The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #224 - Forrest Smith (Kineon Labs)

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi, friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. It has been a long time coming, and also friends backstory on today's conversation. We actually recorded, like, half of this episode a few months ago now. My fault, I actually wasn't recording during it. So, you know, today's guest is so kind at accommodating when he was open to coming back and having the conversation again. But it's about something I am just so obsessed with. So, you guys know I love the power of red light and near-infrared therapy. I've been talking about it for years and years. It's honestly probably one of the first “biohacks” that I started personally experimenting with and sharing with my audience way back in the beginning. And I've mostly been using modular panels, so I was really intrigued when a company called Kineon reached out to me for their device, which, okay, wait, actually, Forrest, question for you, because I know it's called the MOVE+, but is the plus silent kind of like NAD+ has a silent plus after it.

Forrest Smith: No, no, you can say the plus or at least we do. But I'm happy either way as long as people get the benefits from it. 

Melanie Avalon: I'm, like, looking at it written down, I was like, “Oh, it's kind of like NAD+.” I always not laugh, but for friends, NAD+, the plus is silent. And I always think it's funny when people pronounce it, especially in, like, audiobooks and stuff. But in any case, back to this conversation. So, they reached out to me about this device called the MOVE+, which was not a modular panel. It actually it's super cool. I have it in front of me right here. It's three little small modular devices that go into a strap that you can actually put targeted onto your knee, for example, which is really great because I actually personally have knee pain that started about a year ago from, it doesn't really matter, I think I actually got it from doing EMSculpt, but that's another story. 

And so, I had been holding red and near-infrared light devices just to my knee. And so, when Kineon reached out about this device, I was like, “Oh, this is exciting.” And not only is it the LEDs, but the device actually integrates lasers into it. So, A, the device is super awesome. I've loved using it, and I've noticed a huge, huge benefit from using it. B, in the conversation that I had, I'm here with Forrest Smith, the founder and CEO. And in our conversation last time, friends, just get ready because this man knows everything about light and lasers and LEDs, and we had such a fascinating conversation. I'm so excited to have it again and go even further because there is so much to learn here and it's a lot of mind-blowing stuff. So, Forrest, thank you so much for being here.

Forrest Smith: Thank you for having me. And I'm looking forward to another great discussion with you. You ask really great and probing and interesting questions and I can't wait to jump into it with you today. 

Melanie Avalon: Thank you. Yeah, I so enjoyed our conversations. I mean, you know your stuff. So, for listeners, your own personal story, because you, well, I don't want to say it's unconventional, but would you like to tell listeners a little bit about your story and what led you to your interest in working with these lasers and red-light therapy as devices?

Forrest Smith: So, kind of give a little bit of background on myself and my interest. I lived in China for almost 20 years. I was building innovative supply chains and technology manufacturing businesses there. And one of the ones that I had a great time building with my partner and really enjoyed the process was an LED lighting and controls business. And we built the factory in Hangzhou, China and ended up selling it to a multibillion-dollar lighting company in the US. But it was my start of my journey around light to solid state lighting emitters. And our goal of the time, most of our companies that I've started have really started with a goal to impact things systemically. And our goal at the time was to decrease the electrical load by phasing out older, less efficient lights, and also, if we could, to bring some level of health and wellness through the lights that we’re able to bring to people.

In digging into that from a technology standpoint, my partner and I at the time spent years from everything from the upstream, fab side of the LED production, all the way down through the electronics and how you drive these to the production and shipping them.

And I got a really good working understanding of lasers, LEDs, drivers, and how these things from a product standpoint come together. And we actually had our own manufacturing plant that we would assemble them with. And so that was my background from a technical standpoint relative to solid state like lasers, laser diodes, and LEDs. I also had a more personal impact from an injury standpoint. And I think that's one of the things that really connected me well with my co-founders, is that all of us had injuries from having played sports our entire lives. And I tore my meniscus in my left knee when I was younger, when I was grappling and it's one of these things where, from an education standpoint, we don't really see most of the people that we talk to, most of our users on a daily basis, understand how impactful this traumatic tissue damage in your joints can be long term as a generator of inflammation.

And as a second piece to that, how negative that impact of inflammation can be because even if it's generated in your knee, it doesn't necessarily stay local. And we've measured really kind of negative impacts along local, regional and systemic tissues, and we can dive into that a little bit later. Suffice to say, at the time, with my torn meniscus and reaching my mid-30s, I was starting to see the inflammation trigger some movement limitations and pain and inflammation that was sparking more frequently. I knew that right now this is something that I'm going to have to deal with the rest of my life. So, let's try to steer into approach that's going to be as proactive and empowering as possible. And I spend a lot of time in the medical literature, whether it's for training or diet or sleep or recovery.

And in doing that and with my background in solid state lighting, came across photobiomodulation. And it's been really a great place to spend tens of thousands of hours over the past 10 years. Both myself and our team have really kind of dug into the technical side of these things, because it's a treatment modality that offers us the capability to reduce inflammation and pain in ourselves and in our users without pharmaceuticals and the pharmaceuticals that are in this space have a huge kind of knock-on effect for other things downstream, negative impacts for your physiology, where the light therapy actually in replacing that can have positive impacts in downstream effects.

So, in a word, after an obsessive dive into the medical literature and the technology we decided on-- my partner and I decided on building our first product around neuromuscular pain and inflammation. And the reason for that is essentially our mission. We've come together before we spent any time on the product or the technology, what we came to was we wanted to define our company around the mission versus the commercial outcomes. And the mission that we've come to, which holds us accountable for a couple of big metrics, is we'd like to positively impact the largest number of people we can, in the most substantial way we can with regards to their quality of life.

I'm happy to dive into that, but the key for that was that it really just held us accountable for how many people can we get this type of technology to who we can give an alternative to pharmaceuticals and how can we measure the changes that it's making in their lives relative to what are currently still the gold standards, like the NSAIDs and the opiates that people use for pain? So that's a really long response. Thank you for bearing with me through it. But it's really important, I think, for us as a team that we address these core mission points versus just the commercial aspect of the business. And that's really how we focus every decision we make from a strategic standpoint. 

Melanie Avalon: Ooh, I love it so much. Okay, so much to dive into. I have a really quick selfish question not really related to the light stuff first, just because I'm really into product development and I'm working on a line right now. So, you mentioned you owned the manufacturer plant. So, when you created Kineon, were you doing it out of your own plant? 

Forrest Smith: No, we owned the LED lighting and controls business, but that was acquired by, at the time, Cooper Lighting, which has since been acquired by Eaton and then Phillips business Signify has most recently acquired that. But that was our LED lighting and controls business for general lighting and that was kind of my step into this technology. But we did own that manufacturing plant and since then have found manufacturing partners for our laser and LED therapy devices.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, got you. I'll stop myself from going on that tangent. I'm so fascinated by product development now so, okay, picked up on that. Okay, back to the pain aspect of all of this. So, I had my knee injury, which was I did get scans to see if it was tearing my meniscus, and it was not, but it was still super painful. And that was actually the first time. So, this was before trying Kineon. It's funny because I'd been talking about the power of red light and near infrared for pain and inflammation for so long, but I actually hadn't been using it for that specifically because I didn't really have pain and inflammation, but I'd read the stories and I had listener testimonials so I still could educate about it. And that was the first time that I had just searing pain in my knee. 

