Why Your Gut Is Your Second Brain | Emeran Mayer on Health Theory

The brain sends signals to the gut microbes, changes their behavior, um their function, and then these metabolites, you know, that that we know they probably go back to the brain and reinforce it and create this this vicious cycle of um brain-gut microbe interactions that I personally think underlies chronic depression. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. You're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that your ability to actually actuate your potential is at least partially based on your physical body. As such, both of us are here to learn, and my obsession is with helping people optimize their minds, and my goal with this show is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you do just that. I'm Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory, and today we're joined by Dr. Emeran Mayer. He's a UCLA professor, brain-gut microbiome expert, gastroenterologist, neuroscientist, and Amazon best-selling author of The Mind-Gut Connection. In my quest to solve my wife's digestive issues, I came across this book, and I was totally blown away and wanted to bring him on to see what more I could learn. So, without further ado, Dr. Emeran Mayer. Thank you so much for joining us today. to be on the show. pleasure to have you here. Um as I was telling you off camera, sincerely, my journey to help my wife get into a better place um has been massively impacted by your book, which I think is really incredible. And by way of a primer for people, how exactly does the gut influence our overall well-being? Well, I mean, writing this book has been a new experience for me. I've been a scientist on studying the communication between the brain and the gut for um most of my career. The concept is that multiple parts of our body interact with each other, and the brain sits over them like this supercomputer that makes sure the the interactions are okay. And if everything works in harmony, we also feel good as a as a as as a byproduct. So, they're not you know, evolution didn't really select that we feel good. It's but but evolution selected all our systems so they work perfectly and when they work perfectly, you know, we have a sense of well-being. So, my wife Lisa um just about God, almost two and a half years ago now uh started saying, "I don't feel well." And then started vomiting like really badly. And so, we thought she had the stomach flu and couldn't eat when she first had it. Everything upset her stomach. And by stomach, I mean gut. And then in trying to like figure this all out, we realized that she had lost diversity in her microbiome. And so, okay, how do we rebuild from that? And a very long process. We tried a lot of things, but the one that like when we when we were advised to do it just did not seem possible that it could be useful. And then I've heard you talk a lot about it was um she was advised not to eat if she was stressed. And to to do like almost a meditative eating. To breathe in a meditative fashion while she ate. Why on Earth would that matter? Well, I mean, the answer to that is is actually fairly simple. So, when you imagine that the brain and the gut are connected and have always been connected, you know, um millions of years in evolution, this has always been a tight-knit unit. That um if an organism is if a if a person is is stressed, it will send down signals to the gut. It will change a lot of things. So, this so-called autonomic nervous system can change the transit time, the peristaltic activity in different parts of the GI tract in different ways. So, it's stress will slow down the stomach but speed up the intestine. severe stress can lead to these very powerful contractions, secretion of fluid, secretion of what's called antimicrobial peptides, mucus. So, you have to imagine that when you are stressed, your gut is different, completely different from when you're not stressed or when you are when you're relaxed. So, this is not only that it affects the gut, but it also affects the microbes because it's their home. So, um that environment that they live in and they thrive on, if that all of a sudden is changed or is chronically changed, I mean that's really the main problem. I mean, if you are stressed, you know, for 5 minutes because um you were almost hit by a car, you know, that that's not a big deal really in terms of that balance. But, if you're chronically stressed, you have a chronically altered uh composition of of of your gut. So, now when you eat something, it it doesn't feel right. You get symptoms, you get bloating, you get cramps. Um it triggers these reflexes in the gut to, you know, to for things to move through faster, could result in diarrhea. And one thing you've likened it to, which I thought was really helpful for somebody that's just sort of starting to wrap their head around this, is you said we have facial expressions when we're angry, when we're scared, and if you think of those states as being something internal that's now represented by the muscles in the face, those same internal states can be represented in a similar fashion by the gut. And that if you get them in a state that is their version of the angry face or the scared face or whatever, um that they're actually, like you just said, they're producing different metabolites and things like that, which can have a pretty profound effect. And that that image for me of of thinking of my gut states as being as reactive as my facial reactions. And are they as reactive like that, as fast as the face can respond? In my in my book, I also mentioned this these observations by um by physicians in during war times, you know, when they had somebody had like a fistula that somebody they could actually see their intestines moving and blood flow. So