In this episode of the Primal Shift Podcast, I chat with Forrest Smith, the CEO of and pioneer in the world of photobiomodulation and red light therapy. We dive into , including its powerful effects on tissue healing, athletic performance, brain...
In this episode of the Primal Shift Podcast, I chat with Forrest Smith, the CEO of Kineon and pioneer in the world of photobiomodulation and red light therapy.
We dive into the science and benefits of red light therapy, including its powerful effects on tissue healing, athletic performance, brain health, and much more. Forrest offers groundbreaking insights into how this technology not only aids in recovery and performance but also holds the key to future advancements in treating a wide array of health conditions, from dementia to gut health.
In this episode:
0:00 - Introduction
03:46 - The Basics of Red Light Therapy with Forrest Smith
07:42 - The Role of Red Light Therapy in Tissue Healing and Recovery
11:15 - Athletic Performance Enhancement Through Red Light Therapy
24:30 - Future Applications of Red Light Therapy in Brain Health and More
25:20 - The Connection Between Red Light Therapy and Gut Health
35:37 - Introducing the Kineon MOVE+ Pro Device
36:23 - Practical Applications and User Feedback of Red Light Therapy Devices
37:45 - The Potential of Red Light Therapy in Pain Management and Sleep Improvement
38:41 - Closing Thoughts
Links from the episode:
Learn about Kineon’s Move Kineon Move+ Pro in my detailed review (or watch the video review).
Learn about how red light can improve athletic performance.
See my list of the best red light therapy devices for options categorized by use case.
About Forrest Smith:
Forrest Smith is an athlete, entrepreneur and the CEO of Kineon Labs. He has a 20-year history of building successful startups in tech hardware.
Website: https://kineon.io/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smithforresto/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-forrest-smith/
More From Michael Kummer:
Use code “primalshift” to save 15% on your MK Supplements order at https://shop.michaelkummer.com
[00:00:00] Michael Kummer: Why does red light therapy regrow cartilage tissue? What does it do to make that happen?
[00:00:04] Forrest Smith: Initially way, way back is what does sunlight do? How does sunlight interact with our bodies? And we know that there are photo acceptors. How red
[00:00:11] Michael Kummer: light therapy can impact us systematically. One
[00:00:14] Forrest Smith: of the things that started this though is from a research standpoint, what they call remote photobiobondulation.
[00:00:20] There's
[00:00:20] Michael Kummer: more blood flow. More nutrients, and at the end of the day, tissue heals faster, right?
[00:00:25] Forrest Smith: Because it's coming from their doctor, they don't really question this. There
[00:00:28] Michael Kummer: is much more to red light therapy and photobiomodulation than just tissue healing and recovery and athletic performance.
[00:00:35] Forrest Smith: We've been making some really good steps forward with longer wavelengths of near infrared.
[00:00:40] There have been
[00:00:41] Michael Kummer: studies I've seen where red light therapy was used before exercise to improve muscle function during
[00:00:48] Forrest Smith: exercise. This technology is called Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy and we've been working on this for a couple of years. We're in the middle of advancing that in, in lockstep with the, with the medical community.
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[00:02:01] Learn more at shop. michaelkummer. com or check out the show notes. Welcome back to the Primal Shift podcast. In today's episode I have with me Forrest Smith and he is the CEO of Kinion. Kinion is the maker of my favorite red light therapy devices. And Forrest Smith is a very smart cookie. Uh, he speaks Chinese.
[00:02:22] He has had several businesses in China and he knows a lot about red light therapy, photovoltaic modulation. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about all the things that we know red light therapy can do today. talk about the scientific mechanisms behind how photobiomodulation works, or red light therapy works, and what are some of the things that red light therapy can do in the very near future in terms of brain health, dementia, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, gut health, and many, many of the other things.
[00:02:53] We're gonna really drill down into The biology and [00:03:00] science behind photobiomodulation. It's a packed episode, I'm super excited about it, so let's join me. and welcoming Forrest Smith. All right, Forrest, thanks so much for joining me. Today is gonna be a super interesting episode, I think. We're gonna talk about everything red light therapy, photobiomodulation or PBM, what it can do, some of the benefits that we already know.
[00:03:23] PBM can deliver. Some of the use cases where it's used right now, obviously the device that you've developed and what's in the pipeline. What do you think red light therapy and PBM can do in the near future and then in the next couple of years, just based on some of the research and the tests that you've done with the technology.
[00:03:42] Does that work? I
[00:03:43] Forrest Smith: love it. That's awesome. What a great framework for
[00:03:45] Michael Kummer: it. All right, um, so PBM, what's, not to go too much into the history, but how was this idea developed that light can be used to fix injuries, to improve athletic performance, to do all the things that we [00:04:00] already know red light can do?
