Health Longevity Secrets

The Smart Toilet That Could Detect Cancer Before You Know You Have It | Scott Hickle (Throne)

• Robert Lufkin MD

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0:00 | 42:17

Colorectal cancer is now the #1 cancer killer in Americans under 50 — and roughly 60% of cases are diagnosed at stage III or IV. What if your toilet could spot the earliest sign years before symptoms?

Robert Lufkin MD sits down with Scott Hickle, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, to talk about the first AI-powered smart toilet — a hands-free, daily monitor that detects fecal occult blood, tracks gut microbiome shifts, measures hydration and prostate health via sonouroflowmetry, and uses AI to coach behavior change. We unpack why your waste is the richest health signal you currently ignore, the Warren Buffett car-sensor analogy for continuous health monitoring, the 46% hemorrhoid risk from phone use on the toilet, and Throne's 10-year vision to be the first alarm system for cancer.

CHAPTERS

  • 00:00 — Introduction
  • 01:14 — Meet Scott Hickle: From Mechanical Engineer to Smart Toilet CEO
  • 03:00 — How a Call With His Mom Sparked the Throne Idea
  • 05:02 — Why Your Waste Is the Richest Health Signal You Ignore
  • 07:02 — How Modern Plumbing Made Stool Analysis Taboo
  • 10:02 — Fecal Occult Blood: The Earliest Sign of Colorectal Cancer
  • 13:02 — Why Colorectal Cancer Is Now the #1 Cancer Killer Under 50
  • 14:30 — The Warren Buffett Car Sensor Analogy for Continuous Health Monitoring
  • 16:03 — Throne vs Gut Microbiome Tests: A CGM for Your Gut
  • 18:03 — Stress Is the #1 Driver of Gut Health (And Other Self-Experiments)
  • 22:04 — The 46% Hemorrhoid Risk From Phone Use on the Toilet
  • 24:04 — How the Throne Hardware and AI Software Actually Work
  • 27:00 — Sonouroflowmetry: Measuring Prostate Health From the Sound of Your Pee
  • 29:05 — Privacy, Data Security, and Camera Placement
  • 31:05 — Medical Advisors, Clinical Studies, and FDA Pathway
  • 34:06 — The AI Gut Health Coach and Behavior Change
  • 37:06 — The 10-Year Vision: A First Alarm System for Cancer
  • 40:07 — Where to Pre-Order Throne (thronescience.com)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Colorectal cancer is the only top-five cancer whose mortality has risen every year since 2005 — and it's now the #1 cancer killer in Americans under 50.
  • Polyps take 7–10 years to become tumors. Colorectal cancer is one of the few cancers we know how to cure before it becomes cancer — but only 3–6% of people return the at-home FIT test.
  • Visible blood in stool requires 40,000–50,000 µg of hemoglobin per gram. The FIT test detects 10–20 µg/g — about 8,000× more sensitive than what your eye can see.
  • A single bleed could be a hemorrhoid or food poisoning. A monotonic four-to-six-month rising trend is the pattern that signals colorectal cancer — and you can only see patterns with continuous monitoring.
  • Stress is the #1 driver of gut health in Scott's own n=1 self-experiments — bigger than any food, supplement, or fiber intervention he's tried.
  • Sitting on the toilet with a phone for more than 5 minutes is associated with a 46% increased risk of hemorrhoids (Inan et al., PLOS One 2025).

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A Toilet That Could Save Lives

SPEAKER_03

The the real vision for me in 10 years is not only are we contributing to the ongoing maintenance of your daily health, but we are a first alarm system for one of the deadliest cancers in the country, and we're able to cure cancer before it starts by getting you in to see a specialist that you would never have talked to otherwise. And I I genuinely believe like there will be a day when people are saying my toilet saved my life.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to the Health Longevity Secrets Show, where we push the limits of human potential and unlock the secrets to our health and longevity with your host, Dr. Robert Lovkin.

SPEAKER_01

What if the richest stream of daily health data in your home is the one you flush twice a day? Today's guest is Scott Hickle, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, building the first AI-powered smart toilet. Literally a smoke detector for colorectal cancer. We get into why this cancer is now the deadliest in Americans under age 50, the Warren Buffett car sensor analogy, and the 46% hemorrhoid stat that will change how you sit on the toilet. You really don't want to miss this one.

SPEAKER_00

And now, please enjoy this week's episode.

