Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
Speaker 3: our super producer Andrew dry Force Howard. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
Speaker 3: they don't want you to know. Oh man, look, folks,
Speaker 3: fellow conspiracy realist, fart all you want. If you're farting
Speaker 3: right now, we can't hear it.
Speaker 2: We can feel it, though, but if you've got your
Speaker 2: phone in your pocket, somebody probably can't.
Speaker 4: Yes the amazing videos.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it's done with pets, sometimes with humans, where someone
Speaker 5: will basically go up to a sleeping dog or a
Speaker 5: sleeping person and put a microphone by their butt that's
Speaker 5: connected to a speaker, and that's put the speaker right
Speaker 5: by their head, and then when they farted, like wakes
Speaker 5: them up with a start.
Speaker 4: It's pretty funny.
Speaker 3: I like the heat signature studies got really into farts
Speaker 3: a few years ago. Sounds weird because of our job
Speaker 3: and In the course of our strange careers, we learn
Speaker 3: a lot of weird trivia.
Speaker 2: Right, is that when we learned about how much money
Speaker 2: that one lady was making jarring her farts, that's part
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 3: There's also the petomol, a flatchy list of note.
Speaker 4: Not the same as a floutist. It's different different.
Speaker 3: I still would wind.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 3: Wind. At least here's one of the weird facts we learned,
Speaker 3: not a factoid, an actual true thing. The average person
Speaker 3: farts seventeen to twenty three times a day. So if
Speaker 3: you meet someone who says they don't fart, either they
Speaker 3: are lying to themselves or to you.
Speaker 5: And if you're a quality human being, you're writing it
Speaker 5: down along with a note about its intensity and posting it.
Speaker 2: We should get those clickers psychologists use where you just
Speaker 2: click and then we can all check every for like
Speaker 2: a week. Guys, I'm averaging twenty four. I'm a little nervous.
Speaker 3: That's coming with relentless medical surveillance, and we don't know
Speaker 3: what to do with this fact about how often the
Speaker 3: average human farts. But now it haunts you as well,
Speaker 3: So maybe you will get a clicker, maybe you will count,
Speaker 3: maybe you will do that kind of relentless self examination.
Speaker 3: Ben Franklin, did.
Speaker 5: I have an idea they should make like an attachment
Speaker 5: for your fitness tracker. I don't know, man, I'm not
Speaker 5: the expert here. I'm just pitbo on the idea.
Speaker 3: There's probably technology already nascent, if not emergent, that can
Speaker 3: simply monitor flexes in your overall body. Sure to expel
Speaker 3: wind so it doesn't have to be up the butt,
Speaker 3: but that should be an option for the interesting consumer.
Speaker 4: Absolutely so.
Speaker 3: Tonight's episode is something we mentioned in a Strange News
Speaker 3: segment years back. It's it's our cheeky exploration of well,
Speaker 3: butts and guts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, coconuts, yes, just so, fecal transplants, the future of poop.
Speaker 3: We have an important announcement before we dive in. Fellow
Speaker 3: conspiracy realist, none of this is medical advice, jere The
Speaker 3: comment at the end, yeah, it was deafening.
Speaker 2: Is that where there's gonna be a fart sound effect,
Speaker 2: like right after you say none of this is medical advice?
Speaker 3: Perfect? Perfect, I say, but I think it's fair we
Speaker 3: could say, folks feel free to use all of our
Speaker 3: crappy puns.
Speaker 4: I won't to allow it.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well tell.
Speaker 4: When you send along your oad, do what thou wilt.
Speaker 3: Everyone except for humor is Harry.
Speaker 4: That guy's like war criminal.
Speaker 3: Regular Kissinger. Here are the facts. Before we talk about
Speaker 3: transplants at all, we got to ask a question that
Speaker 3: gets asked in clubs around Atlanta often, what's up with them? Guts?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 4: I hate that?
Speaker 3: God too, I do too. I don't co cite it,
Speaker 3: but it is. It has proliferates.
Speaker 4: It's aggressive to the extreme.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you know, you know what, I think it's
Speaker 5: appropriate for our scientific and very high brow exploration of
Speaker 5: these of these things.
Speaker 4: But if that's a pickup line, get out of here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a flag so red that even someone like
Speaker 3: me could see it, you know what I mean, that's
Speaker 3: fire engine flag.
Speaker 2: So, guys, one of the first things that I ever
Speaker 2: learned at how stuff works, back when we were little
Speaker 2: babies and we were just learning things and being excited,
Speaker 2: was this concept that the human body is made up
Speaker 2: of more microbes than it is made up of human cells.
Speaker 2: It wasn't that. Wasn't that one of the things we
Speaker 2: learned early on?
Speaker 5: M Yeah, sure, I mean, it's just the concept of
Speaker 5: like our bodies not only being a temple but also
Speaker 5: being a teeming ecosystem of weird little bacterium.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it gives us a gives us a great
Speaker 3: opportunity to thank our innerds, which we know sounds a
Speaker 3: bit visceral literally, but you know, for most people, if
Speaker 3: you're hail and hearty and in good health, you probably
Speaker 3: don't think about your inner world too often, unless you
Speaker 3: get a stomach ache or you're hungry, or you need
Speaker 3: to use the washroom. But the entire time you're up top,
Speaker 3: you the north pole of your body is ignoring that
Speaker 3: lower inner soldier. Your gut is saving the day, and
Speaker 3: the whole process is entirely bizarre.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's super bizarre. It's gross too. It is really
Speaker 2: gross to think about our insides. What is that thing?
Speaker 2: It's the smell of death that people often describe has
Speaker 2: mostly to do with the bacteria and stuff that's in
Speaker 2: your guts after death when that stuff gets expelled or
Speaker 2: you know, especially if someone's been in a war scenario
Speaker 2: or something and their bodies have been opened, you know,
Speaker 2: the cause of death includes that. That's the stuff that's
Speaker 2: in there is just gross.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gross, but functional, Yeah, gross but functional. I like that,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, like a Honda Odyssey. Speaking
Speaker 3: with Speaking with Wired, Marissa Scavuzo, who was at the
Speaker 3: time of researcher for Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said, Look,
Speaker 3: digestion is required for survival. We eat, the animals do
Speaker 3: it every day. But also, if you really think about it,
Speaker 3: it sounds for it. It sounds alien from the moment
Speaker 3: you eat a snack, whatever you're eating now as you
Speaker 3: hear this, to the second it leaves your body from
Speaker 3: the North Pole to your Australia or your Antarctica. Your
Speaker 3: gut is working around the clock, always on overtime, just
Speaker 3: like how your heart beats, and you're never thinking about
Speaker 3: how it breaks stuff down. It differentiates between the good
Speaker 3: stuff and the bad stuff. It moves things through this
Speaker 3: amazing Wonka esque factory of digestion right your mouth, your esophagus, stomach,
Speaker 3: through the intestines, little family circus route.
Speaker 5: The kidneys, filtering out all the bad stuff or as
Speaker 5: much as possible. So I mean, like, sure, you can
Speaker 5: live with one kidney, but I wouldn't exactly recommend it.
Speaker 4: You can survive with.
Speaker 2: One, yeah, Well, and then all that we were talking
Speaker 2: about soldiers here, right, all the tiny little bits and
Speaker 2: pieces the cells that actually do that differentiation, and then
Speaker 2: carrying the good nutrients in through the lining of your
Speaker 2: walls in your intestines that do that differentiation. That stuff
Speaker 2: is I don't see how.
Speaker 3: It's not magic, Yeah, because science is very good at
Speaker 3: answering the how of a thing, but does it really
Speaker 3: approach the why of the thing. We know how something
Speaker 3: like oh, this is a painfully astute comparison or analogue.
Speaker 3: Your gut has this entire network of things that sort
Speaker 3: of legally migrate the good things, the nutrients, the good bacteria,
Speaker 3: and then kind of function as customs or passport control
Speaker 3: for the bad stuff that will kill you if you
Speaker 3: don't poop it out.
Speaker 2: Right, because the good bacteria is part of the stuff
Speaker 2: that breaks down that food right as it's going through
Speaker 2: your body, like especially towards the end, and the intestines well, yeah.