[00:04:01] That's a great
[00:04:01] Forrest Smith: question. Actually, some of the earlier research on this started way back, and I think from an observational standpoint, one of the things that kind of triggered this initially way, way back is, what does sunlight do? How does sunlight interact with our bodies? And we know that there are photo acceptors, and I think over the last, really, probably, It started really about 50 years ago when you started having ruby lasers for testing, so red, deep red, and infrared are two of the most impactful, most positively impactful wavelengths, and when your emitters that you can make from a technology standpoint don't dial in with what's going to impact the body most effectively, then it's harder to test, really, and understand what's, what are the photo acceptors, how are you triggering them, what's the downstream effects from a signaling standpoint.
[00:04:47] Essentially, the technology, there's a medical side and the technology side and as the technology advances, it opens up new windows for the medical side from a research standpoint. And as the [00:05:00] research goes into More detail as to the underlying mechanisms, it allows us to dig a little bit further into what the technology can do for us to take that a step further.
[00:05:09] And again, what that started off with in the 50s was the, the ruby lasers, which were some of the first red lasers that were actually introduced. And people started noticing these impacts from a testing. They weren't necessarily testing for what they were able to observe. But what they did observe was increase in mitochondrial function, decrease in oxidative stress.
[00:05:30] And you started seeing some of these early studies trying to find a way to quantify what those mechanisms were that, that drove that. And what that's coming to right now, uh, That was amazing,
[00:05:41] Michael Kummer: right? That was the light, not in, in, into the eyes. So there was not photoreceptors in the eyes, but photoreceptors.
[00:05:48] in regular tissue that responded to.
[00:05:51] Forrest Smith: That's exactly right, and what we found since then from the research is that there's a number of, uh, photoreceptors in your tissue, um, one of the ones that, uh, again, and this was found [00:06:00] ages ago. If you ever go to a hospital, you'll see, uh, a pulse ox machine where they, they want to check out your pulse ox.
[00:06:05] They put a sensor on the end of your thumb or your finger, and, uh, you've seen it in both at the hospital yourself, or if you've ever seen, uh, general hospital, the soap operas, there's always somebody attached to a beeping machine that's showing you. their heart rate and their, uh, their oxygenation of their blood.
[00:06:21] And this was from back in the sixties and seventies. What they found though, is that infrared had a, a very measurable and very direct impact on, uh, hemoglobin. And so we could measure from how it interacted, uh, in these predictable ways, these infrared wavelength, and it interacts slightly differently, but you can measure total, uh, oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin very effectively.
[00:06:45] And so. One of the first things that you see with that is those diagnostic tools for understanding what's happening in your blood. But what's actually driving that is that your hemoglobin is a photo acceptor for infrared light. And we actually use that as one of our key signaling molecules or [00:07:00] photo acceptors that we interact with in the tissue.
[00:07:02] So we send 808 nanometer laser light into the body. And the impact that you find from the interactions with hemoglobin is that. Hemoglobin is a carrier molecule. It carries oxygen, but it also carries another molecule that's very impactful in the cardiovascular system, which is nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is a blood vessel dilator.
[00:07:22] It's a molecule that also binds onto hemoglobin. But when we introduce infrared light to the hemoglobin, it reduces the affinity of nitric oxide for the binding site in hemoglobin. So what that does is dumps more nitric oxide into your blood vessels and opens those blood vessels and allows more blood to come into that local tissue.
[00:07:42] Michael Kummer: And that's one of the main reasons why you speak, can speed up the healing process, more blood flow, more nutrients. And at the end of the day, tissue heals faster, right?
[00:07:52] Forrest Smith: That's exactly right. It's so you have the blood flow. And the interesting thing is that it's so nitric oxide is one of those molecules that kind of bridges the gap [00:08:00] between the micro and the macro.
[00:08:01] When the nitric oxide comes into the, in contact with the endothelial tissue in kind of the blood vessel tissue, it. promotes dilation. One of the other things, and so you see these macro effects in your body for blood delivery change because of it. One of the other things that you see is, there's another Photo acceptor that's in the cell wall, or, it's not technically a cell wall, it's called the, uh, phospholipid bilayer.
[00:08:23] But basically, if you think of a mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of your cells, as a cell, in that wall of the mitochondria, there is a chain of events that happen to help you create energy in your body, and it is called the oxidative phosphorylation chain. And there are some bottlenecks in that chain, so there's some things that slow down how quickly you can produce energy.
[00:08:44] One of those is cytochrome C oxidase, which is the third step out of four in this kind of four phase step in creating adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP, your, what your body uses for energy. The third step, though, is a bottleneck, and one of the things that we see [00:09:00] is that It's very similar. Hemoglobin, you can tell from the name, is a heme protein.
[00:09:04] Cytochrome c oxidase, which is this third step in the energy production in your oxidative phosphorylation chain. It's also a heme based protein, and when infrared light strikes, this also reduces nitric oxide's affinity for binding there, and it allows oxygen to bind to that site that, that's where nitric oxide and oxygen are competitive.
