Dr. Kenneth Brown | Atrantil | Gut Health, Brain Health, & the Advantages of Being a Generalist

Dr. Kenneth Brown is a private gastroenterologist with a clinical research division at Atrantil. Dr. Brown shares his journey from traditional medicine to a more holistic approach, blending natural therapeutics with traditional methods to treat gastrointestinal issues. He also discusses the advantages of being a generalist, how to care for your microbiome, and the need for more education about the link between gut health, brain health, and overall wellbeing. 

Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethbrownmd/
| https://atrantil.com/

Charity supported: ASPCA

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Host: Lindsey Dinneen
Editor: Tim Oliphant
Producer: Velentium

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 021 - Kenneth Brown

Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

Hello, and welcome to The Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and I am excited to introduce you to my guest today, Dr. Kenneth Brown. Dr. Brown is a private gastroenterologist with a clinical research division. In his practice, Dr. Brown uses a mix of traditional medicine and natural therapeutics to treat patients suffering from gastrointestinal issues. He hosts the Gut Check Project podcast where he and his team address topics surrounding gut health, healthcare economy, patient safety, nutrition, and more. Thank you so much Dr. Brown for joining me today. I am so excited that you're here and welcome.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Thank you so much, Lindsey. I'm super excited getting to be a guest on The Leading Difference podcast. Awesome. I typically am always asked to do medical stuff, so this is a little bit out of my scope, but very exciting nonetheless.

Lindsey Dinneen: Great. No I'm very excited to have you and talk with you, and I would love if you would start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got to where you are today.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll take you way back. I was in medicals, I basically raised in Omaha, Nebraska. I was in medical school scraping ice off my car and realized one day, "I don't have to do this." And so I immediately drove down to Texas as quickly as I could, did my residency and fellowship, and became a gastroenterologist and still residing in Texas. I seemed to like the warm a little bit more than that scraping ice off cars.

So I started my practice about 20 years ago. Initially, I started doing clinical research specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. And I was helping launch some small biotech firms that were developing products. We were doing research for them, and in that time I realized there was this unmet need. In other words, no drug was being developed, or no drug existed for this big space called irritable bowel syndrome. I started to do research for the first drug that was trying to address this when I was in training. IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, was considered more of a psychological diagnosis and literally I was taught that if you do tests on people and everything is normal, then more than likely, it is a psychological thing.

We used to think the same thing about ulcer disease. Whenever it was 50 years ago, if you got an ulcer, it was because you were too stressed. You need to back off work, do something like that. Then we found out that it was probably due to a bacteria called Helicobacter, H Pylori. And the person that discovered that got a Nobel Prize. That same massive paradigm shift was starting to take place when I was doing this research about 15 years ago. And that was that a doctor had shown that irritable bowel syndrome is actually caused by bacteria growing where it shouldn't be. And that's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So it's just that bacteria growing where it shouldn't be.

And I was doing the clinical trial for them to look at treating people that had irritable bowel with diarrhea and in passing, I was having a conversation with the lead investigator and he said, unfortunately we'll never be able to help the bloated person with constipation because the type of bacteria that is causing it is a very old, ancient type called archaebacteria, and no modern antibiotics affect it." And that was kind of interesting. And and he said, "the issue is that this type of bacteria produces a gas called methane."

So I'm writing on my whiteboard in my office, "archaebacteria methane." And I start thinking, I started the story in the very beginning, 'cause I said I was raised in Nebraska and I scraped ice off my car to come down in Nebraska, the prime export would be agriculture. And what they were trying to do is mandate that these ranchers and farmers give different feed products to the cattle to decrease methane production that they're admitting for the Greenhouse Effect.

And I looked at that and I just went, "they've been trying to do this in Nebraska for a really long time. What is it that they're giving these cattle and can it be transferable to humans?" And so that sort of started the "aha!" moment of a bloated cow producing methane could be something eventually that might help the millions of people, and I mean millions, like 20% of the US population suffers from some form of irritable bowel syndrome and many more suffer from bloating and have never been diagnosed.

So I spent the next several years, me and my research manager, and we were looking at all the data in animals, and then we came across this combination of three large polyphenols, which are the molecules that make vegetables and fruits colorful. And realized that one of the major ones in there is something called Quebracho Colorado that had never been used in a supplement before, but it is used in wine making and beer making and many other things that humans are already consuming.