Speaker 5: And consuming like probiotic stuff like yogurt and keifer and
Speaker 5: all that.
Speaker 4: It helps.
Speaker 5: It helps kind of maintain that gut flora, you know,
Speaker 5: so that you actually are able to properly break those
Speaker 5: things down.
Speaker 3: And this evolves a herculean amount of organization and coordination
Speaker 3: across multiple cells types and tissues, muscle cells, immune cells,
Speaker 3: blood cells, lymphatic vessels. The real heroes we'll see are
Speaker 3: the nerve cells and the bacterial cells. I mean, when
Speaker 3: you think of your gut, what you should think instead
Speaker 3: of gross is the immediate two words one unappreciated, two mysterious.
Speaker 5: I would largely disagree with unappreciated, but I guess maybe
Speaker 5: at large, but I appreciate the heck out of my
Speaker 5: gut and butts I have more than one of each. Apparently, Oh,
Speaker 5: you also have a double brain. Most humans do. Kind
Speaker 5: of see, That's what I was doing. I was setting
Speaker 5: that up for you.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: Nice nice with the segway. Yeah, this is startling. I
Speaker 3: heard a great piece on NPR about this earlier when
Speaker 3: I was on a road trip. If you're human, your
Speaker 3: butt kind of has a second brain. It's not like
Speaker 3: the old thing about remember the stuff about the stegosaurus,
Speaker 3: how the stegosaurus was so large that it had to
Speaker 3: have a second kind of nerve center at its lower back,
Speaker 3: lower vertebrae.
Speaker 4: Well, it's what we might call it like a low
Speaker 4: five brain.
Speaker 5: You know, doesn't doesn't doesn't have all the features it's
Speaker 5: a little bit more kind of on off.
Speaker 3: What's the what's the fancy name for this old double brain.
Speaker 5: Well, the fancy name for it is the enteric nervous system,
Speaker 5: which consists of sheathes of neurons that run through all
Speaker 5: of your intestines pretty much from stem to sterner is
Speaker 5: my favorite movie reviewers from YouTube say ruder to tutor,
Speaker 5: it's called fish jelly. You guys should check them out there,
Speaker 5: delightful AnyWho that that means from euro esophagus to your anus,
Speaker 5: right right, And.
Speaker 3: We call a second brain because although it's not contained
Speaker 3: in one central location organ wise, we're talking about one
Speaker 3: hundred million neurons. That's more than either in the spinal
Speaker 3: cord or in the entirety of the peripheral nervous system.
Speaker 6: That's a lot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but maybe it almost is more of just like
Speaker 5: a a more robust kind of sensor. Like it's right,
Speaker 5: it's more like, let's say, like a security system than
Speaker 5: it is like a CPU.
Speaker 3: Yeah, think of it as if we're looking at the
Speaker 3: body as production. Think of it as your assistant director,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. It's got the goals, it's
Speaker 3: got the stuff needs to do and the stuff it
Speaker 3: needs to avoid. It's what enables the human body to
Speaker 3: feel the inner world of the gut and all the
Speaker 3: contents within. And again, it continually coordinates digestion, It controls
Speaker 3: reflexes and senses on its own. You're up top, like
Speaker 3: your quote quote brain. Brain doesn't need to take notes.
Speaker 3: It's outsourced this to a wide world below the clavicle.
Speaker 3: But no, there's something fascinating you raised. I love again
Speaker 3: the term lo fi brain, because your second brain isn't
Speaker 3: really like writing poetry.
Speaker 5: For you exactly. Like it's more like a it's a
Speaker 5: little less flexible. It kind of like has its programming,
Speaker 5: kind of does it's one thing and then doesn't really
Speaker 5: have to bob and weave too much.
Speaker 2: It makes me think about how sometimes, well especially during pregnancy,
Speaker 2: it's almost as if the body is telling you what
Speaker 2: you need to eat, and then the cravings will occur.
Speaker 2: So it's it's completely independent of your thought processes, right,
Speaker 2: or if often people who need iron in their diet
Speaker 2: because they're iron deficient will have this craving for something
Speaker 2: that is rich in iron, and it does maybe wonder
Speaker 2: if that's the system that's responding.
Speaker 3: I would agree with that it absolutely is. It's almost
Speaker 3: in some ways it's similar to the earlier discussions about
Speaker 3: the bicameral mind. You have this whole other thing that
Speaker 3: is has a lot in common with a brain, and
Speaker 3: it is just providing cravings, determining intention or influencing action.
Speaker 3: And it's not sending you, you know, a nice collegiate
Speaker 3: email saying hey, checking in. It's b from you know,
Speaker 3: your guts, and I have an opinion about what you
Speaker 3: should eat right now instead some sunny afternoon, maybe maybe
Speaker 3: you're carrying a child. You just go, I need pickles,
Speaker 3: I need ice cream, and I need it now, or.
Speaker 4: In my doctor pepper, doctor.
Speaker 2: Pepper, exactly. And it could be a specific thing like
Speaker 2: vinegar would be useful, right, or something fermented would be
Speaker 2: useful or whatever, And it just happens to work out
Speaker 2: that way. And you see something when you're grocery shopping,
Speaker 2: you're like, I don't know why, but I need that
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: Michael Gershawan agrees with us. This is the chairman of
Speaker 3: the Department of Anatomy and sell Biology at New York
Speaker 3: Presbyterian Hospital slash Columbia University Medical Center. Just picture how
Speaker 3: big that guy's business card has to get as the
Speaker 3: title gets longer. Doctor Groshan says, the second brain doesn't
Speaker 3: help with the great thought processes religion, philosophy, and poetry.
Speaker 3: It's left to the brain in the head. But that
Speaker 3: is just one aspect of the amazing gun biology at play. Again.
Speaker 3: If you're human, your digestive system, second brain running that
Speaker 3: that you've outsourced to. It contends with another stakeholder, which
Speaker 3: was mentioned earlier, the vast, multi species metropolis of bacterial
Speaker 3: life that have a fascinating, still not widely understood microbiome
Speaker 3: that pretty much does everything. Because as cool as the
Speaker 3: second brain or this other nervous system is, it cannot
Speaker 3: function without bacteria, it cannot function without these non human
Speaker 3: life forms living inside you.
Speaker 2: And we've begun to learn a whole lot more about
Speaker 2: this whole system and how these systems function together, because
Speaker 2: there are really smart people out there who are studying it,
Speaker 2: and there are a lot of people making companies based
Speaker 2: off of some of the science that's being discovered and tested.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the growing field of medical ecology. It approaches the
Speaker 3: body's microbiome as almost like a garden, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean. There are different we said gut flora. So
Speaker 3: there are different small living things within you. Some are nurtured,
Speaker 3: right like the good plants in the garden, and some
Speaker 3: are weeded out.
Speaker 5: We we have you know, that's like a really good
Speaker 5: comparison though, the whole garden thing, because as we know,
Speaker 5: like composting is a huge part of maintaining or it
Speaker 5: can be rather a huge part of maintaining a really
Speaker 5: healthy garden ecosystem. You put in stuff, it basically rots
Speaker 5: in the ground and ferments and breaks down and then
Speaker 5: becomes nutrients.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: It's the circle of poop life. Indeed, which was the
Speaker 3: original title of that Lion King song.
Speaker 4: No one fact check us.
Speaker 2: But it is a really really good example, ben, or
Speaker 2: a way to picture it in your mind, because I
Speaker 2: can see just somebody who is actively planting a bunch
Speaker 2: of different vegetables out in their garden and there are
Speaker 2: weeds in they're trying to control the weeds. But as
Speaker 2: we're going to get into this, like one of the
Speaker 2: main reasons why this technology is so important is because
Speaker 2: when it's time to harvest, so well, no that doesn't
Speaker 2: really work, but when you take out those plants that
Speaker 2: you do want the weeds can take over pretty quickly.
Speaker 5: Off, Mike, we were trying to all three of us
Speaker 5: figure out the name of this kind of sustainable type
Speaker 5: of gardening method that basically involves LEDs letting things.
Speaker 4: Grow, including that it's perma culture.