Scott Hickle’s Origin Story

SPEAKER_01

There it is. Hey Scott, welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_03

Rob, thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01

I'm so excited today to talk with you about what may be a CGM for poop and pee, but even more powerful than that. But before before we do that and really dive into this fascinating uh technology that you've developed, uh maybe let's just take a moment and tell us a little bit about your journey, Scott. I mean, you from mechanical engineer to the co-founder and CEO of Throne Sciences. So what what early experiences kind of shaped your interest in health and and human performance?

SPEAKER_03

So my parents are both medical freaks of nature. Uh my mom is a geriatrician and a lawyer. And growing up, she was uh general counsel at the hospital in my hometown before she stepped back into full-time geriatrics. My dad is a cardiac anesthesiologist and medical device inventor with more than 100 patents to his name. So I was raised uh in two very medical households.

SPEAKER_01

Um and I would love to sit in on a few of those dinner conversations.

SPEAKER_03

So I literally growing up did not get bedtime stories in the trad in the traditional sense. I got medical marvels, which is my dad regurgitating whatever research he'd read, but in like, you know, explain it like I'm five language. Uh so I remember just distinctly hearing all about the differences between HDL and LDL when I was like eight years old. Um and so for the longest time I wanted to stay far away from healthcare because that was their thing. And you know, big shoes to fill, like they are quite good at what they do. And ultimately, to your point, you know, started studying mechanical engineering undergrad, and it's a long path to what got us here, but ultimately it was uh this concept for throne, you know, a smart toilet, was something that my co-founder pitched me the first time we ever met back in 2021, and it became like a kind of a you know a running joke, honestly, between us as friends, right? Like this concept of a smart toilet felt like the inevitable sci-fi future, and certainly someone was gonna do it, but we didn't think it would be us. Fast forward in 2023, I called my mom, and uh, by that point, Tim and I decided we were gonna go start a company together, and he also comes from a healthcare family with a bunch of nurses. Um, and I called my mom and asked, Mom, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waist and not really expecting much? And she lit up and had so much to say, and ultimately it boiled down to like, honey, like in the field of geriatrics, there's a joke that all our patients talk about is their kids, their meds, and their poop. And it's to the point where I no longer give my phone number to my patients because they send me so many pictures of their poop. And like, that is an amazing story, but also I went away and just could not stop thinking about that line because it tells you two things, which is number one, people intuitively appreciate that there's health information in their waist because they're sending it to their doctor. And number two, it's so commonplace that it changed the way my mom, as a physician, communicates with her patients. And so we went away and started doing a bunch of homework and ultimately realized, you know, two in three Americans experience recurrent GI symptoms. Everybody on earth experiences GI symptoms at some point in their lives. Uh, and to your point, you know, we have CGMs and all these kinds of continuous wearables for insights into all these other systems in our bodies except for gut health and urinary function, despite the fact that you know our bio waste is a rich source of health information. So that's the high level of how we got here.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, yeah, it's a it's a it's a great origin story. Well,

Why Waste Is Medical Data

SPEAKER_01

let's let's step back and just kind of uh bring everybody up to um educate uh everyone kind of on uh maybe waste, uh, you know, pee and poop 101, sort of biology and health insights. Like, like so why the bathroom matters? Like in conventional health tracking, like you say, we have we obsess over wearables, right? We you know, CGM, but heart rate, heart variability, sleep, steps. But stool and urine are you know usually ignored, other than you know, sending pictures to your you know to your doctor. So why why is waste, first of all, why is waste such a powerful health signal?

