Your Toilet Knows More About Your Brain Than Your Doctor Does | Scott Hickle, Throne Science

What if your toilet could detect cancer before your doctor can? Scott Hickle, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, joins Dr. Brandon Crawford to introduce a clip-on smart toilet device that silently turns every bathroom visit into a continuous health monitoring session. No behavior change required. No sample collection. Just data, automatically, every single day. Throne tracks four core biomarker categories in real time: functional gut health, hydration status, bathroom behavior patterns, and prostate health for men, delivering the longitudinal surveillance that a single gut test or annual bloodwork simply cannot.

Dr. Crawford and Scott unpack the gut-brain connection, the failure of patient recall in clinical gut health, why GLP-1 drugs and opioids demand far more gut monitoring than they currently receive, and how Throne's upcoming microscopic blood detection capability could become the first continuous cancer screening device ever built. Real user stories, hard data, and a conversation about what becomes possible when the last dark zone of human health data finally comes into the light.

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Transcript

Voice Over: Welcome to the Longevity Formula with Dr. Brandon Crawford. Let's explore the new era of wellness.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Longevity Formula. I'm your host, Dr. Brandon Crawford. Today is going to be. An interesting and fun yet engaging conversation. I've got Scott Hickle here. He's with Throne Science, and today we're going to talk about why you should give a shit about your poop, right?

And I'm quoting you from your TEDx talk. Um, it's interesting, you know, today in this world we have. Been inundated with wearable technology, right? I'm wearing a whoop right now. I've done the aura. I've done all these different things, right? We're trying to collect all of these biometrics, right? Let's track our HRV, our heart rate, our sleep, all these things.

But there's things that have been kept in silence, right? Mm-hmm. Things that happen in the bathroom. That really matter to us. Clinicians, I mean, really matter. I mean, it's really important. And look, we have gut testing. Which is great, but it's still just a snapshot.

Scott Hickle: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: It's like a picture of a crime scene versus a surveillance camera.

Right.

Scott Hickle: It's an amazing metaphor.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Thank you.

Scott Hickle: I'm stealing that. Sorry.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. And so when I'm looking at these gut tests, I mean, and again, I appreciate them and they give us value, valuable information, but it is just one data point in time. So when I came across your technology, I was very, very interested, very intrigued.

Uh, because like I said, this is, this is a story that you're unfolding for my patient, for me personally, for whoever's using it. So I'm really interested. So first of all, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.

Scott Hickle: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. So let's start off by learning a little bit about you.

Okay. Because you're a really interesting guy. You have an engineering background. Your parents play into, you know, how you ended up where you're here today. Do you mind giving us just an overview about you?

Scott Hickle: Yeah. So I'm Scott, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science. My story here, a joke begins at birth.

'cause to your point, you know, both my parents are doctors. My dad is also a medical device inventor. So I spent most weekends in my childhood in his medical device lab while he was working to get his companies off the ground. I was exposed to healthcare and innovation at a super young age. And like my dad's my hero.

I'm Randall Scott Hickle ii, right? Like 2.0 new and improved. He hates that joke, but he's my best friend and I'm also very close with my mom. And so. For most of my life I wanted to stay far away from healthcare 'cause like that was like their thing, right? And I wanted to go do my thing. So I studied mechanical engineering undergrad, I thought I was gonna go into aerospace.

I did a summer at SpaceX and realized I did not want to go into aerospace because if I doesn't, didn't wanna do it at SpaceX, there's probably nowhere else I wanted to do it at and nothing against. I loved the work, but. It was a very linear career path. Right. At that point it's a 4,000 person company.

And that was in 2015. Like

Dr. Brandon Crawford: it's grown a little bit.

Scott Hickle: Yeah, it's grown a little bit, but like, you know, even at a 4,000 person company, it's very defined, you know? Yeah. Engineer one, engineer two, engineer 3.5. Uh. And meanwhile I had a bunch of friends who were doing startups that summer, and I got exposed to that and I was like, this is way more my speed.

Just, you know, fast paced people are super passionate working late because they just care so much about what they're working on. And I, I loved that energy and so I came back to Austin and started working in startups. And I've been doing, typically I was the first hire or first product management hire at venture backed startups for most of my career.

And, you know, my path into throne. Ultimately, you know, in 2021, I met my now co-founder Tim, one of my two co-founders. He pitched me the idea of smart toilets around a poker table. And I was like, that's brilliant. Clearly you named that company throne. Two years later, uh, we actually started the company and it was a conversation with my mom.

She's a geriatrician. It's like a, you know, old people, primary care physician in New Mexico. And she was like, no. Like my patients are obsessed about. Poop and they send me pictures of the poop all the time. And you know, there's a joke in the field of geriatrics that like all old people talk about is their kids, their meds and their poop.

And, uh, that caused Tim and I to like, take a step back and wait, wait, maybe we should take this throne idea more seriously. And so, you know, here we are.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That, and, and that concept is true in pediatrics too. Let me tell you. Uh, it's like the beginning of, of life and end into life. It's like bowel movements matter a lot and that a lot of conversations are revolve around that.

So you've developed this technology, so we know a little bit about you. I think everyone is really waiting to hear about like, what is this smart toilet thing? How in the world does this work? Like tell us a little bit about the technology.

Scott Hickle: Yeah, so it's a device that clips onto the side of your toilet.

It sits right under the toilet seat and it uses a camera and a microphone pointed down into the toilet. So it's, you know, not collecting any information about you or human anatomy. It's just looking at the contents of the toilet bowl. And then it uses AI computer vision to understand what's happening in your gut health, your hydration.

And even your prostate health for men. And so we have about a dozen different AI models that analyze the contents of the toilet bowl. Every time you go, it's hands free and automatic, which is really a magical experience. So you, you clip it onto the toilet, you pair it to your Bluetooth and your wifi, and then as long as you bring your phone with you to the bathroom, which most of us do most of the time.

Absolutely. Then it uses motion sensing and Bluetooth to know this is Scott versus Dr. Crawford. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then it turns itself on records. What's happening? You leave, it turns itself off, and then like two minutes later you get a push notification telling you, here's. What's happening in your gut health?

Here's how hydrated you are, here's what your urinary function or prostate health looked like. And then you can start to see patterns and trends emerge in real time, you know, day over day, week over week, month over month. So, you know, really the goal is to help you understand how does your body respond to changes in your diet to travel, to stress.