they noticed when somebody walked in and that that wounded soldier got upset instantaneously saw changes in the contraction and in the blood flow. So this what I said earlier, you know, if if that happens every once in a while it's probably not such a big deal. If if it happens chronically, it will rearrange the whole habitat and ecological system in in in in your gut and somebody you know we always know that negative emotions are never good for anything really. So the Buddhist principle is that there's no good bad emotion and so they but they clearly affect your health. I mean it's not just that you feel bad, you know, it's but I would say you know it's it's many parts of the body that reacts to emotions like your heart rate and the difference is the gut is the most complex system that's affected by this and the gut has the microbes. The heart doesn't have that you blood vessels don't have that any emotions it's not such such a new thing that is a physical representation of of of your emotions just as it's like in your face in your muscles. The impact on on on the overall organism is much greater because you know you have the system sitting there with the trillions of microbes that all little chemical factories you have here the biggest part of your immune system the biggest part of your hormonal system it's all sitting there and when the signals go down from the gut it changes the whole interaction. One thing that I really want people to understand that I was blown away by in your book and I mean it's right there in the title so maybe I shouldn't have been as sort of awestruck by it as I was but that there's a feedback loop going both directions. So, the gut is is as you've called it and I'm sure is it's called in your field, the forgotten organ, right? So, that if you took all the microbiota in your body and condensed it down, um which we can't even see it. So, the fact that once you condense it down, you realize just how big it is, about the size of a liver, if I'm not mistaken, which makes it one of the largest organs in your body. Um if you were to flatten it out, it's bigger than a basketball court. Yeah. So, it's this massive sensing organ, which I never realized. It actually has the ability to taste, though not it it's the same receptors that we have on our tongue. It has the ability to smell. Um and so, it's it's taking in all these cues that it's reading from the food, and then it's speaking back to the brain, and then the brain is speaking back to it. And that through the millions of years of evolution, it's gotten really good at communicating with us. It's a big system. Um but, it's not the one that generates emotions. It's It's a system that completely takes care of your gut activity and your daily function. So, anything that you do with in food ingestion, this system can handle, unless you get stressed or emotionally upset about something, then the big brain interferes with that. A lot of people when they're stressed, they don't feel it. Women feel it more likely than men do. When there's a change in that gain in in that sensitivity, then all of a sudden, patients develop all kinds of symptoms, you know, from from fullness, bloating, abdominal distension, um intolerance to certain food items. Is that why IBS was originally considered a psychosomatic problem? Yes, I mean, this this term psychosomatic, you know, I mean, today we we call it mind-body medicine, but the psychosomatic medicine movement was had had had had had a wrong basic concept that that all these diseases were brains were brain diseases. Now we are we look at them as you know, the brain got microbiome um uh disturbances or alterations in in in in the balances. So, one of the things really why um you know, many of these stress-related disorders become chronic because that system that normally keeps things in balance is altered and accepts a difference a different steady state a different stability state. And once it has this new stability state, it's it's stuck in that and it becomes chronic and and it gets it'll change its set point. So, it if you're first starting to get stressed, it tries to get back to a neutral set point, but if you're always stressed, always stressed, always stressed, that basically becomes the new normal. Absolutely. What is the function of that? So, this this terrifies me as somebody who has a wife with microbiome issues that once you get it out of whack, like it's hard, but if you manage to get it out of whack and it's got its new set point, how do you get it built back up? And I read something terrifying which basically said if you look at us as a species over time, there's this like stair-step declination of diversity um in the microbiome. And so, if you if you know, your let's say your great-grandparents were here, your grandparents were here, your parents were here, but you're here, if in your life you experience a decline, you can get it back up to where you started, but as far as I can tell from what I've read, nobody thinks you can get it back to where your great-grandparents were. Why? I don't understand that. Why can't I just take a probiotic? Yeah, so this is this is a a big issue right now. You know, so there was a recent paper starting from this um a population that that can do it. So, the Hadza in in East Africa in Tanzania Rift Valley. So, these are some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers. I think it's only a couple of hundred left that live that lifestyle. And their microbiota their microbiome diversity has a seasonal variation. So, they found that they do it if they test them in summer and winter and what what's different in summer and winter with these people is they they switch from a um more plant-based diet to a more meat-based diet. Their microbiome changes with these dietary changes. When