Unlocking Mental Wellness: Exploring the Gut-Brain Connection with Dr. Shawn Talbott, PhD - Episode 9

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Welcome to "The Journey to Win" podcast, where we explore the mindset, habits, and strategies of successful individuals in their respective fields. In this episode, we are thrilled to have Dr. Shawn Talbott, PhD, a nutritional biochemist and author, who has dedicated his career to researching the link between nutrition and mental wellness. Dr. Talbott will take us on a journey of discovery, as we dive into the fascinating world of the gut-brain axis and microbiome, and how they impact our mental health. He will explain why the gut is often referred to as the "second brain" and how it influences our moods, behavior, and cognition. With his extensive knowledge and experience, Dr. Talbott will share practical tips on how to improve your gut health, reduce stress, and enhance your mental wellbeing. Get ready to revolutionize your approach to mental health, and join us on this fascinating journey to explore the untapped potential of the gut-brain connection.

@doctalbott
www.doctalbott.com

Transcript

Thebrandonthornhill (00:06.490)
Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to the journey to win. I'm your host Brandon Thornhill. I'm here with Mr. Dr. Sean Talbot. Extremely excited to have him on the web, on the, on the meeting today. Sean, welcome to the call.

Dr Shawn Talbott (00:16.896)
Hey, thanks, Bren. Good to be here.

Thebrandonthornhill (00:18.330)
Awesome. And so I'm going to do a quick intro of Sean. Sean, he's a PhD in nutritional biochemistry from Rutgers. Impressive background to he's written two academic textbooks and award winning documentary film, and several best selling books translated into multiple different languages. You know, you worked his work has been shown on the Dr. Osho. It's been on the TED talk stage. The White House, you develop numerous top selling nutraceutical products generating over $1 billion in global sales. You've held the title of world's

Thebrandonthornhill (00:48.430)
curious to see how you've done that and then you're the chief science officer of Amara the mental wellness company man what a resume excited to have you on the call

Dr Shawn Talbott (00:57.348)
Thanks.

Dr Shawn Talbott (01:00.656)
Yeah, it's good to be here. I'm looking forward to chatting.

Thebrandonthornhill (01:03.730)
Awesome. So Sean, you know, we usually start off the call and we just talk about, cause this is called the journey to win, right? So what is winning to Sean Talbot?

Dr Shawn Talbott (01:12.676)
Oh boy, good one. Yeah, I guess it's, I mean, to me personally, it's feeling like you've achieved in multiple areas of your life, right? So like sometimes that means being on the top step of the podium. Sometimes it means, you know, being the best dad. Sometimes it means being the best spouse or just like feeling like you're making a difference out there, right? You know, even the Olympic level athletes that I've worked with in the past, you know, they wanna win the gold medal, but they also wanna be as rounded

as possible in other parts of their life. And to me, that's kind of what it all means.

Thebrandonthornhill (01:48.470)
I love that. So let's talk about like, you know, how you got into your role that you're in right now. I mean, you are the chief science officer at Amara, the mental wellness company. Why mental wellness? I mean, you're obviously a PhD from Rutgers, extremely smart. You got it in nutritional biochemistry, but what from nutrition made you wanna go into the mental wellness space?

Dr Shawn Talbott (02:12.976)
Yeah, so that's actually a really good question. So the kind of work that I've done over the last 20 years or so, these days today is referred to as nutritional psychology. It's this idea of, even though my PhD is in nutritional biochemistry, and I still study a lot of the biochemical impact of nutrition, meaning if we feed someone a particular diet, a good diet or a bad diet, or we supplement them in a certain way, how does that change their biochemistry? So we can measure things like, we can measure their microbiome,

Dr Shawn Talbott (02:43.316)
in their blood or their saliva, stress hormone. We can measure inflammatory markers, we can measure neurotransmitters, like all that kind of stuff. But then nutritional, that's the biochemistry part. But then the psychology part is linking that biochemistry to an outcome. Like how do you feel? What does your focus look like? How is your mood? What's your resilience? What is your, you know, do you have brain fog? Or, you know, do you have good sleep quality? Like all that kind of stuff. So nutritional psychology is a discipline now that wasn't even a discipline 20 years ago

I started, you started dabbling in it. And now it's a whole scientific genre of its own. And the reason for that is because the science has developed and developed and developed. And the cool thing about it, the reason that that is what I focus on, and I'm so excited that we created a whole company around that. Amari is the mental wellness company, is that people feel terrible now. You know, like sort of post pandemic, people have a much, much more nuanced

of the fact that mental wellness is where everything is. If you don't feel good, it doesn't matter how much you're in shape. If you don't feel good, it doesn't matter what your bank account looks like. If you don't feel good, it like nothing else matters in a sense, because you're not able to enjoy anything, right? You're not able to enjoy your day. Every day is stressful or every day is fatigued or something. And I think that, you know, if there's a silver lining of what we went through with the pandemic, it's that people understand

of mental wellness. And it was a big problem before the pandemic, but it's an even bigger problem now because more people are aware of it.

Thebrandonthornhill (04:19.650)
Yeah, I think most people weren't even willing to have that conversation and think that was something to open them up. And I'm a big firm believer that the higher you elevate in your physical career, whether it's, you know, being a Navy SEAL or like you being an endurance athlete, doing Ironmans and ultra marathons and all this stuff, like you can't be your best physical self if you're not your best mental self.