SPEAKER_03

It's it's a great question. So I would take a step way back to antiquity and just say that like so much of even Hippocrates' early writings, right, father of Western medicine, was about waste inspection as a tool for understanding the function of the human body. And it's packed with rich information, you know, your stool is packed with rich information about you know disease states, um, you know, dietary trigger sensitivities and intolerances. Your waste from your urine can tell you, you know, not just your hydration levels, but it can tell you alert you to UTIs, uh, and you know, your metabolites in your urine can tell you if you're pregnant or not. Uh there's just so many different things you can learn about from your waste that historically we paid far more attention to as society, right? Like the diarrheal diseases of the 18th and 19th centuries were some of the biggest global killers, period. You know, it was dysentery and cholera, and the primary way you were diagnosed with those was by looking at your waste. And I I gave a TED talk about this last October, but I I really do believe that the advent of modern plumbing kind of pushed our waste out of sight and out of mind, and the advent of modern plumbing happened to coincide exactly with the Victorian era. So uh these Victorian ideals of modesty came right at the same time that we were introducing plumbing throughout modern society, which was in and of itself a life-saving innovation, right? Like that is what tampered down these diarrheal diseases and made it so that dysentery and cholera were not rapidly transmit throughout communities. However, it also pushed our waste out of sight and out of mind and made it more taboo to talk about, particularly in the West. And that has been something that is kind of almost uniquely an American problem, right? Like other Western cultures, even like Germany and Austria, they have toilets that are specifically shaped so that your stool sits on a shelf for examination. And you know, obviously, you know, Japan and Korea have, you know, like four out of five households have bidets. They're just a it's a very different culture around uh how they talk about waste. Uh so at any rate, why waste is important is because very simply put, it's literally been through you, and of course, it's packed with clues about what's happening inside you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh I mean it's the meta medicine has such a long history, too, of examining waste, uh, both stool and urine for diagnostic purposes. And this goes way back before, you know, before CT scanners, before EKGs, even before stethoscopes, you know, into antiquity. You know, famously diabetes is diagnosed as sugar urine because how did they do that? Well, because the urine was sweet, and you know, and they could see flies around the urine too, but they would actually literally taste the urine. And I remember one time back in the day in medical school, we had a physical diagnosis workshop with a handful of medical students, and the doctor says, Today we're gonna test the powers of observation. So he brings in a little beaker, a clear glass thing full of this yellow fluid, and he goes, Okay, watch what I do. And he he sticks his finger apparently into the fluid and then like tastes it. And he goes, Okay, I want everyone to go around and you know observe what I did and you do it. So everyone kind of like, you know, it put their finger in it, they tasted it, and they're you know, grimacing and groaning, and oh, that's sweet, uh, you know, different things. And and he goes, What'd you think? And they all kind of commented, and he goes, Well, actually, you failed the test. You didn't see my powers of observation. This is obviously someone's urine. You don't want to taste it. So when I put my finger in to taste it, I put one finger in to get it wet, but then the finger I licked was the other finger. So you didn't. But it was it was just it was a joke about observing, and it wasn't actually urine, it was apple, apple juice or something. But anyway, but but the idea is yeah, we test urine uh uh by taste and we observe it, we observe the color, we observe, you know, all different things, uh, and and same thing with stool. So it's it's so great to see you know, see you guys uh now bringing this back

The Case For Colon Cancer Detection

SPEAKER_01

in. So maybe maybe walk us through some of the science. Like what are some of the specific biomarkers in in stool and urine that maybe could reveal early signs of disease like colon cancer or metabolic imbalances or dehydration if you can?

SPEAKER_03

So yeah, so there I mean there's so much to talk talk to here. So um in general, like let's start about with colon cancer, because that's my personal passion. So I long term our mission at Throne Science is to build what we call the smoke detector for colon cancer. And the number one way of identifying early signs of colorectal cancer is through fecal occult blood. So that's blood that appears in the stool that is invisible to the naked of eye or to the naked eye. And just to contextualize, blood in stool becomes overt or visible to the naked eye at a concentration of roughly 40,000 to 50,000 micrograms of hemoglobin per gram of stool. So that's quite a bit. Uh the fecal immunchemical test, which is the current standard of care for testing for blood in stool, is sensitive to the clinical ranges would be between 10 and 20 micrograms of hemoglobin per gram of stool. So that's like 8,000 times more sensitive than the naked eye, which is an amazing, amazing advancement. The challenge with the fecal immunochemical test is that people hate collecting stool samples. Aetna, the big insurance company, sends out about a million fit tests a year prophylactically to people at risk of colorectal cancer, and their return rate is on the order of three to six percent. Uh like people just don't want to do it, right? It's it's I think it's not an exaggeration to say that collecting a stool sample is one of the worst user experiences people are asked to do. And what we are driving towards is a future version of this device that can detect trace amounts of fecal occult blood using optics, and that would allow us to sample every stool passively, hands-free, automatically, and get results in real time instead of having to wait two or three weeks once your results have been shipped off to the lab and returned to you. And the real advantage of that is that we'd be able to look at the pattern of bleeding in your stool. Because there's we all know there's you know a half dozen things that can lead to blood in your stool, fissures, fistulas, ulcers, uh, you know, viral infections, um, you know. The big scary one though is when you see a monotonic increase in bleeding over the course of weeks or months from colorectal cancer, right? If it's a transient, you know, you start bleeding and then it goes away in a few days, that could be a hemorrhoid, or that could be, you know, you had food poisoning. But if you see it increasing over the course of four to six months, that is worth throwing up a red flag and saying, hey, you should get this checked out. So that's you know, that's just one of the most powerful things in stool is looking for just those trace amounts of blood, because that will literally save lives, right? Colorectal cancer, big news just came out two weeks ago, is now the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. It is the only cancer in America whose incidence is rising right now. And you know, it's it's been said many times, like if everyone got a colonoscopy once a year, no one would die of colon cancer, because it takes on average seven to ten years for a polyp to become a malignant tumor. And right now, 60% of colorectal cancer cases are diagnosed at stages three and four just because we catch it too late, right? It's going back to the conversation about just the culture of talking about stool, people are dying of embarrassment. Like I cannot tell you how many stories I've heard of people being diagnosed way too late because they ignored the overt blood in their stool, and finally it was their you know spouse who was like, you need to go get this checked out. And by then.

