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What Your Toilet Doesn't Tell You About Your Gut Health with Scott Hickle - E77
15 Plays13 hours ago
Every day, millions quietly struggle with gut issues - bloating, unpredictable bathroom habits, discomfort, and confusing food reactions. Tracking and understanding what’s actually happening inside our bodies is tedious, messy, and often left ignored, even as research shows gut health impacts everything from mood to energy to disease risk.
Getting real insight feels nearly impossible, thanks to complex tests, hard-to-stick elimination diets, and unreliable self-logging. It’s a frustrating guessing game that keeps most people from finding relief or unlocking true vitality.
This episode dives into the science of gut health at home, exploring how you can turn your toilet into a health device - and transform your health for good. Forget complicated labs and guesswork - here’s how you can get answers right from your own bathroom.
Scott Hickle is the Co-Founder and CEO of Throne, the world’s most advanced health wearable for your toilet. A mechanical engineer by training and entrepreneur by trade, Scott’s mission is to bring precision health tracking to one of the last untapped frontiers of the human body - our waste. Throne’s ultimate goal is to make preventive health second nature, giving everyone the chance to catch issues early, feel better daily, and live longer, healthier lives.
“Smartphone use on the toilet is associated with a 46% increase in the risk of hemorrhoids.” - Scott Hickle
In this episode you will learn:
- Why daily bathroom habits can reveal key signals about your gut and urinary health.
- How tech like Throne turns your toilet into a health tracker, capturing trends and patterns over time.
- The basics of gut health, stool frequency and consistency, and why these insights matter for your wellbeing.
- Ways to spot trigger foods and improve IBS management using data, instead of manual tracking and guesswork.
- The link between stress and gut performance, based on real data and daily patterns.
- How keeping tabs on hydration and bathroom routines can help prevent health risks, including accidental falls as we age.
Resources:
- Connect with Scott on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scotthickle
- Learn more about Throne Science: https://www.thronescience.com/
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
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Transcript
Introduction to Healthspan Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
How long you sit on the toilet after you're done. That's called the wrap up time. And we can measure that as well. And so we can give you your know your trends on that. and are you sitting there for 15 minutes scrolling on your phone, just passing time? Like there are more comfortable places to do that. That won't put undue stress on your anal rectal muscles.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
Scott Hickel and the Mission of Throne
00:00:36
Speaker
Scott, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today. For those without context, this will be the shittiest podcast you listen to today. But we mean that in the best way and Scott will give context. But before we do on Scott and Throne and everything you're doing, how would you describe yourself?
00:00:53
Speaker
Andrew, thanks so much for having me on. I would say I'm a lively entrepreneur. Yeah, i I can see that. i I had the pleasure of meeting Scott at Whoop HQ when he was giving a TED Talk at TEDxBoston, Unlocking Longevity, um talking about...
00:01:11
Speaker
<unk> I think people are familiar with all the the wearable and all the data we're capturing, but Scott noticed a problem that we're flushing away, throwing away potentially even more powerful, insightful and impactful data.
00:01:25
Speaker
And that's kind of his story. So I'll let you just kind of give some context on who you are, um what Throne is and how you ended up building what you're building right now.
00:01:36
Speaker
I'm Scott Hickel. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Throne. We're building The first device to track gut health, urinary function, bathroom habits, hydration from your toilet automatically, hands-free with every flush.
Personal Inspiration and Cultural Importance of Waste Data
00:01:50
Speaker
Basic insight behind this is, as you alluded to, there are dozens of devices to track sleep, exercise, cardio, respiratory rate, and dozens of other continuous biomarkers.
00:02:04
Speaker
There is nothing looking at gut health, urinary function, hydration, bathroom habits, these trends on a daily basis. Despite the fact that there are two places that every single person goes every single day, their bed and their toilet.
00:02:19
Speaker
And you do a great job of tracking sleep and do an awful jog of tracking gut health. And that realization is ultimately what spurred developing Throne, which is a continuous you know gut health monitor.
00:02:36
Speaker
And so we got here because i was raised by two doctors. Me too. Oh, wow. um So birds of a feather.
00:02:48
Speaker
ah But my dad's a medical device inventor as well. And my mom is a geriatrician. And so my co-founder, Tim, have two co-founders. One is Tim who originally had the idea. And he he first pitched this to me four years ago as kind of a you know a joke. But you know he he'd been thinking about this abstract notion of smart toilets since college.
