before. So that, that to me says that there is a signal from that signal. Now we're working to translate that. Well, where do we have a very active program in gut brain axis and working to, to look deeply into the subject. We have a couple of exploratory candidates which are look quite promising but that work hasn't, isn't, isn't on the market today.

I mean how exciting is that if you could actually sequence all the different microbiomes and you could see, okay, this is something that people with anxiety and depression or even people that have schizophrenia, right that would be extremely powerful in the future. If the science came around and showed us the true steps of action we could take on that. I mean is that if you had to say what you were most excited about for the future is that one of the things you're most stoked about?

I Absolutely, absolutely. But more importantly I think it's a whole spectrum. I think every organ system you're going to be able to be able to, to to map back in some way. And it's not just depression, it's people who have risk of neurodegenerative disease. You see very clear patterns or risk factors that start from the blood brain barrier but end up in signals you can pick up in the gut microbiome. But yeah, that really, that really tell you help predict the rate of of progression and severity. So it's now across most organ systems in the cardiovascular system you can see a very clear signal in hypertension and blood pressure, you see a very clear signal in. And cardiometabolic related conditions are still a leading cause of death in the world globally. So the question is just now what are we going to do about that? Because a lot of these findings probably will take this as a data point that you start monitoring younger in life and track throughout life. But it still requires a lot of interest, enthusiasm, buy in from the medical community and most importantly patience for, for people to do and integrate into their life and care about. I think that's actually seems to be some of the hardest problems to solve.

With all the different discussions you've had really since 2018 that you said 2018 is when the DS01 came to market. Yes. So since that time you've had probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of these types of conversations. What is a question or what is something about this technology, this science that maybe somebody hasn't asked you or something that is currently in 2023 making you even more excited about what DS01 actually is?

Yeah, I, I, it's really not in my nature to make broad, sweeping, very, very general claims. And so I think.

No, definitely not a claim, just something that's exciting for you. Yeah, no, no medical claims, by the way, y'. All. Nothing we talk about on the show is ever a medical claim.

Totally fair. I just want to make that disclaimer. Yes. Very clear, which is that it's an obvious conflict of interest. And so I, look, there's, there's not to, to my knowledge, there is not a consortium which consortia just means a community of microbes which is as genomically diverse as functionally defined and seems to be effective in as broad of a patient population as DSO1. And so we're very optimistic that this is a, that this is really a very strong, for, for those that are looking for the best probiotic or interested in optimizing their digestion and their gastrointestinal system. But we, we've heard some very crazy things people have said. For example, like, like they don't feel, they don't feel hangovers as this is actually something which we've never talked about really alcohol, other than one paper that came out a few months ago which actually talked about just recovery of the gut, of the metabolic activity of the gut microbiome with DSO1 after, after alcohol exposure which did show that it helps to jump start the microbiome recovery. But we never talked about hangovers, never talked about stiff feelings, we never talked about alcohol induced gastritis. Like they're all, these are all real clinical endpoints which should be evaluated. The hard part is that there's no real good human model to test that short of like bringing people in for like a three, four day bender and making them like excessively binge drink. And I just don't know, I don't know if that's the type of trial we want to do. But that's a very, that's a very weird one. But yeah, we've heard another thing that we've actually just shown data back on DSO1 actually reduces a metabolite called P Cresol and P Cresol is a metabolite which is constantly been implicated with anxiety, stress Response, depression and DS01 showed a, a significant reduction of that metabolite compared to a placebo. So there's definitely some really exciting areas of this work. But again, I think that there's no probiotic on the market today that if you suffer from severe stress response is going to make that completely go away. To my knowledge, maybe it will, maybe it won't, but there's no data to suggest that today. But, but, but all the areas where maybe the gastrointestinal system is involved in the progression or the severity, I think that there could be a role for DSO1.

What is the absolute best way to take this symbiotic? Like if I were to take it first thing in the morning at night. I mean a lot of people, I'm sure you have suggested doses on the, the capsule and the bottle, but you.

As long as you take it, don't, don't, don't stress over it. The best is on an empty stomach slightly before a meal. But if that's the most important is regularity because they're, they're transient microbes. So you see actually the strongest effect on, on a, what's called a consistent inoculum. So on a somewhat regular administration. And so the best, the absolute best best would be whenever in your schedule you can remember to just do it on a daily basis. And if you want to take it even further is try to take it on an empty stomach or prior to a meal.

Okay, great. That is so good. I feel like this was a, like a tiny touch of the iceberg of a master class. You could probably actually. Have you thought about teaching this publicly or have you taught in this subject?

We've done a couple courses.

I mean you personally though, have you actually gone out and taught?

No, that's, I'm, I'm, I'm very active in the research side of things, so maybe one day.

Okay, I, I think that would be really cool because that's basically what we got today, which was really special. You guys go over to joshtran.com seed.

Use the code Josh for 35% off your first month supply of seeds. DS01 daily synbiotic. It's an absolutely epic deal by the way.

35% is totally unheard of. It's very interesting by the way, like I said, I had never heard the term. You said it wasn't yours. But now it's such a huge part of your offering to the world as we say goodbye. You in the center of this, this offering to the world, your fascination with the immune system and. And the gut, just how the body works. And all the ways we explored, like the anxiety and depression and the ways that you can actually look into our microbiota and see why potentially science is still showing that could actually be an exacerbating factor and why somebody emotionally shows up the way they show up. I mean, it's utterly fascinating. With your fascination in this work and with the road that's ahead for you, how would you describe your own definition of living your life? Well, in other words, what is wellness for you and the life that you live and the work that you do? How do you define that?

Effortless health. The more you think about it, the more it becomes an issue. The absence of suffering, to me is. Is optimal health. And so try to find behavioral patterns, dietary patterns, and just improve them a little bit each and every day.

It's a very simplistic and really scientific answer. And on the emotional side, yourself, for people out there who are suffering and for people that maybe don't even know the unconscious incompetence about a lot of things that we explored today, and maybe they can listen to the episode and share this with a friend. That would really be helpful for people that are dealing with emotional issues and whatnot. Why should they come to a product, really, a tool like Seed?

I mean, I think it's a very complex ecosystem. And so to the extent that a lot of we know that stress response has an origination in. In the system, in the gastrointestinal tract. So there's. Obviously there's many different factors. If there's a lot of external stress or. Or emotional issues in your environment, then sometimes it can only be addressed by the absence of those factors. But again, to the extent that your system is already primed to respond to things in a certain way, I. It could be worth a shot.

Okay. Thank you so much for sharing this knowledge on the show, by the way. I really think you should make a module in teaching if you have time with all the research. I think that could be really interesting. So thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me.

And also thank you for bringing something new to the marketplace. I mean, let's be honest, the conversations of probiotics and prebiotics, it's been a bit boring and it's been a saturation. There's been so much information and so many people touting claims that really don't have the science to back it up. Thank you for bringing this awareness of the symbiotic nature of Seed and how this can really help people in a totally different way. So from my heart to yours, until Raja and I see you guys again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. And by the way, take the product. Give it a shot. It's worth a shot. Like Raja said, if you have been struggling with certain things that have been kind of mysterious and head scratchers for you, give this a shot. See how you feel. Thank you so much, Raja, for the discount. You know, I know it's not cheap and it's not easy all the time to run a company of this magnitude, so we appreciate you, man. Thank you.

Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me. And if anyone has follow up questions, they can just drop something to you. And we're usually, you know, we have a whole cyclade team. That's that. That does educate. So please encourage dialogue with your, with your community. And thanks for having me on.

Yes. All right, we'll see you guys next week.

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