Dr Shawn Talbott (04:38.616)
Right, and that's really how I got involved with it. Like right in the early part of my career, right after my PhD, I was more like what you would call a sport nutritionist, right? I would try to help the athletes to get the most out of their physical performance. But the way that we did that was, you know, help them recover better, lower their inflammation, you know, all that kind of stuff. I helped them with sleep quality, but it was really this. It was really if we could help them get a mental edge, even if it was like, you know, what is referred to now as,

Dr Shawn Talbott (05:08.876)
What is it? What is the word that the cycling teams use? Incremental gains, right? If you can get 1% better here and a half a percent better there and a half a percent better there with all these little marginal gains that that adds up to you know Three or four percent and three or four percent is the difference between the gold medal and not even qualifying for the finals, right? So it really became that idea of if we could give them a mental edge and we could make them more resilient and we could help them

Dr Shawn Talbott (05:38.756)
away and if we could help them bounce back after a hard workout or even a setback, then they were able to achieve that high level of physical performance. Right? So you're, I mean, you're exactly right, Brandon. It's like the people who perform, whether you're Navy SEAL or you're Olympic level athlete, it's that rare combination of being in peak physical condition, but also having that mental edge to help you get that edge over your competition.

Thebrandonthornhill (06:06.350)
So let's talk about that. So a lot of people, you know, they've probably heard of the gut brain access or they've heard of the microbiome, but I don't think they truly have done a lot of research to dive into what that even is. So one, what is it? And two, how do they leverage that to like what you're saying, to either live a higher quality life or to elevate and accelerate to the next level in their physical fitness?

Dr Shawn Talbott (06:28.436)
Yeah, yeah. So like the conversation we just had there, right, about mental edge, most people, and I actually did it myself, right? I was pointing to my head. Most people would think like, oh, if I wanna get a mental edge, I have to do something to my brain. I have to do mindfulness, or I have to do positivity thinking, and I have to get my mindset right. And those are all important things. I don't wanna diminish those. But if you look at the new science, a lot of those signals that your brain is receiving and your brain is acting on

Dr Shawn Talbott (06:58.376)
coming from your gut, what we call the second brain. So some of them come from the gut tissue itself. Some of them come from the bacteria inside what we call the microbiome. And so some of the statistics that we throw out there to show people how big a deal this is, 90% of your serotonin, the neurotransmitter sort of being happy or sad, is made in your gut. About 70% of the dopamine that drives our motivation is made in our gut. Maybe 50% of our GABA,

Dr Shawn Talbott (07:28.736)
that helps us relax when we're stressed out is made in the gut. And so if we know that for neurotransmitters, we know it for appetite hormones, we know it for inflammatory markers that are involved in athletic recovery. A lot of our immune system, somewhere around 70 to 75% of our immune system is in our gut. So if we look at all of that, we go, wait a minute, we need to focus on gut health as a performance measure, as a performance metric.

Dr Shawn Talbott (07:58.496)
of the gut and the microbiome and going across what we call the gut-brain axis, we can improve the performance of this brain in your head by improving the performance of the second brain, the gut, and restoring balance there.

Thebrandonthornhill (08:13.370)
I love that. I mean, you wrote a book called mental fitness all about that. Maybe tell us a little bit about this and how it's been able to play a role into helping, you know, even every everybody from everyday people stay at home, moms, stay home, dads, whoever to Olympic level athletes, take their life to the next level through nutrition, through the microbiome in the gut.

Dr Shawn Talbott (08:31.036)
Yeah, so in that book, I've got separate chapters on sleep quality and movement, physical activity, and baseline nutrition, what I call the mental fitness diet, and specific supplements that people can take, specific strains of probiotic bacteria that can help with stress or depression or anxiety or appetite control or inflammatory balance, or the list goes on and on and on. And so it's this idea of if you want to have that mental edge, whether you're an elite performer

or you're just a regular person that just kind of feels fine, but you want to feel better, or you're someone like a lot of people who feel terrible and want to feel normal again, any of those scenarios, that is what I refer to as the mental wellness continuum. Everybody's on the continuum. I'm on the continuum, Brandon, you're on the continuum, everyone listening to this is on the continuum. And the idea is to find out where you are. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, maybe you're a five, let's see what we can do naturally

Dr Shawn Talbott (09:31.196)
and then to a seven, then to an eight, then to a nine. And like the coolest thing about it, having done it for more than 20 years now, you get somebody who's a five, they can't contemplate ever being a 10 or a nine and a half or a nine, but they can think about, well, maybe I could get to be a six. And then once they're a six and you can get them to be a seven, now they're a seven and they're thinking, huh, I wonder what it would be like to be a nine, right? Because now their bandwidth has expanded and their options have opened up. And they're like, they start thinking like,

wait a minute, I just did a 5k, what if I could do a 10k? I just did a 10k, what if I could do a marathon? And I know you're training for a marathon right now. So that's a that's probably a pretty, you know, appropriate, appropriate metaphor, like, like the more you're able to do, the more you're able to do. And we take them step by step by step to improve mental fitness through some of these modalities that people wouldn't normally think of, like nutrition and sleep quality and things like that.

Thebrandonthornhill (10:26.550)
I love it. Yeah. I mean, if, if you ever want to test your, your gut health, going along 10 mile, 12 mile run.

Dr Shawn Talbott (10:32.236)
Exactly. Yeah, that stresses your lungs and your heart and your legs and your gut too.

Thebrandonthornhill (10:40.390)
And so what do you say to anybody who might be listening to this, whether maybe they're a, I don't know, a clinical practitioner of some sort, or they're your everyday person that might be a little bit skeptical to say of, you know, how can you create clinically proven products that can target the microbiome in the gut and help people feel happier, like literally show proven results to help them feel happier, reduce depression to scores,

Dr Shawn Talbott (11:08.160)
Yeah.

Thebrandonthornhill (11:11.175)
it's curing anything, but what do you say to them?