Went through some trouble of trying to get some Quebracho. This is in the like, weird things that happen with entrepreneurs. The only place that it is being developed is Argentina. And I happen to be half Argentinian, so I'm emailing, I'm calling, I'm trying to do anything to get hold of somebody to get me some of this product up just so I can do a clinical trial on it. And nothing was happening, I'm getting no response.

And so I actually called a cousin who's a physician in Argentina. She physically drove to the manufacturing facility, walked in an office and said, "there's a doctor in Dallas that's needs your product. He thinks he found a reason to give it to humans." And so that started this whole domino effect. And then eventually I get this shady bag of material sent to my office and I had to spend a lot of money to have analyzed and everything because they're used to working in the agricultural business where they would just send bags of stuff.

And so I was able to get this analyzed and all this other stuff, and then we encapsulated it and then put it with a few other things, and then ultimately did two clinical trials and found that it was remarkably successful in this patient population. And, we were able to launch this company called Atrantil. And that was about seven years ago that we were able to actually launch the company. And we have just been learning more and more about the science of all of this.

I've been fortunate enough to do this at the exact time where you and I were talking off air about where there seems to be this push for more awareness about nutrition, more awareness about doing things naturally, and not always relying on drugs to do everything. So I feel like I'm very fortunate to be in this great space, learning a ton. And being able to help millions of people at the same time. So that's where we're at now.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love your story. Thank you for sharing that. There's a few different things that really stood out. First of all, I'm curious, did you always want to be a doctor? Is that something that was always a bit of a goal for you, or what made you decide to go into the medical field?

Dr. Kenneth Brown: I don't know how detailed you want to get into this, but I will tell you another quick story since this is, that one's very specific because, when I was in eighth grade, summer of eighth grade, my childhood friend got severely burned when he was on vacation with his mom. Third degree burns, ICU, whole nine yards, both him and his mom. And I get a call, you know, I was in touch with him, this is back before cell phones, so it's landlines. I get a call from him and he goes, "they say that I need to get outta the hospital because, mom needs to stay in here a little bit longer." Like they were in the ICU for a long time, so he had skin grafts and everything.

And I said, " just come live with us." And didn't even ask my parents and I just said, "Junior's gonna come live with us." And so he came and ended up spending a year living in our house and I was changing his bandages and all this other stuff. One night, at like 8:00 PM at night, doorbell rings and it's a guy-- introduced himself, his name was Leonard Woods. He said, I'm a physical therapist. I hear you have a young man who could use little help. I'd like to volunteer my services.

So he just basically rehabbed and then we all became friends, all of us. And of course I'm watching this guy that comes over and volunteers his time and I for sure am gonna be a physical therapist now. And I'm like in ninth grade, go through high school, always kinda shadowing and then during college doing some internships and stuff. And this guy saves my friend and he's this super cool dude and this is what I'm gonna do. And then he pulled me aside and he just said, "Hey, I know that you think this is what you should do, but I really think your calling is to be a doctor and I think you need to apply for medical school."

So I went, "okay." I just, at this point, I'm gonna do something in healthcare, just to help people. And the fact that your hero slash mentor is telling you to not do the job he's doing that he loves, I'm like, "okay, I guess I'll apply to med school." And then I ended up graduating college early, so I got a chance to spend a year, and I worked officially for him and he knew I was going to med school and then he spent that year teaching me how to manage employees, teaching me how to manage patients, how to run a busy clinic.

And he just said, " dovetail me so that you can see how the business side of this stuff works." And I was fortunate enough to go to medical school already having some idea of how I would do this and then I thought I would be a surgeon and then quickly realized that's a horrible lifestyle. I think I need to shift gears and was internal medicine. And then found gastroenterology and that fit me like a glove. So a gastroenterologist is an internal medicine trained doctor, so they already have a predisposition for a little bit of intellectual curiosity, but you get to do procedures. So you get to get in and immediately fix or help or prevent various diseases.

And so as a gastroenterologist, you basically are treating things from the esophagus to the anus. So I got into fellowship to be a gastroenterologist. I'm loving it. And then that's when I started realizing, "wait a minute, all health begins and ends in the gut." I was seeing all these people, they had gut issues years before they had something else. Everybody would complain that they had something else, and so, when I started private practice, that's how come I was drawn immediately after just a few years, I started the first research division of our company and I did research for about 10 years and it was just this beautiful sequence of events that led up to that point where I'm thinking about a bloated cow.

