Update 2026: the health of the gut and microbiome has only become more central to all I've learned as time passes. The microbiome is foundational to all health and well-being and thus to all dis-ease and illness. It is what we are made of and it's critically important. I'm going to start this post with my final comment from the dialogue at Mad in America because I want to underscore that healing my gut has led me to understand this: "I take the (unfortunately) radical perspective that as human animals we have the capacity to know all manner of things by instinct. It is in our DNA and manifests via intuition. This is not magic. It is not a super-power. We are "psychic" by nature.  It is our human inheritance. We have forgotten how to access our very nature. That is all. And as complicated as we might like to make the conundrum we are faced with right now, it's also pretty simple. We need only pay attention."