Colleen Cutcliffe (on the microbiome)
122 min
•Feb 18, 20263 months agoSummary
Colleen Cutcliffe, a microbiome scientist and founder of Pendulum, discusses how gut bacteria influence obesity, diabetes, depression, and metabolic health. The episode explores the emerging science of microbiome interventions as alternatives or complements to pharmaceutical treatments like GLP-1s, with particular focus on specific bacterial strains that regulate appetite and gut health.
Insights
- The microbiome represents a modifiable ecosystem that can be restored through targeted probiotic supplementation and dietary changes, unlike genetic factors which are largely fixed
- Akkermansia muciniphila is the only known strain that directly maintains gut lining integrity, and its depletion is linked to food sensitivities, obesity, and chronic disease across aging populations
- Microbiome science is only ~25 years old but already demonstrates clinical efficacy comparable to pharmaceuticals, with fecal microbiota transplants showing 97% success rates for C. difficile infections
- Environmental factors (antibiotics, diet, stress, travel, hormones) deplete beneficial microbes more significantly than genetics, making microbiome optimization a scalable public health intervention
- Consumer probiotic products lack standardization and efficacy verification; most don't use enteric coating or delayed-release technology needed to survive stomach acid and reach the colon
Trends
Microbiome-based therapeutics emerging as non-pharmaceutical interventions for metabolic diseases affecting 88% of the U.S. populationShift from treating symptoms to addressing root cause (depleted microbiota) in obesity, diabetes, depression, and neurodegenerative disease preventionClinical validation of specific bacterial strains (Akkermansia, Faecalibacterium) as biomarkers for metabolic health and disease risk stratificationIntegration of microbiome science into mainstream healthcare with Mayo Clinic investment and 30,000+ healthcare practitioners recommending targeted probioticsPost-antibiotic era requiring microbiome restoration strategies as resistance increases and long-term antibiotic consequences become apparentPersonalized nutrition and supplementation based on individual microbiome composition rather than one-size-fits-all dietary recommendationsGut-brain axis research linking microbiota-derived neurotransmitters to mental health, cognition, and neurodegenerative disease preventionRegulatory pathway divergence: microbiome companies pursuing both pharmaceutical drug development and consumer probiotic channels simultaneouslyPackaging and brand experience becoming critical differentiators in supplement market as efficacy becomes table stakes across competitorsC-section and formula-feeding mitigation strategies through targeted early-life microbiome seeding to prevent long-term metabolic dysfunction
Topics
Akkermansia muciniphila and gut lining integrity maintenanceMicrobiome depletion from antibiotics and long-term health consequencesGLP-1 receptor agonists and natural microbiota-driven appetite regulationFecal microbiota transplantation for C. difficile infection treatmentEnteric coating and delayed-release probiotic delivery mechanismsGut-brain axis and vagus nerve signaling in depression and anxietyMetabolic health assessment through A1C and glucose metabolism markersEarly-life microbiome seeding in C-section and formula-fed infantsDietary fiber and polyphenols as microbiota-feeding prebioticsMicrobiome resilience and recovery from antibiotic-induced dysbiosisArtificial sweeteners and microbiome composition changesStress, circadian rhythm disruption, and microbiota depletionMenopause-related microbiota changes and metabolic dysfunctionProbiotic product authentication and strain verificationPublic health implications of population-level microbiome optimization
Companies
Pendulum
Colleen Cutcliffe's probiotic company developing targeted microbiome interventions for metabolic health with Mayo Cli...
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Colleen Cutcliffe serves as health advisory board member; prestigious institution referenced for credibility in micro...
Mayo Clinic
Invested in multiple rounds of Pendulum funding; conducted research linking early-life antibiotics to obesity and dia...
Cleveland Clinic
Channel through which Halle Berry discovered and began using Pendulum's glucose control probiotic product
Northwestern University
Colleen Cutcliffe completed postdoctoral research on early detection markers for Wilms tumors (children's kidney cancer)
New York University
Professor Marty Blazer published foundational research on antibiotic use in infants and later obesity/diabetes risk
University of California Irvine
Conducts the 90+ Study tracking longevity factors in Laguna Woods retirement community residents
HubSpot
Podcast sponsor offering customer platform for data-driven business growth and customer insights
Squarespace
Podcast sponsor providing all-in-one website platform with AI design assistant and business management tools
Allstate
Podcast sponsor offering car insurance quotes and potential savings
People
Colleen Cutcliffe
Microbiome scientist, Pendulum founder, Johns Hopkins health advisory board member discussing gut bacteria's role in ...
Marty Blazer
NYU professor whose research on infant antibiotic use and obesity/diabetes risk inspired Cutcliffe to found Pendulum
Halle Berry
Pendulum investor and communications officer; diabetes patient whose A1C improved significantly using company's gluco...
Richard Isaacson
Physician conducting Alzheimer's prevention research; Dax and Monica enrolled in his study with microbiome implications
Dax Shepard
Podcast host discussing personal microbiome health, food sensitivities, and autoimmune conditions related to microbio...
Monica Padman
Podcast co-host discussing microbiome science applications and personal health experiences with probiotic supplementa...
Quotes
"A healthy gut is a resilient gut. It means you had the most resilient gut, then you could do all kinds of things that were assaulting it and it could make it through that and be fine."
Colleen Cutcliffe
"We've co-evolved with them from day one. So yeah, your microbiome is all these bacteria and viruses and fungi they live inside you on you in all your nasal passages. It's sort of everywhere. And for the most part, they're actually really beneficial."
Dax Shepard
"The most successful treatment is fecal microbiome transplant. Ironically, the treatment for sea diff infection is more antibiotics. So they keep doing this and then you have these people that had the recurring thing and then you can imagine their sea diff is getting more and more resilient."
Colleen Cutcliffe
"I just want to tell you I just went through Christmas. And I could sit at a table with a plate full of cookies and I didn't need a single one. But he broke down. He's like, that wasn't me. That was my microbes sending signals to my brain that I should eat sugar."
Colleen Cutcliffe
"88% of people are metabolically unhealthy. You might be thin, but you're actually metabolically unhealthy. And then you might be obese and you definitely know that you're metabolically unhealthy."
Colleen Cutcliffe
Full Transcript
Welcome, welcome, welcome to our share expert experts on expert. I'm Dak Shepherd. I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi Long time coming we really are interested in this For people who've been listening to show for years there was a period six years ago We were obsessed with getting a fecal transplant from my friend Amy. Yep, and It took us six years to get someone who actually knows about this space and her name is Colleen cut cliff And she is a microbiome scientist and health advisory board member for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health very prestigious school The one you don't like to say because there's an asset the end of John plural and plural. There was something funny on the internet I forget exactly what it was but it was like people have trouble with pronouns, but they're able to say Ruth's Chris That's hard for me, too. It's hard. Yeah, it's too Yeah, anyway very prestigious as we know and she has a company you'll hear about it called pendulum That is making probiotics and prebiotics and with a much different degree of oversight. Yeah, like does Ruth own Chris Right, like Ruth's Chris like with son Chris, but they didn't say son Right or maybe like Chris was a popular cut of steak and Ruth did a perfect You know, Chris this was in the teens and now no one no one calls any cut of steak I mean, yeah, what other what shy of that would make sense. I don't know. Do you want to know the answer? Yeah, so It was named after its founder Ruth Fertel who purchased an existing restaurant called Chris steakhouse That makes sense I bought McDonald's and it was Dax's McDonald's Okay, we saw that please enjoy Let me just say this is we all hear a lot about microbiome We're gonna we're gonna hear about all these incredible microbes in your in your digestive system that do so many things It's fascinating beyond belief the things that we are linking now to certain ailments that are microbiome derived There's a very exciting future ahead for all of us. Please enjoy calling cucklif We are supported by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses Monica only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Yeah, or paying for a coffee. That's one fifth full Yuck point is you miss a lot unless you use HubSpot their customer platform gives you access to the data You need to grow your business the insights trapped in emails call logs and transcripts all that unstructured data that makes all the difference Because when you know more you grow more and when you get a full cup of coffee you can do more too But I digress visit hubspot.com today This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online When we were building the armchair expert website rob actually use Squarespace to get it up and running Which was a smart choice because they've got everything you need in one place to create something that actually looks Professional what really stands out is their blueprint AI feature as like having a design assistant that helps you build a site That doesn't look like every other cookie cutter template out there answer a few questions about what you're trying to do And it creates something that actually fits your vision if you're someone who offers services whether that's coaching consulting creative work Whatever Squarespace handles all the business stuff too payment processing scheduling client management No more juggling five different platforms just to get paid for what you do the whole thing is designed so you can focus on your actual work Instead of wrestling with website tech which let's be honest most of us would rather avoid so head to Squarespace dot com slash dax for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain Tell me what you know about the microbiome while I read I contain multitudes. That's a pretty sciencey book. Yeah, at Young's book. We like him. We love him. Did you over there? I'm so sorry. I just spilled and I don't want to let it soak you know how it goes. Are you coming in from San Francisco? Yeah. I know you well versed in LA or no. My husband grew up here. He grew up in Palsbury. So I know that area a little bit. Yeah, he is good for him. Yeah, it's really nice over there. There's also that incredibly interesting community. I've been studying for a long time. You know about that in Pellows Verde's there's like a retirement community. They have incredible data. The whole community agreed to be a part of some long term study. So there's like a lot of gerontology studies happening in Pellows Verde's. Wow. I'm just gonna remember the neighborhood and what's he up to? What's your husband do? He is an ER physician. Wow. Yes. That's pretty hot. It was crazy during COVID. If we can remember back to when COVID first started and we didn't know anything about her how it's spreading. I remember he came home from work. I had started this company's of like an archbiter startup, which is some work. Yeah. A bit of work. We had two small children and I remember he came home from work one day. He kept his back back on and he was like, should I check into hotel? Because a lot of doctors are doing that because they're like, I don't want to bring this home to my family and my kids. And I said, you said till death do us heart. And we're either all dying together. But like you don't get to go live in a hotel. Why I have to like raise these people and do the work. No, that's too much. Yeah. So he stayed. But yeah, that was the crazy. Have you been watching the pit? No, we are not a lot of watching anything work related at home. Sure. That's a good. Yeah. I heard it's actually really accurate. Yeah. Exactly. That first season is in COVID. Oh, it is. Oh, God. I've got to figure a lot of bad stuff for us. And Dr. Mike is a consultant on it. Oh, my gosh. So this company almost didn't make it through COVID because I was like, all right, well, one of us has to give up. Oh, sure. It'll be me. Yeah. But luckily, I'm not a super good parent. So I kept the company going. You have a mask on for that. That's right. Yes. That's right. Yes. I imagine you in particular, you do forget the notion that if something horrendous were to spread, the doctors are the ones that are going to see it for like you take that on before they know what it is. Yes. Someone gets something. Obviously, they're going to turn up at a hospital. You kind of under exposed. I know. Where are you from originally? I grew up in Atlanta. Oh, my gosh. I'm from Georgia's. Well, you are. Yes. I'm from Duluth. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I grew up in Atlanta. My parents live in Marietta now. Oh, my gosh. What high school did you go to Westminster? Oh, fancy. It's nice to. Yeah. I don't like the way I'm being cast here. Yeah, your husband. Yeah. We're normal. You're very well. What did your parents do? My dad. You worked at IBM for a really long time. And then a small group of them after they all got laid off went and fixed up startup companies and sold them back to companies like IBM and Apple. And then he did what he is lifelong dream was which he became a professor at like a local community college. He always wanted to be a teacher. And but he felt like he had a work to make money for the family. And so his retirement gig for 20 years was professor. Now he's fully retired. That's awesome. Yeah. And my mom was like a consultant. A retirement gig is being a professor. That's like my dad's idea of retirement. Her father's just now retiring as an engineer. Yeah. So yeah. Immediately started right back the next day. He just can't retire. Some people are really better retire. Yeah. I called them yesterday or my mom's like, oh, you're at the Golden Globe. She wanted to hear about it. And you know, I faced him and she's like, dad's in a meeting. I was like, he's in a meeting. His retirees. He's in a meeting. Yeah. Well, probably a lot of people want him like consult on things. Exactly. He's a consultant. Yeah. It just means they don't have to pay any of the other stuff. Yeah. They don't have to pay into the disability. You're in a private contractor now. And it was the engineer of some kind at IBM. He's a computer science person. Okay. And so education prized. Yeah. Yeah. And also I'm Chinese. You're not first generation. Are you? I always get confused. This first generation mean I was born here. I was born here. But they were not. So they're immigrants and I was born here. So yeah. First gen first gen. It is a little confusing the way the gender is what else would it be guys? No. You could be the immigrant. You're like the first generation who came here. I don't know. Because they can't come mid generation. They're already alive. I think I'm half because. Like, yes, I am half. She's not. I am half because I did come here when she was six still rules are out as first. I don't know. I feel like you're like second generation. Thank you. You guys are both way more entitled than I am to have an opinion on this. But I will say I think you technically have to be born here. Okay. All right. But my parents were both born in China. And then when communism came, my mom's family fled to Taiwan. My dad's family fled to Japan. My dad grew going to the American school in Japan. So he's kind of like first generation, but it was American school. Right. And then they both moved to the states and met there. So they're kind of double immigrants. Yeah. So what year would he have gone to Japan? He was there right after World War II. Okay. And then he grew up there. And then he came here and went to college in the US. Were they loving Chinese in Japan back then? No, because basically the Japanese were on their knees after World War II. Okay. And he was in the consulate. Oh, his father, your grandfather? Yeah, the reason they fled is because they were anti-communists. And so they fled and so they were in the consulate