Yeah. Uh, how does your hydration impact your sleep? How does your sleep impact your hydration? How does you know your hydration impact your exercise performance? Yeah. Like there's, there's just so much. That lives in the toilet, that now that we are collecting that, then we can start to build these integrations with whoop and aura, as you mentioned, and start to do the overlays of those metrics with our metrics and see really, you know, how does human physiology, how does your unique physiology interact with itself?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, yeah. And it, it is important data. So a couple of things that. Have, so everyone knows I'm talking to you today, right? I've got like 30 people working in the clinic next to us. And everyone's like, wait a minute, this thing has a camera, this thing has a microphone. So, all right. So let's go ahead and, and make everyone comfortable with this, right?

First of all, so you said the camera's just analyzing the contents? Mm-hmm. It's not pointing up

Scott Hickle: exactly.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. Why a microphone?

Scott Hickle: The microphone allows us to record the urinary flow rate. So this is. This is like magic to me that this works, but like you as a man intuitively know the difference in the sound between a weak stream and a strong stream, right?

True. And the reason is that like grounded in science, your the strength of your stream maps one to one to the acoustics of it. And so this was called the instantaneous urinary flow rate. Maps to the volume of the P stream when you're peeing straight into the water. And so, you know, if you pee onto the side of the bowl, it doesn't work and

Dr. Brandon Crawford: okay,

Scott Hickle: but when you go straight into the water as a man standing up, we can record what's called your urinary flow rate curve.

And the peak flow rate value is the most important metric for. Looking at prostate health,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: that's awesome.

Scott Hickle: And that's important because 50% of men by age 50 and 80% of us by age 70 will have an enlarged prostate that impinges the urethra and makes it harder to pee. Mm-hmm. And if you catch it early, there are over the counter supplements and like pelvic floor exercises that you can do to basically push out the progression of that enlarged prostate.

But if you wait too long, then. You get to the point where you're having like staccato flow where it comes out in spurts. Yeah. Where you're waking up in the middle of the night. 'cause you're never fully avoiding your bladder and at that point you're looking at surgical intervention. Sure. And like my grandpa in January had, so like two months ago, just had a permanent catheter put in his urethra because he ignored the signs of this condition for too long.

Yeah. And like that is worst case scenario, right? Like nobody wants a catheter in their urethra for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow. Okay. So the concept here. I can actually monitor my urinary flow, right? So I'm 40 and let's say, you know, if I start now and when I'm 45, I can take this data and be wow my. Flow over the past five years is starting to change.

I don't have any prostate symptoms. I don't have anything else going on, but this metric is telling me my prostate is starting to maybe be inflamed or start to enlarge a little bit. I need to start acting proactively to work against this. And just to make the statement, this is not diagnostic in nature, this is a wellness device.

Exactly. Um, but it can, it can show us patterns.

Scott Hickle: Exactly. It's the same way that like, you know, if you notice your resting heart rate. At night is starting to climb because you wear a whoop or an aura. Mm-hmm. It's just bringing things to your awareness that you would otherwise never know.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And the cause of, you know, that change in your physiology.

It could be any one of a dozen things. Mm-hmm. But at least you're noticing the changes in those trends. So you can have the informed conversations with your care team or candidly like. Open AI chat. GBT.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you're not able to really monitor urinary flow for females yet?

Scott Hickle: No, but that is mostly because the geometries of toilet bowls are so variable.

Yeah. And so, you know, in most cases we find that when women pee, it isn't always a hundred percent directly into the water basin. It's, you know, oftentimes onto the wall of the toilet bowl, which. Makes the acoustics Gotcha. Not workable for us.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Sure.

Scott Hickle: And the other piece is urinary flow rate is mostly important for men's health because of prostate health.

Mm-hmm. And so there are some changes in urinary function for women typically pre and post menopause. Some, some around pregnancy. Mm-hmm. But it really is considered primarily a men's health metric in the urology domain.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right. And I'm sure. Technology will continue to advance and you're gonna be adding, you know, all this data and, and it's going to continue to evolve,

Scott Hickle: obviously.

Oh, yeah. There's, I mean, the women's health metrics that we can get into are like, you know, correlating, we will integrate with like cycle trackers. Mm-hmm. So you can correlate like, you know, your gut health to your cycle. And like, we know that's a big thing, uh, you know. The next version of the device we're working on, we'll be able to measure microscopic blood in the toilet.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And like then we could track your cycle for you without having a cycle tracker. That's,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: that would be huge. I mean, if you could track that, I mean, there's lots of things that are connected to that.

Scott Hickle: Totally.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. That's great. I mean, it is just talking about the cycle. I mean, you know, before a woman starts her cycle.

There's a huge prostaglandin release. Bowel movements typically increase. They loosen up. Like, I mean, there's a huge correlation with where you're at in your cycle and what's going on with your bowels. I mean, there, it's huge, especially for women. I mean, I just, so I just went through, uh, I had a herniated disc.

I actually herniated, you know, my L five S one. It was the third time this has happened. And, you know, I ended up, I I did start to use pain meds because I could not function. That had a huge impact on my gut. I did end up doing a surgery and now I've, I'm dealing with coming off of the opiates and now my gut is completely trashed.

And so, I mean, I've firsthand, you know, been watching my gut. And how this event has evolved over the past. Four or five months, and it's all been a different experience from a gut perspective. And, and I'm like, wow, I had no idea. I mean, I knew it academically.

Scott Hickle: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: But you know, now because I didn't have this, you know, then, um, and I'm sitting here going, man, I would've loved to have that data to see like, how did just the disc injury impact my gut?

How did the opiates impact my gut? How did the recovery, how did the opiate withdrawal? Like all of these are different data points that. Maybe, you know, in the, in the future that would serve me well if I would have that, you know, it's very interesting. So let's, let's talk about, you know, what all are you capturing?

Like what, what are we looking at when that camera is analyzing the stool?

Scott Hickle: Yeah, so right now we capture primarily four different health signals. One is what we call your functional gut health. So you use the analogy of the surveillance footage as opposed to, you know, the snapshot of the crime scene to your point.