And I remember I held a device because I've worked with Joovv historically for years and years, and I held their device straight up to my knee. And I was shocked that the pain would literally go away in that moment, which I found very shocking, even though I'd been talking about how it could do that for so long. But I was like, “Oh, wow, this really does what they say.” So, my question there, because I was thinking about how you're talking about the effect on these inflammatory cytokines from the red light and the near-infrared and LEDs sorry and-- lasers. And we should probably step back and define that first. But my quick question to start things off is when people experience this pain relief, because presumably, if it's stopping pain in the moment, it's not like it literally healed it. I'm guessing it just stopped the inflammatory cytokines. So, my question is, is it actually healing tissue? Is it just stopping the pain signaling? Like, what's actually happening in the pain relief moment with the light? 

Forrest Smith: It's a great question. There're two mechanisms that we've seen in the literature that have caused this pain reduction. One is a higher power device than the one we use, which is a pain blocking. And so, what you would do with these is these are higher power lasers, which don't really promote the recovery and don't really treat the underlying issues with inflammation and the tissue damage and recovery that we do with the lower power ones. But these would be something where you can apply them to upstream areas of the nerve tissue, and they do have a blocking effect, essentially, on that pain signal coming through that nerve tissue. 

What we do with the lower-level laser or the low-level laser therapy or LLLT, and I know there [chuckles] are a lot of terms around this, and we can dive into that a bit if you'd like to. But what we do with the low-level laser therapy is we actually treat the inflammation. So typically, if these issues and particularly chronic inflammation, so just to kind of draw a line between the acute, which in many cases, the acute inflammation, is molecules coming to the area to bring about changes that need to happen to this tissue to be able to remodel and heal. Chronic inflammation is you can think of these as a spiral or a loop that's just out of control, where your body continues to produce this inflammation and is trying to draw the correct healing factors to this tissue to be able to promote that regeneration and remodeling of the damaged tissue, but being stuck in that loop, it's not able to do that. So, what we find, though, is that right now, many of the pain cycles that people are in with osteoarthritis, with old injuries are driven by inflammation.

And when they are driven by inflammation, by being able to reduce that, that's the largest impactor for the pain. And how we describe it is, you're actually addressing the fire in your kitchen versus with either the higher power lasers or pharmaceuticals what you're doing is really just removing the batteries from the fire alarm. So, the fire is still going in your kitchen, but you're really not addressing the fundamental issues of putting that fire out. What you're doing is saying, this beeping which is the pain is bothering me, I'm going to remove the batteries from the fire alarm. And the low-level laser therapy actually does a better job of putting the fire out. And so that's what we see is our users really, particularly when they have chronic inflammation, see major changes in their range of motion, in their pain levels, measured on the visual assessment score and with their functionality and mobility in the short term and ongoing in the following weeks and month scale time frames.

Melanie Avalon: So, mentioning that short term, how short term? Is it instantaneous or does it take a little bit?

Forrest Smith: Within 15 minutes. So, we would say that for our dosing, the ideal time frame for usage is 15 minutes. And you can see within that 15 minutes already the needle is starting to move, particularly when you have those chronic inflammation markers in the area, which, again, you mentioned the cytokines. It's one of the things that we've been measuring and able to provide objective science support for what we are doing from a pain inflammation measurement is a lot of these inflammatory cytokines, the pro-inflammatory cytokines, particularly the chronic ones that you'll see with our users, drop by up to 80% within the first 15 to 30 minutes. And the 30 minutes is more basically because we have to do blood draws to be able to go quantify this. And those take slightly different time for each different patient.

But, yeah, with somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes, you see these massive drops in the chronic inflammation markers in the area. And we're actually, as an aside, also starting up a study with a friendly brand of ours called Aerofit, who have been doing COVID studies. They do a device that increases resistance for your breathing, to make your inspiratory and expiratory breathing, and how much air you can hold in your lungs stronger over time. They treat, on kind of a macro level, some of the impacts of long COVID. We're actually starting a review with them, a study with them that we're rolling out in the next two weeks, using the MOVE+ to be able to treat local tissue, to be able to improve at a cellular level, the cardiopulmonary delivery of oxygen. So, it's nice to see different people using different methods, but also because they're macro and we're micro, we can kind of stack them and expect to see some really powerful results out of these studies.

Melanie Avalon: Would you put the device over people's lungs? 

Forrest Smith: That's right. So, what we're doing right now is 15 minutes over the left lung while you're laying down on your stomach and 15 minutes over the right lung. And one other piece of this that's, I think, often overlooked with the laser therapy, particularly, is that there are studies, and we're seeing more of these now, showing what they call remote photobiomodulation. So, treating tissue that is not the local tissue that you're trying to improve. And in most cases, the positive results for this remote photobiomodulation have been femurs. So, the long bones and your legs and your gut, your gut microbiome and your gut health are just at the center of so many different signaling pathways in your body that by treating these, you see big differences in systemic inflammation-- in measurable systemic inflammation, but also in brain chemistry. 

And so, this is two of the things that we're testing, is, one, lung treatment, and then two, this remote photobiomodulation for reducing that ongoing cytokine and inflammation impact on the body, particularly with long COVID, which is just to give a little bit more context for it. What we see with people with long COVID is the reduction in performance for how oxygen is delivered to their tissue. So, you can measure what they call muscle oxygenation, or SmO2, in your thigh muscles as an example. And typically, if you're measuring this when someone's healthy, what you're able to correlate it to is their performance. So, are they a top-tier athlete? Are they a cyclist? Are they a marathon runner? Then their efficiency in delivering oxygen to this tissue is going to be a lot more effective.

And the way that we measure it is we cuff off that leg so that you occlude and don't allow blood and oxygen through to these muscles. And then you remove the cuff and you reperfuse the tissue. And we can measure the muscle oxygenation and how fast that it reoxygenates. And in top tier athletes, you see that reoxygenate and reperfuse very very quickly. In people who are healthy but not top-tier athletes, it's a little bit lower. And when people have long COVID, what we see is that their cardiopulmonary delivery of oxygen and how fast they reperfuse this tissue is extremely impaired. One of the things that we've seen with our devices is that we can actually help them train their cardiopulmonary system to using photobiomodulation to uptake this oxygen more effectively in the muscles and to get out of this impaired state.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. Okay, so to clarify, in those experiments, that's putting it on the lungs, and then it's affecting the oxygen to the tissues or was it the tissues? 

Forrest Smith: These are actually on the tissues. So, we're starting the lungs as one test now, and we're also continuing on the testing with the tissue directly. And that was the kind of the femur. So, we're treating the femurs by way of the quads. And again, with that treatment, one of the things that we see is we dump a lot of nitric oxide or S-nitrosothiol which is kind of a flavor of nitric oxide into that cardiovascular endothelial tissue and it just helps it learn to dilate itself again so that the blood flow and the oxygen delivery is more effective than it is when it's impaired by that long COVID inflammation.