in Japan as representatives for I guess Taiwan really at that point. And he kind of grew up in a little bit of a bubble going to the American school. All his friends are your kids in America. Yeah, exactly. So you're one and a half, too. I think so too. Yeah. I'm going to go along with whatever the verdict was. I think kind of what you're getting at is culturally because your mom came in when she was six. And my dad grew up in the American school in Japan. For example, yes, education was important, but my parents, you know, when you're a kid and trying to make decisions about stuff, you like, should I do this or should I do that? They were always about, well, what's going to make you the happiest? What will make you unhappy? What will you regret? That's rare for a first gen. Right. Which you also benefited from. I did also benefit. And here we get into the promised stereotypes. It's a multi-faceted and so dynamic. Also, her father happens to be from an area of India, Karla, where it's kind of a triarkole. And he also had older sister. Like there's a lot that goes into the stew of power. Right. Yeah. But we can go with stereotypes. It's fine. He got in this fight one time. I said, if I saw your father do something that was completely insane to me, like I had never seen it in my life. I would immediately deduce, oh, it's probably something cultural from India. And she's like, you can't do that. You know what that was? Yeah. You said if you saw him eating cereal weird or something with no milk or like some something we made. There was something theorized that he was doing. Yeah. That you would assume that was a cultural thing, which I guess I get, but I don't like it. I'm pretty allergic to you. Here's a good topic. We're on to something. This is actually a good topic. Okay. Because I would say, well, you tell me out of 10, her sensitivity to her fear of being generalized and being an outcast and excluded was quite high. Was a tent. Well, you grew up in Duluth every is mostly white there. It's very white. Increasingly though, right? Diverse. Yeah. When I went to high school, it was very white. There were other people, other ethnicities. No, there are other ethnicities there, but it was a small group. If you were Asian, they were all the smart kids. There was very few diversity in the major population. They were all on periphery. Yeah. And pop. And do you feel like that contributes to the sensitivity? Definitely. I was a cheerleader. I was trying to be so normal. I don't want to look at me. I'm like, oh, I personally just like it. Exactly. Yes. But do you didn't have that, maybe? Atlanta's more diverse. Yeah. And I went to really small schools. So like everybody kind of knew each other. And then there were only four Asians in my grade. There are three of them kind of hung out with each other. I feel like they were more ethnically Asian. And I was definitely more identified with the other kids. And so I didn't experience any racism growing up. Wow. People were super nice. I didn't have any issues. I don't feel like I was excluded from anything because of my race. I feel like it's more of a black white issue in Atlanta. Chinese people, at least at that time, you're like whatever. Yeah, you're not the main gamer. Yeah, you're not a pro. Love. We're actually, I feel like that white people felt like, well, at least you're not black. And black people felt like, well, you're not white. So I got to hang out. I felt like I was most included. Wow. I had the opposite feeling. I feel like because I was in the middle somehow, I was like, well, you're not one of us and then you're not one of us. So you're just like, but without minimizing either person's experience, it's just telling about how subjective the experiences and how perspective is so much of the whole experience. Well, and how individuals are experiencing things so differently. But like two people caught in the middle of two predominant races, right? Like you got black, you got white, where are this summer in the middle? And then you can have two drastically different conclusions. One is like, well, I don't fit in with either versus, oh, I'm not either group that's hated is a perspective. Yeah. Yeah. And then we would have opposite ones, even though we're both one and a half generation. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then where did you go to college? I know, ultimately you went to Johns Hopkins. Yeah. So then I went to college at Wellesley outside Boston. That was terrible. It was cold. I actually had a Southern accent when I went to college and I had a professor pull me a sign. He's like, it doesn't matter what you say, you sound like a moron. You really get rid of that. And so I went to speech therapy to talk in like a normal person. Yeah. Like a northern or like a Yankee. Well, like a Midwestern is actually the perfect English is what I was taught. Yeah, that's newscaster. And there's certain words I still have a hard time saying, but that was Boston. Like you're wrong and it's cold. And so I was like, okay, I gotta get out of here. And then I went to Baltimore. I actually loved Baltimore. Baltimore is running this multi-generational experiment where they have integrated low-income housing and high-income housing, which just means there's like low-income housing and then low-ish income housing. Wow. Because like all the people in the high-income housing just sort of leave. And then your students are your broke and you're like, I have to live near school. And so it's kind of dangerous. Like my parents, when they dropped me off, we drove by the penitentiary with all these guys with these huge guns. And my mom was like, so we're just gonna leave her here. With her new accent. With her new new castor accent. With the new her. Or did you just brought back the Southern accent once you got to Baltimore? Because they're like, you know what? You need to bring some of that Southern. Yeah, you need to have, but actually I feel like now circling back. Now it's really cool to have this sort of individualistic. Like, oh, there's something different about you. Yes, as our culture has gotten homogenized through this online unity. Yeah. Or it's like, what's special about you? My daughter just finished applying to college. She started college, but it was like, yeah, what's special about you? Or what's happened in your life that's been really unique? She's like, I mean, I'm 17, so nothing. Yeah, nothing's happening. And I'm not that unique. When I moved here from Detroit in 1995, it was like, we had our own music scene. We dressed different. There's none of that now. You're on TikTok. You're doing what everyone's doing. Yeah, it's like all melded together. I don't know that it's great. Regardless. Okay, you ultimately ended up with a PhD in my biology. My PhDs in biochemistry and molecular biology. Whatever you can say, microbiology is the thing. What were you initially setting out to before you got captivated by your current? So when I did my PhD work, it was in skin cancer. Cancer is a pretty big thing that lots of people do research on. So I thought that was interesting. And then I did a postdoc at Northwesterns. I lived in Chicago. We were trying to look for markers for early detection of children's kidney tumors, so Wilms tumors. And then I moved out to the Bay Area. I worked in a pharma company. We were developing drugs for Parkinson's disease. And then I worked in a startup company, which is like what you do. And I was running biology. We were making a DNA sequencing instrument. So I didn't really know anything about the microbiome until actually I read a paper that got me excited about it. And I started this company. What was the paper about? It came from this professor at NYU, Marty Blazer. And he showed that babies who were six months and younger who had a lot of antibiotics later in life were more prone to obesity and diabetes. And I had a preemie, two months premature. And she had been on antibiotics and all this stuff in the hospital before I took her home. And she was in elementary school at that time. And she had these food sensitivities that nobody else had. And I was like, this is the march towards diabetes. And the Mayo Clinic actually read that study. And they show that if you're under two and you're on a lot of antibiotics, you're not only more prone to obesity and diabetes. You're also more prone to allergies, depression, asthma, ADHD, Crohn's, celiac disease. And it's all because when you're a baby that antibiotic treatment is killing your microbiome and for a lot of people, they can never recover it. So I was like, oh my gosh, we could start a company, help millions of people, including my own daughter. And I have the technical knowledge with the sequencing and biology, you know, that to be able to do it, that's what actually prompted me to start the company. You bring me to, I contain multitudes, I really recommend that book. It's so great. It's all about microbes in their place in the world and all the animals around us. And they do these crazy experiments where they'll raise mice in a completely sterile environment where there'll be no microbes that get to them. The bubble boy mice. Yes. And the things that happen immediately are staggering. And in what a clever experiment, you can find out almost right away what kind of microbiome they have normally and what it does for them. So I don't think people would know. So we got to do a little bit with is a microbe, how have these come to live in concert with all these animals. And if you've not read that book, it's fascinating how interwoven we are with these bacteria. We've really co-volved with them from day one. So yeah, your microbiome is all these bacteria and viruses and fungi they live inside you on you in all your nasal passages. It's sort of everywhere. And for the most part, they're actually really beneficial. We've co-evolved with them, meaning we're both getting benefit from hanging out together. But we as a society mostly try to kill them. And so in trying to kill the ones that have created disease or infection, we've inadvertently ruined an entire ecosystem that's actually here to benefit our health. And so only now that we're starting to understand what is the ecosystem? How can we bring it back after realizing that antibiotics can actually cause these long-term problem? And the sterilizing of our environment. Everybody buys antibacterial soap, antiseptic wipes. So you appear to me of throwing the baby out with the bath water, right? It's like you might isolate the single microbe you want to get rid of. Yeah. At the expense of 9,000 that are good. Totally. It's like you go into your garden that you've been working on. You see a weed and you're like bleach the whole thing. Right. And so it's not that helpful for the garden. And to give people a sense of just how many microbes you have, a, they represent one to three percent of your total body mass. So two to six pounds you have of living microbes in you. And then even maybe crazier because they don't weigh a lot, I guess, is there one to one, right? There's as many microbes as there are cells in our digestive tract. Seems like that's the case. There's how much they weigh. There's trillions or the one-on-one ratio. But also when you think about how smart they are and the diversity of what they can do, like you just have your genes and you can do the stuff with your genes. There are trillions of these things with hundreds times more genes doing all kinds of stuff in your body. Yeah, the amount of DNA that's floating around your brain. The amount of DNA is like a hundred times your genomic DNA. It's quite easy. Why don't they pick up when they do these DNA swabs and stuff? Are they picking up the DNA of all these microbes when they do these? How are they delineating? What's what? So technically the way that you swab those, you are getting both microbes and human cells. But human cells are easy to break open than microbes are. So the way that they process as an extract the DNA, the bacteria are mostly kept intact. So you're only extracting human DNA. If you want to extract microbial DNA, you actually have to do a lot more stuff to break open their cells. This is the breakthrough that we've recently come upon, yeah, is being able to DNA sequence these microbes. Yeah. When did that start and how did we figure that out? With DNA sequencing technologies. So when I was working this DNA sequencing company, we were making these instruments. Those companies were the beginnings of the technology that enabled this science to exist. So if you look in PubMed and you type in the word microbiome, before the year 2000, it's like a flat line at zero. And then you just start to see this exponential growth of publications and knowledge about the microbiome. So about 25 years old, ish? About a 25 year old science and medicine, yeah. Wow. Okay. So one example I would say in the animal kingdom is like, there's many, many animals that without the microbes in their stomach, they would immediately die. They don't digest the food that they're eating. They're completely reliant on these microbes in their stomachs. We're not as deep on that specter, Marui. We're a little more independent in that respect or not. Well, we have quite a few dependencies, but I'll tell you this crazy story about hyenas. You know, when an animal dies, there's all the animals that get first dibs on it. And hyenas can like wait around until the carcass is basically rotting. And all the other animals like, I'm not gonna eat this. Maybe sick. That's when they come eat. And so their oral microbiome is super interesting. You're like, how are they not getting sick? They have all these effectively antibiotics in their oral microbiome that are killing all those germs. So that's how they can eat this. So there's the scientist. I met him very early on in the company and he was researching hyena or oral microbiome to understand our their new antibiotics. We can find in there like, what's going on? And in the course of trinal swab, the mouth of a hyena, he got bit. So it goes through the ER. They're like, what happened? He's like, well, I got bit by hyena. They're like, oh, we have to like put all these antibodies. He's like, no, no, I don't need any antibiotics because hyenas have the cleanest mouth. This is not going to get infected. And they're like, are you out of your mind? They'll find 10,000 waivers. And he never got any treatment. And they just put a bandage on it. I guess they sewed it up without any cleaning. And he was fine. He's like one of these scientists who injected themselves with an early medicine. Yeah. Just waited to see what happened. That's false. Wow. But wouldn't he be worried that obviously the hyena's mouth is good, but whatever it was eating would have bacteria. And then that would get in there. There was like a few places where the judgment was a little weird. Okay. Yeah. But I met him because he was like, oh, I want you to help me sequence these hyena microbiome because I want you to tell me what's in there that's super different and interesting. And he tells this story. And I was like, okay, I mean, you're kind of yeah, you're out on a limb. I know this about commoto dragons. They don't have a poison, but they have so much bacteria in their mouth that when they bite their animals, that's what kills them, right? Yeah. And I think probably we as humans in general, because we've been living in shelter and things like that for a long time and been killing these bacteria for a long time. We're probably the most susceptible to any of these sort of microbes or infections, because we've done the most to disrupt the system. This just hit me. It was not in my notes. We've been both dying to ask somebody who might know this is I find it very curious that all the primates eat each other's shit and that we are uniquely repulsed by shit. And my hunches were very weird in the animal kingdom that way. And I wonder at what point in our evolution did we start getting repelled by that smell? And I do wonder if it's when we started living in civilizations. And so what can we say about that? Do animals do generally eat each other's? They do. And like if you have a dog, they're sniffing butts, that's where they're getting all the information. But most animals are like this is just part of living and even eating feces and rolling in it like horses, they roll and feces, they roll in the mud. We've been trained to think that's poison, but we can observe in other animals. It's beneficial to that. But that's because we started living together in small communities and then it was kind of bad for us because if you're an animal you're roaming in the wild, you're moving around. You're not staying in this one spot and all your stool is in the one spot, which is why it's super interesting these fecal microbiome transplants. How people like that's terrible. But you're basically eating somebody else's shit. Crapsule. Yes, that's I think when we first got curious about this world is learning that people with sea diff. So let's talk about sea