[00:09:23] You can actually increase the rate of energy production because you're removing the nitric oxide and allowing the oxygen to bind more effectively. But one of the most interesting things is almost, and it just, it's the efficiency of the systems in your body that it speaks to. Most of these molecules in your body perform multiple functions, and when you release that nitric oxide, it also downstream, and you're also generating increased amounts of ATP.
[00:09:49] downstream signaling in your cells outside of the mitochondria. One of the things that triggers also is a balancing of the oxidative stress. And we used to think [00:10:00] from the medical literature that this was just a reduction of oxidative stress, but it's interesting. One of the things. That's unusual about the oxidative stress is that if it's too low, we've, we all know that if you have too much oxidative stress, you'd like to reduce that.
[00:10:14] You want to keep within a range, but if it's too low, meaning if you're not getting any kind of exercise or if you're not challenging that in any way, there's also negative impacts. And what we've seen over the past five years of testing from the medical literature about this is that it's not just reducing that oxidative stress.
[00:10:29] It actually balances it. So if it's too low, it can help it increase as well. Okay. But it balances that oxidative stress, which has some great, uh, downstream impacts relative to things that are reducing damaging dismutases and different types of molecules that are really not great for you from a, an energy generation and a metabolic state longterm.
[00:10:48] So there's. A lot of knock on effects from these signals, but the main thing is that it's triggering this increase in energy, it's balancing oxidative stress, and it's delivering more blood flow to the areas. That translates through to [00:11:00] lower levels of inflamed tissue, or chronically inflamed tissue, without really impacting the acute inflammation, which is something that really should, we're trying to not impact because it's bringing more helpful molecules to the area to heal.
[00:11:14] More
[00:11:15] Michael Kummer: energy, I guess it means Potentially better athletic performance if you can produce more energy. And I think there have been studies using red light therapy or PBM and maybe we should also clarify because whenever we say red light therapy, it's usually the combination of red and near infrared light, right?
[00:11:30] It's not just red, even though most people just refer to it as red light therapy, but there have been studies I've seen where red light therapy was used before Exercise to improve muscle function during exercise and after the exercise to speed up the recovery and mitigate some of the potential damage induced by exercise, which is a normal part of exercising.
[00:11:54] You need to break something to get stronger, right? Much like you have to break an egg to make an omelette. And [00:12:00] so, by using it before and after, you can actually directly and indirectly improve exercise performance
[00:12:06] Forrest Smith: and recovery. Absolutely. Yes. They, the, the early studies on this from a treating beforehand were primarily on cardiovascular performance.
[00:12:14] So typically distance and endurance athletes and distance swimmers and things like this, which makes sense because that's the energy system that you use for that is your oxidative phosphorylation chain. And it's less unless you're, which I imagine many of your listeners are, unless you're adapted for.
[00:12:30] Processing free fatty acids in a more effective way. When you're meat focused and lower carb, that's what you're going to see more of is that balance between those two. But I think one of the things that you see with the endurance guys is that they are very heavily often in the oxidative phosphorylation energy generation kind of a side of the balance, but the one that we've seen actually more and more.
[00:12:50] And so that's, those are, those gains are. Real, uh, and I want to say we're in double digits, but it was not as massive as the, what we've seen from a [00:13:00] recovery standpoint. And the recovery data is just getting better and better. What we're seeing right now is that there's a couple of common markers for muscle tissue inflammation.
[00:13:09] It's generated by intense exercise particularly, and I think there's a few good points to make about this, but to start with how we know that this recovery is improving, two of the markers for that are C reactive proteins, or CRP, and creatinine kinase, or CK, these are generated at higher levels when your muscle tissue particularly is under stress, and particularly with intense stress.
[00:13:29] Oddly, these, although they're inflammatory markers that you're generating from exercise, they don't really have anything to do with increasing strength or hypertrophy. So they just keep you from getting back into your training as quickly or as intensely as you'd like to. But what we've seen with those is in the one case, I've gotten them backwards.
[00:13:47] So I'll have to send you the papers on this separately, but in the one case where over 60%, uh, decrease in, I believe it's creatinine kinase numbers from intense exercise. and then over 80 percent decrease in the C [00:14:00] reactive proteins. And so what this is telling us is that we can get people back into an intense training more frequently and allow them to make these hypertrophy and strength gains in a much go, go through that kind of increased curve much faster without really putting their body at a, at a risk from.
[00:14:19] So one of the other onset, sorry, one of the other impacts of this is late onset muscle soreness. So those two contribute to your delayed onset muscle soreness. And so you'll be a little bit less sore, but you'll also be a lot less inflamed, which means that your performance from a muscular standpoint, your skeletal muscle just recovers faster and actually can go through that growth and hypertrophy a lot more quickly.
[00:14:40] Okay.