I mean, it took a really nice physical therapist to show up and then physical therapist to tell me to do something different-- possibly more, depending how you look at it-- and me to realize that all health begins and ends in the gut. And I basically continued that with that complete curiosity. And I'm continuing to learn all the time as everyone else is, as we're all learning that the gut is probably the root of disease and health.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Thank you for going to that story. I love hearing the why, what prompted somebody's interest or passion in what they're doing, and it really struck me-- both kind of stories you've shared with me so far about how synergistic from an outsider's perspective your life has been in a few different ways where like, seemingly no connection. So grew up in, in Nebraska and just you didn't like the snow, which I totally relate to by the way, side note. And then drawing from that experience is what helped you translate that into your work more recently. And that, that seems so disjointed, but it actually was this synergistic connection. And then you also have something like, you mentioned the one random place in Argentina and you had the connections, and I just love those stories when what's meant to be comes together in such a way that you could never predict.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: For sure. And the other thing about it, you say the story, but I look back and it was months and months of just radio silence. But I knew that we had something there. So it was me asking around, call my mom, "do we have anybody in this part of Argentina?" And so it took that continual pursuit of doing that. It wasn't just, oh, dumb luck. It's there, but it's the knowledge that it's there and it's the knowledge that you have an angle and it's the knowledge to utilize your network to try and get there.

The story sounds like it just kind of fell in place, but I think with every entrepreneur that you speak with, there's that classic line, "it only took 10 years to be an overnight success." There's so much more that happens back over here. And I look at this and I realized that some of these decisions that were made-- I don't know if you gave me another shot at this. Do you ever think about this?

I mean, you have this incredible dualistic career of being a ballerina and then being in the medtech, entrepreneur space and marketing and it's funny 'cause you love your life and you've got this great situation that you have going, when people say, "would you ever do it again?" I'm like, "no, no way. 'cause I don't know if I would make the right decisions, even though I know what decisions I made. I don't know if I would make the right decision to get exactly where I'm at right now, 'cause I kind of feel like I'm just beginning about where we can go with all this."

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. But that's the fun part, right? So it is kind of an interesting exercise to look back and think about the "what ifs." And if you were to redo it, would you make the same decisions? I've thought about that many times with different aspects where I chose between two seemingly really good options, but I'm so thankful I went with the one I did because that got me to where I am now. But you know, I was chuckling about your overnight sensation comment and I have thought about that so many times where, agree-- from an outside perspective it always looks different-- but I've always appreciated the quote, something like, "the harder I work, the more luck I have," or something like that,

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Exactly.

Lindsey Dinneen: I also think there's something to be said-- you talked about drawing on your network and the months of work that it did take. But I do think that there is something to be said to being open to possibilities that you wouldn't ordinarily pursue, or opportunities that you wouldn't ordinarily consider, because sometimes those, again, seemingly random, disconnected moments, somehow do all come together. And it might not be this overnight thing, but...

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Have you heard of a book called "Range" by David Epstein?

Lindsey Dinneen: Nope, but I'm writing it down.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: So the book is called "Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World." It's really interesting because it's an analysis-- who's looking like business leaders and things like that, and generalists that learn a little bit-- it's always thought like in medicine it's " jack of all trades, but master of none." So it's that whole thing of jack of all trades, but master of none. And so in my field, you wanna become the most specialized of subspecialists that just, you're the expert. And I think because of my path coming in, there was never this devotion to this one thing immediately or I'm gonna be the experts' expert. I'm a generalist in life and I eventually end up in this space of a specialized world. But I seem to be better off 'cause I was a generalist.

And what I mean by that is in his book, what he describes is that when you have lots of life experiences-- if you've been in marketing for a little bit, and then of course you did have that, brief minor in accounting during college, and then you dabbled into sales over here-- and what he showed is that if you are adept at looking at this and you're still passionate about everything, you make the neural connections between these different experiences so you can see a connection between something where others are not. And almost by definition, that's kind of what genius is, where you can continually see things and go, "yes, this idea over here relates to that article that I read five years ago."

I see where this happens, and that's how you end up having an electric car company and a rocket company and a whatever that Elon Musk does, right? He's just pooling from all this knowledge and forming something. So I think that is probably the most important thing, and I'm, and I say all this because my massively transformative goal for the rest of my life is to cure something that to me is the, like, the worst thing that can happen, which is robbing you of your memories.