We, we are looking at the patterns in your gut health, and so the two signals that gastroenterologists care the most about when you walk into a GI appointment are what's called stool form or Bristol stool scale, which is basically hard, healthy, loose liquid, but like, you know, there's a seven point. DI diagnostic tool they use to assess stool form and then stool frequency, how often you're going.

And so we capture that automatically. You know, often, particularly with patients with chronic digestive diseases, they'll ask 'em like, keep a stool log or a diary. Like people hate that.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: You know, it's compliance rounds down to zero.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And so by automating that, we get the actual, you know, surveillance footage of what's happening in your gut.

The other thing that I recently learned is that basically like. Patient recall is terrible for gut health, right? Like Yeah. Like intuitively it makes sense, right? I don't remember what I had for breakfast four days ago, much less like, you know, what my bowel movements look like over the last six months since I was in my doctor's office.

But like, even if you ask someone how many times you go to the bathroom in the last week, 70% of people misremember.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Of course it's, yeah. It's not like a, it's like I'm in, I'm out. I'm, I mean, I'm checking my email. I mean,

Scott Hickle: exactly. And so we get that ground truth, like history of your gut health and so. That is the like most important thing is your functional gut health.

Then we also look at things like color, volume, sink or float, which can tell you about fat content or, or liver function. Uh, you know, also looking at things like mucus. Uh, the next big category is hydration, so that's the color and cloudiness of your urine. We can also measure urine foams, which is highly correlated to, like what's called proteinuria or protein in your urine, which we can tell you about kidney function. Next big category is what we call the bathroom habits. So that's the timeline of your trips to the toilet, right? Yeah. And so, you know, we all know you're not supposed to sit on the toilet more than five minutes.

And so we can track what we call the time to first evacuation, which is, you know, how long from the time you sat down do you hide your first movement? Which tells you about urgency or constipation. You know, there's a difference between sitting there for five seconds and five minutes before you have your first movement.

We that, that is informative. Uh, and then the other big one is your total time you spend on the toilet is highly correlated to hemorrhoid risk.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Hmm.

Scott Hickle: So we send you a push notification after five, 10 minutes and say, Hey, you know, might get up and stretch your legs. Stop doom scrolling. Uh, man. And then the next big category is that prostate health that we were just talking about.

Mm-hmm. So measuring the urinary flow rate curves and then the trends in your peak flow rate over time. Nice. So those are the big four categories. And then really the next. Big thing that we're developing right now that we'll release in the next month is a gut health coach that allows us to say, okay, well we just saw you had an episode of Bad Gut Health.

You know, what did you eat in the last 24 hours? Was there any stress in your life? You know, were you traveling? Mm-hmm. And we can start to collect those data points and then start to correlate the things in your inputs that are showing up in your output so you can understand. Okay, well it looks like. 85% of the time that I eat have coffee on an empty stomach or use, you know, almond milk creamer that is correlated with episodes of bad gut health.

So maybe I should try cutting those ingredients out.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's awesome. I love that. Uh, uh, I really definitely appreciate the concept of being able to incorporate lifestyle habits, diet, et cetera, in folding that into your data. Uh, because you know, you, you have the data, but then it's like, well, what's driving it?

You know? Yeah. We have to know that

Scott Hickle: a hundred percent. And the, the, the thing is like. The clinical reference ranges for what's healthy or normal are like incredibly broad.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: You know, it's, it's considered normal to go to the bathroom, like have, have a bowel movement anywhere from three times a week to three times a day, 21 times a week.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow.

Scott Hickle: That's all considered healthy, but

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay. I didn't realize,

Scott Hickle: yeah. If I'm having four bowel movements a week and then I jump up to 20 over the course of, you know, a week or two, even though that's all considered healthy in the medical literature. That's probably not healthy for me.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Correct?

Scott Hickle: Absolutely. And knowing my baseline and when I'm deviating from my baseline and helping understand why is why this exists, right?

We, we say we wanna help you find your normal.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And then understand, right? Like. Am I deviating from my normal because of a change in my cycle? Am I deviating because of a change in my diet? Like, you know, are, do things move on a monthly cadence for me in Yeah, in conjunction with my cycle? And then if I'm, am I off this month compared to last month because of some outside stressor?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah,

Scott Hickle: but like right now you don't remember, you don't have the data to even begin to make those understandings. And so, so many people's gut health journeys is just. Confusion and frustration. And, you know, they show up to the doctor's office and it, it's hard to have an informed conversation.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: It really is.

I mean, I'm seeing this play out in my head, right? You have patient go to the doctor, Hey, I'm having some gut issues. Doctor says, okay, what, what is going on? Right? And you're like, well, I'm gonna the bathroom two, three times a day, yada, yada, yada. And the doctor's singing, man, this guy's not really got a problem.

You know, but then you look back and it's like, well, they would typically go once a day, sometimes skip a day, like et cetera. Right? So this is starting to really vary from their normal, I mean, what would be ideal is if any physician that is recommending a medication or a procedure or anything that can potentially affect gut health, you start monitoring before you get your baseline.

You start the intervention, you see what's happening, right? That way you have intelligent data about mm-hmm. What's really going on. Because if gut health has affected, okay, that's gonna affect your brain. That's going to affect so many aspects of life. I'm a brain guy, right? So we have to understand, you know, roughly 90% of serotonins made in the gut.

There's gaba, which is highly regulated in the gut. Um, there's this huge gut brain connection. Um, there's so many things that happen going on in the gut and that you can look at the research and, and look at how the microbiome has been implicated with cognition, depression, all of these different things.

And so if the gut is really that important. But we're not tracking it and we don't have good data for it, then how are we going to have a good, intelligent conversation about it, especially when we know these interventions are going to have an impact on it.

Scott Hickle: Couldn't agree more. And just like to, to add a little bit more color to these exact types of stories that you're talking about.

Some of them, my favorite stories that we've seen in the data already are exactly the, so the biggest thing I've learned about myself since using our prototypes, going back two years now. Stress is the number one driver of my gut health. I, I did an experiment in summer 2024 where I ate 100% of my food from ultra processed foods for a month, and my gut health was like more or less totally fine, but it, it tanked my testosterone, which is another conversation.

Mm-hmm. But I was shocked to see that like, totally altering the quality of my diet, like didn't have nearly as much of an impact on my gut health as. When I am super stressed.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And like I have seen now two years in a row that when I go home for the holidays and I'm home with my family for two weeks, my gut health is literally perfect.