[00:14:40] Michael Kummer: And that is, again, an indirect performance enhancer, because the more often you can train without damaging, without going into overtraining, the better, arguably, you get, the more, the better you perform over time. Another thing, sorry, go ahead.
[00:14:53] Forrest Smith: Oh, no, I was going to say, it's a, it's a great point, and one of the original, one of the better researchers, I won't say original, but who's done foundational [00:15:00] research in this space, whose name is Tina Karu, Dr.
[00:15:02] Tina Karu, actually had a paper saying exactly that, is, is this a performance thing? It should. It's we're seeing equivalent outcomes with performance enhancing drugs. Should we consider like therapy or performance enhancing drug and it's triggering natural signaling, signaling in your body. So nobody really has, but the outcomes are just better.
[00:15:19] There's not really with performance enhancing drugs. Typically there's some kind of offset that you're paying for with that, the kind of natural signaling that you're triggering with this, you don't really have the offset and I think that's one of the reasons why people haven't gone the step of step further of considering it a performance enhancing drug.
[00:15:36] Michael Kummer: It would be absolutely ridiculous, I think, if they even seriously consider that begun and I besides how would you prove that someone is using this? There is no trace. There is no Metabolic by product, use testosterone or whatever. Talked about athletic performance a little bit, recovery of course. There is this whole thing of tissue growth, of growing new tissue and repairing potentially damaged tissue.
[00:15:59] And I, [00:16:00] just as an anecdotal evidence, the other day I picked up a chicken and she was like trying to Get away from me, because chickens don't want to be picked up by me, and she scratched me, and it was a fairly deep scratch here, you can barely see it now, because it has healed up nicely, I was making a fist, and blood was dripping down, so it was deep, and I just disinfected it, it didn't really bother me, it's gonna heal, but then for a few days, I, I, I kept feeling it, and especially at night, it was like pulsating, so I was, I could tell there was something going on, and then, I just picked one of the modules, I told my wife, I'm going to do an experiment now, because everyone says, and I know that it works for wound healing, and I put this on for 15 minutes, and seriously, the next day, the wound was closed, and I did not feel anything anymore.
[00:16:41] I'm like, this is absolutely nuts. It's crazy. Yeah, and it just proves that just by getting more blood flow, because this is probably an area where there is not, it bled obviously, but it's not like a big tissue where there's a lot of big blood vessels. And it was right here in the crease, and by just [00:17:00] getting some extra nutrients and blood flow into that area and probably mitigating or balancing the inflammation that was going on, maybe even dealing with it, there might even have been a minor infection because of the dirt that the chicken had on its claws.
[00:17:13] And it was literally overnight, ways better. Tingling was gone, the throbbing feeling was gone, it didn't bleed anymore, the wound was closed. Overnight, tissue healed and since then it's been fine. So I'm like, wow, this is unbelievable. And it's anecdotal evidence, obviously. But it's one of the things, if you experience that yourself, you look at technology in a different way than if you just read or hear someone say, Oh, this is great for ABC, but no, you do it.
[00:17:40] And it works and they're like, okay, there you go. I love
[00:17:43] Forrest Smith: it. I love it. Our kids, so I've got two boys, four and seven, and they, being boys, they're out playing football, busted lip, cuts on the knees, all of this, like this. They're so excited to get back in and put the lights on it because it's like, they're like, I'm Wolverine.
[00:17:58] Like they're just, you can almost see them [00:18:00] heal the next day. They love it. That's really it.
[00:18:02] Michael Kummer: One other thing I, since we were still at excellence performance and stuff, and at some point I want to get a tissue regeneration, especially cartilage regeneration, because. That's one of the things where in the past, uh, I think common advice would be if your cartilage tissue is gone, it's not going to come back.
[00:18:17] As much, once the bone is gone, it's gone. Not necessarily, because red light therapy has been shown to be able to regrow cartilage tissue, and that can be an absolute game changer as far as, uh, quality of life is concerned for someone who might have worn down in knees or, I don't know, cartilage tissue gone in, in joints.
[00:18:35] So let's talk a little bit about how does that work? Why does red light therapy? Regrow cartilage tissue. What does it do to make
[00:18:42] Forrest Smith: that happen? Absolutely. So I think actually we can relate it back to the story that you were just telling about your finger, which is there's a few different molecules in your body that promote faster regrowth of tissue.
[00:18:52] And one of these are chondroblasts. And what we see with the soft tissue, like ligaments and cartilage in your [00:19:00] joints. Is that chondroblasts are essentially so soft tissue like that is a very slow growing tissue in general. And so what we see is that there's typically a balance between how fast, if your, if your knees are healthy, or if your joints are healthy, how fast that tissue is degrading and how fast the tissue is generating our balance.