Speaker 3: D well done, Noll, Yes, yes, perma culture. And thank
Speaker 3: you to our fellow conspiracy realists who have written to
Speaker 3: us who are familiar with this industry or proselytizers thereof
Speaker 3: this comparison, this inner and outer world matching. It speaks
Speaker 3: to a growing field of what's called medical ecology. This
Speaker 3: approaches the body's microbiomes as a community of life forms
Speaker 3: that need to be nurtured or times excised. And yes,
Speaker 3: fellow horticulturist, we are well aware that weed is kind
Speaker 3: of a I don't want to say fraudulent, but it's
Speaker 3: kind of a convenient term. A weed is defined as
Speaker 3: anything you don't want in that area.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's true, I mean, and that can it can
Speaker 5: be like an esthetic issue where people just think it's
Speaker 5: ugli or it like chokes, you know, the pretty stuff.
Speaker 4: But it does grow for a.
Speaker 5: Reason, and it is not necessarily like a foreign invader,
Speaker 5: right like it actually is the whole deal with permaculture
Speaker 5: is planting things that make sense in the ecosystem, the
Speaker 5: natural ecosystem that actually exists, and also thinking about human needs.
Speaker 5: So I mean, you know, sometimes you do end up
Speaker 5: killing things that maybe you shouldn't be killing and that
Speaker 5: are kind of part of the ecosystem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a good example of what permaculture fights against would be,
Speaker 3: you know, the metropolitan area of Las Vega is not
Speaker 3: too many decades ago, wherein people planted all of these
Speaker 3: sorts of grasses and other plant forms that simply weren't
Speaker 3: supposed to.
Speaker 4: Be in that environment.
Speaker 5: Right, And the term biodiversity comes into play too, because
Speaker 5: weeds quote unquote to your point, Matt can absolutely contribute
Speaker 5: to the biodiversity of a garden and attract fauna like pollinators,
Speaker 5: and they can also actually contribute to having a better
Speaker 5: balance of nutrients in the soil. So a lot of
Speaker 5: times people pulling the weeds just creates more weeds and
Speaker 5: actually messes up the balance of the ecosystem.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think when I think about weeds, I think about
Speaker 2: something that proliferates extremely rapidly and spreads really fast, so
Speaker 2: like it's something that will take over again in the
Speaker 2: way that some bad bacteria will take over a microbiome
Speaker 2: in your guts, like that, real fast.
Speaker 3: Given the opportunity. Yeah. Absolutely, And some of what these
Speaker 3: pioneers of medical ecology have discovered is inspiring. It is
Speaker 3: literally life saving. Some of what they've discovered is also
Speaker 3: kind of terrifying. Maybe, what do you think as shall
Speaker 3: we pause for a word from our sponsors before we
Speaker 3: dig into the strangest parts of this hot, steaming pile
Speaker 3: of research?
Speaker 4: Chuss if we must.
Speaker 3: Here's where it gets crazy, all right, fecal transplant fancy name,
Speaker 3: fecal microbiota transplantation.
Speaker 5: Quick question, Ben, Why I know that's what we're here
Speaker 5: to discuss, But I just immediately am like, who's asking
Speaker 5: for this?
Speaker 4: Who is this for? It sounds like some rich, bored
Speaker 4: people stuff?
Speaker 3: Who pitched it first?
Speaker 2: Well, don't we know that it went way back to
Speaker 2: this stuff called yellow soup?
Speaker 3: Oh it goes before yellow soup?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 3: Goes way back. Fourth century CE is the first mention
Speaker 3: recorded in medical literature in ancient China. We know that
Speaker 3: Bedouins also apparently used fresh camel feces later to combat dysentery.
Speaker 6: Whoa, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, dysentery is pretty serious things. So I guess
Speaker 3: an important a storm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no matter how stinky.
Speaker 3: So how why Right to your earlier question, how why
Speaker 3: bitch this? We have to check a few facts about bacteria.
Speaker 3: You know, your body is absolutely riddled with it. Bacteria
Speaker 3: are arguably one of, if not the most successful forms
Speaker 3: of life in the planet, right there on their extreme
Speaker 3: files and deep see events. You can bury them far
Speaker 3: underground and they're just fine until you get into an
Speaker 3: outbreak situation and they're all over humans. We used to
Speaker 3: think that the lungs had no bacteria in them. Your
Speaker 3: lungs house about two thousand species, two thousand separate species
Speaker 3: of bacteria per square centimeter.
Speaker 5: Did they do an animated children's movie yet about like
Speaker 5: the Secret life of gut Flora, because that that should happen.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a great idea.
Speaker 5: I know there's like Osmosis Jones, which was like not
Speaker 5: a big hit, But I want a Pixar movie about this.
Speaker 4: I think it's I think it is well deserved.
Speaker 3: Yeah you heard it, or first Pixar.
Speaker 4: That's a great idea.
Speaker 3: We ask for a reasonable fifteen percent.
Speaker 4: Oh no, no, no, no, no, this is not a hot take.
Speaker 4: Someone has thought about this. I just want to see
Speaker 4: it happen, guys.
Speaker 5: I don't want any credit. I just want to see
Speaker 5: the movie. Please, Pixary. Guys, surely you've got a.
Speaker 4: Bitch about this already in your stacks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you think it's weird, right, two thousands species
Speaker 2: of these weird little creepy Crawley's inside your lungs, the
Speaker 2: thing that you do every moment, right, breathing them in,
Speaker 2: breathing them out. No, they're just in there, hanging out, breathing,
Speaker 2: breathe out. Yeah, but then think about just on your skin,
Speaker 2: on your face, on your hands, on your feet, what
Speaker 2: about on your lips?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean the operative word is micro. You know,
Speaker 5: we're not gonna sense these things. They are beyond our
Speaker 5: threshold of feelings, you know, they're so tiny. But yeah,
Speaker 5: there they are, doing their thing. And like the idea,
Speaker 5: you know, when I think of breathing something like this,
Speaker 5: and I think of like swallowing a bug. But let's
Speaker 5: compare like the size of a bug that one could
Speaker 5: breathe in and swallow to the size of a gut bacteria.
Speaker 5: It's like a kaiju versus like a smurf.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's comparatively almost quark level. And that's a
Speaker 3: terrifying idea too. Can you imagine being intimately aware of
Speaker 3: every instance of a micro organism like this in your body?
Speaker 4: You go crazy, you'd go bananas, you'd clow your eyes out.
Speaker 2: There would be no more humans because we would all
Speaker 2: stop having intercourse, like immediately.
Speaker 3: Everybody should have intercourse would stop. But the only people
Speaker 3: left with the you know, some pretty extremophiles of their own.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, yeah, the the mouth to that point,
Speaker 3: it's got hundreds of thousands of species of these things.
Speaker 3: You can't feel. The mouth is weirdly colonized. There are
Speaker 3: neighborhoods of very different species across your teeth. Feel it
Speaker 3: when we're telling you this folks across was.
Speaker 4: Immediately then the moment you spoke it.
Speaker 3: Oh cheese, it's on our tongues. Our tongues are their
Speaker 3: own neighborhood.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't stop there, and it just keeps going.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But I mean, like you know, we we've talked a
Speaker 5: little bit about I think it was on ridiculous history
Speaker 5: maybe about the discovery of you know, microscopic particles and bacteria,
Speaker 5: the idea of like things spoiling.
Speaker 4: You know how where I know what it was it was.
Speaker 5: It was an episode where we were talking about the
Speaker 5: concept of like, you know, do the things that cause
Speaker 5: food to go bad? Are they external or are they
Speaker 5: created from within the thing themselves? And of course it
Speaker 5: was determined that they are in fact external. There's like
Speaker 5: bacteria out there in the world that is attracted to
Speaker 5: stuff and just comes in because of various experiments involving
Speaker 5: flasks with the top open with like a bent little
Speaker 5: segment in the flask that caused different results.
Speaker 4: But like, can we talk a little.
Speaker 5: Bit about like who and when was it determined that
Speaker 5: these things exist? You know, like who decided to like
Speaker 5: look inside the mouth and at what point did we
Speaker 5: get advanced stuff we could truly look inside the gut
Speaker 5: and not just kind of positive this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this goes back in step with the microscope, which
Speaker 3: allowed humans to see very small things in It dates
Speaker 3: back to the sixteen hundreds, I believe, with Luwin Hook
Speaker 3: Sweet Hook.