00:03:10
Speaker
And i was like, clearly you would name that company Throne. And fast forward, the name stuck. It became one of those recurring topics of conversation between he and i And about a year and a half later, called my mom.
00:03:25
Speaker
I was like, hey, mom, is there any medical utility for looking at people's waste? And she lit up. She's like, honey, like in the field of geriatrics, it is a joke that like all our patients care about is their kids, their meds, and their poop.
00:03:41
Speaker
And it's so common that my patients bring in unsolicited stool samples for me to look at. Or they text me pictures of their poop. Like, I have stopped giving my phone number to my patients because they'll send me some of new pictures their poop.
00:03:57
Speaker
And that was the first time we were like, wait a second, like there might actually be something here.
Understanding the Gut Microbiome
00:04:01
Speaker
If people can intuitively appreciate the value of health and sight hidden in their waist yeah because they're sending it to their doctor. So clearly they they appreciate that there's medical utility here. And then the second thing is that it's so common that it's changed the way she as a physician communicates with her patients. Yeah.
00:04:18
Speaker
So that was the original spark that caused us to look into this. And ultimately, the realization was there are hundreds of millions of Americans alone who would benefit from taking gain a closer look at the toilet bowl.
00:04:31
Speaker
Can we pause there for a second? And for most people listening, it may be obvious, but... for anyone not, and maybe I'm overestimating this most, the importance of gut health in the microbiome. So there's example of people say, hey, it's not actually us making decisions, it's our microbiota that it's making us want things or act in certain ways. And just how much of our biomass is made up by things that aren't ourselves, you know, they're bacteria and others, but also...
00:05:01
Speaker
I think more and more research coming out like on doing fecal transplants where you can make a a rat act schizophrenic or make them stop acting schizophrenic based on transferring healthy or unhealthy um fecal matter.
00:05:16
Speaker
And so this this importance of... It's not just, hey, do I have a stomach ache? Hey, do I have IBS? There's a lot happening in gut health that I think we're we're only recently in recent years becoming aware of.
Advancements in AI and Health Insights from Waste
00:05:30
Speaker
can Can you speak to that and just how maybe this has always been important, but we're understanding that importance more now than ever?
00:05:37
Speaker
So the gut microbiome is... very much an emerging field of health. And to be very clear, what Throne is measuring is not the direct health of your gut microbiome, so much as a proxy to the health of your microbiome.
00:05:53
Speaker
i like There are microbiome tests you can take, but that requires DNA and RNA sequencing. You have to collect a sample, send it off to a lab. and we think of ourselves as What WHOOP and Aura are to a blood test, we are to a microbiome test, right? Which is, you're getting a dozen biomarkers every single day as opposed to, you know, a full panel, but a snapshot in time.
00:06:16
Speaker
That said, the microbiome science is like really exciting, really interesting. So much of our metabolic health, of our gut health is driven by the balance of different microbes in our gut that we are starting to understand, but The reality is our understanding is not quite to the point where it's that clinically helpful outside of a few isolated instances.
00:06:43
Speaker
So the reason for that is that we as humans love linear relationships. We like to reduce things in the universe down to linear relationships that are easy to understand. More of this is good.
00:06:53
Speaker
Less of that is bad. And the gut microbiome is a multivariate dynamic compensatory system where There are some examples of microbes that are like, obviously, if you have too much of these, it's bad. Or if you have a lot of this, it's good, right? Like acromantia is the good microbe that everyone likes to talk about.
00:07:13
Speaker
You have too much E. coli or C. difficile, Ostrudium difficile, that can hospitalize you. That's terrible. However, for the most part, it's hard to say this is the right amount of this microbe to have because Just because you don't have that microbe doesn't mean you're not making up for the same functional effects with a symphony of 20 other microbes working in unison to achieve the same function, which is really hard to document and tease apart. The combinatorics of it, there are thousands of microbes.
00:07:51
Speaker
The other thing I'll say that I think part of why this is taken center stage lately is COVID.
00:08:00
Speaker
There's a lot of work done in tracking COVID through sewage systems in 2021 and 2022 that and then twenty twenty that opened people's eyes to the value of gut health from a public health perspective. And the natural extension of that is now making that personal health.