And then I come back to work and immediately it gets thrown off whack. Wow. And it's just like looser liquid bowel movements, like the day that I get back home.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Interesting.

Scott Hickle: And it's like, that's been amazing for me just to learn about myself. Another fun one, to your point about medications, is one of my colleagues.

Uh, started a GLP one, ZEEP Bound. Mm-hmm. And showed the month before, the month after Zet bound huge. The month before. He was like super healthy bowel movements, you know, like basically one a day, which is like the peak of gut health, right? Mm-hmm. And then he cut, he cut down to then. Like 20 bowel movements in the next month.

So it's like a 33% decrease. And he was like having much more constipated mm-hmm. Bowel movements than like healthy, regular bowel movements. And so that's just one of those things, like we know that GLP ones cause these, you know, big time GI side effects, but like you can see these pictures in the data

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: Or the stories in the data. And it's just like, it, it's just amazing to see. Because the other part of this too is that, you know, same thing with opioids and these GLP ones like. They, they cite these potential side effects. But that's all based on, you know, large clinical studies with, it's, it's a distribution, right?

Yeah. Like, but just because there's a distribution doesn't tell you where you as an individual are gonna fall in the distribution, but when you measure it yourself, you see, okay, like, yes, I am affected or I'm not.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, so one of the, the main drivers of leaky gut is actually constipation.

It's actually a mechanical. Pressure on the GI lining and it starts to break it down. And as the stool's not moving, now it's sitting there and there's more endotoxin exposures and li LPS lipopolysaccharide exposure, uh, you get an increased immune activation, et cetera. So I mean, literally constipation is one of the primary drivers of leaky gut.

And so, GLP ones, you brought up a huge topic here, right? Yeah. So any study involving GLP one should be monitoring. With your technology period. Right. I mean, if, if we're really going to investigate, because that's a huge side effect. I've seen it in multiple patients. I mean, it's huge. And so if leaky gut is this hor horrific thing, which it is, right?

And it opens up the, the gut barrier, which then opens up the LPS exposure to the brain, and that causes, I mean, I could go on for an hour. It causes a ton of neuroinflammation. It's not good. So if this is a big deal, which it is, then we need to actually be monitoring and citing this in the research.

There's no tool besides this to really get an accurate description. Right. So I mean, are you looking to. Try and partner with, whether it's pharmaceutical companies or research organizations or someone to, to start to get these metrics out there.

Scott Hickle: 100%. Okay. So one of the things I'm most proud of is not only have we built a truly thoughtful, intuitive, frictionless product.

But the team around this are world class. So, you know, one of my co-founders previously co-founded and built, whoop. Uh, so, you know, he brings experience developing literally the wearable space, right? Like when Whoop was started, wearables wasn't a word yet back in 2012. Yeah. Our advisors are some of the most published researchers in the field of gastroenterology.

So, uh, Dr. David Rubin wrote the clinical guidelines for IBD, inflammatory Bowel Disease, Crohn's and Ulcerative Colitis. Dr. Mark Pimentel wrote the clinical guidelines for sibo, small intestinal Bacterial overgrowth, uh, and is one of the leading thought leaders in IBS. And then same thing, doctors, uh, Satish Rao and Vipul Giraf are.

But I mean, all of these physicians cumulatively across those four have a hundred thousand citations. Like they're just wow. Powerhouses. And we had a meeting back in January and showed them all the data that this can collect and one of them said like, this could redefine our diseases. Right? Yeah. Because we get so much more granular, so much more objective data.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And so we're kicking off our first research study here over the summer. That is comparing thrones data to patient recall for stool F frequency. So how often you're going, because that's one of the most important endpoints for inflammatory bowel disease. And right now, you know, these pharma studies before the rise of GLP ones, uh, these IBD drugs were the most profitable class of drugs in existence because it's an autoimmune disease that you're managing for a lifetime.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Hickle: So pharma companies are always trying to develop new IBD drugs. And then, you know, typically these IBD biologics are also used, used across, you know, have cross indications for other autoimmune conditions, but all of the endpoints that they're using are like 50% based on patient recall, which we know is terrible.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely.

Scott Hickle: And so they're excited because they're gonna be able to get much more objective data, but then also new data, right? Mm-hmm. And like, anyways, I could talk a lot about this, but like the types of data that we're able to get with this. You know, and we'll never, by the way, it's just also very important that we mentioned.

I will never sell your data. Your data is yours and yours alone. You will have the option if you want to. We'll ask, would you like to share your data anonymously for this research, you know, organization, and here's exactly the thing that we're looking at. Mm-hmm. Whoop does this all the time. Yeah. I just got hit with a notification this week.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And that's the kind of thing that what we found is so many of our users have chronic digestive conditions, and they're so eager. To share their data with a, you know, legitimate resource organization that could one day help other people with their condition suffer less. Yeah. And so that's the kind of thing we are very excited about.

And we're, you know, we just launched two weeks ago publicly, but like we have been working, you know, silently in the background, getting these kind of partnerships set up so that, you know, within the next year we'll have legitimate opportunities to advance human knowledge around gut healthly.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, it's huge.

It's, it's huge. I mean. So, I mean, I, I would love to somehow collaborate with you. I don't know if you've looked at how light exposure, sunlight exposure, infrared red exposure actually impacts the gut. I mean, there's, uh, there's studies showing 8 0 8 nanometers improves the microbiome, uh, reduces inflammation in the gut, et cetera.

There's, I mean, really good data that shows certain wavelength of. Light, especially sunlight, you know, certain times of day, et cetera, on the gut can improve peristalsis, can improve the microbiome, et cetera. So, I mean, part of your, I hope, you know, part of the questions that come to the patient is like, how much outside?

How much sun exposure did you get? Et cetera. But I mean, I've got, you know, 5 28 innovations, which I've developed lasers, um. I'm developing a FDA clinical trial right now for the brain. So we're, we're, well, I'm not gonna give the specifics because my competitors are listening, but, uh, but I'm really excited about that, so I'm actively developing that, but I also want to demonstrate how we can impact the gut.