Speaker 5: Lewinhook was a lens maker and you know, while not
Speaker 5: the inventor of the microscope, with someone who definitely made
Speaker 5: some significant advancements in lens technology, but in Western literature.
Speaker 5: Actually found this abstract on ScienceDirect dot com from a
Speaker 5: study called the Origins of gut Microbiome Research in Europe,
Speaker 5: and in the abstract it says, in Western literature the
Speaker 5: discovery of the gut microfloor originates around the eighteen forties,
Speaker 5: and by the last two decades of the nineteenth and
Speaker 5: early twentieth centuries the study characterization and here's for our
Speaker 5: purposes today, even therapeutic use of quote protective microbes reached
Speaker 5: its scientific peak in France and German speaking Europe.
Speaker 3: And additionally, in earlier evenings we know, gosh, shout out
Speaker 3: to the practitioners of Jainism, because Jane Is way back
Speaker 3: in the day said maybe they're tiny things that influence
Speaker 3: us of which we are unaware. We're somehow unable to
Speaker 3: see them.
Speaker 5: Well, thank god, are like gut back to aren't like
Speaker 5: whispering to us telling us to do bad things.
Speaker 3: Weirdly possible as we'll see. I mean, there's so many
Speaker 3: and it's kind of like it's almost a hierarchy. If
Speaker 3: you are standing up right now, we know your mouth
Speaker 3: has a lot of stuff. You go down your lungs
Speaker 3: have a lot of stuff, and then you go down
Speaker 3: to your gut. Your gut can have as many as
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand to thirty thousand different species of gut flora,
Speaker 3: of micro organisms, of bacteria and fungi and protozoa. They
Speaker 3: start call it. They get you young, cradle to grave.
Speaker 3: They start colonizing the bowel in infancy, which is I
Speaker 3: believe part of why newborn spoop differently.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's black tar stuff that comes
Speaker 2: out well. And that's also why breastfeeding is thought to
Speaker 2: be so important, because the mother transfers her gut biome
Speaker 2: essentially and all of her bacteria into the child.
Speaker 3: And we also know that these helpers for the human body,
Speaker 3: they appear to be mission critical with the immune system
Speaker 3: and with the repression of pathogens. Your body right now
Speaker 3: contains ten times more bacterial cells than it does human cells.
Speaker 3: Granted there's a size difference. Human cells are going to
Speaker 3: be bigger than bacterial cells generally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's that what's the phrase we always used
Speaker 2: to use, we are universes or what is it? Something
Speaker 2: about how we were cities or something. You each human
Speaker 2: is a city or each human is an entire universe universe.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and not every human gut obviously has the
Speaker 3: whole like Pokemon collection of the good bakis got. I
Speaker 3: don't know, yeah right, I don't know if if we
Speaker 3: can or should. Also, I don't know if baki works
Speaker 3: as a pet name for bacteria.
Speaker 5: I think baki has been already used for like an
Speaker 5: old timey sell their name for tobacco. All right, to
Speaker 5: think we might have gotten beaten to the punch on
Speaker 5: that by the old timers, by the old prospectors of
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 4: But to the time that.
Speaker 5: We say back though, I like Itatia, You know, I
Speaker 5: just think bacteria is fun to say. I just see
Speaker 5: no reason to short and that I really enjoy the
Speaker 5: mouthfeel of bacteria as a word.
Speaker 2: No, I was just thinking about the bacteria in my mouth.
Speaker 6: Thanks, no, old cheek exactly.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean no to your point, too, bad about
Speaker 5: like that your body being this like microcosmic kind of
Speaker 5: universe or macrocosmic whatever. I mean that applies on so
Speaker 5: many levels as you can think about it, like in
Speaker 5: terms of like the mind and all of the thoughts
Speaker 5: within thoughts and dreams within dreams and all of the
Speaker 5: different like motivations at play.
Speaker 4: But we can also take it super mega literally.
Speaker 5: Like there are things living inside of us that we
Speaker 5: will never fully be able to comprehend, at least outside
Speaker 5: of the scientific realm.
Speaker 4: But they really do kind of have a life of
Speaker 4: their own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and the life that they live tends to
Speaker 3: when everything works out, help the human beings. It's not
Speaker 3: a stretch to wonder whether the same life forms can
Speaker 3: mitigate inflammation associated disorders, you know, cardiovascular disease, type two
Speaker 3: diabetes IBD, maybe IBS in some cases. There's some promising research,
Speaker 3: or I should say, some fascinating research indicating that your biome,
Speaker 3: to your earlier point NOL may influence your mood and
Speaker 3: some aspects of your psychology.
Speaker 5: Well sure, I mean, if you're constipated, you're not going
Speaker 5: to be particularly.
Speaker 3: Cheerful, and as Snickers said, you're not you when you're hungry.
Speaker 3: Also true was that Snickers.
Speaker 4: May as well have been it's as good as Snickers
Speaker 4: tagline as.
Speaker 5: Any I gotta eat, you gotta eat Snickers shout out
Speaker 5: to Checkers and Snickers get together, you guys.
Speaker 3: So we talked earlier about how when you think past
Speaker 3: the surprising shocking headlines. It's not really that amazing or
Speaker 3: that surprising to find that the idea of transplanting poop
Speaker 3: using a natural human biological product to address a medical condition.
Speaker 3: It's not surprising to learn that this is an ancient idea.
Speaker 2: And what a weird idea it was. So back in
Speaker 2: the fourth century, some folks noticed that there were a
Speaker 2: lot of people around them getting super sick. I think
Speaker 2: diarrhea throwing up just stuff where the human beings are
Speaker 2: clearly sick, and the bad stuff's coming out of their
Speaker 2: mouths via vomit and via their rears as.
Speaker 5: You are you saying they were sliding into first and
Speaker 5: they were feeling something burst.
Speaker 4: Yes, sure, I'm just making sure we're talking about diarrhea. OK. Good.
Speaker 2: Diarrhea is one of those things that we talked about
Speaker 2: in this show before and many times over the years,
Speaker 2: of how stuff works, how serious it actually is still today,
Speaker 2: how serious diarrhea can be. But back in the day,
Speaker 2: especially if you have a bad bout of it, you
Speaker 2: could die pretty easily because it could lead to other things.
Speaker 2: It can make you even more sick when you're dealing
Speaker 2: with bacteria. And now that's on the exterior of your
Speaker 2: body as it's being expelled, and others who are doing
Speaker 2: that same thing around you, perhaps as well as the
Speaker 2: thing that happens when you lose a lot of the
Speaker 2: moisture in your body, right, become dehydrated from this thing. Well,
Speaker 2: back in the fourth century, somebody had the idea of
Speaker 2: something's wrong with this person who's got diarrhea. Right, it's
Speaker 2: happening inside their body. There's nothing wrong with these people
Speaker 2: over here.
Speaker 6: Why don't we.
Speaker 2: Take some of their expelled poop and stuff and turn
Speaker 2: it into a soup of sorts and feed that to
Speaker 2: the people who have problems.
Speaker 4: Now, this is a real leap matt.
Speaker 2: Sometimes boofing, but it was like a at first.
Speaker 3: It was yeah, yeah, it was a soup. And this
Speaker 3: also I appreciate that point because this reminds us again,
Speaker 3: you know, in these days, in the fourth century CE,
Speaker 3: and for hundreds of years after, a lot of what
Speaker 3: informed medicine is what we would call sympathetic magic today. Right,
Speaker 3: the like can treat the like. Within the poison, we
Speaker 3: find the antidote.
Speaker 2: That's how the first vaccinations happened. Right, take the puss
Speaker 2: and put it in somebody else.
Speaker 3: It's a true story. If you fast forward still in
Speaker 3: ancient China up to the fifteen hundreds, then you'll see
Speaker 3: a notable man of old medicine, Chinese physician, herbalist, and
Speaker 3: acupuncturist named Lee Shishen. And he's the one who gave
Speaker 3: us the term that I think we all enjoy.
Speaker 2: It's gonna make me think about Massa mn Curry differently.
Speaker 4: I was thinking about, all right, I don't like any
Speaker 4: of this. I don't like any of this, you guys.