SPEAKER_01

So this device, I mean, and assuming this is gonna be hopefully in a future version of the throne. To be to be clear, it's not in the current version, but uh something that would naturally fit into a device like this. You could you and the the fact that you can measure it several times, like daily, literally, daily stool measurements is gonna be more sensitive than the most sensitive single blood test because you're gonna eliminate the false positives and the fissures and the red meat and other stuff like that. And it it's really that that repeated sensitive testing is uh is is a game changer. That's really, really exciting.

SPEAKER_03

That's exactly the vision. I'm a I'm such a believer that continuous monitoring is a staple of longevity, right? Like Warren Buffett used this analogy that I just think is brilliant, which is you know, you get a new car every five to ten years, and your car has like, you know, my I have a 2017 Jeep Cherokee, and that thing has like 35 sensors, right? And they're continuously monitoring the performance of my car's engine and you know the check in airbag sensors and the the engine knock sensors and my seatbelt sensors, and it will tell me on the dashboard if I need to go get something looked at. And I have one body, and we should have some level of instrumentation and continuous monitoring for all of the major systems of our body, so that you can get you know the check engine light that pops up when something is looking out of whack. And so, yes, this is exactly where we're driving towards a you know throne. So this is the version of the device we have today. This is the version of the device we have that can scan for blood. And so, you know, over the next few years, the mission is compressing all of the technology in this to fit in this.

SPEAKER_01

Great. And I I want to we're we're gonna dive in specifically how that device works and that sort of the user experience in

Daily Signals Versus Annual Tests

SPEAKER_01

that. But before we do just kind of some more general principles, uh one way a lot of us interact medically with our gut information is through increasingly using a gut microbiome test. That's become more and more popular, certainly with with health and you know, biohacking, certainly. But um then, and then to be clear, this is not a gut microbiome test, but how do you see gut microbiome has useful information and types of organisms and this sort of stuff? How do you see and but the problem with the gut microbiome test is again, it's it's expensive, you do it once, and um you know, and you know, once or twice a year maybe. Um this test it's again, it's daily, it's like a CGM. So um what can we gain from Throne's type of visual analysis with AI um that would uh help us infer things that the gut microbiome test might tell us?

SPEAKER_03

It's a fantastic question. So the analogy I like to use is that thrown is to a gut microbiome test, what like your aura ring or your whoop or your Apple Watch is to a blood test, which is they are looking at the same systems of the body, but in totally different ways. So with Whoop and Aura, you get you know a dozen different biomarkers every single day, whereas with a blood test or a microbiome test, you get 120 biomarkers, but to your point, you know, once a year, maybe twice a year if you're you know really aggressive with it. Same thing with Frome. We get you about 20 different biomarkers from your gut and urinary subs every single time you go to the bathroom. And the real advantage of that is that you get the historical roadmap of exactly where those systems have been, so then you can go back and start to connect the dots between inputs and outputs, literally, right? Like, you know, what are the major drivers of my gut health from my diet and my lifestyle? How does my, you know, chronotype affect my gastrotype? Like what what basically the the thing that I am excited about is allowing people to run experiments on themselves the same way that they do with whoopinora, right? The number one behavior change that people with wearables see is they drink less alcohol. Because when you go out drinking and you see a recovery score tank the next morning, you've just run an experiment and you see the results clear as day. And we are making that possible for people to do it in the privacy of their own homes and say, okay, what happens when I cut this ingredient out of my diet for a week? What happens when I cut gluten out of my diet for a week? What happens when I add this new probiotic for a week? What happens when I shift my meal timing for a week? What happens if I get really diligent about sleep for a week and really hit eight hours a night for a week? How does how does each one of those factors impact my gut health? How does my stress impact my gut health? That's one of the biggest my biggest personal learning in using Throne has been that stress is the number one driver of my gut health. When I am relaxed, I am having regular healthy bowel movements. When I am stressed, it's highly variant. And as soon as I get out of that stressful period, things get regular again. And that's been an amazing. I did not know that about myself because I wasn't paying attention.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, great point. And and offline, Scott, we were talking about uh I wanted to just give a shout out that one of your co-founders is actually the founder of Whoop, right? Uh so that's a great, a great uh synergy, hopefully. And Whoop is a great product, and hopefully that'll you know carry over into this as well. So I love that you guys are doing that together. Um so back to your point, it's interesting. It's almost like uh low resolution data, but sampled at high temporal resolution, like many, many points of relatively low resolution data is much better than a ultra-high resolution gut microbiome at one point in time once a year. You're you'd rather have that time-varying data, even if it's relatively relatively lower resolution, you could get a stronger signal from that, possibly.