diff a little bit. Very common in hospitals, very common if you're on a long-term antibiotic cycle. Yeah, my stepfather who died of prostate cancer by the end, you know, he had terrible sea diff and it was explained that that was just a result of having killed every other competing microbes at Y. Yeah, like we all probably have sea diff right now inside us and it's not a big deal, but it's the antibiotics kill off all the other guys. There's no competition and then the sedive can just start to reproduce unchecked, then that's when it comes toxic and problematic. But they have a lot of success right with doing crapsules or stool. Incredibly. The most successful treatment is fecal microbiome transplant. Ironically, the treatment for sea diff infection is more antibiotics. So they keep doing this and then you have these people that had the recurring thing and then you can imagine their sea diff is getting more and more resilient. Yeah. You're like basically training it to be able to withstand all these antibiotics. But the fecal microbiome transplant, which is basically just flooding with competitors, that's the whole thing is incredibly effective. And yeah, like the FDH tried to take it off. People stormed the capital with their pitch force. It's got like a 90 plus percent success rate. It's got like a 97 percent success rate versus virtually no success rate in the alternative strategy. Well, and the thing is the repercussions of a seed of infection is death. Yeah. Because you can't absorb nutrients, right? Right. And so you're like, well, what's the risk? Yeah, actually, the downside is pretty bad. Yeah. So yeah, that one got our attention and then how substantiated are these links between depression, between obesity? How much doing know about this currently? And it's always hard to figure out when you read a headline, how much real science is in there. What do we know? What's just kind of a hunch? The obesity one, we definitely have a lot of evidence on probably the most compelling thing is that there are two strains that we know to date that are able to directly stimulate your body's natural GLP one. And that's literally how it works. You eat food, your microbiome digest that you have these group of strains that then stimulate GLP one production and then go help your body metabolize through insulin release and then also tell your brain, hey, we're full. And that's actually how it's supposed to naturally work. And your GLP one, of course, will go up and then it'll go back down, you'll get hungry again, you'll eat another meal. So that's actually your natural body system. That mechanism is known as very much linked to obesity. Really quick. I'm so glad you said that because my dumb assumption like okay, I'm raised or was oh, they don't have a microbe that's helping digest the food. They're not able to process it and expel it as fast, but it's not even that. It's the communication with the brain telling you you're not hungry. When you look at people with obesity, pre-dibities and type-g diabetes, they're actually low or entirely missing those microbes that do that processing and stimulate GLP one. And so then what they lose is two things. They lose that signaling to insulin and they lose that signaling to the brain. They're missing these and so they're not getting GLP one expression at the right time. What's the reigning theory on how someone could be missing those? Why would someone be missing those when so many others have them? There's a wide variety of things that can cause you to become depleted in those strains. The first is antibiotics. The second is your diet. So if you donate fibers and polyphenols, you're not feeding them. And so that's the second reason. But then there's a lot of stuff that's pretty out of your control. So stress can cause you to become depleted. Aging can cause you to become depleted. Travel like circadian rhythms. So when day becomes night and night becomes day, that can cause you to become depleted. And actually hormones can cause you to become depleted. So when women go through menopause, you become depleted. And so these are all just part of life that caused you to become depleted. And so there's a lot of reasons people might not have them. But antibiotics and diet are kind of the two most prominent ones. We don't see a big genetic marker that like, oh, this person makes a certain protein that's killing them. Well, I mean, that's actually a great question. I think that research is still too early to know the answer to that. When's the apex for microbes in your body? I didn't realize that they just diminished throughout time too, which is terrible. Yeah, really when you think about when were you sort of at your optimal performance across the board? You could rewind this podcast. I probably say on every 10th episode, when I was 26, I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I ate every single meal at 7, 11, the two for one chili dogs. And I got drunk every night. And I woke up and I felt pretty fucking good. And I'm 51. I haven't drank in 21 years and I have a perfect diet and a lot of mornings are rough. And I'm like, how could this be or I have an autoimmune condition now? And I have allergies to food. I never had. I'm like, I used to live like a trash can and it didn't bother me. Is that microbes were banging back then? Yes. And actually, I would say this people ask me all the time, like, what is a healthy gut? And a healthy gut is a resilient gut. So it means like you had the most resilient gut, then you could do all kinds of things that were assaulting it. And it could make it through that and be fine. And as you were probably depleting it and lots of different things through your diet or lack of things that you're reading in your diet, then you got a less resilient gut. And now you're dealing with the repercussions of that. But the good news is actually you can change your microbiome even now, all the time you can change it. So whatever you're depleted in, let's say food sensitivities is a really common thing that happens as people age. And we know there's a strain called acrimansi musinophila. We'll say it one more time in sexy. That was really cool. Acrimansi musinophila. It is the only strain we know that's actually responsible for maintaining the structure of the gut lining directly. So your gut lining is sort of like a wooden fence. Okay, now you have to excuse me because I'm like not a carpenter and people have actually told me this is a terrible analogy. But I'm going to say it because most people still understand it even if technically this is how fences work. But do you imagine a wooden fence that has all these wooden planks and they're held together by glue? What can happen over time is that glue can start to weaken, a plank can fall and now you have like a gap in your fence. The structure of your gut lining is actually exactly like that. So you have these planks, these epithelial cells, they're held together by glue. And over time that glue can start to weaken and you can get an opening or plank can fall and then you get what people call like leaky guts. And then you're sensitive to foods because stuff is just leaking out and it's causing all these kind of reactions in your body that shouldn't be. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare, we are supported by all state. Checking all state first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating. 15 minutes later you've logged into seven apps reset two passwords and still haven't found it. 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But you have this tube that's running through the dead center of the sealed system. You think of a water we need. That's going to be my analogy, right? Do you remember water we need? I don't know. It's like a long balloon. I think they were. It's a rectangular balloon filled with water. But the inside you can put your fingers in and you can roll it in and out of it. The whole but remember they like they've fallen out of their chair. Yes. They're hard to hold. What are they going to? Water we need. So what they were called when I was a kid. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know that right. So your body is like that. And your body is this master of we don't want foreign things just entering the body, willing. So it goes down this tube in the dead center of our body and then our body is masterful of pulling everything out. It needs and allowing it through this lining, absorbing it in right. Yep. And then things can go wrong. And now we're letting them things that aren't supposed to be in there. Exactly. Lending things in and out. And exactly to your point, it's very structured and organized and deliberate. And so when you have a hole in there, then you lose all that regulation. And so acrimansia is the only strain known that lives literally right at that lining. And it's trips away that glue when it gets old and it makes new glue and it keeps your gut lining intact. And it's one of the key strains you lose as you age. And so you can actually supplement it. We just spend on make this exact. Who are the first company to be able to manufacture and brought it to market? Now there's a lot of like copycats. And by the way, so just as a buyer beware, if you go on Amazon and you type this strain name in acrimansia, you're going to see a bunch of things under the say acrimansia. And one of my friends is a professor of Cornell. He just bought a bunch of them and sequenced them. And he was like calling the only product that actually has acrimansia as you were. That's just be careful. Yeah. And I was going to save my pushing back. But I watched a great segment on 60 minutes about gut health and the microbiome and the promise of probiotics and pre-botics and all this stuff. Most of the experts said, look, yes, this stuff can work, but we can't even get it to where it needs to be because your stomach's killing all this stuff you're taking as a supplement. And it needs to be in your lower intestine. It's not going to get there. Isn't that part of the problem is keeping the bacteria you would like to land in a certain spot alive? Yeah. That's the other thing to look for when you look at the capsule that the things are in. So we pay more for the capsule. It is enteric coated, which means it gets through the stomach acid. And it's time delayed release, which means it gets all the way to the distal cloths. Where it needs to go. And so you need both of this because otherwise it's going to your stomach. The acid is killing it. You spent eight dollars to kill this shit. Yeah. And a lot of times that's why we tell people take your probiotic with food is because that actually does decrease the acidity of your stomach. And so it can even help the probiotics get through. Wow. That's interesting. Fascinating. So how good are the results of that? I don't want to get too excited, but I want to get excited right now because this is clearly what I have. Well, you should take the product and let's talk in 90 days. Yeah. Let's see. I'll do it too. Yeah. And do it too. And the key thing is the one to punch. So your microbiome is very tied to the food that you eat. And so it's like a high performing vehicle. You want an awesome engine and you want to put awesome fuel into it. You can't have just one half of that. So the microbiome you're going to get acrimansia. That's the engine part. And the fuel that's going to be the high octane fuel that you want is fibers and polyphenols. So you do it in supplement format. Polyphenols aren't in olive oil, right? Yeah. Berries if you eat those. I hate so many blueberries. You'd be so proud of it. I need more chocolate. Okay. That's more you. Yeah. I need more fiber. And I don't know if I should start taking supplements. In my head, I don't want to do that. I just want to get it through food, but I'm not getting it through food. It's really hard actually to get how much fiber is supposed to get through foods. And so it's not cheating if you're supplementing fiber through a supplement. So you should just think about that. Actually, we are launching a product in March, which is called gut fuel, which is a mix of fibers and polyphenols specifically designed to feed these because not if everybody can get it in their diet. Yeah, it's hard. It is hard. Like how many people can do farm to table at every meal? And you have to have this much protein. And I don't want to already expose the whole interview we do with Angela Duckworth, but I'm reading her book right now. And it's all about environment and the power of environment. And this three box modeling of how your brain works, which is you have a situation followed by a thought and followed by a response. And people want to have lots of agency in the thought and the response. But we know statistically changing the box of the environment is infinitely more successful in anything you would tackle. So even GLP once she talks about this great physician who is reticent to go on it because he wants to have willpower. And it's like you can think of the GLP one as the environment changer. And so the stupid shame we have about trying to only use willpower when there's these other levers we can pull is so weird about us. It's true. The shame. And then also we had a customer. I got a chance to talk to him. And it was an awesome story. So he's basically like, look, I have always had an addiction to sugar. I have always had a sweet tooth. That's just me. That's just my weakness. It's identity. That's me. So then he started taking we were a product called pendulum glucose control, which helps you lower your A1C and blood glucose by this is what Halle Berry was on when she was on. She talked about. Oh, okay. Yeah. Exactly. That's what she's on. And it stimulates your natural GLP one. One of the things that people feel most is it reduces your cravings. So this guy was on it for his diabetes. And he said, I just want to tell you I just went through Christmas. And I could sit at a table with a plate full of cookies and I didn't need a single one. But he broke down. He's like, that wasn't me. That was my microbes sending signals to my brain that I should eat sugar. And he had had an epiphany about who he was and who he wasn't. Wow. And it was his environment. It was his environment inside himself. Yeah. I think because we're a social primate, we're so hard wired for shame. It's such a great mechanism for social cohesion. I think we go to it immediately. It's like any kind of shortcoming we have is like, it must be me. I must be doing something wrong. Even this psoriotic arthritis, that's my autoimmune. My shame of I fucked up my body and I rode motorcycles. It's got to be my fault. All my joints are on fire. Yeah. And I'm not even going to look into it because clearly I just deserve this. It's weird. It is. I'd say that's a bug not a feature other than the social cohesion. Okay. Let's talk about how it works initially in the birthing canal. Because I think it's interesting to know, of course, when we are in the womb initially, we don't have any microbes. We're not born with microbes. You know, we don't grow with microbes. Well, turns out there might be a couple in there. There might be a couple in there, but we're getting them from mom is my point. Generally, mom's going to give us her microbes. Yeah. That's the first seeding. Yeah. So walk us through how you end up with this colony of microbes that should be helping you. When you're in your mother's womb, it is mostly sterile. There's a few microbes in there. People are now discovering, but it's not in anything. I mean, actually, I shouldn't say that. We don't really know what are those microbes and what are they doing. So there probably is something relevant happening there. Yeah. The first real seeding of your microbiome is delivery through the vaginal canal. And so that's when you get your first seeding of all these microbes. And then the next is most babies in their born, they go straight to breast milk. And so then breast milk becomes the second place. And so if you're born by C section, you don't get that first seeding through the vaginal canal. And so that's a depletion. And like, there are some people who will try to replicate that. I was going to say they'll take vaginal fluid and rub it on the baby's in the baby and then when the baby feeds. Yeah. To try to get that all started. Now, I've known this part, but I didn't know that part of that is fecal matter that you're getting. It's like kind of mostly that. It's mostly the babies eating fecal matter. What? See, it's not gross. It's not gross. It's the animal kingdom. It's the natural. Beautiful. The baby is eating as it comes through the vaginal canal. Well, the baby's mouth isn't closed. It's trying to breathe. Yeah. It gets its own. That's the problem. I can get it in the muconium. What's it called? Yeah. Yeah. You can get its own. That's bad. That's bad. That's not good. Yeah. I mean, in the end, I think what we realize is there's a few key strains that they need to get during that time. And there's actually companies that are developing