So dementia, it's an epidemic and it continues to go on, and I feel like what you lose when you have any type of brain trauma, even minor trauma, CTE, when you have toxins, when you start developing Alzheimer's and things, you lose the dendritic, meaning the connections between the neurons that allow that use of prior knowledge to now be integrated with new knowledge. And so that's why I think it's so important to protect the brain through the gut. Is any of that making sense? I feel like it just went down a rabbit hole.

Lindsey Dinneen: No, I love rabbit holes, first of all, so that's great. But also I think that is such a fantastic goal and it's so important and actually very encouraging to hear people working on these kinds of things, and the losing your memories and not being able to recognize people you love but realizing that maybe there are ways to slow that process or reverse or cure, that's a wonderful, hopeful thing.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: So that's the thing. Nobody's talking about that, but there's so much evidence out there. So one of my most frustrating things being in this space-- so what's happened since the-- I did, traditionally trained gastroenterologists, and then I'm doing pharmaceutical research and then I figure out that there's this space where maybe natural products can start filling the void, and that has really just shifted me to what I would consider myself more of a functional gastroenterologist. I still do traditional gastroenterology stuff, but I sure would like to find a more natural solution before we just knee-jerk and put you on drugs.

And one of my most frustrating things when talking to colleagues is, and I'm not throwing any individual under the bus here, but I start talking about, "oh, did you see this?" For instance, "hey, I just read a great article on the neuromodulatory effects of flavonoids, polyphenols, my world and gut microbiota through the gut brain access and how we can ultimately start healing our brains by having the right microbiome plus flavonoids. So that's an article. Just reviewed it. Super cool. Neat." And discussing that amongst my colleagues would be like there's no data on that.

And I went to a meeting recently and I was preparing to give a talk on, if you keep your microbiome young, you'll stay young. And, and it's all about manipulating your microbiome. And there's evidence to show that our supercentenarians, the ones that live past 95 or whatever, they actually have a microbiome, the microbiome is the collection of bacteria in your body, the collection of bacteria primarily in your colon that they have their own genome. You and I have a 99% identical genome, but we could have a 90% different genome in our microbiome, which may be one of the reasons why I age quick and you don't, one of the reasons why I get cancer and you don't, got it? The microbiome, it's the collection of the bacteria in our body.

So I was in a meeting, so I'm already preparing for this talk about the microbiome. And so I'm going to Croatia to give it. So I'm like really excited and it's, it's motivating 'cause I'm learning and everything. And I go to a meeting where a professor emeritus is gonna give a talk on probiotics and he gets up and the actual title of the talk was the "Probiotic Guide to the Gastroenterologist in 2023." And he said, "I think we can finally agree to this," and this is his words, "that the data does not support the use of traditional probiotics and we need to move away from this, and this is data. So some people do well in probiotics, but the data really is showing that probably traditional probiotics don't survive the digestive tract." And he said, "but what we really need to start thinking is we need to work on our microbiomes, but unfortunately, there's no data out there."

I'm in the audience and I have a folder of about 200 articles and a Mendeley. Mendeley is a journal repository on my computer of like another 300, and I'm like, "no data out there?" And it just got me thinking. I'm like, unless you have a specific desire to go look at something, the data that you're referring to is when a drug rep shows up at your office and gives you a detail piece 'cause that's how we're being reminded that there's new research. Here's the new drug, not are there any new, because this is like bench research that's going on all over the world.

Now we live in unprecedented times. I can find an article that hasn't even been translated in English yet, translate it from some postdoc candidate in Thailand doing crazy work on the stuff that I'm working on. And this is a true story. This is exactly what happened, and it's helping me develop more products because I'm like, "Oh, this person did do the heavy lifting already." And it was done 10 years ago and nobody's probably even heard of this. It's out there. It's just, do you have the motivation and the time to go look for things? Right now doctors are super busy and the time that they have is the five minutes they get with the person that brings them lunch.

Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Yeah. So pivoting just slightly. I'm so thankful again that there are people like you doing this research and analyzing this data and helping us live healthier, fuller lives. So first of all, just thank you for that. I am curious if there are any moments that stand out to you throughout your career as really affirming that this was the right career path for you.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah. There was a-- I can't call it "aha moment" or anything. It is a, " you cannot not do this" moment, is what it came down to. So I'm an adult doctor and a woman who quit her job brought her 18 year old, severely autistic son in to see me. And I don't have any particular specialty in autism or anything like that. And what she said to me is, she goes, "I need help, 'cause he's now a young man. He's big and he's strong." And she said, "Nobody will take him. Like nobody will babysit him because he can be aggressive. And he's getting much worse with his autism and things are very rough on me, I had to quit my job. I have to spend all my time with him at home."