SPEAKER_03

I I think that's exactly the way to think about it. And it's not only that, it's it gives you earlier signal that might raise a flag that you should explore this deeper with a microbiome test or a fit test or a Colo Gard test or or or right? Um you know, a great analogy to this is I I had a friend who used to wear an Apple Watch. And I guess wears an Apple Watch, but he's in his mid-sixties and noticed that over the course of a month his heart rate jumped from like in the low 60s at night to his resting heart rate jumped into the mid-80s over the course of a month. And yeah, exactly. I see your you know, eyes get big, and that's was his reaction. So he took that to his doctor, and his doctor was like, Well, you know, you're getting older. He was like, That's not how this works, you know, like aging is a gradual process. This should not have been a step change. And ultimately he got a second and finally a third opinion before they decided to, you know, run a panel on him, and it turns out he'd contracted Lyme disease. And that to me underscores the value of having these continuous monitors, because that continuous monitor, that that change in his resting heart rate at night was never going to diagnose him with Lyme disease. But it was enough for him to look back and notice within a month that something had materially changed in his physiology, and that threw up the yellow flag that prompted him to kind of you know dive deeper down the rabbit hole until he was actually able to reach a diagnosis. And it's so so much of continuous monitoring and the value it provides is just raising things to your conscious awareness that you might otherwise have missed.

Toilet Time And Hemorrhoid Risk

SPEAKER_01

Talked about wrap-up time as sort of the bathroom habit that we that we ignore. We certainly don't measure it usually, and it could provide a lot of health information, links to gut function. So why should something as simple as how long you sit have health implications?

SPEAKER_03

I love that question. So there's two kind of factors in how long you're sitting on the toilet. So we we call the time you spend on the toilet your bathroom habits. And there are two main factors here. So there's number one is the time to first evacuation. And you want to train your body so that when you are sitting on the toilet, that is time to go to the bathroom. Same way that you train your body that when I'm in my bed, I am sleeping, right? That's why they say you're not supposed to watch TV in bed or spend time on your phone in bed. Because you basically uh coach yourself to not fall asleep quickly. Same thing with going to the toilet. So the time to first evacuation can tell you a lot about how constipated someone is in their evacuative effort, right? So there's a big difference between sitting there for five minutes and straining versus sitting there for five seconds and having a healthy bowel movement. So that's the first one that can tell you a lot about just the someone's gut health from just that first snapshot of their time on the toilet. And then the next big one that is getting a lot of attention online right now is there's a put paper published, I believe, in October of last year, 2025, that found that smartphone use on the toilet, correcting for all other factors, is associated with a 46% increase in hemorrhoid risk. And that's just because it makes it so easy to sit there for longer than is healthy for your pelvic floor and anal rectal muscles. And you again, like you sit there straining too long and pop a hemorrhoid. And so what one of the features that we built in response to that research is a text message or a push notification that'll say, hey, like looks like you've been here for longer than the recommended 10 minutes. You know, now might be a good time to get up and stretch your legs and come back later.

SPEAKER_01

That's good. That's great. Well, I before we before we wait any longer, I want to dive in and talk about Throne, the Throne device in particular.

How The Throne Device Works

SPEAKER_01

And uh, here's mine here that I could get set up. Uh so how did maybe just walk us through exactly how the throne hardware AI software works? In particular, you've you've hinted at a few parameters. What actually is it is it measuring uh going from image capture to health insights?