those strains. So if you don't want to do the vaginal thump and you have a baby born by C section, or even if you want to bolster their microbiome, you can kind of deliver them these specific strains early on. And then mother's breast milk, a ton of it is actually the prebiotics, which is the food that feeds your microbiome. Okay. And so there's a ton of that in it. But then getting back to acromance, the amuse in a philla, they have never been able to find that. It's not like in yogurts or sarycrow. You can't find out any single food. The only place they've actually found it is in mother's breast milk. By the way, I wasn't breastfed. Maybe you didn't have the even the initial seed. The idea is that you get it from your mom and they spend the rest of your life trying not to lose this thing. Right. What if I had breast milk now? Well, you could also just take the supplement. You could take breast milk if you wanted. You could have a prebiotics. Would that populate mine? Yeah. Why wouldn't it? Yeah, it should be able to. Okay. If you're out there in your nursing, I talked to my wife. I wish we were able to just drink it. My brother's girlfriend is pregnant. Oh, we talked to her about it. I did joke. I was like, I've heard it's liquid gold. I'll pay. The whole new business model. I mean, it's wet nurse 2.0. Yeah, that's right. I wish our bodies could make it without having to be pregnant. I wish there was a weight. I could just start feeding yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You can give yourself something you don't have. That's why they always say you can't give someone else something you don't have. Okay. So that's interesting. Those of someone is breastfeeding and they themselves were born from a C section. Do they even have it in their breast milk? Well, it's like one of the interesting questions about when you have a mom who has obesity or diabetes, they're more likely to have a kid with that. Environmental has always been the explanation. Right. And microbiome is environmental. Part of the question is like, okay, if you don't have the right starting microbiome as a mom, are you screwing your kid because you're not giving them all the initial, because the first initial thing is to the vaginal cowl second is breast milk. And that's all they get until they start eating food, right? It can I ask, do I have any sense of what that percentage is? I'm asking selfishly because both my children were C section. And this is something my wife and I talk about. I don't know what it'd be miss. They were breastfed. But what percentage are you picking up from the vaginal canal, which percentage is coming from breast milk? Do we have any sense of that? The vaginal canal is mostly the bacteria themselves and the breast milk is mostly the food. That's like the body. That's how it takes right. It gives you the strains initially and then the food is coming from the mother's breast milk. But it's possible even if they were delivered by C section that they were able to get these stramming unless they have some kind of health problem that you're aware of. Oh, no. And this is the question about resilience or how some people are able to be fine with that and then other people end up having lifelong chronic illnesses. We don't know the answer to that. And that couldn't have to do with the person's genetics or the proteins they're making and things like that. Okay, so that's one step. And then of course, again, back to multitudes learn that people who have pets in their home have more microbes and a greater variety of microbes and people with pets in their home have lower allergy rates. Yeah, it's actually specific to dogs. Dogs, yeah, yeah, yeah, because actually when you've cats, it doesn't make a difference. Okay, so dogs. Yeah, cats are. They're out there gathered. That's how I feel. I'm like a massive dog person. And I used to give these talks and I would be like this amazing saying that it shows that if you have dogs, you have a better, more diverse microbiome, you have these less allergies at any time. Anytime. So like if you know I'm a dog, you should go get a dog. But for cats, it doesn't make it different so you have a cat or not. Interesting. One thing before we get too far, because I know we're going to get comments about from moms because it's sensitive moms who couldn't breastfeed or dish or us feed. Yeah. And then also had C sections because the emergency C site, whatever that there's going to be some fear and probably some like, that my kids perfect. You know, that kind of thing. I just foresee it. So first of all, you're can might be perfect because there are these situations. Obviously, not every more by C section has these and actually not all babies who are on antibiotics end up with obesity and diabetes, right? So clearly that's not the case. It's just that there's a higher risk or statistical significance associated with having those later on the line. There's a rationale for why that is. But I think most formulas are designed to have these pre-botic symptoms. The formulas are pretty good. But I will tell you one thing about this. One of the mistakes I made that I wish I had known was I pumped a lot of my breast smoking frozen so that first of all, my husband could participate in being the children, but then also while I was at work, you take that out of the freezer and you heat it up and then you feed the baby. If you're like a mildly impatient person like me, you put that thing on high and you're like, throw it and you're like, okay, things can be like ready in four seconds, then you kind of swish it around, you get to the baby. And that's actually really bad because when the temperatures too high, you're actually degrading a bunch of proteins in there and whatever acrimansi was in there, like the microbes are all getting unfolded and killed by that heat. So that would be the biggest learning lesson that I wish I had known when I was back. That's a great tip. Okay, good to know about formulas. But I do want to address the mom thing too because I actually think we talked about shame earlier. Nobody should feel guilty about having had to do a C-section versus a vaginal birth or formula feeding versus breast feeding. That's just early start to life things where you can optimize. These are all recoverable and that's the beauty of the microbiome. You are constantly changing it and you can constantly change it for the better. So there's always hope. It's not like your genes are kind of like this one. Yeah, like this is what I'm pretty supposed to. I can't do anything about it. The microbiome you can change. That's great. Okay, now let's talk about the body's communication network and how it's working with food and metabolism and hormones and mood. I think we've all grown up thinking like your brains behind a blood brain barrier and it's its own little separated thing. We always thought of things very compartmentalized and we're more and more realizing, no, no, this is all one big self organizing complex system. It's all communicating. So how is your gut regulating a lot of things that we wouldn't normally think it is? So if we want to hone on the gut brain connection, first of all, your brain is kind of kept in a secure location and the signaling to it and from it is pretty well regulated and fortified. That's good. Yeah, we don't want leaky brains. You don't want leaky brain syndrome, but your gut and your brain are actually tied together through a connector, a highway called the Vegas Nerve. The first thing that people discover is like your gut makes a ton of neurotransmitters, serotonin dopamine GABA and they're like, why would you gut be making all this stuff? And it literally can send those to the Vegas Nerve to the brain. I think that's interesting, but the more interesting thing is that there's actually neurons in your gut. And so the neurons in your brain, we all know you kill them, they don't come back, you're kind of done, but the neurons in your gut, they're constantly regenerating. That's really cool because that's a source of new neurons. The last really interesting thing is that I started my research career in Parkinson's disease. We were always looking at these plaques in the brain. All the time, there's the same thing, you kind of get these plaques in the brain. You're like, how do I get rid of these? What turns out those plaques appear to show up in the gut neurons first? Really? So there's a theory that your gut neurons get messed up, then they're sending misfires to the brain and so you could actually target the gut for things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's to prevent them from getting to the brain. That's incredible. It's crazy. We're enlisted in an Alzheimer's study from Dr. Richard Isaacson. What are you taking? Well, we're not. So we keep getting our blood drawn. He sends it all over the world. We get the most elaborate panels back you've ever seen. But he has this on stuff. I'm on Omega 3's and I'm on a different Zeta. It's not a statin, but it works. Yeah, I'm on a statin. We are on things. And you've been prescribed a lot of behavioral adjustments that you're in progress on. I've had some muscle mass. Yeah, exactly. It was like your ratios. And then I got on a statin after that. But we've interviewed him and I didn't hear anything about this gut. Yeah, this is fast. Is the amyloid in there too? Those are those plaques. Yeah. So if he's a practicing physician, this is too early for him to be able to put something to practice. Everything I just told you like, okay, so now what? There's no product that he could give you. So that doesn't exist yet. This is just all the discovery that's happened to date that suggests you could start to target. And there are a lot of companies going after it. Okay. So the brain is talking to the stomach. And yes, even depression, you think, oh, depression is something in your brain, but not if all the chemicals are meeting your stomach. Okay, not to make acrimansia, musinvilleis seem like this cure all, but this paper just got published from this group in Taiwan. This is an animal model. So it's not humans, but it's actually really interesting. And it realizes about these mouse models. You can induce stress and anxiety in a mouse model. And they behave like humans. And so what they did in this mouse studies, they have like a placebo, which is just the animal, nothing happens to just like a normal happy animal. Then they have a group that they stress out. Then they had a group that they stressed out and they gave acrimansia to. And then at fourth group, they stress out something they gave pro-zek to. So this is like a head to head of acrimansia to pro-zek. Interesting. Okay. So they give you this and then look at your behaviors before and after. And there are three behaviors in these animals. And okay, you can stop me anytime if you're like you're nerding out way too much. No, I think it's fascinating. So there's these three behaviors they look at. The first one is they throw them into a pool of water. And when they do that, the mouse is immobilized for a second. And then it'll start to swim to like get its way out. And you can actually track how long they're immobilized for it. If you're a healthy mouse, you're immobilized and then you start moving. And if you're stressed or anxious, you actually immobilize for significantly longer. Before it clicks and you're like, okay, I got to swim. And would you give them acrimansia or pro-zek, they look like the healthy mouse again. You've basically resolved that stress and anxiety behavior. The second behavior they look at is they throw a new object in the cage and a healthy mouse will like check it out. It'll be curious. Spend a certain amount of time with it. A stress or anxious mouse will leave it in the corner or like maybe it'll check it out, but it doesn't spend hardly any time with it. And if you get that stressed mouse to either acrimansia or pro-zek, it becomes curious again. And then the third thing they look at is there's just a certain amount of movement meters per day that the mouse moves around. And so a healthy mouse has a certain amount of movement. A stress or anxious mouse moves a lot less. And when you give them acrimansia or pro-zek, they go back to having that normal activity level. So that's all at the behavioral level. And then we start looking at neurotransmitters and particularly cortisol levels and markers of neural activity. All of those, it's the same thing where the stress that animal has lower levels. And when you give it acrimansia, even in some cases it was better than the pro-zek. Really? And I think the theory is, it's because acrimansia makes a ton of GABA, which is known to like help reduce stress. People try to supplement with GABA. I don't know whether it works or not. What happens if you double up? Are you allowed to double up? Oh, we had this funny almost competition going on among our investors. They're like, I take eight a day. Well, one time I took 12 a day and they're like, okay, I hope they don't need that much. But you could have a whole bottle in one day and be fine. I mean, you have to do all these safety studies. Yeah. But I mean more because I'm on an antidepressant. Can I have that and that? We have a lot of people who have actually reduced, okay, here's my caveat with regulatory. Yes. We have not done a clinical trial on this. Yes. But we do have customers who have with the help of their physicians reduced how much drugs they're on through improving their microbiome. So cool. Especially because you're saying you don't get as much fiber and in your diet as you want. There's probably room to supplement and get those strains higher. Yeah. I'm excited. Well, we covered a lot on accident, which is great because when I stopped at one cookie, we kind of covered that. That's the GLP one. Do you think people should not be on GLP ones and focus more on trying to reactivate these microbes? No. I'm not an anti-GLP one. If it's helping you great. Personally, I would be nervous to be on a drug for decades and decades and decades. I would want to be using all the tools in my toolbox. The craving thing, that story that is exactly what people who are on GLP ones say has happened. Yeah. Get the food right. Exactly. Yeah, the food noise and that's a big deal. We're seeing so many collateral outcomes of it that are so beneficial. Even if you were someone losing five pounds, there's also cognition benefits. We've had 30 doctors on here. Everyone's pro GLP one. Every time we do a study, we find out one other benefit from it. Your body is the greatest machine known to man for homeostasis. That's why opioids don't work. It's a uterine. You take opioids. They block your pain receptors. Your body's great. We got to grow more. It's very hard to outsmart the body. Anything you're putting in it, the body has a way of generally adjusting back to the baseline. That's like insulin, which of course is one of the most prevalent diabetes treatments. That is what happens. Your body becomes basically deaf to this signal. Then you have to get more and more and more. I'm definitely not against GLP ones, but all the studies that have been done have been in people type to diabetes. Most of the people who are healthy right now and taking them, they're part of the experiment. We don't really know the long-term repercussions. For you, with your particular profile, what will happen to you? That individual case-by-case basis is getting hammered out literally now. We're going to learn a lot. I'm already anecdotally seeing some friends that have been on it now for four and five years. The dose went up, the dose went up. Now they're capped off and the plattoes ended. I've certainly watched that happen. I go to the hospital. I know a few people that are capped at 15. That's that. They're not going about 15. The rackets returned a bit. This would be a great time for them to be like, okay, what are things I can do to try to stimulate my natural geometry? What else? I do think right now, maybe there's an uphill battle in the, quote, optimization space and even supplements of any kind. I think people are a little fatigued of hearing all these people say, you got to do this, you got to do this, do this. I'm hearing like, I just don't want to hear about any of that right now. That's hard because obviously these things are important, but I also kind of get it that we're being thrown a lot of like, this is how you got to live. You're going to take these 200 pills every day or yeah, and then you have to do sauna for 20 minutes and then you have to eat all protein, but also a ton of veggies. That's what I'm saying. There's like a lot got to do. I think that's right. Look, we are into creating probiotics and trying to help people via that mechanism. But the truth is great nutrition will get you there. I mean, there's certain cases like acrimansi where, look, it would help you to go like 90 days supplementation, but then you don't want to be on our products forever. Like I tell you all the time, do it for 90 days, get the strains in there, and then if you can eat the food that feeds them, you're good to go. And now something else might happen, you have to go on antibiotic, get back on it, but you don't want to take this every day for the rest of your life. Unless you're like, hey, I can't get the food that I need or this is just easier for me. Like, great, but if not, you can do it through nutrition that gets you there. And that's true, a lot of these supplements. And it has the advantage of the bacteria is not going to trigger this thing we were talking about in the body, which is it's just really good at leveling off. It's really good at figuring out a way to not take this medicine intervention or to become immune to it. That's not how it works. You don't have to up your dosage of this or that once it's colonized and functional. You've now got its own ecosystem and you just keep me going, keep it thriving. Okay, what about microbiome as a public health tool? Oh, we talk about population level interventions. And how can we maybe start to attack some of these kind of big public health concerns with microbiome? 