So, perhaps we can talk offline, you know, how we can collaborate into a laser gut study. I think that would be really exciting. So you have tons of data. Do you have a, a story or a case or something like that where you saw the data start to trend before symptoms showed up, before a disease showed up, something like that, and the person was able to take action because the data and actually change a potential outcome?

Has that been

Scott Hickle: a couple come to mind? The first is one of our earliest beta users, like sent me a text, I dunno, six, eight months ago. It's like all caps. He was so excited. He was like, I just learned something about myself with Throne that I would literally never have caught otherwise, which was, uh, I took all, and like right now we're building this AI health coach that you won't have to upload your screenshots to chat GBT, but at the time, you know, all we did was show you the trends.

And so he took all the screenshots of all of his thrown trends, and we have a ton of them in the app. And he uploaded them all to chat GP and said, you know, this is all this data on my gut health, my hydration, my prostate health. And you know, here are the doctors that I follow on social media. So you know, this is my kind of personal approach to managing my health.

And these are the types of people that I would like to, you know, act as if you were interpreting on their behalf. And it was like, I didn't realize that it wasn't normal. To wake up in the middle of the night to pee, and that's a, you know, that's called nocturia. Mm-hmm. And he was like, I wake up on average two times in the middle of the night to pee.

And that was the first thing it flagged for me. And it gave me a protocol to reduce my nighttime wake up. And so I implemented the protocol. I now don't drink, you know, full glasses of water before bed. I, you know, typically try not to drink water within 30 minutes of gonna sleep.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. I

Scott Hickle: make sure to avoid my bladder before going to sleep.

Uh, and I moved my creatine from evening to the morning. Yes. Because creatine's a diuretic.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Exactly.

Scott Hickle: And so, uh, he was like, and now I sleep through the night.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow.

Scott Hickle: And like I didn't realize that something as simple as just like my supplement routine and when I'm drinking water 'cause like, so materially impacts my quality of sleep.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely.

Scott Hickle: And like that, that was just like. I would never in a million years have guessed that would be one of the first kind of user stories of self-discovery coming out of this product. Mm-hmm. Another really fun one is we have a user with Crohn's Disease who is going through a flare over the last few months, which is, you know, not, not good, right?

Mm-hmm. Like he, he's been managing Crohn's for. Like half of his life, he's been in remission for most of his life. And then only recently went back into a flare and he texted me screenshots the other day showing his gut health score, which was better than mine. And he was like, you know, I've been experiencing blood in my stool over the last month.

And historically I would've assumed that was because I was in the flare and because of my disease state.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: But because I have thrown, I was able to go back and look and see, no, I'm having regular healthy bowel movements. I'm not having. You know, the, the types of loose or liquid bowel movements that are associated with a flare up and, and you know, a flare of my ulcers.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And so it caused me to like really think more deeply about this and went back and looked at my calendar and I realized like the days that I have blood in the toilet are 100% after I go for a run.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Oh, wow.

Scott Hickle: And he was like, so I'm pretty sure this is an internal hemorrhoid.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow.

Scott Hickle: Instead of Crohn's disease.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: That's a big

Dr. Brandon Crawford: deal.

Scott Hickle: It's, it's, and he was just like. You have no idea how much that means to me.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: To be able to like, have this kind of analysis. Mm-hmm. And like, I don't know, the, the, again, like it's the, the human body and human physiology is so complex and there's so many things that can go wrong mm-hmm.

That helping people find any kind of clarity that they didn't have, you know, two years ago.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: It's awesome.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. The psychological component to that, what you just described, is huge. Right? That's someone that. Is going, oh my gosh, I've got Crohn's and this thing's flaring up and here comes the malnutrition and oh, this is never gonna end.

And but now it's like, wait a minute, it's not what that is. Yeah. Is running okay, change my lifestyle, fix it. You know, this psychology of that is huge, right? Because that fear loop of that disease would then trigger the Crohn's would then trigger more issues, et cetera. I mean, so the implications there are huge.

It, it, it's actually really cool. Wow. Okay. I like that. Okay, so I, well, I'm curious, do you, like, I've talked about gut testing a little bit. Do you have something on your roadmap where you can actually start to replace these gut tests?

Scott Hickle: So. It's a nuanced conversation. The short answer is I don't think we'll replace gut tests the same way that like, whoop and aura are never gonna replace your, you know, blood test from function health.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: Just because there's so much you, you know, you, you get a, i, I like to use the analogy of like a gut test to thrown is like function to whoop and aura.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay.

Scott Hickle: Right. Like you go take a gut health or a blood test and you get 150 biomarkers, but it's like a one time, you know, snapshot and. When you use a wearable, you get 20 biomarkers every single day, and you see trends emerge in real time.

And oftentimes the changes in those patterns that prompt you to go get that deeper level of testing. Now, there are certain things, very specific analytes that we can look at. So the next version of the advice we're working on, we'll incorporate gas sensing.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay.

Scott Hickle: And blood detection, like, there you go.

Like microscopic blood detection

Dr. Brandon Crawford: that brought up something I just heard. I'll ask you about it.

Scott Hickle: Okay. And, and so, uh, I'll just really quickly, gas sensing is interesting because the gut microbiome, we are still so nascent in our understanding of the microbiome. And like, I think everyone can appreciate that yes, that microbiome is foundational to your health, but it's also an incredibly complex, dynamic system with.

10 million moving parts.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And just because like we as humans like to reduce systems to simple linear relationships, right? Like more of this is good, less of that is bad. And like that's not really how the gut microbiome works outside of like a handful of microbes, right? Like if you have an overgrowth of c diff or e coli, like that's obviously bad.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm. But

Scott Hickle: like. Akkermansia is one that like, that's everyone knows that, is that, that's the good gut microbe. Yeah. Very good. But like if you don't have akkermansia, that doesn't mean you're unhealthy.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right?

Scott Hickle: Right. Like you could be making up for the effects of Akkermansia with a symphony of 15 other microbes working in different ratios that like we just haven't mapped out yet because Exactly.

It's so complex. Mm-hmm. And so the interesting about, the interesting thing about the gut microbiome though, is like all of these 15 million different microbes result in like the same five gases. And the ratios of those gases, I think intuitively can tell. Like, you know that like when you have food poisoning or when you have an overgrowth of e coli, like c diff is the hallmark of c diff is it Smells awful.