Dr Shawn Talbott (11:14.156)
Yeah, well, I say look at the science, right? This is an aspect of science that is very well developed, but it is underappreciated because it's not mainstream yet, right? It's very, very new science. And a lot of times the science will take a decade or more to really make it into the clinic, to make it into a practitioner's office. So I'll give you an example. I was just at a mental wellness conference, a joint conference of an organization called NAMI,

Dr Shawn Talbott (11:44.156)
mental illness. They were one part of it. And then mental health America, MHA, was the other part of it. And I gave the keynote. And I talked all about the microbiome and the gut brain axis and how all of this new science was leading us to have more tools to help people feel better. And everybody in the room, well, most of the people in the room, a couple of hundred people, were health care practitioners who this was like a revelation to them that what's happening in the gut is informing what's happening in the brain

to a very, very high degree. And so I said, hey, all we're talking about is the science here today. Here's some data, here's some study results, all that kind of stuff. And the next day, we were having a meeting where we were gonna talk about products, right? It was gonna be more, not really a sales meeting, but it was gonna be more sort of like a, what am I supposed to do meeting? What kinds of fibers do I eat? And what kinds of probiotic strains do I have? And that kind of stuff. And that meeting got oversold. We couldn't even fit the people in the room

So many people from the science meeting wanted to come to the practical meeting to find out like, okay, I want to help my clients, I want to help my patients. What do I do? That's really cool science, but how do I apply it so somebody can actually get the results? And like, when you can bring those two things together, and that's what we're trying to do with Amare, you bring the science and the results together. And that's when good stuff starts to happen out there.

Thebrandonthornhill (13:08.750)
So how did you do it? So talk about like how you formulated the products, the way that you did to help people. You know, like for example, I have, and there's an article that I read, it's in psychology today. And you know, I got a special place in my heart for all my military brothers and sisters, right? Like a lot of people get out and they struggle with their mental health, mental wellness. And you know, unfortunately we lose a lot of people to depression, anxiety, PTSD, things like that. And you know, this study, I'll read it real quick.

Dr Shawn Talbott (13:23.476)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Shawn Talbott (13:31.739)
Yeah.

Thebrandonthornhill (13:38.750)
about how the gut depends on a balance of healthy floor to produce neurotransmitters and catecholamines. And then people with low serotonin have been shown to have less bioavailability of the floor and the elevated inflammation in the gut. So when the gut is inflamed, your neurotransmitters and catecholamines are out of whack. There's actually a lot of literature on this, right? So neurotransmitters, let me skip this. When your gut health is off, so is your brain health. Gut inflammation results in brain inflammation and vice versa.

Dr Shawn Talbott (13:52.276)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (14:04.418)
Right.

Thebrandonthornhill (14:08.750)
connection is not a theory anymore. So anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction, all of that stuff have roots in the brain, gut access. So maybe if you could talk a little bit on that and then how how you formulated products, you know, scientifically from a doctor standpoint to help target those specific issues.

Dr Shawn Talbott (14:26.276)
Yeah, yeah. And this is what it gets, this is why it's really exciting from the perspective of someone like me who is a scientist and understands the scientific piece of it. And also as a clinician and a coach that wants to actually get out there and help people apply that science like I just described. So the science just in the last couple of years has gone from this whole microbiome gut brain access thing being kind of interesting, kind of being theoretical to now being actionable, where you can say, wait a minute, we can change

Thebrandonthornhill (14:29.116)
you

Dr Shawn Talbott (14:56.076)
Microbiome in a couple of days, right? We only need three days to really be able to see a meaningful change if we feed the right fiber So we for so just to give an example We can take somebody off of a standard American diet, you know Like lots of processed foods and lots of sugar and lots of you know drive-through food and stuff like that Three days put them on a more whole foods diet where they're eating more fruits and vegetables and salads and you know

Dr Shawn Talbott (15:26.876)
So different bacteria start growing, those different bacteria start producing more of those good neurotransmitters and less of the bad inflammatory compounds. And as a result of that, the people start feeling better. And so sometimes you'll see early changes. A couple of days you'll see tension go down and stress levels go down. A couple of weeks you'll see brain fog go away. You know, maybe a month or two you'll see depression indexes and anxiety indexes and resilience indexes and things like that changing in the, you know, in the right direction.

And so if we follow the science and we look at the clinical trials that have been done, we can go to those trials and we can say, well, what strain of bacteria did they actually use in that trial and how much? What type of fiber, prebiotic fiber, did they use in that trial? What herb like saffron or apple polyphenols or pine bark or whatever the case may be, which one did they use and how much of it?

Dr Shawn Talbott (16:26.216)
that one, right? If the researchers have access to it, we can get access to it. When I say we, I mean Amare. And so that's what we do. One of the things I say all the time is that we follow the science. We'll say, here's a good clinical result. How did they do it? How long did it take? What exactly did they use? Let's go find that exact one and let's build a product around that. Because then we know if we're talking about mental wellness, we have pretty good confidence that we can say to somebody here, take this and take it for two weeks or four weeks or six weeks,

trial showed, and you'll feel better, and I do it in quotes, you'll feel better in this particular way. But in some ways it's gonna be this ingredient helps with mood, someone else is gonna say this ingredient helps with energy, this ingredient helps with sleep quality, and so because we have all those different sort of pieces of the puzzle, we can put together a formula that gets people to feel overall better, right? They'll feel happier, or they'll feel more resilient, or they'll feel, you know, like they're

self, you know, people describe it different ways, but if we follow the science, we're able to deliver those benefits.

Thebrandonthornhill (17:32.370)
Yes, and then maybe talk about how you guys created, because you created a fundamentals pack that you feel like everybody should be on, and then you created something called Happy Juice, and you've done the clinical research to prove these products. So maybe talk a little bit about how you formulated those, and then talk about the clinical studies that you actually did around that.