you look at them at the state when they don't have their high plant intake um it looks like ours, almost the same. Woah. This is the same species in the same um types of microbes. Then when they go to the the the plant-based diet it regains its diversity. So, they still have the ability to go from from our level back up to the high level. There's thousands of species that do not are not that essential and you can lose them. But if you lose one of those keystone species then the whole system gets altered. So, it's it's possible what happened in Western society when developing countries that we lost some of these keystone species and so no longer have this ability to to to return. Um I think it's going to be one of the biggest challenges really to Yeah, and so to find that out. If I can't do it through probiotics, could I and I actually seriously I put a date that if my wife wasn't better by and thankfully she is sort of beyond the critical threshold now, but if she hadn't gotten better by X date, I was going to take her somewhere to get a fecal transplant. It is that a possibility? Like is that a way to At the moment the answer is is no. So, there's many ongoing studies now, clinical trials with fecal microbial transplants in uh so as you know, there's one condition where where it works perfectly, it's the best the best treatment in this when all your normal microbes are wiped out is um um C. difficile colitis. It's um so you get this some people get this when they receive antibiotics in the in in in in the hospital. So, it works really well, but you have to remember that in in that situation, the normal microbiome has been wiped out pretty much. So, you start from scratch. All the other conditions where it's been tried, like inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome and autism spectrum disorder, you have an altered microbiome, but it it's it's it's in another stable state. You know, it's it has assumed another ecological stability state and it's it's very difficult to push it away from that. There are studies going on where people get repeated and of course these courses of antibiotics and then fecal microbial transplant like in in in autism spectrum disorders, that's been tried. Um Um and the hypothesis there was that the microbiome is playing a role in autism. Yeah, which is somewhat questionable. I mean, autism starts really in in in in utero. You know, the the abnormal growth of the brain. So, if if anything, I think it's potentially the microbiome and the metabolites of the mother that affect the the the child's brain development and Um so, that's kind of my theory about this. But a lot of desperate parents are doing these these transplants themselves. Then our our diet is clearly another thing. You know, it's um the more plant-based fiber you eat, the greater the the diversity of your microbiome is. And this is sort of where this whole concept of, you know, the the plant-based diet comes in. That the metabolites that these microbes produce, the more you feed them what they have evolved for in evolution to break down these complex fiber components of of of plants, the more you feed them that, uh the larger their number will get and the more of these healthy metabolites they will, you know, they will produce. And it's it's kind of interesting to me on the one side from a gut microbial diversity gut health standpoint it's um it would seem very easy to say what's what's the best diet for people. But but then clearly we have others, you know, um like in IBS is like this FODMAP diet which actually takes out a lot of the the fiber and these oligosaccharides. Um we have the ketogenic diet, you know, which obviously is wonderful to lose weight and if you have diabetes to to you know you know get get your hemoglobin A1C down. But but they're certainly not what the microbes for their health and diversity like, you know, so I mean to sum the whole thing up I I I think we're beginning now to understand that there are situations where the diversity can oscillate depending what we eat. Um let me ask you, what's the role of the gut in depression and anxiety? It's it's very interesting. I mean there's studies going on and you know, we would we're planning to get involved in this where large-scale studies with a dietary intervention like um you know, a Mediterranean type diet in like in in 600 people, you know, where you look at the brain and the microbiome before and after that dietary intervention. Particularly with a focus on uh cognitive performance and cognitive decline. And my guess is that over time um there's there's there's definitely influence. Now the ketogenic diet I I find still find that puzzling, you know, like so a lot of people say oh it's when they started this they completely felt different, the brain fog was gone. It's in some ways paradoxical cuz it's not the good thing for for for your microbes necessarily. But that's the situation where people report as they immediately felt better or different. So, I've used a ketogenic diet very extensively in my own life and then my wife has used it in her recovery as well. And so, I'll walk you through what each of us experienced. So, my experience is not with a lifting of brain fog or anything like that, but a profound difference in the way that I respond to hunger. So, if I'm on a high protein diet, I'm never high carb. I haven't been high carb in more than 10 years. So, my average daily carb intake is probably less than 30 g. And entirely from vegetables. So, what I see is when I get hungry if I'm high protein, I have a declination of performance. I'm not able to concentrate. I get slightly irritable. Maybe I get a headache. I certainly don't want to concentrate. Like if you're going to give me that there's any willpower component to this, my willpower is way low