[00:19:20] There's kind of a, a homeostasis there. So that's one of the things
[00:19:23] Michael Kummer: that's going
[00:19:24] Forrest Smith: on. That's right. There's always degradation. Your cells are gonna die, and how this soft tissue works, though, is that you have these fast growing cells called chondroblasts that are basically the front growing edge of it. And so it just continues growing in this direction, and the back edges kind of degrade.
[00:19:39] But the chondroblasts themselves don't really make up most of the volume of your soft tissue. They build a fibrous material that's called extracellular matrix outside of them. And so, one of the reasons why The tissue grows so slowly is these chondroblasts have to, so to take it back to the homeostasis note, though, when you're in homeostasis, when you're [00:20:00] healthy, you're degrading on one side, you're generating on the other side, and they're balanced when you have inflammatory markers, particularly chronic inflammation in a joint that will increase the rate of degradation Decrease the rate of growth.
[00:20:13] So you're taking a hit on both sides when we're able to reduce those Inflammatory markers by using infrared light to penetrate through to as an example with the knees It's synovial fluid you you have these inflammatory cytokines that are chronic There are meant to be able to bring additional healing to the area, but when it becomes chronic and you have that inflammation there for months and years, which you typically see because of traumatic tissue damage.
[00:20:40] So when people have knee injuries or you sprained your knee or torn your ACL or torn your meniscus, all of those areas of the soft tissue. are exposed to your synovial fluid. And so they generate increased levels of chronic inflammation there. And that inflammation reduces the rate of proliferation for these chondroblasts, which help you [00:21:00] regrow your tissue.
[00:21:00] And they also make that tissue degrade faster. So you're really taking the head on both sides. So when you reduce those, those chronic inflammation markers, you can start increasing the rate of, and actually with the, red light therapy. You also see the increase go above the normal rate of increase of proliferation for these chondroblasts.
[00:21:20] The downside for this is that it's a kind of months long process. So you start seeing that increase. You could measure the increase within a week for this chondroblast proliferation, but they have to then start Emitting this and building this extracellular matrix of, of tissue to regenerate real kind of meaningful substance for your cartilage and that takes months.
[00:21:40] So it's on a month scale and with today and the fix it for me now, pharmaceutical approach to things, it's hard to kind of message that to people that really what you should be treating instead of the, instead of taking the batteries out of the fire alarm and the fire still burning in the kitchen, let's put the fire out.
[00:21:56] And then you, eventually you can, the smoke's gonna clear away and you can [00:22:00] stop hearing that kind of pain signal, which is very similar to that kind of fire alarm beeping that's so annoying and uncomfortable to live with. But at the
[00:22:07] Michael Kummer: same time also, I think PBM can also mitigate some of that pain signaling, right, or interfere with the pain signaling so you don't feel as much pain.
[00:22:16] It's a temporary effect, I understand, but nevertheless, pain can obviously reduce the quality of your life. But so if you can use some retinotherapy, not only to. block the pain temporarily for, I don't know, a couple of hours maybe, but also heal or help heal the tissue that might just take them longer than a couple of
[00:22:35] Forrest Smith: hours.
[00:22:36] Yeah, the pain definitely goes down more. What we've found is within the past three years there's been some kind of watershed research in this space, which is they've been comparing different NSAIDs, which are essentially the gold standard that the medical community has provided us. So if you go to your doctor and you've got osteoarthritis in your knee, take ibuprofen.
[00:22:53] And these NSAIDs, as an aside, as we talk about them, there are knock on effects from these that are really, [00:23:00] I think, unknown to the majority of users. Because it's coming from their doctor, they don't really question this. But there's really powerful long term studies showing increased risk of between 30 to 50 percent of severe cardiovascular disease because it stiffens your endothelium.
[00:23:16] Uh, so your cardiovascular, your blood vessels all throughout your body. Become stiffer. And when they are stiffer, they have a much higher rate of, of breaking. And also they don't accommodate that. They start aggregating a number of different things where, you know, people blaming cholesterol for these issues and.
[00:23:35] Cholesterol does play a part in this, but it's not the driving factor or what's driving these cardiovascular risks up. If you're seeing cholesterol bodies form more in your cardiovascular tissue, it's very likely that this cardiovascular tissue is not very healthy. And that's the reason that this is aggregating there, not that the cholesterol is causing this problem fundamentally, if that makes
[00:23:57] Michael Kummer: sense.
[00:23:57] Yeah, no, it absolutely doesn't. So you're [00:24:00] talking about the non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, right? That's right. Or even ask, I don't know, what have you, and when I, when I was an athlete in my early twenties, I popped them like candy and I'm, I don't even want to know what that has had on, on my cardiovascular health.
[00:24:16] There was, you know, only so much I can do to reverse some of the damage that, you know, that I did already back in the days, but it's, it's, yeah.
[00:24:24] Forrest Smith: I've seen how you train. I think you're well on the way to reversing all of that. I've seen those training sessions you're doing.