SPEAKER_03

So the throne is a downwards-facing camera and microphone. So it clips onto the side of your toilet. So I'll hold it up here. Clips onto the side of your toilet under the toilet seat, and uses a motion sensor on the top to determine when someone is using the toilet. It then automatically turns on. So as long as you bring your phone with you to the bathroom, which most of us do most of the time, despite the research saying we shouldn't, uh then it'll use your Bluetooth to identify this is Rob versus this is Scott. So that's how it knows who's using the toilet, and then turns on if you is and it's really cool because as long as you have the throne app on your phone with an account, then it works without having you don't have to have the app open, you don't have to push any buttons, it's just hands-free, automatic. You can have the app in the background, and it just works. It's you know, within three seconds it turns on, starts recording the contents of the toilet bowl, and then when you get up and leave, it knows no one's here anymore, and then it turns itself off, then everything gets processed in the cloud. We have about a dozen different AI models looking at four major categories of your gut health and urinary function. So we're looking at uh we call gut health is the first major category, so that is looking at stool morphology primarily, so um volume, color, Bristol stool scale, or consistency, so that's you know, seven-point scale that GIs use to classify stool from hard, healthy, loose, and liquid. Uh we're looking at uh the timing of your stool, the frequency of your stool. And so, you know, we we look at consistency and frequency together form what we call the digestive pattern. And so if you're having, if you ask someone, you know, what does healthy gut health mean to you? Like more often than not, the answer is regular healthy bowel movements. If you're having regular healthy bowel movements, the composition of your microbiome can be highly variant from one person to the other, but if you are having healthy, regular bowel movements, you feel healthy. Uh it's when you start having, you know, oscillating between constipated and diuretic and loose and diuretic and constipated again that things start to feel uh you know like you're in dysbiosis. So we get all of that objective history from just your bowel movements alone. Then we look at hydration. So that's looking at the color and clarity of your urine to understand how hydrated you are. Uh this is a fun one just because it changes so quickly, right? You can see you know, every morning people tend to wake up dehydrated because that's the longest period you've gone throughout the day without drinking water. Is that you know, six to ten hours that you were asleep? Um and so you can wake up dehydrated and then see a rebound over the course of the day as you get rehydrated. You can see dehydration show up from activities like exercise or sauna. Um, it's just very fast moving. So it's similar to like exercise, right? Your heart rate is highly responsive to you know changes in exercise when you're wearing traditional wearables. The fun thing, too, about dehydration is that it you see dehydration appear in the color of your urine typically before you start to feel thirsty. Um so it's kind of a leading indicator. Um then we look at uh these bathroom habits. So, you know, the time on toilet, and we can nudge you towards better bathroom habits proactively, and that's another metric that you have, you know, pretty direct response over or control over, hopefully. And then the final category is urinary function or prostate health. And so this this one's why we have the microphone, and it's just absolutely magical to me that we can tell you about the health of your prostate based on the sound of your P stream. Uh, but it turns out that the there's this art called sonouroflometry. And so the acoustic volume of the sound of your P stream entering the basin of a toilet maps one-to-one to your urinary flow rate. And so we can create a flow curve and then evaluate the parameters of that flow curve, most notably the average flow rate and peak flow rate, to understand how your prostate health is over time. And then, yeah, it's pretty amazing. And then we can integrate that curve to get the urine volume, which we can feed back into the hydration model. So uh, you know, we we we're looking at I would say holistic gut health, not just the GI tract, but also urinary tract. And you're getting all those results, you know, minutes after you use the toilet in a push notification, you can start to see the trends emerge in real time and start to understand, you know, when I change these things in my lifestyle, how do they how is that reflected in the toilet?

SPEAKER_01

Wow, that's amazing. Uh the prostate insight is fascinating. I um a technical question. Um, obviously it works when you sit on the toilet, and obviously men sometimes stand, often stand peeing or pee standing up. Does it work then, or do the do men have to sit on the toilet for it to work?

