No,

I mean, all that is fantastic. I wholeheartedly agree with you in terms of being someone who tries to figure stuff out. And I think there is this tendency of people to take a little bit of information and try to run with it. And I've been watching frustratingly, this happened in a number of different areas. One is my chief area focus, which is GI. And there'll be the miracle bacteria that everyone's jazzed about for a while, thinking that we can reduce down your healthcare decisions centered around this one bacteria. Unfortunately, what I've seen that do more often than not is make people worse because instead of listening to their body, they start making other decisions around this one bacterial centric paradigm. The same thing seems to be happening with genes and you know watching some of your work especially in the early days when you were really I think trying to educate people on this, you know, it seemed to me you were trying to educate people on some of the mechanisms underneath the hood some of the particulars and then people would take that and it seemed like they were doing the same thing and they were running with oh well MTHFR this is now going to be the delineating and deciding factor about everything that I do in my life. And it seems that that's not really the best way to handle this issue. So why don't we start there with what would you want to say to people to try to maybe pull them out of the lurch of obsessing over, well, I have MTHFR, NCOMT, read a bunch of stuff on Wikipedia about what those mean, and now I'm going to start changing a bunch of stuff to the exclusion of any biofeedback that I have based upon what I think I should do for those genes. Where do you want to start people to prevent them from that? Well,

to understand the complexity, first of all, let's put it this way. If it was this easy to manipulate your body, and if everything was just important to one gene, say MT -Chafar, and we'll say even two genes, CMT, if these two genes were so, so critically important, and are very important, but they are so critically important These are the only two things that you focus on Human species would not be on this planet right now would be extinct Because the body has adapted to be able to withstand all sorts of assaults from multiple different directions Because we are complex beings and If you try to oversimplify things, you might get lucky and get some improvement. If you're throwing, I'm trying to think of not a gruesome example. That was a gruesome example. If you have 30 garbage cans and you have one piece of gum you want to throw that piece of gum and try to make it into a garbage can, you got pretty good odds. But if you got one garbage can and one piece of gum, you got less odds. So I think if people are... they have 19,000 garbage cans and one little bit of piece of information, they think they make an improvement. But the reality is you have to get that one piece of gum into the specific 19,000 garbage cans. You don't know which one it is. You have no idea which one of the 19,000 garbage cans it is. And you are throwing methyl folate into that 19,000 bin and you have to be accurate and, you know, you're just guessing because MpGFR is one gene that does a lot of different things, but there's about 19,000 other genes that are also very, very important. And so if you think that if you have the MpGFR variant and all you need to do is take methylfolate, or if you're a practitioner and all you need to do is give methylfolate to a person with an end of our variant, you are wholly mistaken.

Right. And so I think this is some, it's a message that just constantly needs reiteration, which is it's tempting to think about these things reductionistically, even though we always criticize conventional medicine for being reductionistic. We oftentimes do the same thing with a natural treatment. When you do that, oftentimes you make bad decisions because a lot of this stuff is better treated kind of upstream or from a more kind of global. Yeah.

And I think part of the reason why we this, Michael, is because thinking requires calories, and calories require work on the human to go and get them, you know, to forage and hunt. So somebody said that it really resonated with me that we try to oversimplify things because it's a survival mechanism. We are conserving calories and we're conserving the need to get out of our cave and to go hunt for food. And this sounds stupid, but we're actually not that far off from where we were, you know, 500 years ago, you know, if you think about it. But the human genome has been around for a long, long time, but we've evolved in terms of you know industrialization and inconvenience so fast that our genome has not caught up and In we are also trying to you know use our reptilian brain and complex matters and our reptilian brain is still controlling us saying Oh, this whole genetic thing is too complicated. I'm gonna conserve calories and just take methylfolite from my MPG -Phar.

I agree with that. I think also, if we extrapolate that out long enough, what eventually happens as we gain mastery on a topic is things become more simple. There's this great quote. I think it reads, knowledge a process of compiling facts, wisdom is their simplification. And I think this happens in all areas if you have the right person giving you education or helping you, which is they can see you through all the complicated collusion of the minutiae and actually give you a much more wise way of applying the knowledge. I think that's where we're coming to with gene therapy now.

Yeah. There's an article published, I forget what magazine, it may have been Fortune magazine, or something about how genetic testing has come down and cost so fast. It used to be millions of dollars to get your genome done. Now, you can get your whole genome done for like $1 ,400 or $2 ,000 or what have you. Next year, it'll be even cheaper. But the problem is how expensive it is to interpret that information, and how do you even interpret it? Exactly. So, everybody runs out and grabs genetic tests from somewhere and then they think they know what they're doing and they say that they got training and what have you. And honestly, I'm grinding in this area. I've been working hard at it. And every time I read something, I'm like, God, you know, are we really getting anywhere in our knowledge of this or are we just grasping straws? You know,

exactly. Which is why one of the other ways I've kind of commented on this is if you try to treat mechanisms, your probability of failure is extremely high. If you try to treat based upon outcomes, okay, I am depressed. We're either going to treat the mechanism think is causing the depression or we'll use an intervention and reassess your outcome of depression after a number of weeks. So one is treating one of an infinitesimal number of potential mechanisms causing the depression. The other is trying to treat it from an outcome perspective and use outcome data, outcome measures compared to mechanism data and mechanism measures. If we can focus on the outcome, then we're likely doing the right thing mechanistically. We may not yet know exactly why, and hopefully one day we will, but that seems to be a much more sure path to the desired outcome. Well,

I think that it's a great point. And, you know, a lot of people rely on medical research, which is important. It's an important aspect that we should all continue to do. That's where I get almost all my information is from published literature, you know, from National Library of Medicine, which is it's awesome tool. But keep in mind that a lot of these research things are are done by humans. There's a lot of bias. There's a lot of horrible methodology and uh, You know, there's there's also just uh The variable well that goes down in the methodology so the research that we're reading that we think is so important You know, it's it's it's leading us through certain areas So I you know and it could be down the wrong road So I think your point, Michael, that we need to look at outcomes is very important. And I do use the research, but I am looking so far ahead into trying new things. A lot of my work is purely theoretical based upon published research, but it's theoretical that we have to apply, try, and see if the outcomes are useful. And if they're useful, we go back to the research and try to explain why the outcomes occurred. Right and then you do another research paper later to try to see if your methodology in the reasoning of why the outcome occurred. Is happened for that specific reason so i may just lost everyone with that statement.