Melanie Avalon: Does that mean with blood flow restriction training, like people who are more athletic, actually get more benefits from blood flow restriction training?

Forrest Smith: Yes and no. With the blood flow restriction training, actually, anybody who's doing it is reducing the amount of you're pushing your muscle into a more hypoxic state. And so, whoever's doing that is going to get a good benefit out of it. But as an aside, it's a great question to ask. We're actually going to be partnering with a blood flow restriction company. As we've seen, one of the things that we interact with most effectively with our infrared lasers is hemoglobin. So, when we interact with hemoglobin, we reduce the affinity of nitric oxide to the binding site, to a heme binding site on hemoglobin.

And that's one of the big drivers of the downstream signaling, both in the blood and from a macro level, increasing, dilating the aperture of the blood vessels and delivering more blood and oxygen back to the tissue. But also, just from a signaling downstream standpoint, this is something that's very healthy for this tissue. One thing that we've seen with this is, when we do with our athlete’s things like platelet-rich plasma or PRP treatments, you increase the amount of hemoglobin in the area, and by doing that, you increase the amount of tissue that our infrared lights can interact with.

And so, there's been a couple of great studies over the past couple of years showing that people who have been using PRP ineffectively for knee pain as an example for recovery modality, for knee pain and inflammation, even when it's ineffective with the PRP by itself. When you stack the PRP with laser therapy, particularly with infrared laser therapy, the results are logarithmically, they're synergistic, so you get much better results out of it logarithmically better out of the laser plus PRP. But while that's great for our professional athletes that we work with in the NFL and NBA and CrossFit and Olympic lifting, etc., not everybody has a PRP resource that they can go to every day.

So, one thing that we've been experimenting with many of our users is using blood flow restriction cuffs to be able to aggregate hemoglobin and platelets at the point where we can interact with them more around these joint pain areas. And it's not as impactful as the PRP, but it's something that you don't have to go ahead and get injections for and that you can do at home on a daily basis. So, it's been a really great thing for us to be able to test that with blood flow restriction and the ability to keep those molecules in the area, those hemoglobin and the platelets in the area, so that we can interact with them more and provide better results. 

Melanie Avalon: So, in that study with a PRP, did they test PRP, PRP and laser, and just laser alone? 

Forrest Smith: Yes, they did. That's right. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. That's interesting. So, they found the PRP, it actually didn't always do anything unless it was with laser, in which case, it did more than the laser alone. 

Forrest Smith: That's right. That's exactly right. And the stack of those two was really powerful. We started actually with an Atlanta-based athlete, Travis Mayer, who, he was an Olympian, and then he's a top-tier Crossfitter and these guys-- he's strong as a horse. I mean, he trains so hard all the time that one of the things that we see with these top-tier athletes like this is repetitive injuries. So, these repetitive stress injuries, it's hard for them to avoid because of the level and amount of training that they're doing. And so, he had patellar tendonitis and had tried PRP and we provided them a study and said, look, “You didn't get great results out of PRP, but what this indicates is that even when you're nonresponsive for the PRP, if you stack it with the lasers, you can expect much better results.” And over a three-week period with the PRP and laser treatment, he went from a 7/10 in pain that he was just having to train through on a daily basis to a 0/10. And so that really let us know that we’re onto something and pushed us into this blood flow restriction cuffs plus laser as well as a new kind of what we think of as a poor man's PRP plus laser.

Melanie Avalon: I doubt you've done testing on this because of the controversial aspect, but I did get stem cell injections in my knee. Is that anything that might be synergistic? 

Forrest Smith: Yes. So, two things with laser and stem cells. One, if you're treating your long bones, your stem cells are generated in two places, adipose tissue and the bone marrow of your longer bones in your legs. When you're treating the long bones of your legs, the femurs, you can increase the rate of proliferation for mesenchymal stem cells. And on top of that these stem cells can turn into anything, but the rate at which they turn into osteoblasts and chondroblasts, which are bone and soft tissue fast growth cells, is increased substantially with the laser therapy. And so, what we see is people with soft tissue remodeling. So, if you have that pain in your knee that you'd like to reduce the pain, reduce the inflammation, and perhaps regrow some of the cartilage there, this is a great way to do it. So, stacking stem cells or PRP are both very effective in being able to provide additional benefits synergistic with the laser therapy. 

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. And then, so you touched on this a lot, but from last time, when we recorded, one of the most mind-blowing things you talked about was the study of athletes with ACL injuries and their cardiac health. Could you tell listeners a little bit about what happened with their cardiac tissue after the injuries? 

Forrest Smith: Absolutely. And we've been actually digging a bit more into some of the mechanisms on that, so I'll kind of enumerate that as well. One of the things that this was a large study done on NFL and ex-NFL players who'd had an ACL tear and what we saw was those who had had the ACL tear had that kind of traumatic tissue damage and then the surgery to repair that in their unhealthy knee, in their injured knee, over the course of the study, had a 50% increased chance of severe cardiovascular disease, which doesn't really seem-- And this is also they watched out for--

Melanie Avalon: Inactivity. 

Forrest Smith: That's right. So, is this person still able to be active? And when you take that out of the equation, this is still a 50% increase in the cardiovascular risk for severe disease. And what we've come back to with this, and not just us and the researchers in the space who put together this study, and a number of different groups have started to dig back into what are the mechanisms for this. And one of the things that we've seen is that this inflammation doesn't stay local to that knee. And so, there's kind of an interim step that we've had measured ourselves, and a number of different groups have as well, which is okay, if this is happening where we've got traumatic tissue damage to the local joint tissue, what's happening in the regional tissue. So, what's happening with the muscles in the quad and your calves on either side of this tissue, and what we've seen, particularly with the ACL, but with knee injuries in general, is that when you have that traumatic tissue damage, the regional cardiovascular delivery of oxygen is impaired as well. And so how does that present? How do we kind of measure that? 

If you put someone who's had this type of surgery, this is even two to three to five years down the road on an infrared camera, where you can measure the temperature of their tissue. The injured quad or the quad above the injured knee is going to be one to two degrees colder than their healthy quad. And that doesn't seem like a huge amount to be off, but it's a massive amount relative to how much blood flow and how much oxygen is being delivered to that tissue. And so, this is one of the things where it's triggered. Well, it's triggered the question of if we're looking at the local tissue and it's not limited there, and we're looking at the regional tissue, is it limited there? And one of the most recent studies on this is that when you see these long-term trickles of inflammation out of joints, like the ACL injuries, what you're seeing systemically is just as bad as what you're seeing from a regional standpoint with blood delivery and oxygen delivery to the quads, which is you're reducing what they call the shear strength of the cardiovascular endothelial tissue, which is essentially, as you pump blood through the pipes, which are your blood vessels, that perpendicular motion of blood across the kind of surface of that pipe, if you can think of it like the blood vessel as a pipe, is known as the shear load. 