00:08:20
Speaker
And you see that with air quality monitors, right? Like air quality used to be something that you measured at the city level. And now you have personal air quality monitors for your home. People are used to blood work.
00:08:32
Speaker
And so you go to your doctor once a year, you you pull the blood and it would be more rare, more invasive, like, cause you're having to catch your poop and mail it off and put it in these scoops. Like that was a rare thing. But if you think about our daily activity, we're,
00:08:46
Speaker
We're not constantly opening ourselves up with blood spurting out each day, but we are constantly having this waste leave our body that is giving these signals. So was there something that developed technologically that enabled us to take that insight and and bring it into the privacy of our home and ultimately our bathroom?
Historical Perspectives on Waste Monitoring
00:09:07
Speaker
Absolutely. So there's few elements The first is computer vision has finally gotten to a place where in really in the last five years, where you could extract useful health information from image content of the toilet bowl.
00:09:24
Speaker
And it's the same thing. you know my My mom's patients sending her pictures of their poop and asking, am I okay? You can now train an AI to analyze that poop and give you similar answers.
00:09:36
Speaker
that That is something that just was not feasible five years ago. That's the biggest unlock. However, there's There's a couple other really just like amazing things to me. The first is the cultural unlock, which is going back to the conversation about gut health is more topical than ever. If you look at the Google search trends for gut health versus sleep health, in the last four years, gut health has surpassed sleep health as a search trend.
00:10:02
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So there's a cultural aspect of this. And then the other big technological one is more on the urinary side. that just this Again, AI, the things that are empowered by an a a i you can't predict the use cases.
00:10:16
Speaker
But you look back and make sense of it in hindsight. And one of the my favorite examples is we started using ah kind of the modern toilet with water in it for the explicit purpose of masking the smell, right? We're trapping scents. That's why the stool falls into a toilet and gets covered by water to trap that scent in so it doesn't fill up the whole home.
00:10:39
Speaker
As fate would have it, Urinary flow rate is one of the most, it is the primary metric for measuring prostate health in men. And your urinary flow rate maps one to one. It is directly correlated to the volume of the P stream entering the water bowl.
00:11:00
Speaker
So it's just like this happy fluke of history that we have water in bowls to drop our waste into. that if you put a microphone there, you can actually measure the urinary flow rate with astonishing accuracy.
00:11:16
Speaker
It's a funny thing on how innovation works. ah There's a book, how innovation works. And it talks about you, you don't know the winding path to get there. So like to invent computers, right. You had to, you don't, they don't use vacuum tubes today, but the path to get there did. And you needed vacuum tubes to be used in TVs and these other things. And so like nobody going back, looking at and ah Mac today would be like oh, you know what? Like on the path from horses and carriages to the MacBook, we need vacuum tubes. Like you couldn't figure it, but it's these steps along the way of, oh, we need water in the toilet today.
00:11:52
Speaker
Like we thought it was for this reason, but now because it's there, we can use it for this other really insightful, impactful reason. It's the innovation unlocks. It's it's ah serendipitous a lot of times. Completely. There are cultures around the world, famously Germany and parts of Austria, where they have toilets that are they're called the poop shelf toilet, where they you you poop on a shelf so you can turn around and look at it. It doesn't fall into water.
00:12:15
Speaker
Which is an interesting cultural comment ah in and of itself, right? that there There are whole cultures that appreciate the value of waste inspection. And that's that was the topic of my TED Talk, the value of looking at your poop throughout the ages.
Current Capabilities and Benefits of Throne
00:12:27
Speaker
But in those cultures where those toilets are shaped that way, you cannot measure urinary flow rate from a microphone. Yeah, I mean, ah you referenced the TED Talk. What was it? It wasn't the minister. It was...
00:12:39
Speaker
What did Henry VIII have? What was the name title? Opening line is talking about the history of waste inspection. And the King Henry VII and King Henry VIII both had members of the royal court known as the groom of the stool whose whole job was to look at the king's poop and go tell the the royal doctor about the king's health.
00:12:57
Speaker
Because it's it's ah it's a window into our health, right? like uses The eyes of the window to the stool. Our pope is the window to our our health, right? Yeah. So it's... These are early days, right? Like I'm sure as technology develops, as AI gets better and everything, you can keep layering on.