88% is the stat that was given to me of people are metabolically unhealthy. Right. So if we're talking specifically about metabolic health, first of all, we don't need anybody to tell us like obesity and diabetes. This is a massive global problem that is not actually getting better even though we have lots of products out there. In fact, like a lot of people, know, GLP ones have been around forever. Yeah. And a lot of endocrinologists continue to prescribe insulin and metformin because those are the things that have been around for a long time. And it wasn't until like regular people realized, hey, wait a minute, that's what made it popular. And so there's a lot of tools out there that people aren't using. And you have to ask the question, what is it about what we're doing now that is keeping that from being able to work? 88% of people are metabolically unhealthy. You might be thin, but you're actually metabolically unhealthy. And then you might be obese and you definitely know that you're metabolically unhealthy. We've had an incredible success in vaccines. We've saved billions of people with that breakthrough. Antibiotics has saved hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. But we've reached a point where what most people are dying from are these four chronic conditions, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer's, these are all metabolic conditions. Yeah. And what we know, and again, you don't need to sign to tell you this, but you know that as you age your ability to metabolize sugars gets worse, right? And your metabolism slows down and everybody's... Hangovers get worse. Hangovers get worse. You get food sensitivities like all of that is happening. So I think fundamentally, the problem is that everyone says you can reverse diabetes and obesity simply by eating well and exercising. Well, it turns out that's not that simple to you while an exercise. And then there's the shame of, well, why can't you control yourself if you could? Like, this is all on you. This is your fault. And I think the microbiome unlock is that even for somebody like Halle Bear, you know they're exercising, they're eating well, and they're regimented about it. Even for them, how could they have a benefit from a microbiome intervention? Because you've just lost these microbes for reasons that we listed earlier. And so the big unlock and the epiphany of the microbiome is that might be a tool. You might be doing all those right things or you might be able to reduce your cravings simply by having the right microbiome and optimizing that. And so if people listen to this and there's just one thing you take away, it's become more aware about your microbiome and try for 90 days. And if you feel a difference, normally it's in food cravings and then sustained energy. Those are two biggest things we hear. Because if you're not on like a sugar spike and crash all day long, you just have sustained energy throughout the day. You don't get the post-lunch slump. You don't get brain fog and some people experience better sleep, but your energy is just better. If you don't experience anything in 90 days, move on like it's something else, but try it. Yeah. Okay. Now selfishly, I want to ask this. I'm one of the few people that's trying to promote Diet Coke. Besides Coke. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. People love to say that Diet Coke destroys the microbiome. Is there any evidence of that? Yeah. This basically gets down to like all of the alternative sugars and what are they doing to the microbiome? Yeah. Yeah. So there are definitely good studies and evidence that those artificial sweeteners change your microbiome. And then that's the end of the sentence. So like, we don't know. Yeah. In every individual, is it better? Is it worse? What does it mean? And your microbiome is evolving? Was that mean for the other things that you're eating? So that's what we know. People love the storyline. Because it's killing you so bad for your like, well, the data has not come out on that yet. How did Halle Berry come to be involved? Yeah. So a lot of people don't know that Halle Berry has diabetes herself and has been able to manage it pretty well. But she can tell the story about like how she came to discover pendulum through the Cleveland Clinic and tried it, which is like pretty crazy. Because she gets pitched stuff all the time, right? And we were like a brand new company at the time. I just can't even believe she'd be like, draw it. So she went on and her A1C went down. And she kind of has said to me like, look, there's a lot of things that can have like a temporary effect. And so I wanted to be on it for a while to like see what happened. And it stayed down. One point, maybe the first year and then two points like this. Yeah, like crazy. Oh my god. But that means nothing to me. How do we measure this? A point is a big deal. A point is a huge, a point could be the turns between having diabetes and not having. It's like a huge number. What happens when you have diabetes is that your body can metabolize glucose. And so you have a bunch of glucose molecules just like in your body. And so what your body does is it basically attaches it to your blood molecules, your HBA, one C are actually blood cells. And it just attaches them to it. And so what we realized is that you can measure how many of your red blood cells have a glucose attached to it. And if it has above a certain percentage, where you have diabetes. And so I can't remember the numbers. They sometimes change. But basically I think like 5% and above, like that's not really great. And it can get all the way you'll see people 12, 14, that's like really bad. But most people I think are sitting in the like 8 to 11 range. So getting down a point is like pretty big deal. Okay. Okay. Great. My dad monitors this constantly because he's pre-diabetic. I'm sending him this. This is really exciting. Yeah. So that's what she experienced. And she was like, okay. So then she said, why I want to know about this company? Like I want to meet the founders says I get a call that says, Halle Berry, like to me. Like, is this my brother? Like, so I get on this call and it's intimidating to be on a call that Halle Berry. She's tough, too. We interviewed her. Yeah. She's a badass. She's so cool. She's not like accidentally this successful. Right? She's super smart. And so she basically said, look, I love this product and what you've built. And it's helped me. And I know it could help a ton of other people. But you don't know anything about building a brand. And I know I'm kind of like good at that. And so I'd love to help you. How can I help you build the brand this company and build awareness around it? It was just such a genuine. I want to help people. And I want to help you help people moment. She became an investor in the company. We gave her like a title of communications officer. She was like first things first is like this packaging is terrible. I was like, it's not that it's just a bottle. Who cares? She's like exactly. Yeah. She's like, this is why you need me. And so she's like, look, it's true. It's what's on the inside of the bottle that counts. But you got to get people to like want to buy it. You can explain 90% of max success, apple success in packaging in packaging. And Steve knew. But I didn't know. And I guess I didn't learn. And so she was like, look, it just matters. And so she came up to San Francisco. We tried all these different packaging. We actually went through multiple iterations. The first one we launched was unsuccessful. It's actually been really cool to get to work with. Hally, she's super entrepreneurial, which I think you have to be to be a successful actor. But she also is really interested in learning and iterating. And so the packaging was an interesting one because we worked so hard on this thing. She was so proud of it. She put all these social media posts out around it. And then we got this feedback that people didn't like it. And it was like hard to open. If you were a guy, it was P3Dish Inspired. It's the exact dimensions of P3Dish, which you're like, that's so cool. And you open it like this. But it turns out if you're a woman, that's no big deal. But if you're like a man choppy hands, they were like spilling it everywhere. They couldn't open it. Oh, they're not. They're like their meaty hands. Yeah, they're like our primary business is retained customers. And so the retention was lower for that. Interesting. So I have to like get on this call with Hally and be like, people don't like it. It's not great for business. It's really different. Like when you put out a movie, you're not like, oh, people don't like it. Let's just take it back and redo it and put it back out again. That's not a thing. And so I was like, okay, so we need to take this off the market and do it again. And she was like, all right, we got to listen to people. We're here to serve people. If they don't like it, let's do it. And I was like, okay. And then we just did a new packaging launch this July. And it's been awesome. Old customers that have been in this for a years. They were like, I was always on your side about like packaging doesn't matter. But actually, it does. I really like this. I have a beer company. We lose money because I want the package to be so great. And I want the can to be so cool when you grab it. And especially for something you're consuming and something they're having a daily interaction with, that feeling that you get is in the packaging, the emotion of it. And so I'm grateful to her for bringing like, what is the brain experience need to feel like alongside, obviously, the product and the science behind it. And so she's been an amazing partner. We've been partners now for like four years. We've known each other. She's awesome. It's so frustrating that you even have to think about that really. Because you're like, the thing works. Can people just forget about this other piece? Eventually they do when they do take it and they like it. But getting people to pick it up off the shelf or go to the website is hard. I'm a regular consumer of a leave because of the auto mean thing. The aforementioned. And they make one bottle with like a rubber top that's red. I love it. I'll spend more. It's the same fucking a leave in the bottle. But I got to reach in and grab it. And I like that experience. And I don't like the other one of pinching the thing. It matters. Well, and probably the most compelling thing is there are other probiotics out there that have beautiful packaging and great marketing and branding. But their ingredients are basically the same as everything else out there. And she's like, you're losing to these competitors. And it's just packaging. And they don't even have the thing. Okay. Yeah. Let's do it. Well, Colleen, I like you. You're fun. I'm so excited. You're from Atlanta. Most people know from Atlanta are really cool. Yeah. One and a half generation. Yeah. I only know one and half generation not white folks from Atlanta. So that's maybe just more a comment on that. Oh, we're going to try it. And we're going to. Yes. Yes. We're the only probiotics coming that the Mayo Clinic has invested in. And they've invested in multiple rounds in us. We are sold through over 30,000 healthcare practitioners. So that's like doctors that are recommending the product. And we just got the number one GI doctor recommended acrimancia brand. But how do you get like those crystal bullet points? It's like still a lot of words. Yeah. You know, when you're a product to be just a bunch of writing all over. Right. Yeah. Yeah. How do you make people feel like this is the cutting edge thing without all those words? That's right. And that's emotional. And it's visual. And it's actually not as intellectuals we think it is. We get a feeling right away. Exactly. And so I will say my biggest weakness is that as a scientist, I'm thinking like, how do you give people to love it? Franely. Like what I just listened to you guys like, oh, that would obviously make you believe. Yes. And so I am actively looking for help from people who are like actually viscerally. And so to the point about clean lines, the new packaging, it feels soft when you touch it. Oh, nice. And it just has the name of the product on the front and all the like words about what's in it. And all of a sudden it's actually on a packaging that you throw out. The bottle itself is really clean and feels good. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to have my dad on it. And I'm going to be reporting back on his life. I'm going to be like, I'll get you guys and asking you to help me. Yeah, I'm so feeling just wanting to put me on it. If I could be blue again, oh, that'd be so cool. I could eat garlic again. You're really missing out on garlic. My life is half as good since I'm quitting garlic. You can't eat garlic right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get it back. Well, it's lovely meeting you. It's such a fascinating topic. I think a lot of people are very interested in this. But again, it's one of these things. Christopher comes out whatever the first MPR thing I heard was like 13 years ago. And I think, oh, my God, overnight, they're going to fix all these genetic disorders. When is it happening that you hear this microbiome? We make all these links. But it's like, when is it going to actually start helping us? But I do know we're on the cusp of all these things. But you can get a little fatiguing. Like, when is it going to happen? When's it going to happen? And actually, one thing that doesn't happen can set the whole industry back. Christopher is a good example that like gene therapy was really hot. There was like one adverse event and then everyone's went ice cold on it. And then it comes back in the form of CRISPR. So these things happen. It takes a long time to change our biology as it turns out. That's why I think for us, it was so exciting to have this intervention that can lower A1C and lower blood glucose spikes as well as essentially a pharmaceutical. But it's this microbiome intervention. And one huge difference between our company and all the other companies that have been going after it with discovery platforms and doing real science. I don't want to like bash anybody. But most of the consumer products aren't actually doing real science and investing in that. And almost every one of the microbiome companies that's investing in science is doing a drug path. We are like the weirdos. We're the ones who've done all the science, but are bringing it to consumers. And so that ability to have a new microbiome intervention is the first and only probiotic that can help with diabetes. That's so cool. I'm super excited for you guys to try. Well, thanks for coming. This is great. Yeah, thank you guys. Yeah, I'm pleasure. Yeah, great to meet you. Good luck with everything. Thank you. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Hi there. This is Hermian Hermian. You like that. You're going to love the fact that Miss Monica. Hi. Hello. We're recovering. I think we need to be honest about the fact that we're recovering from a story we just heard. Oh, yeah. We heard this is a hard claim to make, but top three most bonkers stories we've ever heard on armchair anonymous. Yeah. It's on the first responders episode. And it is really something. It's disturbing. It was disturbing. It was on saddling. Yeah. And it was also great. I feel very privileged to have heard such an insane story. I'm very nervous that the protagonist in the story is going to like show up at my door. Okay, not the person who told us the story, but the who it's about. Yeah, the main character. And appear at my window. Holding his, um, speaking of body parts, I guess, or being exposed. I'm going through someone popping out. Okay, pop out. Uh-huh. We forgot to put a door on my, where I potty. Your toilet. My toilet room. My water closet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was in the plan for the beginning. It just, it somehow, it got missed. These things happen. They happen. And it is so interesting because at my apartment, I would in the night or whenever I would like pee and stuff. I never closed the door. Right. Of course not. Now when I'm in there, I feel so exposed. But do you think that's because you know there are lots of people working in your house still? No, it's like in the night. I feel very vulnerable. I don't use mine. I have a little door on my toilet area. Uh-huh. Unless the kids forever were like, I don't know how they're impervious to whatever. They come in and chat with me. And I'm like, I can't believe they're not commenting on the smell. Right. But they've reached the age where now they come in and they're like, oh, and I'm like, I don't want to be shamed every morning. Yeah. Um, but if they weren't in the mix, I would never shut that door. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have expected to really need one, but I do. Now you do. Yeah. And I don't, I don't like that. Now when you go in the middle of the night, are you suggesting that when you have a door, you will close the door behind you when you go pee in the middle of the night? I won't. But I definitely will in the morning. You will. Yes. For your putty time. Um, that's generally what you're doing in the morning. I do have a, I have, I'm very regular. Yeah. Um, but you'll want to close it. Even when you're in the house by yourself. Yes. Even when there's a number two, I want to close you want to contain that. Even about that. It's, it's, it's about feeling like very vulnerable. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So I guess I'll report back once the door is there. I mean, it's also such a ding ding ding, because we didn't have a door upstairs for so long. And it was, it's a blessing. It's a big part of our, our history and our lore, our origin, our origin stories. So it was like very sim. Uh-huh. But no one was going duty in there. No. I want to transition to something not kid friendly. Okay. So if you're a kid to turn off, yeah. Now this is a weird question. Okay. But, but I was wondering, I mean, maybe you're not allowed to answer this, but I'm in a new era, which is a very unexpected, didn't, I didn't expect to be in this era. What do you mean? Well, I feel like for eight years, I've been seeing whatever I wanted and no one gave a shit. And like recently in the last three or four months, it's like a lot of stuff I say ends up as a news thing. And I got to say, it has, it's bothered me. But it's, yeah, that's fair. I'm just like, do I want the headache? Like, if you asked me if I went my, but with my hand, it's like normally I would have asked answered that. Now I'm like, I can't bear to know you have to. Okay. No, also because the real controversies are cut. So like what it shows me is just they're going to find something. Yeah. Yeah. That's dumb and nothing. So you might as well just say. What a rip. Yeah. Let me know. Okay. I don't know if that's great advice, but let's continue. This is a masturbating question. Oh, okay. Okay. Now, do you ever like, I've never masturbated. That's what it says. He's never masturbated. Yeah. That would be a somehow that would be bad too. Okay. All right. A masturbation question. Now, have you ever been just like, okay, I'm in a masturbate now. I mean, I know you have both that you have. And is it, has it ever been random? And then like you realize your environment isn't okay. I'm gonna need to ask more specific. It also feels like you're telling us a little bit about what's happened in your new house, but you're gonna pretend like you're not. That it's our story. Like what if you guys ever have you guys ever have your new house and you decide you want to masturbate there, but then you feel a lot of sorts there. Yeah. No, that's not it. Um, sometimes I get the the desire at random. It has nothing to do with like, you can see what I'm watching. Exactly. What I'm watching. What I'm thinking about. It's just like, oh, like you feel the surge of lever and orphans tell you that's right. Yeah. So I guess I'll just say the deeds. So I was I was in my house. And I had the TV on. Uh huh. Kind of in the background. It was just sort of on. Yeah. And I was like on my computer and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, hmm, okay, it's time. Uh huh. So I get my friends. Yeah. I got my friends down. Uh huh. And um, in the middle, I realized that the TV was still on. And what was on was nobody wants this. Oh, wow. Okay. And I all of a sudden I felt really we, this whole this whole episode is me being exposed. I didn't feel exposed. I felt like, oh no, no, oh no. Like, bone kill. We would call it. Well, no, it didn't like stop my, it was just like something. This is bad. It felt like this is like your mom was watching. Not that she was watching, but like, but I shouldn't be doing this while she's on my TV. Yeah, while your friends watching, but not what it was not about her watching. It's more like getting caught and then be done the TV. No, it's more just like, it's not comfortable. It's sharing this space. Like, okay, like if you were and you look over and you had a frame picture of your mom, right? Exactly. You're like, oh no, like I don't know or a video of her just go. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. So yeah. So it's not, so it was like, oh, so you do turn off the, yeah, turn the TV off. And I wondered if you'd ever had any experiences. Where is all of a sudden felt very weird and awkward. Yeah, like, oh, this is not appropriate. Well, all of my early teenage years, you felt, I felt a lot of that. Like, oh my god, I'm in my house or I'm, you know, like I feel like I should be in a field somewhere where you know, like I, yeah, the notion that my mom would know or something terrible. My family, right. And I felt bad. Like I felt lascivious for doing it. Yeah. Which again, I can't explain because I had a very sex positive mother. I wasn't religious. I don't know. I think I sensed a little bit of like, I don't have control. Maybe that's the thing that was scary me. Like, oh, I have to do this. I think it might be my first feelings of powerlessness that I learned to embrace, obviously, throughout my addictive life. But I definitely think I was a little bit like, oh, I think I had this inkling like, I can't stop this if I want to because I, as I told you, I did try to stop at times. I have these crazy compromises. What do you mean? I was allowed to do it for a bit, but not all the way. Oh, you want to let this agonizing. Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird thing. That was because also that's what the deal with. Yeah. I guess that's the bad part. And that's when the guilt would set in post that. What was the guilt? Was the guilt like, like I was just a bad or perverted. Poverty. Yeah. Again, I didn't have a dad that was like, son, you're going to start cuffing your carrot. And that's fine. You know, maybe that's what I was missing. He would have been happy to tell me that. Yeah. Yeah. There is something about like, oh, I'm perverted. But she is just normal. It's not perverted. Of course. It's completely normal. That's what I'm saying. That's the dissonance for me. I don't know why I had a hang up about it. I shouldn't have. I had the perfect, probably, situation to not have any guilt about it, but I still did. Yeah. So it's just human. I think it's like the, like that, that original sin feeling. Like we have all this like, there's something curious that goes on with us. Do you think maybe men have a like guilt about? Well, obviously it's like societal and stuff. But maybe it's also biological. Maybe it's like you wasted one. Oh, wow. Like evolution. Yeah. Because like women, obviously that comes more like then you're like dirty. I might have had a little bit of like gay hurdle. Oh, yeah. But that's weird. Like I'm playing with appenas. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And at the beginning of my experience, my journey, yeah, I wasn't even like I wasn't fantasizing about a girl. I hadn't done any of that. No, it was just a sensation of it. Yeah. Yeah. Which I don't know if that. Oh, do I? Rodic. I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense that I had issues, but I did. Yeah. You never forget. Do you remember exactly the first time you did it? Because I know. Yeah. Yeah. I do. No. Same Rob. Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. Yeah. Where's a little monkeys? You know, just a little monkeys. Yeah. And if you go to the zoo, you'll see those monkeys are not shy about. No, and at least we don't throw poop everywhere. That's one thing we don't have to feel guilty about. Okay. Well, I'm not going to get that off my chest. Yeah. You know what? I also think it's curious. Now that we're talking about it. Yeah. You went upstairs to get your stuff and then came back downstairs. I did. That's curious to me. Why not just want your upstairs? That's not the environment I wanted. Okay. Okay. Interesting. You were just like, I got it. It wasn't like, I know. I know. I know. I'm just thinking, I'm such an efficiency expert. Yeah. I'd be like, I'm going to have to now go back upstairs again to return this stuff. I know. I'm just here. I know. But it wasn't about that. It was like, about the room. Yeah. I just, I want, I wanted an experience, not the experience I got, unfortunately. But yeah, we're really weird to hear. I would love if this manipulated in your mind and all of a sudden you had to have it on. That would be like that would be an interesting update. Oh my God. How would I tell her? I would have to tell her. If anyone would be fine with it, I think she would, she'd be fine with that. Yeah. But then like, I'd be flattering. I have thing. God. And then when I saw her, I'd be like, yeah, you'd be very good. This is like when you have a dream about someone you don't want. Like you're waking hours, you have no feelings about, but then you have a very romantic dream about them. And then when you see them, you're a little confused. Oh, if you have that, normally, normally, normally the people in my dreams were pre-existing. Oh, yeah. Are people I already like think are very hot? Right. No one's snuck in. God, that's a good question. I've had a few sneakins. And then I'm trying to like, there's dissonance. Now I'm with this person. There's not a spark and it's so confusing. They were just standing in for something else. They represented something, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the case. And then do you ever like kiss them on the cheek to see like how? Just to test the water. See how you go. Oh, yeah. No, I've been friends with her for 20 years. Oh, that's okay. Also, I sent, I've been sending you some videos on Instagram. Oh, this is a great conversation to have. Yes. I've been sending you some videos on Instagram that I love so much. Yeah. And you think they're AI. So this is a very good conversation. I bet I imagine a lot of people are in this situation. Which it, hold on, you have something right? I know. Oh, my God. The whole time. Only once in a while when you turn all the way this way, which we shoot the say your face anyways. But yeah, is it done? Yeah. It was a burrito. No, it was like a white flock. It was dandruff. No, I don't think it was dandruff. Okay. I think I'm pretty good at detecting AI. I could be wrong. Okay. That's what I think. Yeah. And I'm regularly, I don't know whether I should tell the person who sent me the video that I think I'd say. It literally happened on our 10 minute break between record. Oh, my friend guy who sends me the greatest videos. He sent a video of two moose fighting next to a car and they were damaging the car. Okay. I'm giving away for me is the dialogue and the voices. They have a very distinct pattern. And if you listen closely, they don't talk like humans talk. They're like, oh, God. Why is he ruined the car? Oh, this sucks. Oh, hell, get out of here. Like it's too, the thoughts come too fast. That's the giveaway to me is the audio generally because you can hardly tell now the visuals. They're so fucking good. Yeah. I wonder. It is the reactions of the bystanders that I don't think AI does very well. Well, that's interesting though because the types of videos that I love and I'm sending are they're very reactive, but that's the point of them. Yeah. So the ones you've been sending, what started was these murals on the ground that people, and we've seen them. They're very deceptive. The 3D murals and it looks like the floor has dropped out from these people. There's a ladder. These people walk by on their phone and you can even hear like, hey, like there's this weird audio stuff going on even before the people fall. Okay. And then they fall. And then I also question whether or not because it only looks that way when you're standing at our vantage point, when you're on top of it, it doesn't look that way. We stood on top of that thing at Disneyland to take the picture where it looks like we're getting sucked down into a world pool. But as you know, when we're standing on it, it doesn't look like that at all. It only looks that way from the vantage point of the camera. So I also don't believe anyone on top of it. It would look like the thing we're seeing. I don't think that's the physics of it. So I don't even think it would happen. I mean, be just really listening to the bystanders the way they're reacting and stuff. But before you even play it, what do you think the ethics for me are just let people have enjoy their thing or do you think I should point out? I'm on the fence. A lot of them, like I let three years go before I said anything if you recall. I was like, she's enjoying this a lot. We're not sure. And so and it's like, oh, you just sit in your house thinking like, oh, she doesn't get it. Like I don't want you to have not you anyone feeling like that. Well, I don't think anyone's I don't go like, oh, they're so stupid. I just worry. I guess I want people to know what. Okay, I found it. I found one. Okay. Okay. No, they're falling. That part. That's the way he just said that. That's not a real life. See, it's too quick. He has a start to wait two together and he's just rapid fire. Like, they I know. There'd be a lot longer period of confusion and he there'd be a what the fuck? Well, he's like, what the fuck? Why'd you put this all here? It's too fast. I don't know if you're I mean, maybe, maybe I just feel like if if you're reacting and panic, things do come out fast. I think that's too fast for me. Okay. I mean, they also might have spent also like you're embarrassed. Most people are like 99% embarrassed. But they go straight to like outrage and anger. And I think that's a little too of them. So I actually that was part of why I thought it was real. Okay. Because some people were mad, but others were like, you could see our embarrassed or some are laughing. The visuals are outstanding. I don't think you could detect those visuals other than I don't think it when you're on top of it, you would see anything. That I don't know that yeah. But you stood on that thing and it didn't look like we were going to a whole. I just don't remember. You don't remember. Also, I knew what we were doing. Like, I think part of it is they're catching these people off guard because they're not just the illusion of it though. Is there making the front really obscured and wide? But when you're on top of it, you don't get the illusion. Yeah. You can't get the illusion. It has to be viewed from. Yeah. You can. Now, do you think this baby holding the knife is AI? Yep. I think those are AI. But that's not okay. That sounds like it sounds like obviously a baby holding a knife is air. But the it's a prank. Yeah. The concept is it's a prank. Yes. And also so many people know this prank. There's like 12 clips. Oh, yeah. I mean, but that's like their trend. They're like tick-tock trends where people are pranking their parents and so. And they all got the same fake knife. Oh, Jesus. What the hell? Yeah, that sounds so fake to me. That's what you think. Yeah. Yeah. That's really funny. I don't think that sounds fake. Yeah. Okay. But my favorite ones are when the wives are tricking the husbands or the boyfriends. And a lot of them, they just act scared. Like the woman act scared to see what will happen with the man. Okay. And there's so many different reactions. It'd be one thing if there was if they were all the same. Okay. People should weigh in. Yeah. I'm sure they know what I'm taught. I'm sure they know what video. Yeah. I'm sure people are getting sent videos all the time. Yeah. And I've been thinking so much about it because it's like I still enjoy watching them. Yeah. And also they're not as good as if it really happened. So yeah, it's just such a weird space in your head. You're like, yeah, because they still want to see these. But I do prefer when it's obvious just because they get the physics so right. I'm just blown away with how good the AI is at. And then