Yeah. Like death. And so there's a really interesting like emerging body of literature around looking at the gases associated with gut microbiome. Mm-hmm. As a proxy of the health of your gut microbiome. Right. And so that's one that I'm very excited about 'cause it's just way more accessible to measure gases than it is to do the DNA sequencing that you would need to get to the microbiome.

Yeah. And I think in some ways can be, you know, as like actionable. The next one, blood detection is, I mean this is really the vision of the product is we wanna build the first continuous cancer screening device ever, and one in six US cancers are cancers of the lower GI tract or urinary tract. Whose earliest presentation is microscopic blood in your waist.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow.

Scott Hickle: Bladder cancer. Kidney cancer, stomach cancer. And then the big one is colorectal cancer.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: Which is now the deadliest cancer in Americans under 52nd deadliest cancer behind lung cancer. And if we can accurately detect patterns of blood in your waist, the theory is that, and, and you know, there's a lot of literature supporting this, right?

Like if you test positive for blood in your stool. Multiple times in a row, the likelihood that you have colon cancer goes way up and we are building advice. We'll be able to look for microscopic quantities of blood a hundred thousand times more sensitive than the naked eye every time you go to the bathroom.

And so seeing those patterns emerge over the course of a couple weeks or a couple months. We'll be able to throw up a big red flag and say, you need to take this data and go talk to your doctor, and then your doctor will make the determination. Right. Do we need to get you a Cologuard test to test for DNA mutations, or do we need to go straight to a colonoscopy?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And like that will save lives.

Absolutely.

Scott Hickle: Like genuinely. That that will say, just to put that in scale, 50,000 Americans died of colon cancer last year, and when you include the other cancers of the urinary tract and lower gi, it's cumulatively a hundred thousand Americans. Yeah. Last year, 43,000 Americans died in all traffic accidents around the country, and like about 50,000 Americans died in from gun violence.

And so like this has the opportunity to save more lives every year. Then all traffic accidents and all us gun violence combined.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's amazing. And you know, just for clarity, so the viewers kind of understand this a little bit, like blood in your stool is not obvious all the time.

Scott Hickle: Yes.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Until it's a really big problem.

Scott Hickle: So the, exactly, so that's the difference is called fecal occult blood, or microhematuria, which is like blood that's invisible to the naked eye versus overt blood. Right? Yeah. That's just blood you can see. And just to put some numbers to it. We are blood becomes visible to the naked eye at a concentration of roughly 40 to 50,000 micrograms of hemoglobin per gram of stool, uh, which means nothing to people except for to compare it to the standard of care, which is called a fecal immunochemical test, right?

Which is like you collect a sample, swab it, send it off to a lab that is sensitive to about 0.6 micrograms of hemoglobin, pergram of stool, so, mm-hmm. Roughly 80 to a hundred thousand times more sensitive. We are. The version of this device that we are working on, we have working in the lab right now, so this will be, you know, years out, but is currently sensitive to 0.5.

Wow. So like as sensitive as the thing that requires you to collect a sample and send it off to a lab, but it's hands free automatic, like that's the vision is like by scanning every sample. Like you're not gonna collect a sample of every stool and send it off to a lab. No, not at all. First all it's like 20 bucks a sample that's just not Yeah, exactly.

Like most people won't do it once a year.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: No, we did that from our kid and. It was a train wreck. He had eczema, and it's like, okay, we, we have to do this test. Oh my gosh. It was a whole ordeal.

Scott Hickle: Yeah. Yeah. And so our, our whole thing is that if we can make it truly effortless, frictionless, like why wouldn't you do that, right?

Mm-hmm. This is a smoke detector. Like,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: yeah,

Scott Hickle: you have a smoke detector in your home, why wouldn't you have one that could save you from cancer?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. That, that's awesome. Have you looked at any type of correlation? Uh, and getting your data and correlating that to autonomic tone. You know, obviously with, you know, we want to be more in a parasympathetic state.

You mentioned stress and how that impacts your situation. I mean, are there any correlates that are gonna point to HRV or any type of parasympathetic tone?

Scott Hickle: So, not yet, but that is on the roadmap for this year, is pulling in wearables data so that we can measure and take in your HRV and correlate that against your gut health, your hydration.

Like, you know, one of the ones I'm most excited about is correlating sleep and hydration because the it's, this is less having to do with HRV and more to do with like when you sleep a full eight hours, you release vasopressin in those last two hours of sleeping, which is an antidiuretic. So you actually wake up more hydrated.

If you sleep better.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, true.

Scott Hickle: Whereas if you go to bed dehydrated, it raises your core body temperature and you sleep worse. And so seeing those effects, like, and I have personally, I've pulled my whoop data, I've pulled my throne data and done these correlations, and I can show it like when I am better hydrated in the final hours of the day, I do sleep better.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Nice.

Scott Hickle: And I think just being able to show people like these effects on their body and like, how does my, you know, monthly HRV trend correlate to my gut health? Like, I don't know that that research exists right now. It

Dr. Brandon Crawford: doesn't.

Scott Hickle: We are this close to being able to show you personally.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: How that stacks up.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's huge. And you know, from, you know, we do neuro rehab, so obviously we're looking at autonomic tone. Every minute of every day. So being able to add another thing there, because not everyone's wearing a, a wearable and, you know, each wearable has their own proprietary way to calculate the HRV and it, that's a little frustrating.

And I get, it's hard. I'm not, I'm not saying anything negative about those people. But having another thing like that, 'cause this, this is a little more concrete, you know?

Scott Hickle: Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Gut motility. Is huge.

Scott Hickle: Yep.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: It has a direct correlation with your autonomic tone. So if I could know the current state, we start therapy, this is how it's trending, we're moving in the right direction, we're not moving in the right direction, et cetera.

It's, it's a huge data point. It's not just a little thing like this is a big thing. Um, okay. Separate question. Kind of a big one. I was actually thinking about it when I was driving in. Right. So. I spend some weeks I'm in the office, maybe 80%, you know, of my time. I'm at home 20%. But then I'll go on vacation or then I'll travel for work or like, I mean, if I have one device, like what do I do?

Do I take it with me? What's the solution?

Scott Hickle: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Que question comes up a lot. And so right now we have the ability in the app, you can also take pictures or use a form to track your. Stool or your stool consistency. So, okay, hard, healthy, loose, liquid. You can track that in the app manually. So when you're, you know, we call it away games.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Okay?