00:13:16
Speaker
But today, what is it that you're able to measure in the insights that someone's able to get at home? So you think about... I'm just so excited where this is going. Like if we go back and sure I had a a bad rap for good reason, but there are notes of like, Hey, you don't have to give all this blood. We can do it from this pinprick, but that doesn't mean the idea wasn't right and wouldn't eventually come.
00:13:37
Speaker
And we think what you had to do not that long ago, um, for a colonoscopy, how you had to go in, you got put under, they do all these things and now you can do them at home.
00:13:49
Speaker
Right. Because test and the innovations moved. And so where are we today in terms of the insight that like, hey, daily, i can get this and track over time. What what am I able to see and do? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. So on gut health side, your stool frequency and your stool consistency, like the the shape of it, those together comprise what we call the digestive pattern.
00:14:12
Speaker
And so looking at that pattern over past week, month, 90 day period, tells you a lot about how your gut health is functioning, the functional gut health, right?
00:14:24
Speaker
And it's actually very useful in identifying dietary intolerances. Trigger foods, you know, 30 million Americans have IBS, and IBS is an incredibly frustrating disease for people because unlike all, you know, typically when people think of receiving a diagnosis for something,
00:14:45
Speaker
They think, okay, great. That's the first step towards finding relief, right? And IBS is does not work that way. It's saying we don't know. It's saying you got something going on, but we don't know why. It's a description of symptoms, right? yeah And what brings one person with IBS relief is completely different than what might bring their sibling with IBS relief. yeah And finding out how your body responds to different stimuli, particularly in your diet,
00:15:15
Speaker
is a really shockingly painful and frustrating process for people because you have basically two options. The first option is people often work with dieticians and nutritionists.
00:15:27
Speaker
And but by the way, this typically is like, you know, third, fourth. Yeah, years into the journey. Yeah, exactly. They work with the GI first, often medication doesn't resolve it. And then they get stuck with this diagnosis and then they start working with kind of more naturopathic sources.
00:15:45
Speaker
and holistic health practitioners. And oftentimes, the dietitians and nutritionists will ask their clients, patients, to keep a manual stool log and a manual food log. And then they'll just eyeball it, which is pretty crude when you think about it, right? And they'll like look at it and be like, okay, well, it looks like when you have coffee on an empty stomach or eat cruciferous vegetables or eat foods with Red 40, whatever it is.
00:16:07
Speaker
like These are the patterns that we're seeing that tend to be associated with loose or liquid bowel movements, which means your body is... ah rejecting this food or this ingredient or has inflammation. You have to keep a manual log of all of your bowel movements and all of the food that you eat.
00:16:22
Speaker
That is tedious. People don't like doing that. and And when they do it, they don't fully do it. like There's been studies on that, right? You're undercounting, underreporting. You don't remember the snacks here and there. yeah And that's food, which people are you know much more familiar with than gauging the health of their poop. yeah And then...
00:16:43
Speaker
The alternative is going on an elimination diet, which is kind of the gold standard, where you basically go down to hyper-restricted diet of you know what my mom calls beige foods, right? Like potatoes, chicken breasts without the skin on it. but And then you slowly reintroduce foods and food groups into your diet over the course of like two weeks at a time, and then you move on to the next one. and then you And like in the hundreds of people I have met,
00:17:12
Speaker
along this journey who have gone through but health journeys, I have met, I think, two people who have the discipline to stick with an elimination diet long enough to identify actual cause of their digestive discomfort.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah. There's a bit massive gap theory to practice, right? Like theoretically, this is the perfect path, but if nobody does it, it practically it means it's
AI's Role in Connecting Diet and Gut Health
00:17:36
Speaker
worthless. Totally. And so one of the things that we're really excited about is giving people the ability first with rudimentary tools, just to able to go back and look their patterns and be able to make those mental connections themselves. Right. Like this is something that whoop and aura users, the number one behavior that they change after using whoop or aura for a while. Can guess? Can I guess?
00:17:55
Speaker
Please, you know it. Cut down on alcohol because they see what it does to their sleep. Exactly. And their recovery. Yeah. But exactly you're exactly right. yeah, and I have dozens of friends who wear these and I love you know quizzing them about their experiences with these devices and almost none of them put that data into the app, but they can go back and eyeball it. right they like None of them are going back and saying and putting in the tags like I drink alcohol. like you know Three drinks. Last one was at 11 p.m. and yeah No one's doing that.