Dr Shawn Talbott (17:39.339)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (17:51.016)
Yeah, yeah. So with fundamentals, it was, fundamentals was interesting because nobody had ever done, put together a whole gut brain access system before, right? At that time, this was probably six or seven years ago, like it was, the science was just barely baked enough where you could apply it, right? So we, you know, we sort of came up from the perspective of, if someone is feeling sad, if somebody is feeling tense, if somebody is feeling irritable, what's the problem, right? So I

Dr Shawn Talbott (18:21.016)
on and I say, well, maybe it's their neurotransmitters, right? So there's, there's certain nutrients that we know that we can give to people that will increase their, their, their neurotransmitter activity in their brain. Things like pomegranate, things like pine bark and things like, you know, grape seed extract and things like that, right? Really good data on that. We can, we can look at that. And then thinking about the gut brain access as a system, you go, well, wait a minute, what if they're feeling bad and they're in the, and the, and the problem

Dr Shawn Talbott (18:50.976)
we need something to solve the inflammation piece, right? There's all kinds of ways we can solve inflammation. We can give omega-3 fatty acids, we can give, you know, etc., etc. Well, what's the source of their inflammation? Well, it might be that their immune system is overactive or weirdly active, and we can solve something with the immune system, like give glu cans or give mushroom extracts, or there's a whole bunch of different ways we can solve the immune system problem. And then you keep going down the list there and you say, well, maybe their immune system

is out of whack, but what's causing that? Well, maybe it's their leaky gut. And so here now we're in the gut. What if we can improve the integrity of their gut by giving things like zinc carnosine and glutamine and things that are known to help the gut? Well, why is their gut leaky? Maybe it's their microbiome is out of balance. They don't have enough good guys and they have too many bad guys and they have a bad environment in their gut. So you think all the way down that chain of events and we thought, well, wait a minute, somebody knows they don't feel good.

Dr Shawn Talbott (19:50.916)
perfect A game. It could be any of those that are out of balance or all of those that are out of balance. So let's put together a pack of products that became fundamentals that addresses all of that. And when we introduced it to the world, we won all kinds of awards. We got clinical trials published and some peer reviewed journals. We were invited to present our research at all the top scientific conferences. It was really cool because it had never been done before. And now we look back and it's kind of like,

Dr Shawn Talbott (20:21.356)
It's sort of in retrospect, you go, yeah, if you follow this science, this science, this science, this science, and you put them all together in one coordinated system, I mean, it's logical now that it works. It wasn't then, but we got those results. And then, so that's fundamentals. Then we came out with Happy Juice a few years later because we got people saying like, well, I don't really have any problems necessarily. I just, I'm just a normal person and I wanna feel better, right? So there's a way we can do that too. We can say, well,

Maybe we're not trying to fix anything or repair anything. Maybe we're just trying to optimize those systems and get the signals to be better. So maybe you need more dopamine. Maybe you need better blood sugar control. Maybe you need a little tweak to your neuron activation. Well, we can do a formula around that too and get you from feeling blah to feeling amazing, right? So really, really whichever way you want to look, it's a systems approach across the gut brain axis.

Thebrandonthornhill (21:16.390)
You know, I didn't know until I talked to you that, you know, when you're talking about like a digestive product or something, a probiotic, prebiotic, like they target, there's different strands that target different things. Can you, can you educate them on that a little bit?

Dr Shawn Talbott (21:27.781)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (21:30.056)
Yeah, and that's a big thing that I talked about at this mental wellness conference. Everybody knows now like, oh, probiotics are a good thing to get, right? You read an article about it and you, oh, my gut's off and my gut is talking to my brain. I gotta go get a probiotic. But just thinking that probiotic, the metaphor that I use is like, all right, let's say you decided that you needed a dog and you went to the pet store and you said, hey, I need a dog. And they said, sure, we have a lot of dogs back there. What kind are you looking for?

Dr Shawn Talbott (22:00.296)
just a dog, you know, probiotics, dogs, it's all the same. And you were looking for a poodle and they gave you a Rottweiler, right? Completely, completely different solution for what you were looking for, right? Probiotics are exactly the same. And instead of thinking about breeds of dogs, we talk about strains of probiotics. So one strain of probiotic might help with constipation. Another strain might help with diarrhea. Those are completely opposite effects and they're both probiotics.

different strains. And the reason that I talk about this a lot is because, again, if we follow the science, we can pick out and we have picked out in our product line at Amare, one strain that helps with stress, one strain that helps with mood, one strain that helps with tension, right? So those are those three, let me stop there. Those three are all three different ways of getting somebody to feel better. They're all mental wellness strains, but they're different ways of feeling better. So if somebody has stress, that's their solution. If somebody has,

low mood, that's their solution, etc. We use those three in combination because they help people feel holistically better. But then we use other strains to help with appetite control or fat release. We use one strain to help with gut inflammation. So you get the idea, like strain specificity is a really, really important concept. So two things, if you don't know the strain of your product, you should not use it, right? Because

It's like you're rolling the dice. It's a crap shoot. You have no idea what that's gonna do for you if you don't know the strain. And here's the other thing, 90% of the products on the market don't even tell you the strain. Because even today, a lot of companies, that hasn't sunken in, and they're just buying generic probiotics because that's what customers are looking for, generic probiotics. But the customer experience ends up being like, oh, I tried probiotics and they didn't work for me. Or I tried probiotics and then,

me feel weird, but that's because you weren't choosing the right strain for the benefit that you were looking for. They're out there. You know, you just have to, you have to go with a science-based company.

Thebrandonthornhill (24:10.110)
Yeah, I just, I think that's the point is a lot of people just, they don't know the science behind it yet because there's not a lot of people talking about it, which is what I'm so glad that you're out there spreading the word about it. Right. I mean, I remember the other day I was talking to somebody and they were like, Hey, you know, your, your daughter's, you know, sick. She needs, she should take some pre you should get her some, taking some, uh, some yogurt because it's got really good pre and probiotics. And I'm like, well, that's great. Sure. I said, but what you don't realize is that I actually have a sensitivity to yogurt. Um,

Dr Shawn Talbott (24:32.639)
Right.

Thebrandonthornhill (24:40.290)
I mean, I'll eat it. But I did a food comprehensive like test that tests like 250, I think 250 to 300 different foods. And one of the biggest two eggs were eggs, egg whites. And milk based products were three of the issues that were causing inflammation in the gut. And as you know, inflammation is no one cause of disease.