Scott Hickle: Uh, and that gets you the basics of your digestive pattern, right? That thing, the, the stool, consistency and frequency, those are the two things that GIS care most about. Those are the most, uh, responsive to changes in your diet, your lifestyle, you know, sensitivities, triggers, and tolerances. So you can still get those anywhere you go.

Now, you're not gonna get hydration data, you're not gonna get the prostate health data. Mm-hmm. But you'll still get the fundamentals of your gut health. And for people that are really trying to dial in because they have IBS or IBD, or they're trying to show up to their doctor's appointment next time with a full map.

That's really the most important data. Mm-hmm. And then for other things like tracking changes in your prostate health, like we don't need every sample every day. Okay. Right. Like,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: right.

Scott Hickle: You know, the, the number one change in your flow rate is not prostate health. It's how hydrated and how full your bladder was.

And so we just really need to look at like your peak flow rate. From each week or each month and how that trends over the course of months and years.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: And is the morning time more important in that scenario or

Scott Hickle: so that, that's actually a fun one. Your morning hydration is the best proxy for your 24 hour hydration status, so it's less to do with your pro prostate health and more to do with how hydrated have you been over the last 24 hours because.

When you wake up first thing in the morning, A typically you're going straight to your bathroom at home. So that's great. So we get that, you know, automatically. But then B, that's also the longest you've gone without drinking water every day, typically is that, you know, 7, 8, 9 hours you were asleep.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And US military did a bunch of research in on this going into Desert Storm, trying to understand how hydration impacted soldiers' performance. And they found that that first morning void, or the first morning urination was the best proxy for 24 hour hydration status, which is great. Because going back to your question earlier about research, one of the questions I'm so excited about that we've had some urologists come to us and ask, you know, can we do studies on this?

Is everyone knows that like the best way to prevent kidney stones is to be well hydrated.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: But is that. Is it enough to be well hydrated one day a week to flush out your kidneys? Or is it five days a week that you need to be well hydrated, flush out your kidneys?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Good point. Yeah, good point.

Scott Hickle: And like until now, the best way to measure hydration that urologist had is they collect what's called a 24 hour urine sample.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: Where you collect every drop of pee for a day and then you bring that back to the lab. The problem with that is that it's hugely subject to observation bias, which is when. You know, you're being measured. Mm-hmm. You act better.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And so you show up better hydrated that one day because it was being measured.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: Whereas this is, you don't think about it.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: And so we'll be able to actually see, you know, across the scale of population, like, and, and you know, known kidney stone formers. Like do their hydration habits have any impact on the outcome of, you know, kidney stone recidivism?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Wow. That's pretty cool.

Scott Hickle: Anyway, there's a sidetrack, but like this the kind of science that I'm so excited about, but like yeah. You know?

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. Well you're going into a field that is, I mean, you're the pioneer here, right? I mean, no one's really looked at this. I mean, you have so many different ways that you can go, uh, as far as data collection and what that can correlate to that has never really been thought of.

Well. It. I want to go back to your, something I heard in your TEDx talk, but I forgot about the Flatulent situation. You brought up gases, right? Yeah. Okay. So I was reading, I think it was in Scientific American. I think that's where I was on the plane. I was reading an article and uh, there's a researcher and I don't remember what university or the guy's name 'cause it was just one of those random articles.

I was, I didn't think I would ever. Recall it, but here we are. Uh, but he actually created a monitor that you put in the underwear and he's collecting farts. He's collect, he's like looking at how often, and I think he's trying to measure the content. Mm-hmm. Right. So I mean, this is actually a, a big. Well, not big, but I mean, people are really looking at the emergence of like, Hey, let's measure flatulence and correlate to microbiome.

So I mean, that's the same thing you were talking about, right? So I mean, you're going to, you want to have some type of measurement of the gases and that can then correlate to microbiome health. The D did I hear that correct?

Scott Hickle: That's exactly right. It's Dr. Brentley. I think it's like universally of. Just some like northeast, like not maybe Maryland, but I met him at an event a few weeks ago,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: so you know what I'm talking about.

Scott Hickle: I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. It's, it's a wearable for your underwear. Yeah. That tracks parts and like. This is one of those things. It's just like the rising tide floats all ships. Right? Like the more people that are interested in that, like great.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. Yeah. I think I read that, you know, he expected like a few people to be interested in that.

It was like

Scott Hickle: thousands.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, I think like 10,000 people or something. Yeah. Like he was like, wow, like people are really interested. And then not only that, but you know, they had estimates about, you know, how many times you far today and that is being completely. Like disproven. I mean, it's like all over the place.

I mean, some people are like hundreds of times a day and some people are like 10, 20 times a day. Mean it's, it's crazy. You know, when you start looking at this, it's funny. I don't know, I'm a. I work with kids, and so I tell a lot of fart jokes and so this is a daily discussion, you know, farts. Anyway fun stuff.

Okay, so going back to the conversation of like, yes, this is a new thing, however, it's kind of not right because you, you opened up in your TEDx talk saying, you know, what did King Henry VIII and Kim Jong-un have in common? Right? You want to take us from there?

Scott Hickle: Yeah. So the, the kind of the overarching theme of the TEDx talk is that.

So I, I, I start with, you know, what did Kim Jong-Un and King Henry VII have in common? They're both obsessed with their poop.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: And so, you know, king Henry VIII 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 then go talk with the royal doctor about the king's health.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: That's a shitty job.

Scott Hickle: It's a shitty job, but it was actually like a, you know, a sought after position in the royal court. No, no way. Yeah. 'cause you got a lot of one-on-one time with the king,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: apparently.

Scott Hickle: And so, you know, I opened them with that. But then, you know, and Kim Jong-un famously travels with his own toilet everywhere he goes.

Serious because serious, he doesn't Seriously, yes. Because he doesn't want his bowel movements falling into enemy hands so that they can learn about his health.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: You gotta be kidding me.

Scott Hickle: Like famously, oh my gosh. Putin. Similarly, there was a similar rumor about Putin that he has, uh, like, you know, whatever the equivalent of like Russian Secret Service agents whose job is to like, follow him into the bathroom and then like, collect his bowel movements and take it out in a briefcase.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: You're kidding.