00:18:24
Speaker
But... You know when you drink and you can go back and make those correlations in your own data yourself and be able to be like oh, wow, it really is shockingly impactful. Same thing with diet.
00:18:36
Speaker
Just having an accurate history of your digestive patterns gives you the ability to go back and be like, okay, like what did I eat on that day? And then the the step we're going to take that I'm really excited about is asking you retroactively, hey, it looks like you had, you know, looser liquid bowel movements. What did you eat in the previous...
00:18:54
Speaker
eating window, right? your dike And that's it's a whole other conversation about how long digestive transit time is. But for most people, it's on the order of like 24 to 36 hours. we So we can ask, you know, what did you eat in your previous digestive transit time window? Okay. So the window isn't the previous meal. It's a period of time typically.
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah. And there's there's there's a lot of really cool science on this, but it's it's interesting. Most people's digestive transit time is about one day or two days. And it's a bimodal distribution. But it's also highly personal. And some people it's as low as 10 hours. And for others, it's as high as like 72.
00:19:31
Speaker
OK, and you can pick that up over time based on, hey, it's, you know. 40 hours ago, you've consistently had this thing. And so it's not necessarily your 24 hour. You seem to be like the 40 hour that's impacted because of.
00:19:45
Speaker
The most precise way we can gauge this and I've done it myself a few times is what they call the blue dye test, which is eat food with blue dye in it. You can see it when it comes out the other side. So you just start a timer when you eat the food.
00:19:59
Speaker
And we you know, when we first moved into our office, we had a little office morning party and had blue dye food cookies for blue food coloring cookies for everyone. And we encourage everyone, you tracking Texas. Yeah. Text us tomorrow.
00:20:13
Speaker
or the next day when you notice the past, like, we're just curious to see, you know, what's this look like for the attendees of the party? And it's it's a shockingly fun party trick. Yeah. What was the range just within your own company? What was the range there?
00:20:27
Speaker
So actually, this is a bit of a tangent, but... Within our own company, it mostly covered around a day, which is what you'd expect for people with healthy digestive patterns. However, especially like a lot of you know young people in their 20s and thirty s because your gut motility starts to slow down as you get older. So at like as you age, average digestive transit time gets longer and longer.
00:20:50
Speaker
um That said, we found that some people had shockingly low digestive transit times, like on this order of like 8, 10 hours, which is like the very low end in literature.
00:21:01
Speaker
And yeah raises a question for me around our understanding of digestive transit time and the literature surrounding it, because so much literature is constrained to researchers working hours. and we ran we had, we had people eating these cookies at like 10 PM.
00:21:24
Speaker
And if they're bowel circadian rhythm has them waking up and you know their next bowel movement is at like 7 or 8 a.m. And for some of those people, they had already processed the cookie and it showed up.
00:21:35
Speaker
And I don't know that there's been that much literature around people's digestive transit times when they eat late at night. I wonder too, if ingredients matter, if they're different intolerances that would make your body process and like, Hey, we need to get this out of your system faster, or whether it's the diet itself or it's the gluten or depending on, you know what your dietary restrictions might be.
00:21:57
Speaker
totally So anyway, there's, so going back to your larger question, what can you track and what are the benefits?
Significance of Hydration and Throne's Broader Implications
00:22:03
Speaker
Right? So one of it is just your digestive pattern, frequency, consistency, how often are you pooping? What's it look like? Is it part healthy, looser liquid?
00:22:10
Speaker
next one is what we call bathroom habits, which is, this is completely within your control for the most part, which is how long you're sitting on the t toilet. And there is a lot of literature and guidance around this. you're not supposed to sit on the toilet for more than 10 minutes. Smartphone use on the toilet is associated with a 46% increase in the risk of hemorrhoids.
00:22:29
Speaker
And that's something that We can help you right then and there on that in the moment tell you how long you're sitting on the toilet. Exactly, we can give you a nudge after 10 minutes and say, hey, you know, this isn't working. It might be you know prudent to come back later.
00:22:42
Speaker
And can also measure the time to your first evacuation, which is helpful because that's a proxy for how much you're straining if you're constipated. Right, if you sit on the toilet, and what we want is to have a healthy bowel movement within like two minutes of sitting on the toilet.