The amount of shear load or the amount of pressure that these blood vessels can withstand is core or is key to your cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary health. And it's one of the things that allows you to have flexibility if your blood pressure is increasing or decreasing from training or from anything that's happening to you in a day, you'd like that tissue to be robust enough to be able to deal with those kinds of increases and decreases in pressure. What we're finding is that inflammation trickling out of the knee is now spreading systemically and is negatively impacting the strength and the robustness of these blood vessel pipes, as it were. And so, they're just much more fragile and more likely to burst. If we keep the analogy of the pipes moving the water through your house being similar to the blood vessels moving the blood through your body, these pipes can burst much more easily and are weakened and stiffer because of just that tissue in your knee. Putting out that inflammation makes your whole body much more at risk.

Melanie Avalon: Would that mean that people who are more active and athletic, because you're talking earlier about when there's the people who aren't as athletic, that the blood flow and the oxygen doesn't really-- I'm using super casual language, but get in as far. Does that mean people who are more athletic when they have an injury that those cytokines actually can be more pervasive in their body?

Forrest Smith: You'll see interesting spreads of this in the literature and it's hard to say, actually, it hasn't been completely consistent as far as the severity relative to athletes, but they do have this kind of paradox, the athlete’s paradox of when you are delivering blood more effectively and oxygen more effectively through your tissue, you're delivering everything that's in your blood more effectively. And so occasionally you do see these spikes relative to the athletes showing worse outcomes than, say, unhealthy folks. But with that said, well, I wouldn't say unhealthy-- athletes relative to healthy cohort is one thing, athletes relative to people with metabolic disorder or prediabetes or diabetes, it's still the athletes are significantly lower risk.

Melanie Avalon: And then going back to the hemoglobin. I know we talked about this last time, but does that have any indications for people with anemia?

Forrest Smith: That's a great question. There have been a couple of studies with photobiomodulation and anemia, but I don't have them in front of me now and I'd have to go back and dig into those a bit, but it's a really good question. So, I'm going to take a note to dive in on that one. 

Melanie Avalon: I'm just personally super interested because I've struggled with that myself, so I find it really, really interesting. Okay, one more health-related question and then maybe we can step back and actually talk about the different types of light going on here. But you mentioned the brain chemistry piece in the study, and actually it's really appropriate. So yesterday, I'm so excited about this, in Fox Health News, they posted an article about how to prevent brain aging and support cognition and mental health, and they actually heavily featured me, which is very exciting. 

Forrest Smith: That's awesome. 

Melanie Avalon: Thank you. I wish we had this conversation-- Oh, what's really crazy about it though, just sidenote, for some reason, I don't know why, but the Fox Health editor has decided she really likes me. She actually-- I had three articles last week in Fox, which is crazy, like in a week, it blew my mind, no pun intended. And they were all about longevity and health. And it's really great because basically she comes to me and she's like, “Do you have tips for this issue?” And then I like, [chuckles] “Give her a list of tips and put the studies and all the things.” I wish we’d had this conversation, like, three days ago, because I could have included this into my answers. So, what have you found with how it affects cognition and brain health?

Forrest Smith: This is a great question. I love it actually. I'm going to take one step back from that one and say, when we started our product development with our MOVE+ neuromuscular pain and inflammation device, my preference was to really dive in on the brain. So, transcranial photobiomodulation has been shown to be effective in treating chronic anxiety, major depressive disorder, bipolar addiction, and a couple of different types of dementia. And we feel as a company that there's great opportunity in this, because the dosing in this has not been optimized 100%. And the more we see it, the more we recognize the idea that many of these neurological behavioral pathologies, like major depressive disorder, chronic anxiety, bipolar, etc., have a metabolic component. 

And so, we are right now developing and working on a brain device to be able to not just treat these issues, but also measure the before and then immediate short-term and long-term impacts of the photobiomodulation on that metabolic health of the brain. And one of the things that we see with this, both from our own tests, but also from the medical literature, is that different pathologies, whether it's chronic anxiety or depression, have different footprints of impaired metabolic dynamics in your brain. And so our assumption and our belief just from all of this testing that we're doing and from the medical literature, is that as we start testing more and dialing in these signals and these footprints, for lack of a better term, in the brain for the metabolic disorder, that we are going to be able to dial in our transcranial therapies, but also that in doing so, we can also provide a feedback loop for people who, when they're doing the transcranial treatments, they can also change their diet, their sleep, their training. 

There're a number of different supplements out there that can really benefit this. So that the key from our perspective as a company is to really have the mirror to hold up to your brain and say what's happening here that we'd like to correct. And then when you have that mirror, you can change your behavior and what you're doing in front of the mirror to be able to change the performance and the metabolic footprint that you have in your brain and you have a feedback loop for it. And so again, that's a huge commitment from, it's a very complex technology we're working on for it called broadband near-infrared spectroscopy, which essentially helps us build this footprint measuring device that we can show a 3D scale of your brain and then how metabolic dynamics and blood dynamics, hemodynamics are performing within these different regions of the brain. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, now I'm modifying my statement. I wish we had talked like five days ago, because one of the other articles was tips for depression. So, oh my goodness, that's crazy. Well, it's interesting because. I mean, I guess this is a good segue into talking about the avenue of administrating this like panels versus the device against your skin and also the addition of lasers, but using the panels, for example-- So, I talk, like I said, a lot about the benefits of red light and near-infrared. And personally, the benefits I experience the most is the mood boosting effects. But that's more just like putting up my panel devices and using them. Well, I kind of run them all day, but in the morning and evening. So, all that to say, going back to the brain, is it a direct effect on the cells in the brain, does it reduce inflammation? Does it relate to circadian rhythm? Like, why do I get the seeming mood boosting effects when I just have ambient red light in my sphere?

Forrest Smith: Ambient red light, actually so one of the things that we talk about with the panels particularly is that they don't penetrate as far in as the lasers do. And it's harder to dose your internal tissue, but your largest organ on your body is your skin. And so, when you're able to interact with your skin in this way and the capillary level blood vessels, you have a lot of access to a lot of surface area. And so, this is one of the things that you're seeing is your surface area blood vessels will start to dump nitric oxide and you'll start feeling-- again you will feel wound healing, collagen increases, wrinkle reduction, better skin tone. There're a number of things that you see from the panels. There are some of these that carry on to the brain and cross the blood-brain barrier. And I think those are a little bit less when you're doing it from a skin level, but when you're doing it from the brain level and actually treating targeting that tissue inside the brain, the impacts are meaningful and substantial. 

Melanie Avalon: Talking about crossing the blood-brain barrier, because that's so interesting, it would never occur to me that light would be something that would have to-- that would be possibly impenetrable to the blood-brain barrier. Does all light cross the blood-brain barrier, like all forms of wavelengths? 

Forrest Smith: So what we've seen is the penetration is higher for infrared. And this is one of the things that, with our testing, it's one of the reasons why we want this mirror, why we want the broadband near-infrared spectroscopy, which you can think of as an fMRI so that we can see what's being impacted internally. Red lights don't penetrate as much, the infrared does and so our current tests are with five different flavors, for lack of a better term, of infrared and modulating those to be able to penetrate through to the correct depth at the correct power levels with our core technology. And what we've spent a lot of our team's time on is tens of thousands of hours, really, into rebuilding our own proprietary dosing model for how many photons are we delivering to the photo acceptors at these different levels of tissue? And so, the idea being that most of what we've seen from devices that are in the market are more kind of engineering specs of things like irradiance and power density, which is essentially, how much light am I putting out of this device? How much light am I seeing at the skin level? 