now, which is a bummer, like I watched a alligator and a commoto dragon fighting. And that one looks so real. Oh my god, you could not was like moving all exactly the same. And but I'm like, yeah, those two animals don't interact. And then I watched one the other day. And I was really sad because at first, I was like, it's a it's a badger in a bearer, a pretty good size bear. Okay. And they're getting at it. And then a second bear arrives and actually bites the badger. But the badger bites its tongue from inside of its mouth and the bear freaks out. Okay. It's so real looking at the end of it. I'm like, I don't know if that happened or not. That is something a badger could do. And would they're so tenacious. They just keep biting. They don't care if they're getting attacked. I've seen National Geographic them fight back to leopards and stuff. So I'm like, it could definitely happen. But I don't know. Someone caught this on video. Well, that part is a little and they were standing this close to two bears fighting a badger. They would a ram. There's two big bears on the scene. I don't think is real. These that I have could be filmed because the whole point is prank. The whole point is to catch them. And ours are the ones that are getting sent to me are all like, you know, like you happen to be standing there and they're good at making it look chaotic. But you do the math and you're like, yeah, those two animals don't live in the same hemisphere. Right. Also, years are so animal based and animal fight. I feel like that raccoon biting is because we talked about with winner. We had a whole conversation with the winner about your riddle. And I think your phone we said grab the tongue. We were talking about the tongue. Yeah. I think it hurt it and sent you that. Oh, well, it nailed it because I was quite interested. I had a new idea too. I hope these are real. But now I'm wondering if they're a I mean, I talked about them. Aaron, I got obsessed with them as during Halloween as all these ring camera of people of skeletons on their porch that are motion activated. Right. And then they have some candy up. Yeah. And like one is a moose. This moose like comes up on the yard and it's like sniffing around. It's going towards the can a moose. It's like in Alaska. Oh, and then it gets up to the bowl of candy and the skeleton wakes up in the fucking moose losing. Yes, you feel so bad for the moose. But it's happened to bear. There's a bunch of ring cameras. And so it's totally plausible because these animals do come up in interface with your porch. There's plenty of them. What's funny though is when you're saying it, it's like obviously it's a it's funny when it's not your thing. Yeah. And when you're not incentivized for it to be real. Yeah. And I'm not seeing it visually. This one was so real with the bear that I said to myself, oh, the move isn't stand tall. Barmbig. It's definitely not to run. Right. My new move I think is I'm going to sit dead still and let it get super close. And then when it's about a foot away, I'm going to go, because I think any animal for free. It's horrible. No, I think it would work. They pee themselves and fall back. Don't use an AI video as its structure. See, this is why it's scary. You could be making life choices. Yeah. A.I. model. Yeah. I think it is probably right though. Because nothing could be scarier than your inching closer to something. It's completely seems unanimated and not anything. And then I mean, a second, it's a pop out. No, it's all animals have a pop out. I think their reflexes just to eat it immediately. I think they back up and freak out. Okay. Oh, TBD. Oh, but you know, they run you with Grizzly and I, but I do think that's my new preferred technique. God. Okay. Well, anyway, I guess people should weigh in on if they think any of these things are real AI, but now I'm starting to think they are. And I want to know whether people think you should just let people have their fun or if you should tell them. I think you're allowed to tell people you think it's AI. Okay. I mean, it does like it, I was like, oh, it's a Debbie down. It is. It's a Yuck my Yom. I'm not someone generally who thinks it's okay to like, be fooled. Yeah. Or like, let lie or like let people believe something that's not true. Even if it like makes them happy, except religion. Yeah. I think you have no business. I don't. Yeah. I mean, me. I don't have any business trying to poke holes in Noah's Ark. I think religion is so much more complicated than that. Like people who believe not everyone who believes believes in all the details and what they're believing in is not exactly not something I can, I can refute. I don't know. Yeah. So, but we know the whole world is probably not populated by two people just giving the gene. I'm saying, I'm saying that a lot of those stories in the Bible, depending on what you believe, but I do think a lot of people believe them as allegory. Like, and then I'm not to tell them, um, hey, I went to the book because they're like, I know, but I believe in blah, blah, blah, blah, exactly. And great. I also don't want anyone to tell me how to believe. You're right. So, I'm not going to tell them. But when it comes to being tricked visually, I think we need to be told because I think we need to be more aware. Like, there are tricks, there are tricks out there. Well, this is what Adam was talking about. You have to consider who sent this, who created this, who has the incentive for what? I know. Let's just say, I go to this guy's page and I'm low and behold, this guy has witnessed many animals. Right. Well, okay, this is an account that's trying to get views and likes by creating this thing. If the guy has a completely normal life and he has this one video of an animal acting crazy, that's pretty reputable. And he's been on here forever. Yeah, but I bet that page where it came from is like a bunch of those types of videos, but they're not saying like, it's me. Right. But I'm saying if you can track it back, which is what he's saying. Yeah. He wants to be easy to do to find the source of it. And you go to the source of it and they have many videos. Yes. Then it's quite obvious at that point. Either this is the luckiest person in the world. Yeah. Or they've created these with AI. Yes. And I think you should be able to easily follow that path. I agree. Back to what I was saying about feeling like, that is generally how I feel. Like truth is the most important thing. But the end of Beth's dead. I had a different takeaway, and which we talked a lot about on that show and on the little extra episodes we did. Like I really did make me question, does the truth matter if there's peace? Right. I think before you're evaluating anything in life, you have to first establish what is the goal? Yeah, exactly. Is the goal full knowledge of what happened on an anatomical or atomic level? Yeah. Or is the goal piece? Is it contentment? Is it laughter? Understanding and love? Is it connection? And I think the only imperative is that you are pursuing your goal in a way that you can meet it. Yeah. I don't think it's especially as I get older. I know it's like a big pop culture thing to go like, well, they live in a different reality. It's like, yeah, and you live in a different reality. It's not that other people live in a different reality. You're in reality. That's not the case. You're in a different reality than everyone else. And you're certain yours is the most objective. And it's not. And you have to have a lot of humility, I think. And I think the time where it's like, okay, for you to point out is like, well, is this lie going to impact me negatively? Then I want to advocate for myself. And so you know, this is x, y and z because you don't, you want to protect yourself. But if it has zero, like, that's where I'm at with this is like, it has zero impact on me. Whether someone believes this AI video or not. Well, but it's just a slippery slope of everyone's believing things that are true. Like it is slippery for the whole world. It is. But I also agree. And this does suck. I don't want to see those anymore if they're made up. Like they don't make it. That doesn't make me laugh as an AI video. Right. That's only interesting if that is the way humans are behaving. I wonder how the news like what filter are they using? How are they determining at this point when they get sent video? What is there? Now, I'd be very curious. I should ask my father in law. They must have to do an interview with the person. They must have to see the person. That created the video. Yeah. And it better be the same person that's in the video. This is what Adam was talking about. It's like we got to be able to check the reputation of the source. Exactly. For people who don't know what we're talking about, I guess we'll spoil that next week is Adam Mosari. Yeah. CEO of Instagram. And returning. Yeah, returning, I guess it's interesting. Speaking of, let's go ahead and do some facts. Okay. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. Micro biome, Colleen cut cliff. We've been easter egging the shit out of the stuff. So because we have already consumed these probiotics. Yeah. And you just ate bread. Yeah, I have a few times now. And I haven't had any issues. I'm scared to be too optimistic. But yeah, and I have no, it's not my plan to go back to eating it. Right. But I do love the idea that occasionally I can without issue. Yeah. And again, I'm not endorsing anything. I'm just giving my own personal experience. I don't want anyone to buy or not buy anything. But not a medical professional. I also got my mom on it. You know, I sent her and I just talked to her weirdly before I walked in. And she's like on day eight. And I'm like, have you noticed anything? And she's like, in the moment, she's like, yeah, actually, yeah, my hip or I've really bad arthritis has not been hurting. Interesting. It still hurts a little bit, but it went from like 80 to 15. Okay. And I was like, girl, and that's only day eight. And it's supposed to take a while to completely recolonize. Anyways, I am like very optimistic. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. And then I have my dad on the GLP one one. And they sent it to us. And we were going to try it. We haven't tried it yet. Why not? Because they're refrigerated. And it's in my fridge. And I always have to bring stuff over. I was hard of me to remember. I know. Do you try post it, Trevor? You could come get it. I could. I won't. I won't. I won't. I won't. And it'll be easy. Yeah, I will only have to walk across street quite soon. That's right. So I didn't take my shot yesterday. Uh-huh. And I think I'm going to try this instead. Yeah. Give it a whirl. I won't try it. I wish you could have seen my daddy just once. It was in. Probably like Jess. Yeah. Yeah. But the way I know I've told you, but he would make a frozen pizza. But that was simply the base of what the meal was going to be. There would be chicken wings on it in salsa. Yeah. It was insane. The amount of meals on top of this pizza. I know. There's that's a type of person. That's just he would in the air fire. You'd be shook. Like it's like pan-chette noodles, mustard, uh, turkey slice, like it's not. It's nuts. The creativity's off the charts. Combining ingredients and no one think of it. It's not. It's not. No, it's not creativity. That's like saying this is an art piece when you're just throwing shit. Yeah. I mean, I guess a critical assessment would be like they can't even decide which like they they're like 20 things sound good to them. Yeah. No, like great. I'll have all 21. They don't taste. They must not have taste buds like because that must taste so disgusting. Any who? No, no, they're like super tasers or it's like no, they can actually enjoy each individual taste. Like maybe they ratchet through like, oh yeah, there's the salsa. There's the chicken wings. There's the chicken chow mein. There's the pit pepperoni from the pizza. But yeah, I would look at this thing and be like, how does that taste like anything? Yeah. It's me at more of it's like when you put too many colors together, you get what? Yeah, exactly. You're just going to get black. Brownish. Yeah. But but a good someone who has a good palette, can taste the depth of flavor. Like you are supposed to layer flavors. Flavors that go together, salt that acid. Flavor profiles. Exactly. But not pan-chette noodles, lettuce. Two cans of. Yeah, I know. No. Two-pound rope rows. Two-can cheese soup. Anyway, so this was, yeah, this was good for us and we're giving it a whirl. And the product aside, I've been having so much fun talking to everybody about the amount of things that the gut is in charge of. I know. Yeah. So much going on in here. There's a lot of going on in there. Not happening. Okay. Especially in Mike's, we just ate some Philly cheese today. I only had half and you only had two, but I want my other half. Yeah, I might put a burrito on top of it and some some kung-pang chicken and some burritos and some. That's what he would do. And like sprinkle cheese on top of the whole thing. It's mother-of-the-old cheese. That's one of the greatest, uh, SNL fake commercials of all time. Remember that? The pizza one. Oh. Ultimately, it comes in a bag and you put like a gallon of sauce all over it. Yeah. It's a taco, isn't it like a taco bell spoof? Yeah. I think it is. Or pizza, one of the two. Taco town? Taco town. Yes. Okay. You said that there's a taco. That's what it sounds perverse. Taco town? Yeah, like let's go to Taco town. It's a vagina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. It's a dina. Veridays? Could it be another? The fact that you're seeing it the way you say it is interesting. I say palos Veridays. You say palos. Palos. And you're saying palos. You're saying palos. How do you say it, Rob? I don't say it. Palos Veridays. You try saying it. Palos. Palos, that's what I said, right? Palos Veridays. Palos Veridays, yeah. That's how I would say it. I think you're saying it like that just with your accent. Hey, come on. I'm in the middle of a fact check and I'm trying to remember the name of that community your parents lived in at palos Veridays. TBD on that because I'm not getting any info from the internet. Well, no, I'm just going to ask chat. I'm going to be specific. I saw a 60 minute segment about a retirement community in palos Veridays where they study aging period. Do you know which community that was? Laguna Woods. Laguna Woods, okay. The story center done long running research project known as the 90 plus study yet out of University of California Irvine, which follows residents from that community who have lived into their 90s and beyond to learn what factors contribute to longevity. Originally, the residents had filled out lifestyle questionnaires decades earlier when the oh, when the community was known as leisure world. Yes, that's what it used out. So it was originally called as leisure world. Okay. That's why you weren't able to find it probably currently. A large, active senior retirement community. So the place you saw at Laguna Woods retirement community, formerly leisure wood in Southern California. Let's see if leisure wood was in palos Veridays. Yeah, that's the big question. Oh, he is with Rowling Hills estates. Who's his? My friend Jeff. Oh, his parents live there. Leisure world. Um, Rowling Hills is a city. So it might just be leisure world is in seal beach, California. Oh, not palos Veridays. Okay. Well, maybe I've conflated where Jeff's folks lived. Seal beach, orange county. Okay. So that exists, but not in palos Veridays or in palos Verdees, Rancho palos Verdees, palos Verdees. They are 28 miles apart. So I'm correct. No, you're correct. Yeah, you're correct. Thank you. Monica, you're right. Thank you. Also, they're 28 miles apart. That's long, in my opinion. It is. If you're like picking regions of the country, palos Verdees is specific. Yeah, it's 28 miles up the ocean front from from seal beach. Yep. Different places. Yes, yes. It just makes it. I'm saying it was a mistake and also is very, very close. It makes total sense that when I was Googling it, that's not coming up because it's not there. That's true. That's a hundred percent true. Okay. Now, a huge fact that I have to say is that the beginning of this episode, my hair is messed up. Okay. And it's like, there's a bears on my forehead in the middle of my forehead. Okay. And that was just an accident. Did you fix it mid interview? I did. Thank God. Okay. Without Rob's help of saying cucumber or whatever you were supposed to say. Did your preference be people, listen on audio to the first third of the episode and then watch the remaining. Yes. I want you to skip the beginning where my hair is clearly messed up. Okay. First generation. Okay. Generally refers to a person born in the US to immigrant parents, meaning their parents were born in another country. While the US Census Bureau defines the first generation as foreign-born individuals themselves, this term can be confusing because some people