Dr Shawn Talbott (24:55.197)
Hmm.

Dr Shawn Talbott (25:00.396)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Thebrandonthornhill (25:01.850)
So there's just not a lot of people really, there's a lot of people talking about it. There's a lot of people marketing behind it, but there's not, I don't think enough doctors out there yet. There will be really shouting it from the rooftop.

Dr Shawn Talbott (25:14.836)
Yeah, that's a good point. And I say that to people all the time. I said probiotics and the gut brain axis and the microbiome and all the things that we're discussing right now is early, right? The science is there, but most people haven't heard of it. Most people haven't tried it the right way, like the strain specificity, for example. Five years from now, people are gonna look, if we would have this conversation five years in the future, Brandon, people would be tuning in and go, why are they talking about this? Everybody knows this.

Dr Shawn Talbott (25:45.116)
where it's gonna be mainstream science someday soon, and everyone's gonna know exactly what we know, but they don't know it yet. And so that's a big piece of why I love having these conversations, because the more somebody understands this and goes, oh my gosh, and then they apply it to their life and see the benefits they can get mentally and physically, they'll go, why didn't I know about this before? And like even scientists didn't know about this 10 years ago, and we couldn't really apply it

Dr Shawn Talbott (26:14.936)
recently. So it's very new, but it'll be the mainstream thing someday.

Thebrandonthornhill (26:20.170)
So then again, if I'm a mental health specialist, whether I'm, I don't know, a PhD or whatever, the different varying levels there are out there, or a doctor who wants to implement certain things inside their practice to help their patients or a personal trainer, like what advice would you have for me maybe as far as maybe I like what I'm hearing, but I'm like, I need more data to prove what you're saying. Like where can they find that data? Do you have white papers to prove the research

talk a little bit about that because again, I always wanna talk to the skeptics, man. You know what I mean? So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we'll talk about the skeptics.

Dr Shawn Talbott (26:51.716)
Yeah, so I always say, I'm glad you said that. I always say our best customer is an open-minded skeptic. They're the person who's like, I don't know about that. That sounds really, the gut is talking to my brain. Really, I can change the signals coming from my gut to improve my performance. I don't know about that. And so people can read my book, Mental Fitness. I have a lot of research in there. People can hit my blog, which is SeanTalbot.com.

Dr Shawn Talbott (27:21.636)
all kinds of research papers up there. I post videos, I walk people through the research and say, this is why we know it's true. So the research is there, right? We try to make it as available as possible. The clinicals that we do at Amari, we publish in open, in peer-reviewed journals, but also open journals, so people can go right there and see who we studied, how we studied them, what our measurements were, what our pre and post results look like, all that kind of stuff. Because again, if we follow the science

Dr Shawn Talbott (27:52.016)
out there and someone can go, huh, okay, there looks like there's something here scientifically. Then the next step is to take that open-minded skeptic and just give them a little nudge off the fence to say, the science is there, this sounds interesting. It's something that's probably complimentary to what you're trying to do with your clients and your patients right now, and you don't have in your arsenal, why don't you give it a try and see how it works for them and see how it works for you,

Dr Shawn Talbott (28:22.076)
It's one thing for me to say, here's this white paper, here's this publication, here's this scientific presentation, blah, blah, blah. But then for them to use it with one of their patients and say, oh my gosh, they did get better. That's the real proof, because then you'll see how they got better. Did they get better? Because now they're able to shift out of fight or flight reaction, and they can downshift into like, rest and digest, and they can activate their parasympathetic nervous system,

Dr Shawn Talbott (28:51.756)
start to recover where they've been in this sort of go, go, go situation all the time, you'll see that. If somebody has not been motivated to make the lifestyle changes that they need to with their diet and their exercise and their sleep quality, now maybe you get their motivation up with one of these supplements and they are able to make those changes, right? And they feel encouraged and they feel engaged and motivated that that can make all the difference.

Thebrandonthornhill (29:18.610)
man, I love it. You know, the mind's like a parishioning works if it's open, right? And I've always, I've always had a healthy level of skepticism in life, because probably my background, but at the same time, you know, I always knew that if you don't have an open mind, at least two would be willing to do your own research on something, you just take other people's opinions in life. Like, if you take other people's opinions, you know, you're always going to be closed off because everybody has not everybody, but a lot of people have negative opinions about everything. Right? I mean, you go on social media, negativity spreads six times faster than

Dr Shawn Talbott (29:22.963)
Exactly.

Dr Shawn Talbott (29:43.340)
Yep.

Thebrandonthornhill (29:48.570)
clickbait negative, right? So I say that because, you know, I believe in your guys movement so much that you guys actually acquired our company that I built in for seven years. And we had powerful products that helped, you know, they have a healthy inflammatory response with the inside of the body. And and I was very healthy when I first got started in the business still very healthy, you know, as you say, I'm training for a marathon. And so I knew like, I was going to see crazy results on the products initially. But what I did is I said, Well,

Dr Shawn Talbott (29:50.439)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (30:04.897)
Right?

Thebrandonthornhill (30:19.470)
I'm not the test person. I'm gonna take the products for sure. So I started taking it. And I noticed I was feeling a little bit better, but nothing crazy. But I handed it out to 20 different people. And then from there, I was like, okay, out of 20 people, how many people got a response? How many people felt better over a seven, 20, 30 day period? And it was crazy the amount of results I was getting off of these products. And what's funny is now that we've merged with you guys, and you could tell us a little bit more about your experience so far,

Dr Shawn Talbott (30:26.497)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (30:38.861)
Yep.

Thebrandonthornhill (30:48.730)
The Happy Juice, that is my number one go-to for everybody. It's the foot in the door. Like, hey, you need to take this product. Check it out. Take it for 30 days. If you're extremely unhealthy, listen, you didn't get unhealthy overnight. You might not get healthy overnight, but give it some time. But man, I see people seeing results in one day, three days, five days, way faster than I ever did previously. So maybe you can talk a little bit on that.