What we're trying to do instead is work backwards from what is the most optimal amount of photons that we need to deliver to this type of photo acceptor at this depth of tissue. And then we build out larger light distribution models for how that light distributes through the tissue. And then we baseline those on existing metrics, in whether it's serum nitric oxide or the changes in hemodynamics, which are also measurable or changes in things like cytochrome c oxidase, which is an enzyme in your oxidative phosphorylation chain in your mitochondria. These are different things that we can measure and so we have expectations about each of those and what should change or the scale of change we should see relative to someone's physiology based on how many photons we're delivering to different depths of tissue and what photoacceptor reservoirs exist at that depth of tissue.

So that's really our core technology for our neuromuscular pain and inflammation devices, how are we delivering this and what's optimal to make people's outcome the best? I think that's why we see more effective outcomes relative to other photobiomodulation and laser therapy devices in the market, is because we really started from the outcome we wanted and worked backwards to how do we engineer the product to deliver that? 

Melanie Avalon: The lasers, is it the same type of light? It's just a different intensity and how it's focused.

Forrest Smith: So, the difference between lasers and LEDs from a light standpoint is essentially, lasers are collimated light, which, if you think of a column, it's just like a circular, although in the case of the lasers is actually elliptical. The lasers we use are a 10-degree by a 20-degree emission pattern, but they don't spread out. They just stay in that column as they go into the tissue. LEDs emit light. So, LEDs are a dye-based technology, and this dye emit light in 306-degree pattern. When we actually implement them into devices or when anyone implements them into devices, they're packaged into what are called PLCC or surface mount diode packages, which is essentially a cup that you can put on a PCB, that cup restrains that 360-degree emission pattern to 120 degrees. But as it's emitting, it continues to get broader and broader and broader versus with the laser, it's just that same column that's going in one direction and all the light is kind of parallel to each other and are going in from a penetration standpoint, the lasers are better because of that, because they don't spread as much. 

And with LEDs also, lasers are a tighter bandwidth from a wavelength standpoint, so the colors are more selective. And we know from the literature from our own testing that certain wavelengths are better. So, if as an example, 808 or 810 nanometer infrared is more effective both from a penetration and from a dosing and cellular interaction standpoint then, for example, 850 nanometers. And these are just things where you have to go into literature to dig into it. But that's, again, where our team spends a lot of time and where our  core value proposition lives. 

Melanie Avalon: You said the LED is more selective than the laser. 

Forrest Smith: The laser is more selective than the LED. So, the LEDs are typically, say 40 nanometer kind of spread. So, if it's 850, then it would be 830 to 870, where with the lasers that we're using for the infrared, we're an 808 nanometer wavelength of infrared, and that's plus or minus about 5 nanometers. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Okay, maybe I heard that wrong then. Okay

Forrest Smith: I may have said it backwards, sorry. [laughs] 

Melanie Avalon: No, I just wanted to make sure, because I was like, “Hmm, I'm not sure.” Okay, that makes sense. Well, so the actual photoreceptors themselves where are those? Are those in all of our cells, in all of our bodies?

Forrest Smith: Pretty much. One of the biggest ones is hemoglobin. And blood is pretty much everywhere in your body. You have to have oxygen delivery. And it also turns out there's a nitric oxide component to that system as well, that cardiopulmonary system. But there are other photoacceptors like cytochrome c oxidase, where often when you hear descriptions of laser therapy or a light therapy, you hear people talking about increasing ATP, which is essentially your body's energy currency, for lack of a better term. And you have in your body a few different ways that you create ATP for your body to spend it as energy on whatever you're doing at the time, whatever your cells need it for. And the major one is called oxidative phosphorylation, which is essentially a four-step process that's embedded in the walls of the phospholipid bilayer of your mitochondria. 

And there's a bottleneck in that process, which is around an enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase, which, similar to hemoglobin, is a heme core protein, and it's an enzyme that binds both oxygen and nitric oxide. And those heme cores are targets for us, particularly for the infrared interactions that we have with them for signaling. What we'd like to do is reduce the affinity of nitric oxide for these binding sites and allow oxygen to bind more effectively to them. But when you release that nitric oxide, there're also a number of things from a signaling standpoint that happen downstream. And so, if you're looking at the hemoglobin, one thing happens, which is that nitric oxide will help the cardiovascular endothelial tissue dilate when it's inside the cell. And it's not in the blood serum there. It's signaling between the mitochondria and the nucleus of the cell. And what we've seen with that is a balance built around oxidative stress.

One of the big impacts and one of the reasons why we see so much of the downstream impact of light therapy be around reducing inflammation is oxidative stress in your cells. If you don't have enough-- it needs to be a balance. If you don't have enough, then it's going to be one set of issues. And if you have too much, which is often what we're dealing with when we see our users and our patients, it's another set of issues, and that's the inflammation side of things where it's kind of representative of that from a set of level. So, there are photoacceptors, photoreceptors at almost every level of tissue. But the main ones we're interacting with are in the blood and in the mitochondria.

Melanie Avalon: Which type acts on the cytochrome c oxidase.

Forrest Smith: More of the near-infrared, but both do, just the near-infrared is a little bit more effective at it.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so that's normally bound to oxygen and nitrous oxide, but when the near-infrared acts on it releases the nitrous oxide, which then has a beneficial effect in the body. 

Forrest Smith: That's right. And so, you can actually bind oxygen through there faster, and you increase the rate of production for ATP, again, from an energy standpoint. But again, one of the biggest things that I think it's missed on this a lot is that you also signal downstream through a number of more complex signaling pathways that help you balance your oxidative stress that you may have, whether it's from metabolic disorder or from tissue damage, you start managing that oxidative stress more effectively. 

Melanie Avalon: And is there a chain reaction or is it local? So, like, if you're treating your knee, does it affect the cytochrome c oxidase right there and then just that dumps the nitrous oxide and has the carry-on effects from what it dumps, or does it actually have effects throughout the rest of the body as well? With the cytochrome c oxidase, dumping the nitrous oxide and having these effects.

Forrest Smith: Primarily with the blood, it will be carried more broadly for the body with the local tissue, the mitochondria actually have a better impact. So, we see both though, and again, where you have large tissue masses, like your upper legs around. If you're treating your quads and your femurs or if you're treating your gut, they're large tissue masses there. And so, when you treat these, we tend to see and these are what I mentioned earlier was called remote photobiomodulation. You tend to see more systemic level impacts than you would if you're treating your hands or kind of smaller tissue areas.

Melanie Avalon: So, super curious. You're talking about the effects on the mitochondria and energy production and ATP. So how does it potentially affect metabolism? And could you use this to spot treat, like, stubborn fat on your body?