Speaker 5: But see when I think of a transplant, though, I
Speaker 5: do think of like, I'm sorry, I'm a child, I guess,
Speaker 5: but sticking it.
Speaker 4: In where it comes from kind of like. But it
Speaker 4: also it doesn't.
Speaker 5: A transplant also kind of involve removing something and replacing
Speaker 5: it with something else.
Speaker 2: Well, in this case, the patients that have severe diarrhea
Speaker 2: are kind of they don't have any help removing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they ran the first part. Yeah, they made the space, so.
Speaker 5: They're definitely sliding into third. I'm sorry, I'm not going
Speaker 5: to look up the song. It's a little bop.
Speaker 3: So the phrase er pal Lee she shed used translates
Speaker 3: to yellow soup, and sometimes he said golden syrup. H
Speaker 3: depending on the preparation of the stool or the feces.
Speaker 3: Is it fresh, dried, you know, a fir minute for
Speaker 3: a little while, did get back up? Put it in someone,
Speaker 3: Let's see if it helps their tummy.
Speaker 2: Oh well, here's why this is important, though, People at
Speaker 2: the time, as they're experimenting basically in this way, found
Speaker 2: that folks were getting better. Whether you know, whether that's
Speaker 2: some people were getting better on their own, whether that
Speaker 2: was actually this form of medicine was better than a
Speaker 2: placebo back in the fourth century, who knows, but it
Speaker 2: does seem like it caught on enough and it was
Speaker 2: thought enough of a real remedy that humans continued experimenting.
Speaker 3: With it, which at this point means not that many
Speaker 3: people were instantly dying. Yes, sort of like you know,
Speaker 3: mercury treatments killed people, which is why people didn't keep
Speaker 3: practicing it for as long as they were practicing some
Speaker 3: version of fecal transplant. Let's go to nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 3: Let's meet our guy, doctor Ben Eisman, who must have
Speaker 3: been pretty interesting. He is the doctor who set the
Speaker 3: precedent for the modern fecal transplant, and he actually saved
Speaker 3: four folks lives doing so.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 5: Heisman and a team of surgeons. And yes, we're saying surgeons,
Speaker 5: unless you worry. Fecal transplants don't typically involve cutting people open, but.
Speaker 4: They were involved in this. They were in Colorado. They
Speaker 4: treated four critically ill people with fecal.
Speaker 5: Enemas to combat a super nasty condition called full minent
Speaker 5: pseudo membranus colitis. Yeah, nailed it, which we now know
Speaker 5: is caused by something that is colloquially often referred to
Speaker 5: just as sea diff, which stands for Colostridium dificile.
Speaker 4: I believe is how that's pronounced, see dificile or just
Speaker 4: sea diff.
Speaker 3: Got the sea dif.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I always pronounced its deficile because I think Spanish.
Speaker 4: You guys are fancy for me.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, we're We're all just in the same
Speaker 3: boat trying to avoid that sea diff. Yep, and folks,
Speaker 3: it is serious. We're about to dive into it. But unfortunately, statistically,
Speaker 3: several of us in the audience this evening have had
Speaker 3: some sort of experience with this mean, mean, little life form.
Speaker 3: After our buddy doctor Eisman hits the scene, fecal transplant
Speaker 3: research and procedure kind of wanes you know, it occurs
Speaker 3: successfully in later decades, but it's kind of sporadic. It's
Speaker 3: not the first thing your medical practitioner thinks about, or
Speaker 3: if it is, they might have their own thing going on.
Speaker 3: The streets are watching, though. You know, this technique proves
Speaker 3: time and time and time again to be successful combating
Speaker 3: medical issues caused by seediff in particular, and people start
Speaker 3: asking whether this can help address other infections as well.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, this pseudomembrtist Collidis thing is so weird and
Speaker 2: crazy and gross.
Speaker 6: It is.
Speaker 2: When this this sea diff bacteria, it starts basically breaking
Speaker 2: down the lining of your colon, stuff called the mucosa.
Speaker 2: And when it starts breaking it down, it creates these
Speaker 2: like scabs in like imagine scabs inside the lining of
Speaker 2: your colon, and like the lower intestines down there, and
Speaker 2: then your white blood cells go into attack some of
Speaker 2: the stuff and some of the bad bacteria, and that
Speaker 2: even these some of the parts down there, and you
Speaker 2: can get sepsis from this. You can get all kinds
Speaker 2: of really bad infection. So sepsis would be like infection
Speaker 2: in your blood. And the other one is that your
Speaker 2: your body is basically attacking itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, making a feedback loop exactly.
Speaker 2: And the reason why the sea diff is so difficult
Speaker 2: to fight often is because an infection of this this
Speaker 2: type of bacteria often arises after we've taken antibiotics, so
Speaker 2: specific rounds of antibiotics that kill a lot of them
Speaker 2: mic grow biome the good bacteria that's in us. So
Speaker 2: like the weeds as we're talking about in that example, right,
Speaker 2: that metaphor there in the way. We're talking about our
Speaker 2: bodies as gardens and some of these bacteria as weeds,
Speaker 2: those weeds proliferate because they often don't get killed by
Speaker 2: the antibacterial stuff that we're putting through our whole system,
Speaker 2: so they just are everywhere and they grow out of control.
Speaker 3: And we're going to take a pause for a word
Speaker 3: from our sponsor, and we'll dive into maybe some specific stories,
Speaker 3: and we'll take a deeper look at the problem that
Speaker 3: makes see so deficile. We've returned, all right, this is
Speaker 3: the story that I think stood out to a lot
Speaker 3: of us outside of the medical professional community. Back in
Speaker 3: twenty twelve, Caitlin Hunter, a resident of our home state
Speaker 3: of Georgia based in Marietta, goes to visit her father
Speaker 3: in California. Fortunately, she has a brutal automobile accident fractures
Speaker 3: her lower this is in twenty eleven, fractures her lower spine,
Speaker 3: lacerates her liver in colon, breaks all ten of her toes,
Speaker 3: which is just at that point insult on injury, you know,
Speaker 3: and does down Indeed, indeed, yes, sir, And she is treated,
Speaker 3: you know, in California, she does survive the horrors of
Speaker 3: this car accident. And then because she is in a
Speaker 3: hospital similar to being in an elder care facility, where
Speaker 3: these are the places where se diff opportunistically proliferates, she
Speaker 3: gets a life threatening bacterial infection in her colon and
Speaker 3: doesn't quite clock it until she leaves the medical facility
Speaker 3: in California and returns learns to Georgia.
Speaker 2: And we have a quote from her in speaking with CNN.
Speaker 2: Here's the quote. Right when I got off the plane,
Speaker 2: I went to the hospital. I was having extremely bad
Speaker 2: stomach pain. A month later we found out it was
Speaker 2: sea diff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is which is just terrible. You know, all
Speaker 3: the usual treatments for this infection seem ineffective. Right the
Speaker 3: you know, we're hitting the antibiotics left and right of
Speaker 3: for a time, it appears that Hunter may have lived
Speaker 3: through this accident, only to die from knock on consequences. Luckily,
Speaker 3: her physician at the time, doctor Suku George, is a
Speaker 3: very sharp cookie and starts thinking outside the box.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: He figures, since antibiotics can also kill good bacteria, why
Speaker 5: not fight a little fire with fire. What if the
Speaker 5: answer is actually not to kill bacteria, but to introduce
Speaker 5: more bacteria, more good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the good stuff. Kids go for beads.
Speaker 5: So Hunter's mother is all up for the challenge and
Speaker 5: decides she will donate some of that good bacteria herself
Speaker 5: in the form of a poop.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why the doctors were scared,
Speaker 2: why the mother chose to do this kind of strange thing, right,
Speaker 2: donate my poop to put it into my daughter. This
Speaker 2: stuff sea diff infects around five hundred thousand Americans, like
Speaker 2: human beings in America every year, and it kills somewhere
Speaker 2: between fourteen and thirty thousand Americans every year, just depending
Speaker 2: on the year and depending on how bad what kind
Speaker 2: of outbreak there's been.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a good friend of mine, and I think for
Speaker 5: Ben's as well, friend of the show was just messaging me.