SPEAKER_03

No, it works uh standing or sitting as long as you have your phone with you for hands-free. Alternatively, if you don't bring your phone with you to the bathroom, then there's two buttons on the device. So you can have up to two users mapped to each of these buttons. So player one, player two, just push your button, and then it works as well. Um, and actually for the the prostate health stuff, you have to void standing up because you have to aim straight into the middle of the water. It's because if you pee on the side of the bowl, then we don't have the right kind of acoustic fingerprint to be able to do that analysis.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, uh, super

Privacy And Data Security

SPEAKER_01

exciting. Um, quick question about privacy. Everyone's probably thinking that in their minds. Maybe you could talk to privacy and trust and how you uh ensure that with data security.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so there's a few points here. The first is you own your data outright. We will never sell or share your data without your explicit permission. We'll never sell your data, period. It's sharing your data would be like, you know, I want to share this with my physician, or I want to opt in to research to share my data. And that's something that, you know, platforms like Whoopinora allow you to do, but it's always on an opt-in basis. The second is we totally understand the hesitation around putting a camera in such an intimate space. Um, so it's explicitly designed so that it only captures the contents of the toilet bowl. It's not looking up, right? Like there, there's a wealth of health information looking down, looking up, there's nothing but liability, and so that is not of interest to us. Um and then the third is your data is encrypted with bank level security in motion and at rest. Uh, we we just went through uh, you know, hired an external firm to do a penetration test to make sure that you know like we are locked down. So um, you know, we take privacy extremely seriously just because we understand that this is something that is so intimate to people that if we were ever caught in a situation where we did not uphold you know privacy and integrity to the highest standards, that would end our company. Like the for us to uh for us to achieve our mission of improving people's health and one day saving lives, that this is paramount. We have to earn your trust.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, got that existential

Clinical Validation And Research Roadmap

SPEAKER_01

risk. Uh you um you've partnered with tech and academic institutions. What how is that research shaping your roadmap? And what is any of the early findings you could talk about or that you're most excited about so far?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so we have uh an amazing team of medical advisors uh led by Dr. David Rubin. So he is the chief of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at University of Chicago. He's one of the godfathers of inflammatory bowel disease. He's got, you know, he's published more than 500 papers, been cited more than 35,000 times. Um we have another four, you know, equally esteemed GIs on a medical advisory team that he's pulled together for us. And they literally wrote the clinical guidelines for IBS and IBD. Uh and so we are publishing our first abstract in May of this year at Digestive Disease Week that shows that our AI is as accurate at classifying stool on the Bristol stool scale as gastroenterologists. Uh, we're kicking off research later this year uh comparing the efficacy of Thrones uh stool tracking to patient recall. Because right now, uh for you know understanding like literally like how pharmaceutical drugs are working on patients with IBD, one of the main scores is called the Mayo score. And it is one of the questions is how how many bowel movements have you had in the past week? And patient recall is notoriously horrible, right? Like I don't remember what I had for breakfast three days ago, much less how many bowel movements I had in the last seven days. And so getting that objective data uh can materially change the decisions that clinicians are making with their clients or with their patients based on what they're seeing in the data versus what the patient you know thought they were seeing. Um we're working with uh urologists out of Stanford to validate our Euroflow metrics. So kind of internally we aspire, again, want to be very careful. We are not a medical device company where a health and wellness device similar to Whoop and Aura in their early days, but similar to Whoop and Aura, we aspire to clinical levels of accuracy, right? Like we want this tool to be as good as something you would get as if a physician prescribed it to you, uh, even though you can go buy it yourself on our website. And so you know, we're we're kicking off these studies to show that you know the effort that we put into the the careful effort that we put into developing a product that can measure these things for you is uh you know trustworthy. And you know, from that point it'll you know, ideally uh help see adoption in more clinical settings and when we can you know pursue those indications with FDA.

Turning Insights Into Behavior Change

SPEAKER_01

So so even the even the best health tech uh can often fail, not because of the tech itself, but because of the behavioral behavior change. So how does how does throne help people not just see their data but actually act on it?

