Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. Long time coming. We really are interested in this. For people who've been listening to the show for years, there was a period six years ago where we were obsessed with getting a fecal transplant from our friend Amy. Yep.
And it took us six years to get someone who actually knows about this space. And her name is Colleen Cutcliffe, and she is a microbiome scientist and health advisory board member for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Very prestigious school. The one you don't like to say because there's an S at the end of John. Plural and plural. There was something funny on the internet. I forget exactly what it was, but it was like people have trouble with pronouns, but they're able to say Ruth's Chris.
That's hard for me, too.
It's hard.
Yeah, it's too, yeah. At any rate, very prestigious, as we know. And she has a company, you'll hear about it, called Pendulum, that is making probiotics and prebiotics and with a much different degree of oversight.
Yeah, like, does Ruth own Chris? Right.
Ruth's Chris.
Like, Ruth's son Chris, but they didn't say son Chris.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Colleen Cutcliffe to start her microbiome company?
And so his retirement gig for 20 years was professor. Now he's fully retired.
That's awesome.
Yeah. And my mom was like a consultant.
A retirement gig is being a professor. That's like my dad's idea of retirement.
Yeah, her father's just now retiring as an engineer. Yeah. And he immediately started. Right back the next day.
He just can't retire. Some people are really bad at retirement. Yeah. I called them yesterday or my mom was like, call because we were at the Golden Globe. She wanted to hear about it. And, you know, I faced him and she's like, dad's in a meeting. I was like, he's in a meeting in his retirement. He's retired. He's in a meeting.
Yeah. Well, probably a lot of people want him to like consult on things. Exactly. He's a consultant in quotes.
It just means they don't have to pay any of the other stuff. Yeah. They don't have to pay into the disability. You're a private contractor now. And was he an engineer of some kind at IBM? He was a computer science person. Okay, and so education prized you?
Yeah, and also I'm Chinese.
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Chapter 3: How do antibiotics affect the microbiome and health?
And then mother's breast milk, a ton of it is actually the prebiotics, which is the food that feeds your microbiome. And so there's a ton of that in it. But then getting back to acromantia, mucinophila, they have never been able to find that. It's not like in yogurts or sauerkraut. You can't find it in any single food. The only place they've actually found it is in mother's breast milk.
By the way, I wasn't breastfed.
Maybe you didn't have even the initial seed. The idea is that you get it from your mom and then you spend the rest of your life trying not to lose this thing. Right.
What if I had breast milk now?
Well, you could also just take the supplement. But you could take breast milk if you wanted.
It does have a lot of prebiotics. Would that populate my gut? Why wouldn't it?
Yeah, it should be able to.
Okay, if you're out there in your nursing. I've talked to my wife.
I wish we were able to just drink it. My brother's girlfriend is pregnant.
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Chapter 4: What role does the microbiome play in obesity and depression?
One and a half generation.
Yeah, I only know one and a half generation non-white folks from Atlanta. So that's maybe just more a comment on that.
Oh, we're going to try it. And we're going to. Yes. We're the only probiotics company that the Mayo Clinic has invested in. And they've invested in multiple rounds in us. We are sold through over 30,000 healthcare practitioners. So that's like doctors that are recommending the product. And we just got the number one GI doctor recommended Acromantia brand.
But how do you get like those crystal bullet points? It's like still a lot of words.
Yeah, and you don't want your product to be just a bunch of writing all over it.
Right. Yeah, yeah. How do you make people feel like this is the cutting edge thing without all those words?
That's right. And that's emotional and it's visual and it's actually not as intellectual as we think it is. We get a feeling right away.
Exactly. Exactly. And so I will say my biggest weakness is that as a scientist, I'm thinking like, how do you get people to love it trainingly? Like what I just listened to you guys like, oh, that would obviously make you believe. Yes. And so I am actively looking for help from people who are like actually viscerally.
And so to the point about clean lines, the new packaging, it feels soft when you touch it. Oh, nice. And it just has the name of the product on the front and all the like words about what's in it and all this. It's actually on a packaging that you throw out. The bottle itself is really clean and feels good. And so I'm like, okay.
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Chapter 5: When will microbiome advancements start helping us?
And I think, oh my God, overnight, they're going to fix all these genetic disorders. when is it happening? Then you hear this microbiome, we make all these links, but it's like, when is it going to actually start helping us? But I do know we're on the cusp of all these things, but it can get a little fatiguing. Like, when is it going to happen?
Chapter 6: What role does CRISPR play in microbiome research?
When's it going to happen? And actually one thing that doesn't happen can set the whole industry back. CRISPR is a good example of that. Like gene therapy was really hot. There was like one adverse event and then everyone's went ice cold on it.
Chapter 7: How does Pendulum Therapeutics differ from other microbiome companies?
And then it comes back in the form of CRISPR. So these things happen. It takes a long time to change our biology, as it turns out. That's why I think for us, it was so exciting to have this intervention that can lower A1C and lower blood glucose spikes. It's huge.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of AI in our daily lives?
as well as essentially a pharmaceutical, but it's this microbiome intervention. And one huge difference between our company and all the other companies that have been going after it with discovery platforms and doing real science, I don't want to like bash anybody, but most of the consumer products aren't actually doing real science and investing in that.
And almost every one of the microbiome companies that's investing in science is doing a drug path. We are like the weirdos. We're the ones who've done all the science, but are bringing it to consumers. And so that ability to have a new microbiome intervention, it's the first and only probiotic that can help with diabetes. That's so cool. I'm super excited for you guys to try them.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, thanks for coming.
This is great.
Yeah, thank you guys. Yeah, our pleasure.
Yeah, great to meet you.
Good luck with everything.
Thank you. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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