00:22:59
Speaker
Because otherwise you're training your body that you want to train your body that when you sit on the toilet, it is time to go. And if you don't, then you're training your body to sit there and strain. Right.
00:23:10
Speaker
There are a lot of parallels with sleeping, right? Where they say, hey use your bedroom for sleeping and sex. Don't sit there and text and work and all that. Like you want to associate it with this thing that you get in and out for.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yes, there are so many parallels with sleeping. and same thing, like how long you sit on the toilet after you're done. We can, that's called the wrap up time. And we can measure that as well. And so we can give you you, know, your trends on that. And again, like, are you sitting there for 15 minutes scrolling on your phone, just passing time? Like there are more comfortable places to do that, that won't put undue stress on your anal rectal muscles um and blood vessels.
00:23:46
Speaker
So that's a whole category. And then there's hydration, which is, you know, That's obviously impactful to everyone. It has not only impacts your cognition, your mood, mental clarity, but also has genuine life-saving potential in the statistical sense that as you age, your thirst response becomes diminished. You're less aware of being thirsty. This is something Peter Atiyah has talked about.
00:24:12
Speaker
um yeah He himself took a dehydration-related fall and ah you know has gone pretty deep on this subject. But The number one cause of accidental death in adults over 65 is complications due to accidental falls.
00:24:27
Speaker
And chronic dehydration, a study the Mayo Clinic ran in 65,000 people. Actually, it might be 30,000 people. Anyways, tens of thousands of people found that chronic dehydration has a 13% elevated odds ratio for taking an accidental fall.
00:24:45
Speaker
And so there are a lot of older adults. I have lost people I love in my life due to accidental falls. And it's just so, I think most people I know have lost a loved one.
00:25:00
Speaker
Yeah. yeah and it's so common that it's one of those things at scale. This will absolutely save lives. We just won't be able to point to that person and say, I saved your life because I helped you drink eight ounces of water in that day, but it doesn't make it any less meaningful.
00:25:17
Speaker
I mean, it's Steven Pinker and Bill Gates, others talk about like you, you don't get the the headlines on 8 million people didn't die today because of this thing. It's very hard to track that, but you could see it over time in metadata and it's hard to isolate the the factor.
00:25:31
Speaker
But I guess... This always brings up an interesting question for me with wearables with data devices of, hey, we're surfacing these insights.
00:25:43
Speaker
And then what have you been able to see people then be able to do with that to change? So they see that hydration and say, okay, like I'm going to be more thoughtful and I'm going to start each morning drinking a 12 ounce glass water. So like I just at least set my baseline. Like that's this habit thing I'm going to adapt adopt to to address. Are there certain...
00:26:01
Speaker
actions that you see have been able to have trackable impact once people start seeing this data? Diet's the easiest one, right? For gut health, it's changing your diet and particularly yeah avoiding ultra processed foods. one One of our beta users, it's probably my favorite story today, is he this device for months and didn't install it.
00:26:25
Speaker
And Finally, his girlfriend was like, dude, like, what is this box that you've had on your desk for two months now? He's like, oh, it's a strong thing. And ah she was like, your gut health is terrible. Like, you need to try this.
00:26:42
Speaker
And so he got on, downloaded the app, and within... A couple days, the gut health score, which is like a composite score that we give, ah basically factors in your stool frequency and consistency of that digestive pattern, and synthesizes it into one 50 number.
00:26:59
Speaker
His gut health score was like in the 50s. And he was like, within two months of using this device, like he was like, I saw that number. It was very motivating. Within two months of using this device, I was back up into like averaging in the high 70s. And like I was scraping 90 couple times.
00:27:16
Speaker
And was like, in the the biggest thing was I started eating healthier and it was incredibly motivating to me between this and my whoop to go to the gym.
Personal Experiences and Future of Gut Health Monitoring
00:27:27
Speaker
And those two numbers together, like, and then materially improve my quality of life. And like, that is so cool because that was a beta device, right? Like, that's amazing to me.
00:27:38
Speaker
That's the worst it will ever be. So that's a really fun example. For me personally, the the most interesting lessons I've had from using this device, is the number one driver of my own personal gut health is stress.
00:27:54
Speaker
On stressful days, like we all have stressful days, but like especially as a founder, some of the most stressful days of the founder journey have absolutely wrecked my gut health.