SPEAKER_03

A great question. So we are building an AI gut health coach, and the whole idea is that like you have 15 apps that help you track calories, but they the compliance with those apps, the retention rounds down to zero over the course of a year, right? Like nobody wants to count calories for an extended period of time. It is just so hard. Uh, because if you miss a meal, you've thrown off your metric for the whole week, you know? And so one of the big advantages we have is when it comes to your gut health, it really is more qualitative than quantitative. And so, and and that fortunately is how people remember the meals they ate, right? Like I had bacon and eggs for breakfast with, you know, uh like I can't believe it's not butter instead of regular butter, and I had a latte with almond milk, and I'm just making stuff up, but like you you remember qualitatively what you ate really easy, and it's also very quick to recount that, right? I can tell you everything I ate in the last day in under 30 seconds. And so we are building an AI gut health code that prompts you to tell it, you know, what has your diet looked like over the last day? You know, also how are you feeling? How have you slept? Um, you know, has there been anything else in your life that could be relevant, like travel? That's a big driver of gut health, you know, any acute stressors. And so you you document all these things, and it takes you 30 seconds, and you can literally talk to your phone and dictate it the same way you would talking to Chad GPT. And so we document all that, we use AI to extract all the relevant information, and then we run correlations against those tags and what we're seeing in your gut health and urinary stuff. And then we can give you objective, you know, here are the insights for it. Looks like when you eat, you know, red meat, you are 85% more likely to have a looser liquid bowel movement or gluten or lactose or whatever it is. And ultimately, we want to help guide you through the process of running experiments on yourself, as we talked about. Because if you run 10 experiments one week at a time, and you, you know, I'm gonna cut gluten from my diet for a week, and then I'm gonna cut lactose from my diet for a week, and I'm gonna add this probiotics for a week, and I'm gonna try psyllium husk for a week. You do that 10 times, you will guarantee find two or three things that improve your gut health, and that's a huge win. Or, or you'll find things that didn't help your gut health or decreased your gut health. And just all of that information is a victory because you can use that to change your habits and improve your gut health, right? Avoid the things that are bad and keep doing the things that are good.

SPEAKER_01

What's it what's the big 10-year vision for thrown science uh beyond beyond this first uh beyond this first product?

The 10-Year Vision For Prevention

SPEAKER_01

So, in other words, uh how how do you see it integrating into global health systems or or personalized longevity strategies?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Again, like earlier on, we said that continuous monitoring is the basis of longevity. And I think the 10-year vision for us is incorporating all of the data that we're getting with your wearables and your labs and your microbiome data so that we can start to run the correlations and see, okay, uh, you know, it looks like when we see these trends happening in your hydration and your gut health data in comparison with these trends happening in your sleep health data, like there's an 85% chance you'll get diagnosed with this chronic disease within the next 12 months. And if we can catch that six months sooner, that could materially change the outcome of the real vision for me in 10 years is not only from dropping to the ongoing maintenance of the correct health. But I also think there's an opportunity. We are able to detect flavor. First alarm system, certificate or Crohn's disease, one of the deadliest cancers in the country. And we're able to cure cancer before it starts by getting you an specialist that you would never have talked to about. Because I genuinely believe like the only conditions. There will be a day when the cancer thing that saved my life roughly 1% a year increase in incidence. And like 4% of the country at today's rates is going to get colorectal cancer at some point in their lives. That's one in 25 people. Like that's you know people who are going to get diagnosed with colon cancer if you don't already know those people. And the challenge is like it is an entirely preventable disease if you catch it early. You can literally go get a colonoscopy, you nip it in the bud while it's still a polyp. Like, you you cured cancer before it became a malignant tumor. That's amazing to me. That that is so unique in the morphology of all cancers, right? Like, that's not how melanoma works. You diagnose melanoma once it's become, you know, I you you wait basically until you see a mole becoming melanoma before you actually like remove it. Like, polyps are pre-cancerous. That's amazing. And so the the real vision for me in 10 years is not only are we contributing to the ongoing maintenance of your daily health, but we are a first alarm system for one of the deadliest cancers in the country, and we're able to cure cancer before it starts by getting you in to see a specialist that you would never have talked to otherwise. And I I genuinely believe like there will be a day when people are saying my toilet saved my life. And like that is an amazing, like I can't imagine something more motivating to work towards.

SPEAKER_01

That's a that's a great vision. Well, as we wrap up this segment, is there anything uh that we didn't talk about yet or any final closing thoughts you want to leave our audience with?

SPEAKER_03

I mean, I I love talking about this stuff. I wish we had another hour, but uh I I'd say, you know, so we're launching March 10th. Um and just I can't wait for you and your audience to try the device and give us feedback. Uh, you know, like our website is thronescience.com. You can pre-order the device now and save $40. You can wait until it's launched. But uh, you know, just thank you so much for having me on and for the opportunity to kind of you know share the message of this thing I'm so passionate about.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I love the passion. It's coming through, definitely. Well, thanks, thanks again, Scott, for for what you're doing and then the great work you're doing on this project. You know, you it truly can change the world with this. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_03

Rob, thank you so much.

Preorder Details And Subscribe Request

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SPEAKER_01

It's already recorded.

SPEAKER_02

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