Speaker 5: Actually I just happened to catch it and said, I
Speaker 5: can't talk right now. We're talking about poop transplants, and
Speaker 5: she said, my friend got one of those because he
Speaker 5: almost died of sea diff and it saved his life.
Speaker 5: So confirming. This is absolutely a thing that to this
Speaker 5: day is hugely impactful on people's lives.
Speaker 3: And let's talk a little bit. Let's put on our
Speaker 3: old Alma matter hats for how stuff works and talk
Speaker 3: about how this functions. Okay, so good news, or for
Speaker 3: some kind of very specific people, maybe this is disappointing news.
Speaker 3: You're not like pooping in a doctor's hand and then
Speaker 3: having the doctor run to the next room and then
Speaker 3: just boof up the patient let down.
Speaker 2: Well, but in nineteen fifty eight it wasn't enema, right.
Speaker 3: Like it wasn't innima. Animas are still used what are
Speaker 3: called retention aenemas. The way it usually works now, you
Speaker 3: screen a donor for whether it's a family member or
Speaker 3: partner or a stranger. You screen them for any other
Speaker 3: kind of disease causing germ any communicable infection. The doctor
Speaker 3: takes this stool sample. They dilute it with saline or
Speaker 3: get this four percent milk, and then they blend it
Speaker 3: into what is honestly kind of like a milkshake for drinking.
Speaker 4: Though doesn't it go into capsules? Isn't that the idea.
Speaker 3: It's a poop shake, It doesn't have to go into capsules.
Speaker 3: They used to use nasogastic or naso duodenal tubes. The
Speaker 3: only difference is going you know, through your nasal cavite
Speaker 3: or going even deeper.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: Isn't that similar to how you if you're like not
Speaker 5: able to eat solid food and you're in the hospital
Speaker 5: and can't they also feed you that way?
Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes they'll go through your side basically, but in
Speaker 2: this case, like imagine poop going through a tube that
Speaker 2: is going into your nose all the way down to
Speaker 2: your sister.
Speaker 5: The first question I think is on many people's minds
Speaker 5: is but do you smell it immediately?
Speaker 4: I mean maybe, I guess it's contained within a tube?
Speaker 6: Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 4: It probably puts you out for it, that's true.
Speaker 3: Also, there is a similar technology used for to your point,
Speaker 3: no force feeding in black sites.
Speaker 4: Mmm, maybe that's where I've seen it, of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the retention ETIMA was used, as you point out,
Speaker 3: Matt by doctor Eisman, I believe now the primary preferred
Speaker 3: delivery method is it's through the gold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they do offer pills like you can swallow
Speaker 2: poop pills.
Speaker 6: You can't.
Speaker 2: You can do it.
Speaker 3: Please again, remember this is not medical advice. I feel
Speaker 3: like we have to say that before people get not
Speaker 3: red pilled, but poop built.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about the mother, right. Of course, this
Speaker 3: is an out of the out of the usual procedure
Speaker 3: kind of thing for the Hunter family and for the
Speaker 3: doctor involved. Her mother does donate that stool sample and
Speaker 3: they get it from her mother to minimize any possible
Speaker 3: unforeseen side effects, the idea being that the birth mother's
Speaker 3: gut flora will have a much higher likelihood of being
Speaker 3: familiar or being closer to the gut floor of the child.
Speaker 2: That's a I mean, it's a really good point. That's
Speaker 2: that's huge. It kind of goes back to the during
Speaker 2: pregnancy thing during you know, right after giving birth, how
Speaker 2: important the milk is, how important, at least in a
Speaker 2: lot of studies, how important a vaginal birth is for
Speaker 2: getting the same kind of microbiome transfer essentially.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we know that. In twenty twelve March of
Speaker 3: twenty twelve, studies conducted found astonishing numbers that seem to
Speaker 3: give credence to the philosophers and the sympathetic magic practitioners
Speaker 3: of old. They found ninety one percent of patients with
Speaker 3: similar seaediff conditions were cured after just one transplant procedure.
Speaker 3: And then if you couple that after the procedure of
Speaker 3: you couple that with around of the right antibiotics, your
Speaker 3: success rate shoots up to ninety eight percent, which is
Speaker 3: crazy for science.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's insane. There was a there was a trial
Speaker 2: in twenty thirteen that they were conducting to I think
Speaker 2: they were trying to see whether or not fecal transplantation
Speaker 2: would be as effective or not as effective versus I
Speaker 2: can't remember the name of his. I think it's vancomyasin
Speaker 2: or fancomias, I think, yeah, yeah. And as they're going
Speaker 2: through this trial and they started to notice that the
Speaker 2: fecal transplant was so far superior to these intense drugs,
Speaker 2: they decided it would be unethical to continue the trial,
Speaker 2: so they were just yeah, they stopped the trial, and
Speaker 2: they said, which poop transplants for everybody.
Speaker 5: You get a poop transplant, and you get a poop transplant,
Speaker 5: and we you know you don't get one.
Speaker 3: Oh, you can have one if you want. It's a treat.
Speaker 4: Can have mine. I'll give you mine, guys.
Speaker 3: Let's all share our poops.
Speaker 2: Just put coffee in my enema.
Speaker 3: Good good. I'm sure there's some real TikTok science by
Speaker 3: that one.
Speaker 2: That was a thing, wasn't it coffee animas back in
Speaker 2: the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, Kelly, he was in the yogurt aemas.
Speaker 5: But that's funny though, because that actually I mentioned it.
Speaker 5: That's all about that's a similar thing. John Harvey Keller
Speaker 5: was all about the probiotics and all about the gut floor.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now we're not saying he was a perfect guy.
Speaker 4: We're also not saying squirt yogurt up your butt. We're
Speaker 4: not saying that.
Speaker 3: Again, none of this is medical advice, but we are
Speaker 3: fun at parties, medical suggestions, observations. Folks. We know how
Speaker 3: people are. There's all kinds of woo woo pseudo science
Speaker 3: out there. I mean, you know, on the flip side
Speaker 3: of that coin or on the other butt cheek. The
Speaker 3: world is full of desperate people. Who are see remedy
Speaker 3: for otherwise intractable medical conditions.
Speaker 5: Oh, so many people on the internet saying I drink
Speaker 5: a gallon of my own urine every day, and that is,
Speaker 5: I believe provably, not a good idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not the best. Now it's even worse than
Speaker 3: you know, soda. I think I'm still dealing with this
Speaker 3: soda withdrawal. You guys, gosh, so soda is so great.
Speaker 3: But yeah, don't try this at home is our main
Speaker 3: thing we have to say, because feces is a level
Speaker 3: to biohazard that is bad. If you don't test those samples,
Speaker 3: if you just try to, you know, go out on
Speaker 3: some wildcat poop transferring, you could end up worse than
Speaker 3: you began.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean with the urine example, you know what happens.
Speaker 5: What is urine? What is feces? It is materials that
Speaker 5: have been excreted from your body because they're bad for you.
Speaker 5: So if you drink your own urine, you are drinking
Speaker 5: back down those necessary toxins, which is forcing your kidneys
Speaker 5: to process them again and perhaps work overtime. Let's just
Speaker 5: not take this.
Speaker 4: Into our own hands.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, obviously there are good reasons to
Speaker 5: have equal transplants. The sea diiff thing very very real,
Speaker 5: but as just some sort of holistic kind of woo
Speaker 5: woo remedy, I would definitely seek a professional.
Speaker 2: You just gotta cut it with a little tequila and
Speaker 2: lime and you're good to go. Yeah, the you're inner,
Speaker 2: the poop, poop, the poop to the point of the
Speaker 2: level two biohazard. Go back in your mind and think
Speaker 2: about how I guess freaked out science was that there
Speaker 2: was so much coronavirus in the sewer systems of the
Speaker 2: United States, in particular, when they were just noticing, oh,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of active coronavirus swimming around in that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the poop leftovers just live in its best life.
Speaker 5: Also, guys, I know were here talking about poop today,
Speaker 5: but I've just found so much stuff about peepee.
Speaker 4: Really, it's not sterile. People always screaming about how it's
Speaker 4: sterile and you should your jellyfish bite. That's just not true.
Speaker 3: I believe the mechanism for the pe on the jellyfish
Speaker 3: thing is not due to sterility.