Forrest Smith: You can actually, people have done studies into white adipose tissue being browned by way of using laser therapy on it. And also, the other piece of that is that increasing stem cell production from adipose tissue has also been studied. So, there are benefits to treating white adipose tissue if you have deposits particularly around the midsection. One other piece of this that's very interesting, I think in spot treating things is both with COVID but also with a number of different kinds of treatment modalities with treating organs. So whole organ treatment is a new method that's really just started up testing from a COVID and long COVID testing standpoint and has shown some really good results. But one of the most damaging types of fat that you can have is fat on your organs. There've been a couple of studies over the past five years showing a reduction in the generation of and accumulation of organ fat if you're treating your organs with laser therapy. So interesting work going on in that space and hopefully we'll see more of it in the coming years, but it's very promising right now. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. Have there been any studies on treating fatty liver?

Forrest Smith: They're starting in with that. One of the things that we're seeing right now is the test started with the gut-brain axis. And what they found is that the gut is so in the middle of so many different processes with your body that they're now kind of modifying that to gut-brain and then plus additional organ. And so, in this case, gut-brain-liver axis. Yes and they are seeing benefits to kind of fatty liver disease as well. 

Melanie Avalon: That's really fascinating. Would there be the potential?-- I just feel like this could sell really well commercially, like a fat burning waistband or something that people could wear. Do you think that [chuckles] would actually work? 

Forrest Smith: I think it's hard. There have been studies on mobilizing fat using red light therapy or low-level laser therapy or photobiomodulation to help mobilize fat. There were some positive outcomes with those, but I don't think they were substantial. I think it was still under the kind of significant measurable changes. But I'd have to dig into it a little bit further because it's an interesting space. I think the main thing for it is that if you're accumulating whether or not you're losing that fat from your waist and fat deposits there, if you're losing it from your organs, the health benefits for you are even better long term.

Melanie Avalon: I feel like there needs to be a different term like instead of fat burning like fat unlocking, because not so much that it presumably burns the fat, but that it just makes it more accessible to the body. 

Forrest Smith: Yes. And this is one thing that we have seen good literature on, is when you're in metabolic disorder, it's more difficult to mobilize fat. And so, using photobiomodulation to get out of prediabetes/metabolic disorder as part of a broader approach with diet and a number of different therapy kind of intervention methods has been very successful. And so, adding this on top of it does nothing but moves the needle in the correct way. But, yeah, fat mobilization, particularly when there's a restriction for it, like with prediabetic or diabetic people, is definitely enhanced by using laser therapy. 

Melanie Avalon: So actually, using the device, what is the response curve of the effects in a single session and is more better, what does that look like time wise and the effects that people see? 

Forrest Smith: Our device, we've developed it to a 15-minute optimal window relative to kind of the dosing that we want to see from those photoacceptors. With that said though, you can do that twice a day, because a number of the different things that you're triggering, like the hemoglobin and cytochrome c oxidase, for lack of a better term, they'll reset within 12 hours. So, if you can do it in the morning and the evening, you're going to certainly see a much better benefit than you would for just doing it one time a day.

Melanie Avalon: So, with the resetting, say you do it in the morning, and then you do it again like 4 hours later. Does that not have effect and also push back the reset window? 

Forrest Smith: If you did it 4 hours later, just do it at a shorter time period. So, say 5 minutes, the devices. So, the modules that we make can be changed from 5, 10, or 15 minutes. And if you've done 15 minutes in the morning and you don't have the evening time to do it or you have a window opening up 4 or 5 hours later, just do it a shorter amount of time because essentially what you're trying to do is trigger the ones that have reset. And there's a percentage of them, it's a statistical model of some percentage of them have reset by that time and some haven't.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so just to double clarify, so when they're not yet reset, are they listening at all? I'm just wondering. So, when they're not reset, what happens when you put light on them? 

Forrest Smith: They won't be listening at all. If you're looking at essentially kind of a 12-to-14-hour reset, that doesn't happen at 12 or 14 hours. That happens as a percentage over that time. So, some percentage of it will still be reasonable to interact with 4 or 5 hours later. You just won't need to dose it as much because it won't be 100%. 

Melanie Avalon: I didn't know you could change the time on it. Do you do that on the actual device itself?

Forrest Smith: That's right. If you turn it on and then hold the button for 2 seconds, then it will beep and it will move the white indicator from 5 minutes to 10 minutes to 15 to 5 again.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I just learned something. And for listeners, it's such a cool device. I can tell that you have a forte in product development. It's really easy to use and you have these three different units that just really easily clip into this strap that you can put around your knee. And then they're really easy to take out and charge. And it's cool because you turn one on and it turns all of them on. It feels really magical. [chuckles] I remember the first time I turned it on, I was like, “Oh, [laughs] it's all connected now magically.” As far as people using them, because like I said, it does come with this strap that's really great for putting around your knee and stuff. But we've been talking in this show about treating all different areas. So, if people are doing that, how should they do that? Should they use the strap at all? What would that look like? 

Forrest Smith: So, we have people doing everything from plantar fasciitis treatments, which has been great. We treat plantar fasciitis, on soft tissue issues we treat very effectively. For the plantar fasciitis, people will take it and put it inside of their socks because they feel it's more comfortable for them than the strap is. We also have an extender strap, and I need to get you one if you don't have one yet because it's been amazing. I have. I'm a tall Crossfitter which is to say deadlifts and Olympic lifts will trigger my lower back to flare out once every two months, something like this. So, I treat that tissue in my lower back daily now. And it's so much better. When I started this, if I triggered my back with kind of box jumps or a deadlift or something like this, I'd be out for a month and a half, maybe six weeks something like this. Right now, I'm out for three days, four days, then I'm back in, just because the tissue is so much healthier there. But, yeah, the extension strap. I put the three modules as close together as possible and then put the extension strap around my waist, and then I do my lower back for 15 minutes, and then I just spin it around and do my gut for 15 minutes every day.

And the results of this have been really awesome. And I probably should be treating my knee every day, but I have the same problem that everyone has, which is if it's not screaming at me, my knee with a meniscus tear in it, then I kind of just let it go, and so it'll flare up every now and then from, again, box jumps or rope work or something like this, heavy squats. And when it does, I treat it. As long as it stays painful, inflamed, I treat it, which is, again, what we like to tell our users is keep treating it after it stops being inflamed. Keep treating it after it stops being in pain, because what we'd like to see is that fire in the kitchen completely put out versus leaving kind of smoldering embers in there with that kitchen on fire analogy. But I fall into the same trap that everyone does. There's only so many hours in the day. What I should do is the same thing that we've told everyone else, which is stack it with something that you pragmatically do every day.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, habits. [chuckles] 

Forrest Smith: Yes. Habit stacking is the way. [chuckles] 

Melanie Avalon: When I'm working on show preps and sitting, watching TV and typing on my computer, that's when I strap myself up. But even I forget too because when it's flaring, it's so easy, because you're like, “Ah, I got to fix this.” But when it's not, not so much. Okay, wait, how do you treat it? Where do you put it on your gut? I definitely want to start doing that.

Forrest Smith: So, I start probably two inches below my belly button, and then move it up about an inch and a half and then move it up about an inch and a half. And I treat each of those areas for about five minutes. One of the things and we're bringing out a gut-focused product that will dose this area even. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh.