[00:24:29] Michael Kummer: Uh, I hope so too. Knock on wood.
[00:24:30] Okay. So we talked about that, but there is much more to red light therapy and photobiomodulation than just tissue healing and recovery and aesthetic performance, it can impact sleep in a positive way. It can adjust this circadian rhythm. There are now even devices, and I know, I'm not sure how much you want to talk about that, that can help with brain issues, with mental health, with gut health.
[00:24:54] There is just so much that is completely either untapped or at least Not [00:25:00] known by the general public of how red light therapy can impact us systematically. Not only if you have a wound or an injury or what have you, there are systematic effects that you can benefit from. So maybe let's talk a little bit about those systemic, more at least in localized things that people might not associate with radiotherapy, that brain health, gut health and sleep.
[00:25:20] Forrest Smith: No, it's a great point. And it's actually a subject that's very near and dear to me as we are working on both a gut and brain product that we'll be releasing within the next year. One of the things that started this though, is from a research standpoint, what they call remote photobiomodulation. And what we see from that is that when you are treating your gut, as an example, there are a number of things.
[00:25:41] So your gut and brain have a very strong connection. through your vagal nerve, but also through a number of different axes of signaling, molecular signaling in your body. And one of the things that's come out within the last five years of research is that there's a, there are powerful effects whether you're treating your gut or your brain in your brain.
[00:25:59] And so, [00:26:00] you know, your gut produces dopamine. There's a number of other brain Chemicals that are produced in your gut and that are either produced or supported from a production standpoint in your gut. And so we've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years Working on what's the right way to dose this because when you're working on muscle muscular tissue and soft soft tissue in your joints And things like this there was a little bit more Existing literature from a research standpoint to help us guide our dosing and we've built out an ex credibly complex dosing model, which is essentially showing how photons move through your tissue.
[00:26:34] And then at what level of tissue we need to deliver what level of photons to be able to impact the photo acceptors that we know are existing in different reservoirs there. And so we've talked about a couple of them, hemoglobin and cytochrome C oxidase. There, there are a number of other photo acceptors at these different levels of tissue.
[00:26:52] And so what we want to be able to do is dose those as effectively as possible. And with the gut, the tissues a little bit further. internal. And we've [00:27:00] been making some really good steps forward with longer wavelengths of near infrared. And we're trying to base all of our work in this space really around what we can do from a physiological measurement standpoint.
[00:27:11] If we say, Hey, dosing, we expect this from an outcome, how to, how do we hold ourselves accountable for the math we've done to be able to get to that point? And there's some really great things coming from a number of different. Kind of sensor companies these days. One side that's been very interesting is seeing that light therapy, particularly with gut decreases blood glucose levels, and that's even in people who have issues with this from a pre-diabetic or metabolic disorder or even type two diabetes.
[00:27:39] You see these? Blood glucose levels come down relative to the gut treatments. And so, we're trying to find more and more of these. We found things like, like glucose, serum nitric oxide, that we can actually measure signals on. Because, if you're taking it as a blood draw, how do you say before and after?
[00:27:55] It's very kind of, uh, hand wavy. Where what we're seeing right now is, with, [00:28:00] with signals from light, we can start targeting and sensing and diagnosing different levels of molecules in the body in kind of an ongoing signal levels. If we start someone on a gut treatment and we can see the glucose levels, nothing else changes.
[00:28:15] We can see those glucose levels drop outside of a range or a trend line that we would, that would be outside of what people would be dropping from. In the short term, we can start attributing things to the dosing levels. And then now we can test different wavelengths and different power levels and different.
[00:28:30] frequencies and things like this. And so that's where a lot of our time has gone over the past couple of years is building out and then justifying these mathematical models that show us what this light's going to do in the body. But the, the, I think the most exciting thing we're on, at least for me, from a technology standpoint, and I think you'll like this as well is what's we've had.
[00:28:48] Ways of measuring chemicals in the brain and then also behavior of behavior of different tissue in the brain between regions communications. There's been electrical signals for this. There's been magnetic signals for [00:29:00] this. So functional MRI has been something that really over the past. 10 to 20 years has really exploded in being able to provide an insight as to how our brain operates.
[00:29:09] The limitations for that though are it's multi million dollar tubes, and if you go in there with a, with anything kind of metal, you can't exercise while you're doing it, and if you go in there with anything metal on you, which would be something like a photobiomodulation or light therapy device, You're going to wish you hadn't.
[00:29:26] Like, they're magnetic chambers and once a year, some, somebody will go in there with a pistol because they don't want to, it's America being America, they don't want to take it off and yeah, it's, it will put a hole in you. Like, it's very powerful magnets. But one of the things that we've seen from this though, is that there's limitations around it.