Speaker 4: That's right. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5: Okay, so let's let's walk this back. You can definitely
Speaker 5: pee on your jellyfish thing. It does neutralize this thing,
Speaker 5: but it is not because of this thing. People are always
Speaker 5: screaming about how urine is quote unquote sterile. It's full
Speaker 5: of all kinds of bacteria and healthy urine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, just the way people used to believe that
Speaker 3: lungs didn't have their own little cities within them. I
Speaker 3: mean this is also there's good news. The Fecal Transplant Foundation,
Speaker 3: which is a real thing, has confirmed that there are
Speaker 3: not any documented cases of infection transmitted through FMT or
Speaker 3: you know, these fecal transplantations still better safe than sorry,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. And one thing we can
Speaker 3: say if you're if you're transplanting poop and you're not
Speaker 3: a doctor just gaming this out, the biggest scenario would
Speaker 3: be the power move to go full chimpanzee. Just poop
Speaker 3: in your hand and throw it at someone if you're
Speaker 3: about to be in a fight.
Speaker 4: That will definitely make them go away and not try
Speaker 4: to fight you any further, I would hope. So I'm sorry.
Speaker 5: Last thing about your en Apparently the jellyfish thing thing
Speaker 5: a folk remedy as well, and it actually might make.
Speaker 4: It hurt worse. Sorry, thank you, poison dot org.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not folk remedy or a folk thing.
Speaker 2: Oh when when you get a toxic mega colon you
Speaker 2: ever you ever heard of that?
Speaker 6: Boys?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's from a seed diff infection. It is a
Speaker 2: very serious, real thing. It sounds like some kind of
Speaker 2: monster or I don't know, a horrible thing, but it is.
Speaker 2: It is real. It's just when your colon gets super
Speaker 2: inflamed and enlarged. And that's one of the ways you
Speaker 2: get stuff like sepsis and horrible, horrible death.
Speaker 3: Which can escalate and exacerbate very quickly. They can become
Speaker 3: life threatening conditions. And now this brings us to sort
Speaker 3: of the crux of our exploration. The future of poop
Speaker 3: is a question. We're talking about a little bit off air,
Speaker 3: all right. It's a gig economy. Things are kind of dystopian,
Speaker 3: you know, let's be honest. So could people begin donating
Speaker 3: poop for money similar to other biological based industries like
Speaker 3: sperm donation or you know, the horrors of the red
Speaker 3: market and the organ trade.
Speaker 4: Please be yes, please be yes.
Speaker 3: The answer is yes, awesome.
Speaker 4: Because what am I gonna do with the stuff.
Speaker 5: It's kdible, I know, but I mean maybe if I
Speaker 5: just if instead of flushing it, I can go out
Speaker 5: and donate it every time, the plumbing system in my
Speaker 5: house will probably last a lot longer.
Speaker 3: Now, the people who do get human waste for use
Speaker 3: in fertilizer through waste treatment plants, sure they may have
Speaker 3: something to say about this. But imagine a world where
Speaker 3: you're work on scratch and you see a particular branded
Speaker 3: porto potty. You know what I mean, poop for cash.
Speaker 3: I could see the infomercial. Now, if you go to
Speaker 3: places like human Microbes dot org, there are multiple outfits
Speaker 3: like this. By the way, you'll see that as long
Speaker 3: as you fill out their questionnaire and pass a pretty
Speaker 3: rigorous screening, they will pay you to poop.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, because of the rigorous screening, it won't be as
Speaker 5: simple as sort of.
Speaker 4: A reverse pay toilet.
Speaker 5: Maybe in the future though, when they can just like
Speaker 5: scan you. But I love the idea just being able
Speaker 5: to sit down, do your business and then money comes
Speaker 5: out at you.
Speaker 3: I love the idea of being the guy who meets
Speaker 3: my daughter's new boyfriend for the first time, like, oh, so, Darryl,
Speaker 3: what do you do? Oh, Darryl's a pooper dad.
Speaker 4: Professional he's got the best poop.
Speaker 3: He's a pro poop. So but if you do this
Speaker 3: with so some of these outfits, there's no regulatory body
Speaker 3: right now saying how much, like what the going price
Speaker 3: is for a poop, But it's five hundred bucks per
Speaker 3: stool at human Microbes dot org up to one hundred
Speaker 3: and eighty grand a year. And if you're what they
Speaker 3: call a super donor that they're still looking for superpooper, Yeah, superpooper,
Speaker 3: then the prices are negotiable.
Speaker 4: Right on. You got the upper hand there, coming to
Speaker 4: that negotiation.
Speaker 6: Hot dude.
Speaker 2: And there's so many of these programs that are popping
Speaker 2: up everywhere. Just another quick example. Good Nature is another program.
Speaker 2: You can go to goodnatureprogram dot com and learn about this, y'all.
Speaker 2: They have a stool donation program that if you live
Speaker 2: in Tempe, Arizona, or Irvine, California, you can head into
Speaker 2: their offices poop several times a week and make fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred bucks a month.
Speaker 5: That's a pretty respectable living US dollars. And I mean
Speaker 5: it's a lot easier to give.
Speaker 4: That's saying give poop just sounds rich.
Speaker 5: Donate your feces and you could probably do it much
Speaker 5: more regularly than you could say plasma or blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I mean, and you know there are some
Speaker 3: blood cells in your poop. But ah details. So this
Speaker 3: is what's inspiring about this, despite the clear dystopian aspect
Speaker 3: of it, is it's literally turning beat me here, it's
Speaker 3: literally turning shit into.
Speaker 4: Gold, you know what I mean, pretty American or at the
Speaker 4: very least, you know, dollars.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and just just a couple more details, because
Speaker 2: this is so fascinating to me. If you were going
Speaker 2: to get in that Good Nature program, you would go
Speaker 2: four to six times a week to their offices. You
Speaker 2: would have a one hour visit per you know, PLoP.
Speaker 2: I guess you would get monthly blood draws, and you
Speaker 2: have to not smoke, not have any issues with drugs
Speaker 2: or alcohol, be eighteen to fifty years old.
Speaker 6: And just live near one of their centers.
Speaker 3: And I think some other places also have increasingly robust
Speaker 3: genetic screening. Oh yeah, we know that. The example I
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier Human Microbes dot org. I am very interested
Speaker 3: in the founder, Michael Harrop h a r r OP
Speaker 3: because if you go to their about page or you
Speaker 3: go their FAQ and stuff, you'll see that. They describe
Speaker 3: themselves as quote a stool donor network currently focused on
Speaker 3: the USA and Canada, but accepting stool donors from around
Speaker 3: the world and willing to do global dry ice shipping
Speaker 3: if possible. So you'll have to go to their office.
Speaker 3: If you got the right poop, they'll take care of it.
Speaker 6: Dude, that's so awesome.
Speaker 3: They do a lot of work with indigenous populations. The
Speaker 3: website is a rabbit hole because the idea is that
Speaker 3: they these folks will be less likely to be exposed
Speaker 3: to certain contaminants because there's a growing crisis apparently, and
Speaker 3: I'm sure we see this whenever we look at these
Speaker 3: donor networks.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, because like the other one, the Good Nature
Speaker 2: has an R and D department where if you don't
Speaker 2: meet their rigorous health standards, you just donate to their
Speaker 2: R and D department so they can study your poop
Speaker 2: for like stuff that goes wrong in poop.
Speaker 3: I guess the FMT Foundation, the Fecal Transplant Foundation, found
Speaker 3: that only zero point one percent of the population is
Speaker 3: still healthy enough to qualify Wow as a high quality
Speaker 3: stool dodor.
Speaker 4: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: I think I think they're talking about superbugs proliferating over
Speaker 3: exposure to antibiotics, which you know, when you dose a
Speaker 3: bunch of livestock and you dose a bunch of humans
Speaker 3: with antibiotics, a lot of the good backies catch strays,
Speaker 3: they die in the crossfire.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and they also have restrictions about weight, so
Speaker 2: like they they they use the phrase normal weight on
Speaker 2: a couple of these, but that just means probably the
Speaker 2: BMI index, like you'd have to be in the green
Speaker 2: area or whatever.