Dr Shawn Talbott (31:01.096)
Right? Exactly.

Dr Shawn Talbott (31:14.216)
Yeah, yeah. And I think that people who are on some of those Keani products might even see benefits even faster because you've got a good foundation already of controlling oxidation and controlling inflammation and enhancing blood flow and those sorts of things, which are really like foundational biochemical pathways that if they're out of balance, the whole system goes kablooie. And if they're in balance, you're in a place where, all right, now when we layer on top of that, these mental wellness parameters,

then you can go, oh my gosh, I've up-leveled myself, right? I was doing pretty good here, but now I've kicked it up a notch because my serotonin and my dopamine and my gut integrity and et cetera, et cetera, right? That gut brain access systems idea is really able to just be jet fueled when you have the right biochemistry underlying it, right? And vice versa. People have been doing the mental wellness piece and getting the neurotransmitters and all that kind of stuff,

benefit from getting a more solid foundation biochemically with oxidation, inflammation, blood flow, all that kind of stuff. So I see it as the perfect merge of physical performance and mental wellness, which is, I mean, they're really two sides of the same coin, like we talked about before, right? The athlete who wins the gold medal isn't in any better shape physically than the person who comes in second or third or last in the finals, but they had something mentally that allowed them to get more out of their physical performance.

Dr Shawn Talbott (32:44.096)
to bring to the average person, right? I don't, there's probably not a lot of Olympic athletes listening to this right now. There's probably not a lot of active Navy SEALs, right? But everybody in their regular life, you should want to perform at your highest level, whatever that is. Like I'm an old broken down endurance athlete now. I used to be fast, but now I'm just trying to do it and enjoy it and not get hurt. So I want to have the highest level of performance as a 55 year old. It's not going to be the same performance that I had

Dr Shawn Talbott (33:14.217)
old but I'll take what I can get.

Thebrandonthornhill (33:15.890)
Yeah, yeah. Well, let me clarify for the audience because broken down 55 year old who's still doing ultra marathons. Sure. You know, Hey, I guess there's levels to the game and, and you continue to perform the highest level. You know, I always, I've always followed this rule do what they do, how about they have, and if you follow people who are at the pinnacle of their health and fitness, like why wouldn't you want to do what they do? You know, then you're going to get the results. And so let me ask you this, you know, products, you can

Dr Shawn Talbott (33:22.476)
Ha ha!

Thebrandonthornhill (33:46.250)
they're always gonna have a little bit of a level of healthy skepticism maybe and say well you can't just take products and and feel better but you guys did a study and and and I remember you talking about this study where you guys got people on your products I think was the fundamentals and they you told them don't work out they did it for like 30 days and then all of a sudden 30 days later so tell me I don't want to say you tell it because you're gonna tell a lot better

Dr Shawn Talbott (33:52.097)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (34:02.481)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (34:08.476)
Yeah, yeah. So in that trial, we followed people for six weeks, and we said, just take the supplements, don't change your diet, don't change your exercise, don't get all healthy on us, right? Because we're just gonna track your biochemistry, right? And we measured their microbiome, which is a fecal sample, poop sample. We measured stress hormones, which is saliva. We measured blood chemistry, so, you know, cholesterol, triglycerides, inflammatory markers, which is a blood test. So, you know, these poor folks were giving us

their fluids. And the premise was, we were just going to see how the supplements changed all these, you know, healthy blood, you know, biochemistry parameters. And they did, right? Microbiome was better. We saw more resilience. We saw the good guys go up. We saw all that kind of stuff. Cholesterols went down. Cardiac risk profiles went down. Stress hormones went down. Blood sugar was better. All the things. People felt better. We measured their psychological

Dr Shawn Talbott (35:08.396)
and mood states went up and it was perfect. But what we were actually doing is we gave everybody in the cohort, we gave them an activity tracker, a Garmin watch, and we tracked their stress and we tracked their movement and we tracked their sleep quality and all that kind of stuff. And then before and after, we also did a, we also did what's called a three-day diet record. So we were tracking their nutrition. And what we found was, what we're actually looking for is, if we gave people supplements, properly formulated supplements,

strains of bacteria, the right prebiotic fibers, the right phytonutrients and vitamins and minerals and all that kind of stuff, would it make them feel good enough or better enough where they started making better lifestyle choices, right? So remember, we told them, do not make any lifestyle choices, don't get all healthy on us. And what we found at the end six weeks later is people were eating better, they were moving more, they were sleeping better, their sleep quality was better. Like they, and these are all things

Dr Shawn Talbott (36:08.456)
Everybody knows they're supposed to eat better. Everybody knows they're supposed to exercise. Everybody knows they're supposed to get eight hours of sleep. But we don't, mostly because we're too tired in the day to exercise, we're too stressed out to eat a healthy salad instead of a pizza. We're too tense and irritable at night to relax enough to get good night's sleep. Like there's all reasons that are logical reasons in our life why we don't do the good things, but we use the supplement to help people feel better in all those different ways. And because they felt better,

we're just subconsciously making better decisions. And so like that, I think is important because even though we told people, just take the supplements and don't do anything else, the reason they got the great benefits at the end is because the supplement helped somewhat, but the exercise changes helped somewhat, and the food changes helped somewhat, and the sleep changes helped somewhat, and that's the moral of the story. We don't want somebody to just say, oh, I'm gonna take the pill and sit back and eat Big Macs all day, right? You know, like you're allowed to,

right? Because that sounds ridiculous, right? But that's what happens in the supplement world. People sometimes think like, oh, just take the pill and it's gonna it's gonna change all the things. If it's properly formulated, it can sort of nudge you in the right direction, but it's that whole collection of things that is really bringing you to that next level.

Thebrandonthornhill (37:09.994)
Yeah.