when I get hungry on a high protein diet because I'm burning glucose. Now, my wife's experience has been the anti-inflammatory effects cuz she has often self-reported that her gut feels swollen. She doesn't know how else to explain it. She's like, "It just feels swollen." So, you know, she eats something and it's going through her system and it just feels irritated and inflamed. And when she does a ketogenic diet, that is significantly reduced. However, she'll still have bouts of what sound like typical IBS symptoms, right? She'll um uh she'll have diarrhea, she'll have cramping, bloating, pain, like all of it. And be like, "What just triggered that? I was doing perfectly for let's say 4 days and now all of a sudden eating the same thing, all of a sudden she has like some big episode." So, clearly not a silver bullet for her, but has been a big part of what we do to to maintain her inflammation levels. Yeah, so I mean, I I say, you know, now with with the gut microbiome science, I think there will be a whole revisiting of of dietary recommendations. Even though initially I was a skeptic of the ketogenic diet, but I mean you have to listen to to to people. I mean, in some ways it that tells you more than than than the mouse experiments, you know. So, if people feel better, obviously there must be a reason why that is the case. I think nutrition and diet is just entering a phase of of real scientific rigor now, which it didn't have in in the past. Um and that's largely driven by the interest in the microbes, cuz you want to understand what the microbes do, you know, they live off what we eat. So, it's it's going to be essential to um to you know to to to to sort this out. So, really fast, going back to depression and anxiety, the the question that I most want to ask you, why on earth is 95% of the serotonin, which I think of, I mean, you know, SSRIs, right? Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is used for depression, which is all about the brain, why is 95% of serotonin stored in the gut? And what does it mean? Cuz you you say it's stored, but I don't remember you following up on like what does it mean to be stored versus used? Is 95% used in the gut? Or like what what is serotonin's role in all of this? Um it's it's a story in in in in progress, you know. Um I mean, I wish I could give you the answer. I I asked myself the same question. Why why would, you know, evolution design us in a way that that that molecule that plays such an important role in in sleep and well-being and pain sensitivity? Why why would all this be at the gut level? And is it manufactured in the gut and stored in the gut? Or manufactured elsewhere and stored in the gut? No, it No, it is manufactured in the gut. So, there's a hormone tryptophan hydroxylase from dietary tryptophan. Um that's that's taken up um by these cells and interestingly, so we now know of last couple of years this has come out that this enzyme that that converts tryptophan into serotonin is to large degree under the influence of microbial signals. So that the microbes can actually you know, influence how much serotonin that you synthesize, that you produce. Um and ultimately also how much is being released. When they're stimulated by microbial signals or by contractions of the gut or by some food product the serotonin is being released on the synapse and sends a signal through the vagus nerve into your brain and into emotional regulation centers of the brain. So that's really the the main communication pathway between um the serotonin the the microbes, serotonin signals and and you know, brain function and emotional function. You know, so for example, if you eat a a diet high in tryptophan and then people have taken tryptophan supplements Mhm. which really should be good for you in some ways because the microbes if if they see more tryptophan they send more signals to these serotonin cells to produce serotonin. So you would have a very simple antidepressant. You initially think that's yeah, that's the answer, you know, like there's a change in gut microbial enterendocrine cell communication and that that somehow plays a role in in depression and and and anxiety. Unfortunately, it's not that it's not that simple. I think depression probably starts at the brain there's some vulnerability then it's becomes manifest during periods of stress or trauma. The brain sends signals to the gut microbes, changes their behavior um their function and then these metabolites, you know, that that we know they probably go back to the brain and reinforce it and create this this vicious cycle of um brain gut microbiome interactions that I personally think underlies chronic depression. And I've heard you say that you think meditation may actually play a role in that. Like what what's your belief about mechanistically what's going on? Like why would meditation help? Our hypothesis was that um meditation changes the the activity of your autonomic nervous system that signals back to the gut. Um clearly if you're in a state of relaxation or mindfulness will be less sympathetic or less stress signals going to the gut. That changes the microbes and metabolites and then that would in some ways you know break that that that that cycle. But we did another study with with cognitive behavioral therapy in patients with with irritable bowel syndrome and as we had anticipated you know patients do quite well. So about 60% response rate on that with this cognitive behavioral therapy. The only thing that we found is which is interesting that your gut microbial composition when you start out the therapy in some ways predicts if you're going to respond to it or not. Wow, I've never heard that before. So you're saying that you could sequence the microbiome and say either you have a setup that matches people that have gotten