Forrest Smith: Oh, yes. It's so exciting. [laughs]

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I'm excited. I'm so excited. Okay. 

Forrest Smith: I am as well. I think there's one thing that I've noticed from this one, even though it's not the completely optimal dose for the gut, we've got some different wavelengths that we're bringing in and kind of the balance of those. And the testing has been so exciting. But even with just treating with this one, I just feel better. Your gut produces a lot of your dopamine. The impact and this is actually an interesting thing, where you see even the impact for people who have Parkinson's, where you have this piece of your brain called the substantia nigra. That's a dopamine-producing area of your brain and when it stops being able to produce that when those cells have some kind of impairment, one of the ways that presents is with Parkinson's. And one of the things that we've seen with this remote photobiomodulation is because you can produce dopamine in your gut, the Parkinson's symptoms are offset by treating your gut with this light therapy. But if you're just doing it from a daily basis and you don't have dementia, for me, I just feel better. I feel more stable and happier and just in a better mood on a daily basis from the treatments. 

Melanie Avalon: I don't know if you can talk about it, but what will the design of that look like for the gut one? 

Forrest Smith: We've got a new platform we've designed around. It's essentially small, roughly one to one-and-a-half-inch diameter modules that slip into a breathable waistband that you can put around your stomach and you can take them out and put them into the charger and then you can charge them up and put them back in. And the same kind of thing as the MOVE+, you press one, they all turn on, but they have five different wavelengths instead of two. And those five different wavelengths are weighted in their output relative to what's going to be healthiest for your gut. Yeah. I'm so excited about today. Similar to you, it sounds like I'm a product person, and I love product design, and this is really, really cool stuff that we're going to be able to get to people. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness. I'm so excited. I know with product design, its timelines are not fun, but do you have a timeline on it. [chuckles] I want it now.

Forrest Smith: [chuckles] Yes, we'll put you on the beta testing programs. We have our beta modules for this coming in by the end of the month. So, we're putting in testing with those with a select number of people in October with the idea to launch an Indiegogo campaign to bring our community around it and get it out to the market in early 2024. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness. Okay. I'm so excited and I'm excited because it never occurred to me to use this on my gut until now. So, I'm going to start doing that like the current version, the MOVE+. Have there been any studies on how it affects gut bacteria? 

Forrest Smith: I'll send you some through, if your listeners want to download them, there's amazing impacts on gut. So a couple of things that are impacted are the bacteria and so you see this. One of the problems with gut though is and it's going to be a little bit less direct a metric for us than the brain ones that we're developing as well, where we're looking at being able to test the brain tissue for metabolic dynamics and hemodynamics. With the gut, we only have a snapshot, because essentially what we can do for these is blood and fecal draws. So, you have this kind of static picture and it's one of the things that's making the gut ones a little bit harder to kind of quantify with the outcomes. But what we do see is there's something called the F/B ratio, which is two different kind of classes of bacteria in your gut, and if you have them at the right ratio, then your gut operates more effectively.

So the F/B ratio balance improves with laser therapy. You also see-- And these are more expensive, so we've been limited to date on how many of these we can do, but metabolomics, so you can test the kind of waste materials of these different gut biome bacteria for what they eat and then what they turn out as their metabolites. You can do fecal tests for these. And so, what we see is improvements in a few different chemicals. But I'll send you through the full papers. So, if people want to read them, they're there to read. But it's just super exciting and it's also just nice to see it on a daily basis where you can actually feel it. So, I'd love to hear, as you start folding it in with your protocols, how you feel about it. And if you notice anything on a daily basis from your daily mood and how you feel.

Melanie Avalon: Definitely I will. I'm so, so excited about that. Okay, that made me think of some other questions. One, does it need to be direct on your skin? Does it go through clothes at all? 

Forrest Smith: Ideally, it's direct on your skin. That's we've dosed the model, kind of built our dosing model around. It's essentially to be able to calculate how much is delivered through to those photoacceptors. But the other piece of it is also, and there're a couple of recent studies on this, when you compress it on your skin, it blanches the skin, and so it removes some of the surface level absorption that you would have otherwise and helps you have better penetration for it. So definitely on the skin. 

Melanie Avalon: So direct contact has that effect. 

Forrest Smith: That's right. 

Melanie Avalon: And then, oh, this is just a product question about it. Is there a way to turn off the sound? Because sometimes I would hold it up to my head. The first time I did this, I was like, laying in my sauna and I had it up to my head, and I was like, kind of napping at the same time. And the beep went off and I almost had a heart attack because it was like Indiegogo campaign, [laughs] is there any way to adjust the sound? 

Forrest Smith: We haven't yet, but that's a great note. I'm going to send our team a note about this. We are developing an app that will be released next year, and I think that would probably be something that comes in with the app where we could say, “Turn on, turn off the sound.” It does have a buzz as well. So, I'm sure with the complement of the buzz plus the beep, especially when it's on your head. Yeah, that could definitely be a little bit off-putting, but I'll put in a note to talk with our team about that. One other note, if you are treating your gut daily, try to treat the brain as well. And I'll send you through a diagram for where on the brain to treat, because these are things that stack quite effectively, that gut-brain axis is a really powerful one. So if you're treating both of them, then you get this kind of synergistic increase with the impacts. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I will definitely do that. And yeah, that would be amazing about the sound, because when I'm doing it on my brain, I set an alarm on my phone to go off before it goes off because it scares me so bad. So otherwise, I'm like anticipating the sound going off. It's not too loud if it's not right by your head, but when it's right by your head it's a little bit loud. Okay, two other organ questions that made me think of. Are there studies on the sex organs? 

Forrest Smith: Yes. And so not necessarily on the organs exactly, but on sexual health and sexual dysfunction, I think this comes back to the nitric oxide that you see, which is a good vasodilator. So, for men's sexual health, there are numerous studies showing an impact on sexual health in general, and I believe on erectile dysfunction, although I'm going to take a note to send you a note about this, because I believe that they also tested this as well, but definitely for general sexual health. On the female side, a couple of things that we've seen with this, and I think, and I'm really glad you asked the question, one of the things I didn't know, and I'm not sure why I would have, but it's strange to me that I didn't, was that the tissue in your body that has the most inflammation and the most you know orders of magnitude, more inflammation and more regularly than any other tissue in your body is the uterine lining. And so, we interacted with and managed inflammation very effectively. And so, a couple of things that we've seen amazing results for, but hadn't really quantified those yet, was monthly menstrual pains and discomfort as well as endometriosis. 

And so we're actually working on dialing in a separate product for how we can dose those most effectively, because the results with, you know, the first time we tested this was, we had a chief science officer whose wife was suffering from endometriosis, and she would be down for a couple of days at a time and the pharmaceuticals don't help with it. It was just going to be a miserable couple of days. And so, he said, “Look, this is something that should technically be impacted positively by our device. Why don't you try it out?” And within 30 minutes, she was without pain and was back to her normal life. And it's hard to find people more excited than folks who get those kinds of results. 

Melanie Avalon: That's amazing. I do know, especially in the biohacking sphere, a lot of men will use it to treat themselves for, I think, for sperm production. I've also heard that maybe there could be a negative effect on sperm, do you know if that's the case, if it's overdone.