[00:29:40] And so there's some new technologies where we can use light that penetrates the skull and, and brain tissue, which is in the same range near infrared and middle infrared that we've been using from a testing standpoint with. Photobiomodulation. And so one of the things that we're working on right now, and we're actually writing a number of grants for is How do we [00:30:00] use light and sensors and the advances in lasers and then these sensor technologies that have really exploded over the last five years to build something where essentially we can take Uh, insights from the brain, like you can from an MRI, and we've been working on this for a couple of years, we're in the middle of advancing that in, in lockstep with the, with the medical community, and so this technology is called functional near infrared spectroscopy, and in our case, we're actually working on one called broadband near infrared spectroscopy, and what that does is, puts light into your brain with lasers and then you measure it with what's traditionally been photodiodes.
[00:30:37] But again, the sensor technology is booming and we're testing now with things called photon, silicon photon multipliers, which are hundreds of times more sensitive than what we've had available to us. And these are still a little bit too expensive to bring to market from a consumer product. And our mission as a company is to get this into real people's hands and let them see the benefits.
[00:30:58] What we noticed with our lasers when we [00:31:00] started building them in was that this, that was also too expensive to put into a commercial device, but we saw where it was going. So when we see these silicon multipliers advancing so quickly, we believe that they're going to be adopted by larger volume industries like cell phones and that we can drop, we can assume a price drop because of those.
[00:31:19] But with that said, We've got these broadband interferon spectroscopy devices, which traditionally, and we talked about a little bit earlier, have been, sensors have been focused around things like hemodynamics. Again, there's so much hemoglobin in your body, and we know so clearly how important they are.
[00:31:34] So, um, we're Uh, light interacts with these different types of hemoglobin, whether it's oxygenated or deoxygenated, that we've got a very good kind of mature, robust technology around measuring hemodynamics. Hemodynamics gives you one picture of what's happening in the brain. One of the other things that we're seeing now because of the photobiomodulation research is More
[00:31:52] Michael Kummer: an analysis device or a treatment device?
[00:31:56] Forrest Smith: So we're doing two things at once. We're, we're actually building out treatment modules [00:32:00] that can be modified by software interactions to change their treatment level, power, frequency, et cetera, according to what we're sensing from the brain. And so what we want to be able to do is what we've seen for, as an example with fMRI, different behavioral pathologies, like major depressive disorder, like Uh, a couple of different types of dementia, chronic anxiety, have different footprints, geometric footprints, for how your brain is performing from a metabolic standpoint.
[00:32:33] And right now, what we're able to do with these new classes of lasers, with the new classes of sensors, and then layering on the advances that have come through machine learning, is we're able to start understanding And diagnosing those more effectively with devices that'll be sub 2, 000 and we're really targeting sub 1, 000 so that you're seeing people with Alzheimer's and as an example from a dementia standpoint, it is very similar to what we're talking about with [00:33:00] cholesterol earlier.
[00:33:01] People see this amyloid plaque in your brain and say, Hey, this amyloid plaque is causing these, these problems from a neurological behavior standpoint. And what's really happening is upstream from that, you have metabolic issues. That are causing this amyloid plaque. That's then also, and so there, there's, the causal factor has been, it's being better understood now, but we, not the cause that's exactly right.
[00:33:26] But what we're finding is that that metabolic health in your brain is really fundamental to all of these different pathologies. And if we can treat that, which we can from being able to, to dose the mitochondria, uh, directly with photobiomodulation, and we can say, let's. If we can treat that already with the, with, without the diagnostics, when we can use that diagnostics for targeting and then for optimizing the level of dosage, the treatments become world class and gold standard.
[00:33:54] That's what we're seeing from our research and our development right now. Sorry, go ahead. It's good. Ah, it's so exciting. It's [00:34:00] so exciting. I don't know if I, uh, you can tell, but I am so excited about what we're doing in the space. We're expanding on our team around this as well. We, we've got a, a grant team and we're going to be doing some work for the U.
[00:34:09] S. Air Force and Special Forces groups relative to how do we use the diagnostic piece of this to say, With, with, as an example, traumatic brain injury. One of the things that's misunderstood about that is people think that concussions are the foundation for this. And you don't even have to have concussions.
[00:34:24] Like, that the level of vibrations on your brain, when guys are going out to the, the range and, uh, the gun range and shooting. 800, 900 rounds a day, an impact from that. And particularly when they're doing that day on day, week on week, it really adds up with the brain impact. And so the, the special forces and the, the Air Force have actually noticed this and said, how do we start having operator tests that allow us to understand when we should be pulling them down off of this?
[00:34:51] And for the Air Force, it's a little bit more about changing levels of pressure. Helicopter pilots and, and things see this quite a lot for the Special forces guys. They're blowing up stuff and shooting it on a daily basis [00:35:00] and. They want to know how to protect relative that. So we're doing some great work with how to apply this diagnostics to that, because you can't take a, an FMRI out into the field.