a lot of benefit out of this or you haven't. And potentially do you know what biome is doing in terms of sequencing? Yeah, actually I'm I mean I should disclose I'm on the scientific advisory board of that company and if you do that biome test it could and you have suffering from IBS it could predict you know if if you're going to respond to to what type of therapy diet or um mind base or or or medications. I mean that technology and that approach I think has has the potential to really break the current paradigm and the the current practice of medicine. Yeah, I'm really intrigued to see what big data is able to pull out of this, especially with that hypothesis that you just put forward, which should be perfectly answered by that. If we can see set states and then they have predictive abilities in terms of outcomes, then if we can use big data to really work back, what actually is the causative rather than just the correlative element of that be really fascinating. All right, I want to do a segment now called gut check. Huh? Nice and clever. And I give us the top whatever number two, three things that are going on right now either at the individual person level or at a societal level that have massive gut health implications that people may or may not be aware of. The food industry has played a big role in um providing us with nutrition that's not good for us. So, all the processed foods and the high sugar and high high fat and Um so, there's a a pending I mean, an ongoing paradigm shift as well. So, many of the the CEOs of these companies have There's some very visionary um CEOs of some of these big companies that have in mind the the the benefit of of the consumer, not not the benefit of the of the shareholder. So, I think that's a a very exciting thing and the change in the in the in the food that we eat and the awareness of people and the response now of the the people that produce these foods, I mean, that's that's clearly a you know, a big thing. I think the um the antibiotic use in terms of a negative example, um I think that's still unabated. I think that um Yeah, you know, some pretty dramatic changes will have to will have to happen to for for this to really fundamentally change it in in OBGYN and pediatrics and adult treatment. There's people that recommend antibiotic treatment for IBS, which I personally think is in some ways crazy in a time where we all know that, you know, we we don't want to harm the microbes. So, to give repeated doses of antibiotics for which gives you a marginal benefit, transient benefit, um I I think it's really irresponsible. Well, I mean, I would say the third thing is that there are now a massive effort to see if how the the the the microbiome the the wisdom that's in that system, how they can be utilized to both for diagnostics, um but also for personalized medicine. It's conceivable that um doing that test, um it has more predictive value, diagnostic value than doing your annual physical and your Wow. your regular blood test. Potentially, you know, it's um and at different stages of life. So, if you do this on a pregnant mother, you could predict the risk for autism. If you do it in an infant, you could predict um how this infant later will, you know, if he's at a high risk of of developing depression or And, you know, the the this potential clearly has been recognized by by people like at at Viome or you biome or um Day Two. So, I mean, there's there's many players now. Not sure who's going to win that race, but it's it's there's a huge potential this could revolutionize medicine. Yeah, the so we've leveraged um Viome very heavily. So, we happen to know Naveen personally. He's been on the show Impact Theory a couple of times. Great dude, really like him. Yeah, he's a really good guy. so, he's allowed us to access the back end and work with some of the people that they have. And And the thing that is has been so terrifying, and the thing that I'm pushing him that is the problem he has to solve, is that the massive complexity. So, for instance, what we realized was Lisa has SIBO, but she also has a deficiency in um the uh the variability, the variety of um species that she has in her gut. She also has uh diminished lining of her gut and probably has some gut leak. So, it's like, okay, you can't attack them all at once. So, there's no one simple solution that's going to solve everything. And if you took the antibiotics for SIBO, which like you were saying is the traditional recommendation, well, the problem is now you're going to exacerbate all the other problems that she has lower down in the line. So, working on these like one at a time, right? Okay, so first we have to address SIBO. And what do you have to do to do that? That's already insanely complicated. To tie this up with um one thing that I just could not wrap this interview without talking about, it's something you introduced me to. I'd never heard of this before. And while I think you mean it specifically in reference to the brain as an analogy, I think it works for the complexity that I'm talking about, which is the brain connectome. Um what is the brain connectome? What does it mean? And maybe most interestingly, what is the paradigm that it totally shatters? The brain connectome project is something that's been initiated by the National Institute of Health um and it's it's based on the idea that um seems like obvious that every cell in in the brain is connected with each other, and that there's there's networks of the brain that are connected with each other, and it's like a massive supercomputer, really, the way it's organized. And um there are people that do you know, with fiber tracking, with brain imaging, different modalities of brain imaging, that study this phenomenon and ultimately will be able to get a much more accurate