00:28:06
Speaker
Did you know that before you had this data? No. Yeah. Cause I, I was blind to Cause as someone like I've worked with the nutritionist, I've done all the log, I've done all these things. Right. And my mom had colon cancer in her forties. Right. So I, this is a thing I take very seriously and care a lot about. Um, and it wasn't until someone said, yeah, I get that you ate the same thing here to here, but did you notice your stress this day? Like, do you remember what you were doing that day and why that may be different like, Oh, I never, I always thought it was just the food. And so that's yeah Amazing.
00:28:35
Speaker
blew my mother For me, it was I had a team member leave one day. like That absolutely wreaked habit on my gut. and Then you know recovered from that and a few months go by and then i went out to go fundraise.
00:28:46
Speaker
For the three months I was fundraising, my gut health was all over the map. and Then we closed the round and immediately I got back to like once a day healthy bowel movements.
00:28:59
Speaker
That is
00:29:02
Speaker
so you You hear about the brain-gut axis, mind-gut axis. It's very topical. There's all sorts of great talks and articles about it. It is one thing to know this exists in theory and a totally different thing, but see it in your own data.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah. be Be able to say, to your point, I haven't changed a thing about my diet. I eat, I'm very much a food is function type person. I eat the same thing six days a week.
00:29:28
Speaker
And for the change to be that dramatic just based on My you know fight or flight response. Yeah. Eye opening. That's amazing. i am excited to see the number of lives improved.
00:29:45
Speaker
with stuff like this. yeah I mean, you talked about the 30 million people with IBS. I honestly believe there's massive underreporting in this space. So you talk about your mother's patients would send pictures. And I think you have to get to a certain age where it's, I don't give an F anymore that I'm sending people pictures of my poop. And I think there's a lot of people not in that age that they just hide it. They're all this normal, especially guys, like, I'm not going to talk about this, all this, but having this in your home,
00:30:12
Speaker
It's just your privacy. You figure and you can start acting on it. And I think it's really going to impact so many more people than anybody realizes right now. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that's but that's something we talk a lot about is this concept of finding your normal.
00:30:25
Speaker
Because what's normal for you and what's healthy for you is highly unique. And a lot of people don't even realize that they are not normal. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the medical literature says that pooping anywhere from three times a week to three times a day is healthy.
00:30:43
Speaker
That's a 7X range. That's pretty yeah wild range. Yeah. But so much of is diet dependent, right? Like this is something that's very well documented. People with high fiber, typically, you know, vegan diets poop more than, you know, i'm in I'm in Austin, Texas. There's a lot of carnivores here. You know, that's a fat. and That's a trend. That's cowboys.
00:31:03
Speaker
Like a totally different diet. And how your body processes it is naturally going to be very different, even if they have similar caloric values. That's one aspect. And then the other aspect of it, too, is, you know, your personal normal. If you are a three times a day person and then you go to once every three days.
00:31:24
Speaker
That's not normal, even though it's all within the well-defined medical literature. a shift in that frequency is worth lagging. I mean, this is something I try to encourage a lot of people on with hormone changes, right? Tracking your hormones that if you only go once you start having problems, you don't know what your normal is.
00:31:43
Speaker
And so the earlier you can start tracking, like if you get a baseline panel 18, 19, 20 and track over time and similar with gut health of don't wait till you start having these gut problems, like pop this in, get going, start tracking the data so that you can see when something goes amiss because it may happen over time. It might not be an overnight thing, but it still could be a serious negative impact to your health and your quality of life.
00:32:07
Speaker
So Scott, I understand you are in taking pre-orders now. um And when when's the launch? Yeah, so we are shipping our first mass production units. Our our proper launch is looking like Third week of January, 2026. All right. The 2026, the year of gut health, gut insight, gut data. And if people want to learn more about you, about Throne, what's the best place?
00:32:34
Speaker
Thronescience.com is our website. You can find us on yeah every social media platform, just Throne Science. And then I'm Scott Hickel. Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you diving into all things waste and toilets today.
00:32:49
Speaker
i hopefully, our listeners find as much value from it as I did. I really learned a lot and I'm excited, especially from how impactful and insightful it is now. And to your point of this is the worst it's ever going to be. Like it's only getting better from here. So it's really exciting. So thank you, Scott.
00:33:06
Speaker
Andrew, thanks so much for having me. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com.
00:33:21
Speaker
Enjoy a lively day.