[00:35:09] You have to have something that you can put on people. And these are going to be great modules that you can put around the brain and get a really good understanding of what's happening there and how to improve your metabolic health in your brain and avoid a lot of these longterm impacts that are caused by this metabolic damage.
[00:35:23] Wow. That's
[00:35:24] Michael Kummer: awesome. Wow. That's super exciting. Can't wait for a beta test. Yes! You're the first one on the list. What's wrong in
[00:35:30] Forrest Smith: my head? Unfortunately, my diagnostics for what's wrong in my head is not going to start from metabolic analysis.
[00:35:37] Michael Kummer: I hear you. Okay, that was great information. Um. Maybe let's wrap it up by talking about this device here, because that's what's already available.
[00:35:46] You don't have to wait for, for any technological advances or prices to come down. This has already gone through all of that, and that's the Move Plus Pro. That's the device that I've been using. I dunno, when was the first time I used [00:36:00] helped me. One of those devices was. Maybe a year or even two years ago, a
[00:36:03] Forrest Smith: while ago.
[00:36:04] Yeah, it was a while ago. You were one of the earliest ones to have it. It's, and it's been great. Actually your feedback and your followers feedback have been great on this. And it has actually helped us. We do have some new straps that, that both your input and your followers inputs have given us. We'd love to stay connected with the community about these types of things.
[00:36:18] And they've been great. We're able to upgrade usability based on that. Yeah,
[00:36:23] Michael Kummer: that's, I'm glad to hear that. And it's been, it's been working. We use it for so many different things. Sports injuries and recovery are one thing, but for us, it's often the simple thing. We have bees, so we get stung often, more often than the average person, I would say.
[00:36:36] And so by just, or even mosquito bites, just putting on one of those little modules for a few minutes and the pain is gone, the itching is gone. It really helps for wound healing. We talked about for anything joint related, soft tissue related. It's super convenient. It's super flexible. There are different straps.
[00:36:53] The extender strap is not available, I understand. Yes, so you can use it for your back or what have you, and we have that here too, and [00:37:00] anything really injury, joint pain, pain reduction, wound healing, scar tissue, stretch marks, technically even in a cosmetic things, you could put this on your forehead if you want to reduce fine lines and wrinkles if you wanted to, right?
[00:37:14] There are just so many use cases and it's such a flexible device and I'm going to make sure to add a Uh, link and everything in the show notes so people can check that out also for the review and the YouTube video. But that's the device you currently have and all the stuff that you're working on, I'm super excited to, to try that at some point once it's available.
[00:37:31] And with that, anything else you'd like to share where people can find you? And obviously Kenyon.
[00:37:37] Forrest Smith: Absolutely. Yeah, Kenyon, K I N E O N dot IO. And if you want to reach out to me directly, Forrest with two R's at Kenyon. io. And one, one final thing on a use case for it, cause I think you mentioned it a moment ago is, and I've been using it for this quite a lot lately.
[00:37:53] We've been underwater from a workload standpoint is when I'm short of sleep. One of the things that you see in the brain is that. [00:38:00] Your glymphatic system can't clear out the waste material as fast as you generate it when you're not sleeping well. And so if you treat your prefrontal cortex and then your sinus areas, you can actually increase the rate of clearance for this waste material in your brain if you're not sleeping well.
[00:38:15] That's right. It's
[00:38:16] Michael Kummer: been super helpful for me. Yesterday I wanted to try it out and then I didn't, but I'm like, I'm just going to extend the strap a little bit and just wrap it around my head
[00:38:22] Forrest Smith: and try it out. Yeah, you'll love it. And again, if you have a chance, do, do that prefrontal cortex and then the sinus is in here and those are all connected back in with your glymph cells and in your brain.
[00:38:32] This glymphatic system is really powerful for getting, once you trigger it, is really powerful for getting rid of that waste material and you feel, you can sense it, you can feel a lot better. All
[00:38:41] Michael Kummer: right. Sounds good. I much appreciate your time, Forrest. It was awesome information. Hopefully a lot of people are going to see this and apply some of those, that information and then use devices like the MovePlus Pro.
[00:38:53] And yeah, with that, we're gonna wrap it up and I love
[00:38:55] Forrest Smith: it. Thank you so much for having [00:39:00] me.
CEO
Forrest Smith is the CEO of Kineon Labs and has a 20-year history of building successful startups in tech hardware and operated his last 3 startups in Chinese. As a technologist he’s built innovative engineering and supply chain teams that anchored the value for multiple successful exits. He is an entrepreneurial optimist has founded and operated multiple companies to successful exit. Passionate about health, wellness, and advancing technology to improve quality of life
Forrest also played competitive sports: winning a junior national Olympics in team handball, receiving multiple scholarship offers as a placekicker/punter, and anchoring baseball teams in national competitions. He now regularly participates in rugby matches and trains CrossFit, which ultimately led him to develop Kineon’s MOVE+Pro targeted laser therapy device.
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