description of the functions of of of our brain, which it's still pretty primitive the way it is right now, you know. Um and um the impact will be I mean, clearly there's a race on in understanding the brain and its potential and its role in disease. And so, for example, that whole idea that the brain is a it's not just a cognitive machine and an emotional machine, but its primary function probably being the supercomputer that surveys every cell in your body constantly on a millisecond millisecond time scale and monitors for potential threats to its homeo to the homeostasis of the organism and then responds, you know, based on its memory, its experience, um but but also based on on on inborn patterns um to overcome that perturbation. So, understanding how the brain does that, this regulatory role, I think will also revolutionize medicine. I mean, it's um as you said earlier, you know, medicine until I mean, even today in 95% of medicine does not take the brain into account in in health and That's crazy. Uh which is crazy. It's the most powerful machine, you know, in in the well, certainly on this planet, that you would not take this into account in in your theories of how the body functions and is is really amazing to me. Mhm. But but that is changing. I mean, so the the connectome project is one of those areas that is really pushing ahead and and will will establish the the correct role of the brain in in in you know, in our physiology, and our health. Mhm. I love that notion of of a connectome of being far more interrelated, and I think that's the the thing that was the big breakthrough for me, is far more interrelated than our metaphors and our analogies up to this point would lead us to believe, which is the exact issue that we're having with digestion, right? You've talked about people have historically thought about it as this machine, uh kind of like a car, and it's like if you take care of it and give the right fuel, it'll last about 75 years, and you know, with having to address the occasional infection or whatever, but but not understanding the role that communication plays, that there's the, as you said, the bidirectional communication of the brain to the gut, the gut to the brain, um that so much of our immune system is housed in the gut, right? And oh man, when I read this in your book, I almost flipped out, that the reason that so much of our immune system is in our gut is because of its encountering potentially deadly, um bacteria in the food that we eat. Yeah. And I thought, oh my god, like it was one of those that should be patently obvious, but never made my radar until I read it. And I think what you're working on is is so critically important in this moment. I because it's affected my life, um I know just how important, and I I worry that um Lisa and I are sort of the the tip of a spear of what's coming, which is really terrifying if we don't get a lot more answers. I think there's going to be an immeasurable amount of suffering, and um yeah, so getting some of these answers is is incredibly important, and and your book has really been a a touchstone for that. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? My my personal website, emeranmayer.com. Um that guides you then to all the other uh areas. All right, my final question, and this admittedly is meant to be hard, cuz I want to force you into a binary situation where you can only choose one thing, um what one thing could people do additively or subtractively, uh reductively, I guess, to have the biggest impact on their overall health and well-being? Yeah, so with the one thing, that's makes it difficult. I would, you know, I would probably start with the exercise part, um but right after that or at the same level, the diet part. Um I did not see that answer coming, I'll be honest. Really? Yeah. Well, the exercise part Diet, yes. Exercise, no. The exercise part is because, you know, there's so many studies, um the benefits on cognitive function and um slowing the the cognitive decline and um stress reduction and change structural change in the brain. So, sorry I disappointed you with the exercise, but No, no, I love that. Being surprised is the best possible answer. Yeah. That's awesome. Dr. Meyer, thank you so much for coming on. It was a real pleasure. Guys, if you haven't already discovered him out in the wide world, if you haven't read the book, if you haven't gone to his Facebook page, his website, Instagram page, go check it all out. He's really somebody that is at the absolute forefront of discovering this and what I love about him and what I think is is just so apparent in the talk that we had today is he's not dogmatic, he's really trying to discover the answers. He has a deeply inquisitive mind and something that we didn't get to talk about in the interview, he was meant to take over a chocolate business, uh which was in the family for generations and he left that because he had a deep uh passion for his inquisitiveness around the subjects that we talked about today and that shines through in everything that he does and you get the sense of somebody really trying to discover the truth and that to me is what the show is all about. We are going to succeed or fail based on our ability to really look at a lot of different hypothesis and build a worldview based on that rather than presenting dogma. Um so, just incredibly grateful for you coming on the show today. It was really, really amazing. Guys, dive into his world. I think that the connection between the mind and the gut is just absolutely critical. Uh and you've got to figure that that one out for yourself for sure if you want to be able to optimize your mind and live the best life possible. So, thank you guys so much for joining us today. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.