These

are real problems, right, when you move into clinical practice because they need a very specific definition so they can lead to a very specific outcome.

You know, dysbiosis is the opposite of a healthy symbiotic relationship, right, which is what you normally have with your gastrointestinal microbiota.

You feed them, they feed you, right, and your relationship is bidirectional, by evolutionary selection.

When something goes wrong with that relationship, where the microbiome starts harming the body, and the body starts harming the microbiome, that's what we refer to as dysbiosis.

But that's a very non-quantifiable term.

So people have tried to put bounds in it, tried to say, you know, alpha diversity, the number of bacterial species you find in a sample could be indicative, but it's not.

Jack, do you think there's an area or a part about FMPs other than what defines dysbiosis and a healthy individual? But is there an area that is particularly not well understood that we should focus on future research? I

Could you just give us a, a foundation here about the microbiome? For parents who are getting kids outdoors, now, our youngest child is 10, but we have five kids, and they all go through that stage where they're crawling, and they're putting things in their mouth, and you're thinking, "This is just horrible." But for the sake of developing the microbiome, and especially you talk about that birth to three age, this is actually great for them.

Yeah.

This is, this is one of the most exciting, uh, misnomers, is, uh, that the microbes out there in the world can colonize your child, and mostly they can't, right? 99.9% of all of the bacteria that live in and on your body come from the mother.

And, and this is, this is what we call, uh, transgenerational, um, inoculation, right? You, you know, uh, your mother and then immediate family members, maybe a father figure or a, um, or, or siblings can provide bacteria to the person which will colonize them.

But the bacteria that colonize your skin, your gut, your mouth, your lungs, your urogenital tract, these have evolved to live alongside you.

You become dependent upon them, and they become dependent upon you.

So it's not like I can feed a baby a bunch of soil, and the bacteria in the soil will colonize their body.

It la- it just lands on the ground.

If you can't validate, you need to be really clear that it's an idea, not evidence.

I fully agree with that.

Uh, my, my concern is right now is, um, that I'm seeing people, um, try and move outside of their sphere of educational rigor, you know, i.e., what they've been trained in, what their fundamental knowledge base actually is, um, because AI helps them to reach outside of that knowledge base into a new space without the fundamental architecture that would support them in being rigorous in that new space.

And so I, I do say that while I think, you know, large language models and AI can help you communicate with a novel discipline or explore ideas outside of your discipline, you still need to ensure that you are-- you as an individual understand enough to be able to either interpret it or know enough people in that discipline to help you engage with that material more effectively.

I-- So many CEOs I see now have suddenly become experts in coding or, you know, or have suddenly become experts in a particular area of science.

And when you actually interrogate the idea, they've gone off on a really wild goose chase that doesn't actually make sense or has been, you know, completely done in the literature before, but their AI just kept on telling them that they had a really good idea and that they should pursue it, right [laughs].

So I think there's, there's a role for, yeah, as you say, validate.

And how do you quantify that in a way that, you know, societally makes sense and can motivate people to continue, um, continue on in, you know, in a way that stays true to that, that spark? It's interesting.

[chuckles]

...

so they'd get that proper immune stimulation.

Mostly, it's through physical contact and breathing stuff in.... right? So if you plunge your hands into the dirt, your immune system is actually, uh, being stimulated by all of those microbial antigenic signals in the soil, right? And if you rub a pet with your hands or you let it lick your face, you're getting that kind of microbial exposure, and then whatever you breathe into your lungs is stimulating the antigens, antigenic receptors that are all throughout your respiratory tract, and your mouth, and your skin.

So these are, these are primary ways.

It's physical interaction and, you know, and, and respiratory interaction with the world.

That's really important.

I don't know about me.

Hmm.

... see what's actually happening in the world.

So, for example, it's quite obvious that the vast majority of, um, microbes that might be super evolved to live inside a particular species will go extinct should that i- species go extinct.

So think, you know, um, uh, the microbes living inside an otter species or, or a panda, right? They will go extinct when that animal goes extinct.

So that's a problem, right? But we're finding that certain species might be starting to disappear because their environment's changing.

So, for example, really important species like phototrophs living in the ocean, these are, these are like cyanobacteria that produce all the oxygen on our planet, they appear to be disappearing because the oceans are getting warmer and they can no longer survive or thrive or adapt in that system.

So, one of the great examples that we've, we, we know is a big problem for humanity is the reduction in the biodiversity of a species called Bifidobacterium longum infantis.

Uh, are there other strategies? Like, uh, like give me another example of how microbe conservation would work.