like children of immigrants, second generation by census, often identify as first generation because they are the first in their field made to go up with dual cultural experiences, bridging their parents heritage in American culture. So I'm still one and a half. Okay. I, I feel like it's one to one. I think I lost the first one and I think. This one is more muddy. This is like, like children of immigrant, children of immigrants, second generation by census. That's me. I understand that sentence to mean that the US Census is defining it one way, but that no one defines it that way other than the census. If the census is defining it that way, I define it that way. Okay. We know that motto. Okay. What does it I do? Okay. Because you're in lockstep with all the governments. Declaration. Just the census. Okay. Just this one thing. Yeah. But I mean, I just, what is logic tell you? How could someone who moves here at 50 years old be the first generation? Yeah. First gen to step foot in this country. But their whole generation was spent in another place. Well, also that's not my situation. My mom's life was spent in America. I understand that. That's why I wanted that. I understand that. But she moved here from another country. She wasn't born here. I know. So I'm saying when you step foot, right? And you're saying, no, it can't be that because they grew up. Well, what I'm saying is the term generation refers to a segment of time from which people were born. So gen X, you're born between set, you know, whatever it is, 68 and 80. That's a generation. Well, if that, if you weren't here for that generation, the definition of the generation is you were born between this time and this time. But during this time and that time, you weren't in another country. How on earth could you call that being a part of that generation? But if you're growing up in that generation in America, yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're focusing the whole thing on your mother's singular experience, right? Yeah. So she's the most extreme in this example, I would say. So sure, even if we look at her, I would love to look at what generation she's a part of, which would probably be the baby boom generation. Yes, she is. And I guarantee that the baby boom generation ended within a couple years after she was born. So what I'm saying is she was in India when the end of that quote generation we're looking at existed as a defined generation. So she couldn't have been an American part of that American generation when it ended before she even got here. Now there's another generation that has followed it. But when you're born here, you are intrinsically in that generation. Why though? Because you didn't miss the window. Like your mother can't, could have come here. Let's say you were born, you're what? You're millennial. And you didn't come here until we were now in the generation of Gen Z. But was I six years old? When Gen Z started. Right. I don't know. That's why it's so murky that obviously what's much more clean and would make what would apply to everybody. Like for us to have a definition that would include your mother, but exclude your father, we can't even come up with that definition. Well, that's what I said I'm one and a half. If we say when you're born here, that is officially the first generation. There's really no way that that can't be defined or measured or it's saying or according to the census, the first generation, it says you were born in China and moved to the US. Yeah. I have no beef with, I am no argument against what the census defined it as. I asked you what logically makes sense to you to me that makes sense. Like to me, it makes sense. Like I'm not thinking of it at all in the way you're thinking of it as like millennia. Like the way we break down generations here as groups. To me, it's like this is almost a different definition. It's like the first generation of kids or second generation or people, the first generation of people to hit this land, second generation. Maybe we should start with defining the word generation. All of the people born and living at about the same time regarded collectively. So that's kind of my argument, right? It's like they weren't here at that time with this collective group of people considered that generation. Right. But if you look at immigrant generations, that's like a different, that's its own Wikipedia. In sociology, people who permanently resettle to a new country are considered immigrants, regardless of the legal status of their citizenship or residency, the census uses the term generational status. That's what it, it's not talking about age and stuff. It's its own thing within immigration. I want to make another point, but I think we're getting heated over something that doesn't matter. I'm saying, my question was just like, do we agree on the definition and the dictionary of generation? No. And you're on a Wikipedia page versus the dictionary of what the word generation can't you see that this, this, this iteration of immigrant generations is different from that generally. That definition of generations, which is about age and growing up in a cohort or a group. This is how when you move here from another country, they define you. Yes, that's the census. I've already submitted, surrendered, conceded to how the census bureau is doing it. Okay. So I don't, so that's not. But it's about, my point is that immigration status is different than this. Like it's what you're called. Yeah, you're right. The census has defined it that way. Yep. No argument for me. That is what the census defined it by. I'm talking about everyone not in the census in the real world that talks about the generation, my generation blank generation, this dictionary generation. So we all have a very clear understanding of what our generation is. And so the only one we know is first from soup to nuts in that generation is the first one that was born here because they are in this collective. For me, I don't have any, I don't know why the census does it the way they do it, but I'm just saying why it said generally people think of first generation except for the census. And why I think it is kind of intuitively makes sense is that you're born into this actual American generation. You can't really, I'm arguing you can't really join midway through. But that's like, what if it went the reverse? What if it was, if it was Americans going to India? That's first generation, second generation too. And that's not going by our, like we don't, Indians don't have that. I would not think if I moved to India tomorrow that I'm first generation Indian at all. But if I had a child with a 30 year old woman when I got there, I would think that child was the first Indian generation. Maybe Indian always had been always will be. Yeah. All right. Well, okay, she went to West Minster, which is a private school in Atlanta. It is a very fancy school. And I was impressed by that. Animals that eat poop. Yes. I know. Because many animals eat poop, poop, a behavior called copravogy. Copravogy. Copravogy. Copravogy. Copravogy. To gain essential gut bacteria for digestion, like baby quals, elephants, pandas, re-injust loss nutrients, rabbits, rodents, get vitamins, guinea pigs, or due to instinct hunger, dogs, and beetles, making it a common survival strategy for various species from insects to mammals. I wonder how many calories are still in the poop. Right. Good question. I don't know. Birds do it. Salamanders do it. Hamsters. Lemurs, monkeys, chimpanzees, wolves. These are all very regal beasts. No, I didn't see any. I'm going to ask of tigers, do. A bit not because they're solitary. Oh, do tigers eat animal poop? Do they corpore for a minute? Do not typically eat animal poop as part of their regular diet because they're so regal. They're strict carnivores that consume meat. Oh, it says tigers may consume their cubs feces to remove scent and protect them from predators. Oh, good mom. That's good mom. They're rare documented cases of tigers eating elephant dying, likely for nutrient absorption or due to specific gut needs. I guess they do. But that's like if people have people at Pika and they eat paper, that's what that is. I saw an episode of that show and the gal was eating her, the ashes of her mother or father. No. Yeah. And she was like panic. She was going to run out of the ashes. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. It was like one of these A and E, like strange obsession type shows. There was a guy that was in love with his car and he would hump the hood of his car. Yes, it was on TV and it was treated so serious. Yeah. It's like academically almost. Oh, my God. Yeah. And he would like wash it and he'd get a rouse as he was washing it and he would start pumping it. And ejaculate on it. Clearly, I mean, clearly. I love you hump the person you love. Well, you might ejaculate on the ground. I think in his pants. Oh, God. Who knows what he's doing when the sun went down? Oh, when the cameras were on. Yeah. Yeah. God. I was like, why does he fuck the muffler? Right. That's at least all the way. But he didn't need to. No, I think he was most attracted to like the hood and the bumper. Yeah. The face. The face. It's more to the face than the body. Wow. He wasn't an ass man. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Now, were they called water wienies? To you, yes. They were called water wienies in your house. No, on the shelf at DNC dime store in Michigan. Okay. Water snake is the like, you know, there's water snakes. There's water wigglies. I can't trust you anymore. I mean, I if you type water wienies super water wienie and Amazon is called a super squirt. And it looks like this. Yeah. That's something water wienie. If you type water wienie. It says water snakes or water wienies. If water wienies are toable boat tubes, there are water wienies. And thank you. I'm not saying they didn't have different names. I'm saying I didn't make up the name water. We need the kind I bought we're called water wienies. I didn't like make up the name as well. So you think it was the brand? Yes. Yes. Original water wienie is the super squirt. So that's not it. Water snake wigglies. Maybe they were called that machine. Yeah. That's a squirt gun. That's not the thing. That's the original water wienie on Instagram. They have an Instagram that I looked up. Feel free to get a squirt gun from original water wienie. And enjoy your time. God, remember of water fights in the neighborhood? Did you guys do those? Have like squirt guns and water balloons and have water fights? That was a bit advanced. Two PG for my neighborhood. Oh. Snowball fights. You know, you weren't hurt. Sure. The squirt gun is not super. Yeah, it's a little, I think I was seen as a baby, baby business. Oh my God. Even when you were like seven, you were a baby. But my coat, my, my peer was 12. Right. Okay. You know, I didn't get to like, I didn't do the Star Wars toys. Like I wasn't really allowed to do the things that were my age. Oh my God, speaking of Star Wars toy. I have a anniversary present. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. I didn't wrap it. Okay. Now, it's another beanie baby worth a lot of money. He looks just like Lechitti. What's the difference between him and LeBarratt? Because that one's name is Valentino. Okay, because he has a heart. Yeah, he has a heart patch instead of an American flag. That's what differentiates. Yes, his name is Valentino. He's not as, he's more white. He's not like all covered in shit. Well, right, but originally Lechitti wasn't covered. He was this white. He was originally. Okay. Oh, where'd you get this one? I got it from my parents house. It was in the basement. And I, you know, the tag is, oh God, he attacks a smelling it. Wow, smells like I'm a grandparents motel. It does. Yeah. Cause it's probably a little moist in your basement. Yeah, I know, I know, cause I have makeup on and I don't want to get this. But see, this is how it happens. Uh-huh. Put it. I can't smell anything. Berrier knows. Don't worry about the makeup. Put it in his ass that way. The stain is in his ass. Can't smell anything. I don't know. It's like it's your home. Exactly. Oh, no, that scares me. That scares me. Um, so. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I'm gonna big ol' hit a kiwi here. Oh, shit. Is it smell really bad? It smells. No. Um, my grandpa's bathroom at the motel. He used aquana. All right. And some weird, I think a liquid deodorant. Like I think he splashed it in his armpits or something. Okay. Whatever that could call for me if smells was, which I enjoyed. It smelled like my pippy's bathroom. Yeah. He also wore to let he put it like a palm aid in his hair. That was in the mix. Oh, you know, it's that much smell. Like somehow, although it smells together, this is as close. Oh, big time. And then the salt that they used at the colonial motor in, the branded soap. I would love my brother to take a whiff of this. Yeah, he too. And I want to see if he. Be too. Because the other thing, my favorite smell in the world is occasionally, my bathroom will smell like my grandparents kitchen, bubble bobbin grandma. Your bathrooms? Your different grandparents. Oh, I love it. The ones that really raised me, bubble bobbin grandma. They brewed coffee all day long in a percolator. Yeah. And it was humid because it was Michigan. And so my bathroom sometimes, like if someone takes a shower and I brew coffee, something happened. No. I just need a cigarette burning because they also smoked, they chain smoked. Yeah. I love that smell. I would give anything. And my uncle now lives in the house and there's just no way the smell has been maintained. But like I would just walk through that door where my dad would drop us off. And the second the screen door opened, I'd get in that kitchen and that smell. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to have the best three days. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, but this is good too. I like being at the colonial motor in. And glasses, glad that reminds me. Yeah, wow, pippy. Oh my god. This is my pippy. Oh. I'm going to call him pippy bear. Well, it's his Valentino. No, it was. I ruined it like I ruined it. That's a jewel, a bone. I ruined it like I ruined Liberty by removing its tag. I don't know why I kept doing that. It's not like you. I know. I don't understand because. I am glad though because as it turned out, they were valueless. So it's like to not be an enjoy it because it had a big tag hanging out of it. And it's worth like that is expensive. Hold on. I will give you a thousand dollars if you can get more than 20 dollars for that. And that one might not be because it's missing its tag. But Valentino, beanie baby, eBay, um, $12. No, no. The one in mint condition is $200. Well, it's for sale for that. Let's see if anyone pays. And then there's one for one fifty. There is one for $9.89. I'm not sure why because. There's big, big delts of between you. $9. Yeah. Those that are $10 are fakes. Mine's original. Okay. You got to get it authenticated. That's going to cost you some money. Well, it looked like at the tag. Look at the tag on him on his butt that you've been eating. Yeah. Um, I did ruin it also because I broke my name on it. Who do you think was going to steal it? Exactly. Your brother wasn't even like around you. Was he? He was. How long were you when you collected these? I know you're going to say younger than you are. So I'm going to add two years to whatever you say. No, no, no. I was in like, I think it's peak was when I was in like fourth grade. And like all my friends had that. Okay. So nine and ten. You're nine, although you said you're super young when you joined. So really just nine. Yeah. I was twenty nine. So Neil was at best one year ago. Yeah. I don't know if it was to keep from him. I think it's when you went to your girlfriend's house to play with your baby. Maybe. You don't want to get a mixed up. Maybe. Yeah. I'm not sure if it was true. Did you use your left hand right? That was my handwriting. That's it. Very small. Yeah. This thing is valueless. I got you written your name on it. It doesn't have the tag. It does have although not nearly as bad as a little shit tea. There are stains on this thing. There's blue ink. There's. Oh, that was a fuzzball. You know, regardless. If someone gives you ten dollars, don't even think about it. Take it. Take it. And as I'm saying, if you can get more than twenty dollars for this, I will give you one hundred dollars. Two thousand dollars. And no one, no one of the listeners can participate. I don't want someone bailing you out and offering you twenty one dollars for this. You guys sell on eBay under a pseudonym. But then I have to show a close-up of the name. You guys have collectibles where you guys show them all the imperfections. And that ad is going to get as dusty as this creature. No. I love it. I think he's going to go for two to three K. I have high hopes for him, Valentino. Okay. That's it. That was all the fact. Yeah. I love you.