Speaker 3: BMI is superflawed.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, but it's still like, if you're using that
Speaker 2: as your metrics, I can see why it's zero point
Speaker 2: one percent.
Speaker 3: I'm also wondering if it's something to do with microplastics,
Speaker 3: which have infiltrated everything. We still don't know what the
Speaker 3: long term effects or of those are going to be
Speaker 3: on over all human health. Not to sound too RFK
Speaker 3: Junior about it. I like McDonald's cheeseburgers much as the next.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but isn't it kind of like against OURFK Junior's
Speaker 5: brand to be housing cheeseburgers. I've seeing people saying it's
Speaker 5: sort of like when the drug dealer makes the cop
Speaker 5: do some drugs to prove that he's not a cop.
Speaker 3: Welcome to training day.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, was it a power move because it was clearly
Speaker 3: a photo op.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's a different story. Oh the other knock on bad factor,
Speaker 3: our buddy, see diff is making out like gangbusters. So
Speaker 3: if you need this kind of treatment, let's exercise empathy.
Speaker 3: Let's think of the people who don't have a willing
Speaker 3: family member or part donor if you can't get a
Speaker 3: family member, they'll often suggest looking toward your partner because
Speaker 3: your partner, also by living with you, has a higher
Speaker 3: likelihood of not having you know, plot twist in their
Speaker 3: gut flora. But then, you know what if you can't
Speaker 3: get a poop plant procedure because you can't afford it
Speaker 3: with or without insurance. You know, insurance makes money in
Speaker 3: this country denying medical procedures.
Speaker 6: It's true.
Speaker 3: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 4: Oh, it's more than fair to say.
Speaker 3: Uh, well, Mammon and other economists would call this an
Speaker 3: inflection point of supply and demand. It's quick man in reference. Oh,
Speaker 3: absolutely warranted.
Speaker 5: But Ben, I'm speaking of, like, you know, procedures that
Speaker 5: an insurance company may or may not deny. I mean
Speaker 5: there is part of this the idea of a fecal
Speaker 5: transplant as a way of like preemptively improving.
Speaker 4: Your gut bacteria.
Speaker 5: That would probably be considered by an insurance company to
Speaker 5: be medically unnecessary in there for you know, paid for
Speaker 5: by the individual. But in the case of the seediff situation,
Speaker 5: I know that would be a life saving thing. So
Speaker 5: it's interesting how this kind of occupies those two spheres simultaneously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, our inflection point may well be a moment
Speaker 3: where we have more people who need good poop and
Speaker 3: fewer people who possess good poop, which is odd to
Speaker 3: think about. But you know, then there's the other question,
Speaker 3: what if the bad stuff evolves? The call is coming
Speaker 3: from inside your button. No, it's the cognitive neighborhood of dystopia, right,
Speaker 3: we talk about this bacteria is constantly evolving. Gut bacteria
Speaker 3: are it's these microbes are linked to good health, but
Speaker 3: then they also can be linked to auto immune disorders,
Speaker 3: metabolic syndrome IB. Yes, a lot of this is currently
Speaker 3: explained by something called sleaky gut.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I remember hearing about this. This leaky guts
Speaker 2: by the way, and this is great, just a call
Speaker 2: back to the Karen Reid trial. If anyone watched that
Speaker 2: where the some of the officers were sending text messages
Speaker 2: to each other about Karen Reid and about the symptoms
Speaker 2: that she had of some of those things you just described, like,
Speaker 2: you know, chronic inflammatory responses in your guts, which is horrible. Sorry,
Speaker 2: that's the last thing I thought about when I thought
Speaker 2: about this stuff. But leaky gut syndrome is where some
Speaker 2: of the bad bacteria actually goes in to your body.
Speaker 2: It's not it's not contained within that system. I'm like
Speaker 2: imagining the colon the intestines. It goes through into your
Speaker 2: you know, through the cell walls and stuff that's supposed
Speaker 2: to protect you.
Speaker 3: Can get into your organs, can get into other parts
Speaker 3: outside of the digestive factory line, right, and this can
Speaker 3: create these chronic inflammatory responses that are part and parcel
Speaker 3: of a variety of diseases. Apparently a lot of bacteria
Speaker 3: is indeed constantly evolving. Noah Palm, assistant professor of immunobiology
Speaker 3: at Yale, conducted this study where they found that when
Speaker 3: a lot of the bad bacteria is evolving, it's becoming
Speaker 3: more pathogenic because it's evolving to do just what you described, Matt,
Speaker 3: to migrate across the gut barrier, to persist in any
Speaker 3: organ you can imagine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like you said, sometimes it could be in
Speaker 2: there for ages and it's not hurting the host of
Speaker 2: the human being that is hanging out in but as
Speaker 2: soon as it exits that host, other people better watch out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So now we have a third challenging
Speaker 3: factor of play. Fewer healthy people one, more people in
Speaker 3: need of fecal transfer two And now the bad gut
Speaker 3: buddies are growing tougher and they're becoming more focused their
Speaker 3: scoping in I feel like it's such a pickoli guys.
Speaker 3: Because C. Dith spreads and proliferates in places with the
Speaker 3: most vulnerable people hospitals, elder care facilities. The antidote may
Speaker 3: become the poison. When we're talking about antibiotics, you know exactly.
Speaker 2: We've said it before on the show, but this it's
Speaker 2: what killed my grandfather. He went into the hospital, had
Speaker 2: a big procedure and ended up getting an infection that
Speaker 2: was untreatable and it killed him.
Speaker 6: And it was.
Speaker 2: It was this stuff. It was this like terrible bacteria
Speaker 2: that it ends up giving you sepsis where the bacteria
Speaker 2: the infection is now in your blood.
Speaker 6: Stream and there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 3: It's terrible, man.
Speaker 6: Sorry for that downer.
Speaker 2: The good thing one of the good There are good
Speaker 2: things though here, right the FDA. While this this whole
Speaker 2: thing like poop transplants are.
Speaker 4: A bit.
Speaker 2: It's got a new car smell, and uh, it's not
Speaker 2: like you can go to your doctor that you see
Speaker 2: every day and say I need one of these, or
Speaker 2: you know, even request one, or it's very unlikely your
Speaker 2: insurance is going to do anything for.
Speaker 6: You with those.
Speaker 2: But there are products that big pharma is coming up
Speaker 2: with that the FDA has approved over the past two years,
Speaker 2: so like there could be a silver lining.
Speaker 3: Here, silver gut lighting. Yeah, the FDA has approved fm
Speaker 3: T primarily to treat recurrency diff infections, so when other
Speaker 3: stuff doesn't work, you can go for this. It's not
Speaker 3: illegal to do so. The second nugget of good news
Speaker 3: is the more we're learning about the human gut, the
Speaker 3: more potential promise we see in fecal matter transfer NOLL.
Speaker 3: To your earlier point about the idea of it affecting
Speaker 3: mood or influencing behavior, there appears to be some scientific
Speaker 3: sand to that you know, as dead pres once observed,
Speaker 3: maybe we should let our food be our mad.
Speaker 6: Yeah, man, look up.
Speaker 2: I want to hear some verses that use these two
Speaker 2: terms ribiota and voust. Those are the two FDA approved
Speaker 2: drugs that are usually given rectally.
Speaker 3: I think, oh, my gosh, is there a group somewhere
Speaker 3: out there, a hip hop group called Big Parma? Oh,
Speaker 3: Big Pharma Sorry, Big Parma is my nickname for the
Speaker 3: Parmesan cartels.
Speaker 4: That's the parmesan cheese trade.
Speaker 3: Yes, so let us know if you have a Big
Speaker 3: Pharma mixtape on the way. Love them or hate them.
Speaker 3: Humans have a pretty great track record of creating wonderful
Speaker 3: things from gross circumstances. Again, not medical advice please, just
Speaker 3: on a common sense note, folks, don't try to put
Speaker 3: other people's poop inside you, and whenever you can, if possible,
Speaker 3: try to avoid putting your poop inside other people unless
Speaker 3: the doctor co signs it.
Speaker 6: You down with opp Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: Me, what a little long this evening, but we would
Speaker 3: love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have experience
Speaker 3: with c DIFF or if you are a medical professional
Speaker 3: who has experience with FMT We try to be easy
Speaker 3: to find online.
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