Thebrandonthornhill (37:26.870)
Yeah, but we've all been there to where we feel better. We have a good day, right? Somebody on this is like, you know what, Brandon? I started a new diet. I started a new supplement program, workout program. I felt really good for two or three days. And then I fell off the train. And then they never got back on the train. And then it's this vicious cycle over and over and over. So if we can get them feeling better, it makes sense to me. It's like a lot of my military brothers and sisters, they, one thing that I've noticed, and this isn't just them, this is a lot of people, right? They'll wake up in the morning,

Dr Shawn Talbott (37:30.297)
Yeah.

Dr Shawn Talbott (37:38.961)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (37:42.898)
Yep.

Thebrandonthornhill (37:57.810)
they didn't get a good sleep at night. Why? But so let's let's reverse engineer why the net did they not get a good sleep? Probably because of stress because of all this different stuff, but also because maybe they're taking some sort of sleep medication. That's not how letting them hit their REM sleep or their self medicating through alcohol. Right. And so and so they just expect this their life to get better when it's really a negative stacking effect, right? But if you guys can come in and we can show them how to positive stack.

Dr Shawn Talbott (37:59.418)
Yeah.

Dr Shawn Talbott (38:15.597)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (38:22.739)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (38:25.336)
Yeah, you start positive stacking and then they get out of that vicious cycle of being tired during the day and overstimulating themselves and then not getting a good night's sleep and having to do all that like badness over and over again. Now we get them to reverse it and it's goodness on top of goodness. And then like, let me say this, cause we're talking about this. It's not about just like being happy all the time, right? That is not, that's not what our company is all about or what any of these principles are all about. It's about giving you the resilience.

giving you a good day and then another good day and another good day and the more good days you string together, now you've had a good week. And now you string a few good weeks together and now you've had a good month. And you're like, whoa, wait a minute. And you might have some off days where, you know, the you know what hits the fan, but if your resilience is higher, you can navigate your way through that and solve the problems and figure out a plan better than otherwise. And a lot of that resilience comes from your gut. So like, this isn't about like, you know,

and rose-colored glasses all the time, but it's about helping people navigate their stressful world in a much more impactful way.

Thebrandonthornhill (39:32.990)
No, I love it, man. And here's the thing, like, you know, the products are amazing. I think I'm a part of the company because I believe everybody should be on the products. And, you know, also, I'm also a brand ambassador because I love the community aspect to where we can come in. And not only can we help you with your health, we can help you with your mind, your body, but we can also come in and help you through a community aspect with your, you know, wealth account, right? With your, you know, and there's no guarantees, but either way, what we're doing is we're helping you with your elevate and accelerate your mindset.

Dr Shawn Talbott (39:54.939)
Right.

Thebrandonthornhill (40:03.470)
And, you know, it's all about having a growth mindset like Carol Dweck says in her book. And so we really help people take their mindset to the next level, we help them have a community of positive, like minded individuals who just want to pour into them and help them win every step of the way, get in the trenches and actually help them. You know, in a world of always negativity out there on social media and gloom and doom and you turn on the news, we want to only pour positivity and be disciples of hope, you know.

Dr Shawn Talbott (40:03.761)
Right.

Thebrandonthornhill (40:33.030)
brand ambassador side is to help people do that.

Dr Shawn Talbott (40:34.916)
Right, right. Well, just like, you know, from a biochemical perspective, right? We use the supplements, we change your biochemistry, you feel better, you make better decisions. That's one piece of the puzzle. Now you surround yourself with other people who are doing that and you have different mindset and you're around other positive, successful, motivated people, what do you think's gonna happen to you? You're gonna become a more successful, motivated, positive person, because that ripples out.

Thebrandonthornhill (40:39.116)
you

Dr Shawn Talbott (41:05.256)
ripples out to make you feel better, but it also ripples out to make you perform better, and it ripples out to the people around you, right? It is the coolest thing to see. And people, you know, top performers know this, and that's why they try to surround themselves with other top performers, so it brings out the best in them, you know?

Thebrandonthornhill (41:22.430)
Yeah, that accountability is real man and energy is transferred. You know, when you surround yourself around a bunch of other lions, you start to become a lion. You know, you surround yourself around a bunch of sheep. They're going to get led to the slaughterhouse, you know, happens all the time. So, so what's your vision? Um, you know, you guys, you are the mental wellness company and you want to be known to be the number one mental health wellness company in the world. What is the vision of where you're where you're going to take this company, not where you're trying, but where I'm confident that you guys will take this company?

Dr Shawn Talbott (41:29.976)
100%.

Dr Shawn Talbott (41:35.526)
I love it.

Thebrandonthornhill (41:53.057)
to accomplish that mission.

Dr Shawn Talbott (41:55.116)
Yeah, so our vision is to be in a million homes in the next four years, right? We made a good start, right? We set that million homes goal last year. We said we'd be in a million homes in five years. So one year is down and we're off to a good start. We've got four years to accomplish it. And if you look at the problem, the size of the problem, how many people feel kind of blah right now, especially post pandemic, and you look at this new science around the microbiome and the

Dr Shawn Talbott (42:24.996)
at how fast everything is coming together. How many people are focusing on their mental health now because they realize it's important. How many new studies are coming out showing us all these different natural ways we can modulate the microbiome and the gut brain axis. I kind of look at it and I go, maybe a million, maybe we undershot, maybe we should have said two million or five million or something like that. So like we wanna be the biggest, but it's not gonna come through just products. It's gonna come through connections.

Dr Shawn Talbott (42:55.176)
that we just talked about, it's gonna come through people leveling up and then going, oh my gosh, I gotta teach other people about this, how to get to where I am. And so the more we can do that in a very holistic way, I think that's our vision, to really be able to come at this mental wellness problem from many perspectives simultaneously. Some's gonna be products, some's gonna be programs, some's gonna be the people connection part of it,

Dr Shawn Talbott (43:25.296)
and helping people solve that piece of the puzzle, which is the source of most people stress these days, right, finances. So yeah, there's all a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but they come under that overall umbrella of mental wellness.

