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