Scott Hickle: No. Like, this is like, I can show you the articles, but like,

Dr. Brandon Crawford: oh my gosh.

Scott Hickle: This is, so, like the, the whole overarching thing of the TED Talk is like tracking gut health. It's something that historically has been reserved for like kings and world leaders.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: But it has also been historically way more popular than it is today.

Because for most of human history, like, you know, first of all, like Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine plays heavy emphasis on stool observation as a diagnostic tool. Like going back to like the, you know, 18, 19 hundreds or the 20th century, the deadliest diseases killed hundreds of millions of people around the globe were diarrheal diseases, you know?

Yeah. Dysentery, cholera. And the primary way they're diagnosed, we're looking at people's bowel movements.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Gotcha.

Scott Hickle: And what changed societally is that number one, modern plumbing was introduced and that was an amazing innovation. Right. Just the, the sanitation. The sanitation that modern plumbing introduced really did cut down on deaths from the spread of disease and viruses, bacterial disease as well.

However, that coincided exactly with the Victorian era. So not only at the same time that we pushed waste outta sight and outta mind, literally, it also became inappropriate to talk about taboo things.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Gotcha.

Scott Hickle: And that is a uniquely Western American cultural difference. 'cause like in other parts of the world, they're just far more candid and frank about conversations around poop and gut health.

Right. Like, you know. Four in five Japanese households have a bidet. And you know, like I have friends from other parts of the world who are like, oh yeah, like this is gonna crush when it gets to my home country. Mm-hmm. Like talking about poop is just like not something to be shy about the same way it is here.

And so it is ultimately, you know, make the case that like, you know, there are so many conditions today that could be better. Understood. Not only. Like from a wellness perspective, but like from a lifesaving perspective, like we talked about with, you know, these, these cancers by paying closer attention to what happens in the toilet.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, it, it, it's very interesting. I can't believe that Kim Jong-un and. Putin and whatnot are, oh my gosh, that's, that's just hilarious. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that, but, uh, that, that's really interesting. Okay, so is there some type of topic or something you want to convey to the audience that we have not touched on yet?

Scott Hickle: I think the big thing is just like to emphasize like there's. You know, we chose the name Throne Science for a reason, which is just like, this is grounded in real science. Like at every level. It's, it's, we chose markers that are clinically relevant. Mm-hmm. We have worked for three years to make sure that we are as accurately as you can possibly be in our measurements of these things.

We put a tremendous amount of effort into making this something you will actually use. Mm-hmm. And it's unobtrusive and like, you know, melts into the background, but then just pops up and gives you insights when you need them.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: You know, if you wanna learn more, check us out@thronescience.com. We just launched and if you want discount code, use Scott 40 at checkout, and that saves 40 bucks.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Nice. And then Instagram, I just followed you and thrown on Instagram. What, what are those handles?

Scott Hickle: Yeah, it's just, so I'm Scott Hickle. It's like Pickle with an H. Uh, and then our handles on pretty much all social media are just at Throne Science. Very

Dr. Brandon Crawford: cool. I think, you know, because I, I do love data collection.

I've been wearing a whoop for a long time. I love this concept, so it is okay if I get multiple devices right? Like I could put this at home in the office and it'll be seamless, right?

Scott Hickle: Yeah. So one of the cool things about throwing is like, unlike your whoop, which is necessarily a one-to-one relationship, right?

Like no one else is gonna wear your whoop strap.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Mm-hmm.

Scott Hickle: We have a one to many and a many to one relationship in the sense that like you can have up to six members in a household use throne

Dr. Brandon Crawford: perfect.

Scott Hickle: And you can also have a throne on every toilet. In your home and it'll pair up seamlessly.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Nice. Okay.

That's good. So, so six users per device. Uh, that's great. So that's going to work for the majority of households. And I can have multiple That's fantastic. Different question. Can you travel with this? 'cause I mean, I used to travel a lot. I'm really scaling back on that. I really want to focus here in the United States.

But I, a lot of my colleagues, I travel like weekly. I mean, can you travel with this thing?

Scott Hickle: So. We don't encourage it right now just because we haven't made a travel case. Mm-hmm. Like, is there, you know, sanitary considerations? Mm-hmm. Like, you can, it, it is very easy to clean. You just take a wet, wipe it, wipe it off, and it's for all smooth surfaces.

So it's not that difficult. But the biggest frustration is you have to pair it to wifi in every toilet you use.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Gotcha.

Scott Hickle: Which is like, that's a hassle. Yeah. And so you could in theory travel with it.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah.

Scott Hickle: I don't, I just use the camera or the form Sure. And get the basics of my digestive pattern while I'm out and about, because that tells me, that's gonna tell me, you know, how.

Travel is showing up at my gut health.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Very cool. Well, man, I really appreciate your time today. Uh, this has been a eye-opening conversation. I, I actually really, really appreciate where you're going with us. As again, as a clinician, right? So I'm working with, um, anything from autism, neurodegenerative disorders pain syndromes, you name it, right?

So these complex neurological conditions. An overarching theme is that no matter what's going on in any of those conditions I just mentioned is that they all have gut issues. You know, I mean, go find an, there are kids with autism that don't have gut issues, but those are rare. I mean, you go talk to any of these populations and there's going to be gut challenges in all of them.

So we know in the science, the literature tells us the gut is huge, right? Yeah. The gut is. It's a gateway, right? It's a gateway to the brain, it's gateway to overall hormonal health, inflammatory status, all of these things, right? We know that, but now we actually have a way to really track and monitor and measure what's going on, right?

You can't really act on anything you don't measure, right? I mean, you're, you're not acting very intelligently at that point in time. So, so I really appreciate what you've done here. Everyone, if you have enjoyed this conversation. Please, you know, obviously like share, do all the things that you do. But go check out Throne Science.

Uh, Scott threw out a discount code for you, so that's fantastic there. And yeah. You know, drop some comments and just reach out. And yeah, I really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Scott Hickle: Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Crawford.

Voice Over: We hope today's episode has inspired you to take that next step towards your best self. Remember, the path to longevity is paved with small daily decisions. Your journey is unique and every step, every choice brings you closer to your ultimate vision of a healthier, happier life. For more insights, tips, and resources, visit drbrandoncrawford.com.