Thebrandonthornhill (43:38.290)
I love it, man. And let me ask you one last question. This is more of a side topic, I guess, or more of a personal question that I wanna ask. So for someone like you, who you're already extremely successful, like we just get read off a whole bunch of accolades of accomplishments that you've been able to do in your life, how are you right now? Because it's very easy for you to rest on your laurels. It's very easy for you to say, you know what, I'm winning, and kind of just take a step back.

Thebrandonthornhill (44:08.450)
hit their pinnacle and then they've hit it and there's nothing else to shoot for again. Right? So like how are you continuing to have a vision for another Ridgeline and another Ridgeline after Marathon, after Ironman, after Ultramarathon, after book launch, after media, you know, launching your own brand here. So like how are you keeping that and then being a family man, a father, a husband, you know, like how are you keeping all that in balance and continuing to strive, you know, for the next Ridgeline?

Dr Shawn Talbott (44:36.236)
Yeah, I guess I'm just lucky that I'm naturally curious, right? It's funny that you said ridgelines, right? Because one of the things my wife jokes about is that I'll go out for a run, you know, like up in the mountains or, you know, down on the coast or something like that, and I'll say, I'll be back in an hour. And I come back in two hours, you know? And she's like, what happened? And I'm like, well, I just wanted to see what was like around the corner. I was gonna see what's over the ridge. I wanted to see like, you know, so like that curiosity in my hobbies is the same curiosity that I have in my career, right?

And I try to distill that to my family. Like my kids know that, my kids are grown now. They're 21 and 24. But they're curious as well. They're always asking questions. And that's how you keep it exciting, right? You're always asking questions in science and saying, what if? And how does this work? And what's driving that? And that's what keeps me excited. And that's cool because the more we discover cool, interesting things that nobody else has, the more we can build that into products

Dr Shawn Talbott (45:37.296)
and all the things that we do, and the more we can bring that to people to get everyone to level up. I'll say this last thing, I love the science and I love the curiosity and I love the research and all that kind of stuff, but I'm in a really, really unique position where my products will get out there in the world and people will share them with other people, and then I'll meet somebody in one of the cities that I travel to, and they'll have tears in their eyes about how the product helped their child in school or how it helped their family

you know, husband or wife or something like that. And like, that's where the science gets real. And like, it's great that they're thanking me, but like, I didn't manufacture that product. Somebody on our team did. Like, I came up with the science and the formula, but then somebody came up with a label and somebody put it in a box and somebody shipped it and somebody took a call to place an order or to ask, answer a question about it. Or, I mean, there's all these moving parts of the overall company to get

million homes, it's a really special thing.

Thebrandonthornhill (46:39.930)
Yeah, you know, it really is. And it's so easy for someone to sit back and hear that and say, you know, yeah, right. Like these products can change somebody's life that fast. Well, the reality is that some of these people, they're so nutritionally deficient that when they just take a product, they start feeling better immediately. So the answer is yes, it can. I mean, it's not going to cure anything, but it can help them live a higher quality life. Like my mom, she started taking the products of Kayani and it didn't cure anything.

Dr Shawn Talbott (46:52.997)
Yep.

Thebrandonthornhill (47:09.870)
helped her live a higher quality life to where she didn't have to live in constant pain. When she wasn't taking the products, of course it was the same, right? But as soon as she was taking the products, she was like, man, I can cope. Pain wasn't gone, but she could cope. You know what I mean?

Dr Shawn Talbott (47:11.560)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (47:18.118)
Yep.

Dr Shawn Talbott (47:21.918)
Right.

Dr Shawn Talbott (47:25.476)
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we measure that kind of stuff, we call it activities of daily living, right? And so like, it can be something as little as like, I can't go out to the mailbox because my knees are killing me, or I don't wanna get up from this chair because my back is killing me, or I just don't feel motivated, I feel sort of blah. You change those activities of daily living, and now someone's able to function. That's a huge quality of life. They're not winning the gold medal, but for them, it feels like they're winning the gold medal. And then you sort of scale that up

that continuum idea I talked about before, no matter where you are, we can meet you there and help you move a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And that's what it's all about.

Thebrandonthornhill (48:06.470)
Awesome, well, Sean, thank you so much for your time. I know it's really valuable. I know everybody got massive value out of you being on today. Where can they find your website? What's your website? What's your Instagram?

Dr Shawn Talbott (48:17.616)
Yeah, my website's just my name, SeanTalbot.com, and I post lots of stuff up there. I've got a YouTube channel. If you go to YouTube and just type in Dr. Sean Talbot, you'll find it. Instagram is Doc Talbot, D-O-C Talbot. And wherever you like to find me, I'll try to post some relevant information there for you.

Thebrandonthornhill (48:35.610)
awesome. I'll put it in the comments below as well on all the different channels. And so guys, as always, if you got value out of this, you know, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, share it. You know, the way that we get this out there and help more people, life's about growing and it's about giving. We want to give back at higher levels. So give this blessing to somebody else because you got a high level PhD from Rutgers right here who has a massive amount of success, you know, that he's been able to create in his life through every different area really. And I think that this will be able to help them in their life.

Dr Shawn Talbott (48:39.481)
Awesome.

Thebrandonthornhill (49:05.550)
life, Garen, in my opinion, it's gonna, it's gonna at least help them with their mindset. So, Sean, thank you for your time, as always appreciate you. Thank your wife for, you know, letting you spend this time with me and, and I'm looking forward to having you back on one day as well. I'm sure we'll have another deeper conversation, you know, as I continue to grow this, this podcast out. Alright, cheers my friend.

Dr Shawn Talbott (49:12.996)
My pleasure, Brandon.

Dr Shawn Talbott (49:26.596)
That sounds great. Thanks, ma'am.