And I said, "I'm just curious, why here?" Now this is years ago, so it isn't like I was really deep into the functional medicine yet. And she said, "I've noticed one thing. I've noticed that when he eats, he's much more combative, and he's non-verbal so his communication is just really limited." And she said, "There has to be something with his gut if it's doing this." it didn't take very long to realize that he was getting super bloated after he ate and his belly hurt and he couldn't say, "I'm hurt, I'm hurting."

And so now we're in my wheelhouse. I started doing some research real quick and it's very evident that people on the autism spectrum disorder can have dysmotility or changes in the motility of their intestines, which can predispose to developing bacterial overgrowth, which is exactly my space now. And so we treated him and we treated him with both an antibiotic and my product and then changes diet. Changed lifestyle, change his diet, just made some changes. No processed foods. Don't open a bag. It's whole foods.

I personally, with the way that we grow our crop, I really try and get patients to avoid gluten as well. I think it's very neuroinflammatory. And so she came back three months later and she was crying. And she was so happy. And this young man was calm. He was talking. She's like, "he can eat." She's like, "I haven't seen him like this in 10 years since he was like a little kid."

And I'm like, "Okay, this is the n-of-1 that tells you, the brain and gut are connected and you have to keep pursuing that." And so that was oof, I dunno, six, seven years ago or guess well, like shortly after we launched. So I guess about, yeah, I dunno, six years ago or so. Yeah. So when you say that, I always think about that, if that's ever a case. I've heard that many other times since then and I don't think it's just the product or the antibiotics, I think it's the lifestyle change as well.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And how it all comes together to support Oh my word. Wow. Thank you for sharing that story. That is really powerful and I can see why it would be such a moment that would make you say, "yeah, this is what I'm meant to do, this is the impact I can potentially have on changing someone's life." There's nothing quite like that.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah. And then the more that you get into it, it just more reaffirming. So then it just becomes all consuming. You're like, you have to do this. And I think everybody that owns a business or is an entrepreneur-- I'm the visionary. We need an implementer to make things run at the company and all this. So if I had all the time and all the money in the world, it would just be 24/7 trying things out, looking at these natural products.

The beauty is we're learning that the modulation of the microbiome, the gut microbiota, the thing that seems to positively affect them the most are these large, stable polyphenols. And it's these large, stable polyphenols that get broken down into smaller phenolic compounds that work in an anti-inflammatory way and can cross the blood brain barrier, which is what I think is happening. Just go ahead and name any neuro-inflammatory disease from anxiety, A D H D, dementia, autism spectrum. There's different neurologic mechanisms primarily excitability and overactivity due to inflammation, creating all of it.

So knowing that's the root cause, where does most of the inflammation come from? It actually can start in the gut. So knowing that, how do we stop that inflammation? And then how do we improve the microbiome to produce anti-inflammatory aspects that then heal the brain? And the science is mapping out there. I think the traditional scientists will say that we don't know enough about it.

And that's true, 'cause you can't manipulate it in a way that people wanna manipulate it, but, I'm kind of taking that functional approach. Let Mother Nature figure it out. Just give your body what it wants, give it the foundation. Make sure you have a good sleep. Make sure that you socialize. Make sure that you exercise a little and make sure that you eat the right foods and all of it will sort of work itself out If you have your foundation right.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So last year, I had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time in Puerto Rico and there was this beautiful rainforest that we did a hike in. And it was really interesting, our guide was telling us that with the hurricane that they had just a few years back, had destroyed like, I wanna say maybe 80%, it was a very high percentage of the flora and fauna of the rainforest. And when we were there, there was no way we would've known that had she not pointed it out. And it really struck me how resilient living things are.

I think about this with humans as well. And when you intentionally try to nurture and cultivate and take care of yourself or other living things, how much we can bounce back from and how much we can heal and regenerate and make new, and I just thought of that when you were talking about the possibilities that if we can heal our gut, maybe we can heal our brain and heal some of these other things that come from, from that inflammation.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah, for sure. So let's use that same analogy with the hurricane, because what we do to our microbiome is a tropical forest. Exactly what you are walking through. There's trillions of bacteria. There's thousands of species. The more diverse it is, the healthier it is. Just like the rainforest you were walking through. Now you take antibiotics, you eat a highly processed diet, you do something to disrupt it. That's equivalent to that hurricane disrupting the rainforest.

The difference is we continue to do that and what we try to do is, we try to take control of it and take drugs or take different things to try and say, "oh, I'm gonna heal it with this." So the equivalent would be, when the rainforest was knocked down, somebody comes in and goes, "the rainforest was destroyed, but what I'm gonna do is I'm going to plant anything, name it, corn. I'm gonna plant grass, anything."

And so now you have a big lush field of grass. Now on the one side is just grass, and on the other side is a dense tropical forest. The dense tropical forest is the healthier version. We tend to focus on one bacterial species. That's where the science is. It's like, how do we grow more of this? How do we do more of this when it's the diversity that has to happen? They left the rainforest alone and it figured it out. And grew back quickly. The more that they would intervene with that, the slower that process would be.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Thank you for taking my own thoughts and putting it in, into exactly what we're talking about 'cause I appreciate that. Okay, so I am gonna take the conversation slightly differently, so just for fun, imagine you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It could be in your industry, could be related to your work, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach and why?

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Oh my goodness, it's gonna be so boring 'cause it's, I mean, the masterclass would be this exact same topic. It's, you can protect your brain through your gut, would be what it is just because there's too much evidence that so little people are talking about it. And would it be a masterclass, 'cause I'm still learning? You'd pay me a million dollars and we would have to share it, 'cause it would be a group learning session. That's what it would be like. Everybody that attends, we all teach each other and share the million.

Lindsey Dinneen: There you go. You can use part of it to further your work because you were saying, if you had unlimited resources, how much more could you do? So, we can share the love.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Yeah, I just, immediately was thinking, "my ego would not allow me to accept a million dollars to give a class". I'm like, "oh my gosh." What kind of a, like, there's my PowerPoint. Could never be that good deserving a million.

Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, yeah. Like We'll just give it to your organization and I'm sure you could find good ways to use it. I'm sure that would be a worthwhile masterclass to take, and it would be just a good learning experience for everyone. So, good answer. What is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?

Dr. Kenneth Brown: I wanna be remembered as a curious and kind person.

Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I like that. And then final question, what's one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Dude, I'm so boring on these questions. Like my knee jerk is like, oh, my family. I want to give something cooler than that. Oh my gosh. I try to practice some mindfulness type things. Have you heard of neurolinguistic programming? NLP? And so you know how there's an anchoring technique so that you can get yourself excited or happy? I will say that my happy memories would be, I took my family to Spain and we went to a Michelin star restaurant and had a chef's tasting menu there. And just thinking about that is my, anchoring to be happy. And then this summer, we went to Portugal and did the exact same thing, except the kids are older and all this other stuff. And so something that makes me smile immediately. Alright, there we go. It doesn't even have to be me. Something that makes me smile immediately is when people are loving and caring and they're breaking bread with each other over a nice Mediterranean meal.

Lindsey Dinneen: That is a great answer. Yes. I would have to say that I, I can fully support that. I love both Spain and Portugal, and some of my fondest food memories would have to be there too. So see this.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: It's just that feeling of, just openness and enjoying and discussing. There's something primal about breaking bread with other humans in a way that is, I don't know. And of course, it's a chef's tasting menu, so you don't know what's coming. There's that dopamine anticipation, and then it gets put down and it's like nine courses. It's just stuff like that that's awesome.

Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love it. That's amazing. Thank you so very much for joining me today. This has been such a great conversation, and I learned a lot. I'm very thankful for the work that you do and just all the ways that you finding to help people live their best lives. I just wanna, again, say thank you for your time and as just a small token of that, we're honored to be making a donation on your behalf to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is dedicated to preventing animal cruelty in the United States. And we just appreciate again, your time, your efforts, and we just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.

Dr. Kenneth Brown: Thank you so much, Lindsey. Thank you so much for having me on. And I really enjoyed this and I enjoyed our 10 minute off the record banter and I feel like you would be a great guest on the Gut Check Project, my podcast, and we can talk about the ballerina days and all that. Let's do it.

Lindsey Dinneen: That sounds amazing. Alright, well, thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time.

 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.

Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.

Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.

Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.

Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.