Forrest Smith: It definitely can be. One of the things that we've seen with. So, I think both people treating testicles for sperm production, but also for testosterone production.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, actually, that's probably why? Yeah.

Forrest Smith: But there are benefits to it. But the dosing model is very different from standard tissue, and we haven't done that dosing model yet. And so, what we've seen for it is that it should be a lot lower dose, but we haven't dug into that literature and really provided that dosing yet. So, I would say with this, if you were going to do it A, we'd advise you to wait until we kind of do the math on photoacceptors and what's really going to move the needle from the correct dosing. So, if you can wait and we can get this math done and testing done, if you were going to do it directly, limit it to less than 5 minutes. This is certainly not going to be that 15-minute dosing schedule that you'd see for soft tissue remodeling.

Melanie Avalon: And what about for women? Is there a potential issue if they're putting it on their vulvas?

Forrest Smith: No. What we've seen from women is that the dosing that we're working on in that space, we have kind of addressed a little bit more directly than we have kind of men's issues and men's tissue is that actually getting kind of treating uterine lining through the pelvis area is the correct way to do it and we're dialing that in. But we haven't seen this lower dose or higher sensitivity to dosage that we have with the testicles. 

Melanie Avalon: My brain is just going crazy places now with product development. I'm like, “What would a vibrator be like with red light therapy? Would that beneficial?” [laughs] Oh, my goodness. 

Forrest Smith: It's not a bad idea. 

Melanie Avalon: That's really funny. Another question. Well, speaking to that point about overdoing it. So, are there other concerns about overusing it anywhere? And that actually brings me, I said I had a question about another organ. So, the eye, is this good for the eye? Does it damage the eye? What are the effects on the eye? 

Forrest Smith: Our maximum output per laser is 5 mW which means that we're under a threshold for eye damage. The FDA doesn't like us to tell people to stare at lasers anyway, but there are devices out there that are cleared for things like macular degeneration, that are higher powered than our devices or per laser higher powered that don't damage the tissue there. So, again, the FDA, with anything in the laser class, doesn't like us to say, “point this at your eyes,” but from a scientific and safety standpoint, we really don't see any reason not to. So, the risk doesn't exist aside from us with a regulatory standpoint, if that makes sense. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it definitely does. Is your device a medical device? 

Forrest Smith: It is. It's an FDA-cleared device. And we actually were going to go for a Class 2. We get a lot of people misunderstanding the dosing out of these the dosing that we have-- so dosing versus-- There're different safety classes for lasers. And I think our product, we originally planned, without much additional complexity to it, to release as a Class 2 device with slightly higher power lasers. We've actually tested those with the physiological responses. And instead of using 150 W laser, using 10,15 W lasers as an example, that's not the exact dosing we have, but kind of breaking the power output into smaller, lower power lasers was actually much more effective from the physiological interactions and adaptations you're trying to trigger. We get a lot of questions from people like, “Hey, medical devices are Class 3, Class 4 lasers. You know, why don't you guys make the Class 3, Class 4?”

Well, it's because the dosing that comes out of those isn't as effective. There's hotspotting you have. There’s a number of different things you have to deal with in these dosing models. So, as an example, I mentioned hotspotting. If you put a Class 3, Class 4 laser trying to penetrate through to a certain depth of tissue with photoacceptors at that depth of tissue that you're trying to trigger, if you're pushing higher density of power through the laser, which is why people would get the Class 3 or Class 4, then you're also having a negative impact in the tissue between the deeper tissue and the laser. So, anything that's between those two is having a negative impact for it, which is why we're seeing such good results for. I think we have three modules with 10 lasers on them each. It was an increased cost to us to do that, but we saw substantially better outcomes by again breaking that down and distributing it more effectively. 

Melanie Avalon: And it just occurred to me how I can habit stack this while I'm recording, because now I'm holding it and I'm putting it on different areas I can habit stack while recording. Just if you hear the really loud sound, I just got to turn the sound off, only thing. And actually, to that, because that's making me think, because right now I'm, like, holding it to my head. So, going back to the use and the timelines and everything, like, if I'm putting it on my head in different areas, is it basically just, I would do like one session in one area or could it be like, 10 minutes in one spot on my head and then 10 minutes on another spot on my head, and then how does that work? You've touched on this a bit, but just to get super clarity on that. 

Forrest Smith: Sure. So, I would love to send you a couple of different-- There've been different things tested. What we found most effective is treating prefrontal cortex. And if you're treating prefrontal cortex, one of the things that you'll also see a benefit for is outside of treating just the brain, your brain has a self-cleaning system called lymphatic system. And if you're treating your prefrontal cortex, for example, if you've been low on sleep the last couple of days, what you'll see is the glymphatic system will start backing up, and you'll have waste in your brain that your brain would really prefer to have gotten rid of by way of more sleep. But if you're traveling or if you got jet lag or something like this, treating the prefrontal cortex and then sinuses is an amazing way to help your glymphatic system clear out all of that waste that you've generated more of or and that you've stacked up more of by not giving your body enough time to process it from a sleep standpoint.

Melanie Avalon: That made me think of two more things. What about hair growth? 

Forrest Smith: Hair growth, it actually increases quite effectively, and it works synergistically with different hair chemicals. I'm struggling for the actual kind of commonly used one, but there are topically applied chemicals to be able to increase hair growth or to reduce kind of androgenic hair loss. And particularly the infrared works very well with those. So, in conjunction and synergistically with these chemicals.

Melanie Avalon: I'm having flashbacks to my really early biohacking days, and I think the first thing I did when I found this whole world of red light and near-infrared was I ordered diodes. I thought I was going to try to make a hair cap myself. I didn't. I actually, just the other day, found all the stuff I ordered, and I was like, “Oh, well, that project never happened.” But, yeah, I was really interested in the potential for the hair and the thyroid. Can it treat the thyroid? 

Forrest Smith: Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up, because we've just been digging into this more recently. My partner Tom has Hashimoto’s, has an impaired thyroid function because of this. And up until about two years ago, there were questions about whether laser therapy was going to damage your thyroid. And so, it was a contraindication for us. And we would just say, “Hey, don't point it at your thyroid, because we've been advised by the medical literature that this is something that's going to increase risks for you.” And what we found out in the last two years, and particularly this year, there's been some great studies, and I'm happy I got a bunch of doses things to send through to you. [chuckles] 

What we found is that thyroid actually is not negatively impacted by this and that our dosing for it is exactly in line with a couple of great studies where people were having impaired thyroid function, like a Hashimoto's. Some subset of these people were given supplements, and some subset were given laser therapy, and some subset were given the combination. And the combination was the most effective way of increasing function and substantially more than either the laser or the supplements just by themselves.

Melanie Avalon: Two questions. Was it supplements or was it thyroid medication? 

Forrest Smith: This was supplements. So, this was people who had Hashimoto's that were--

Melanie Avalon: Supplements, interesting. The second question, so were there studies though showing damage? I'm wondering what was happening with the confusion originally. 

Forrest Smith: No, I think they just flagged this as more susceptible tissue. And because it's signaling tissue where you're having so much to do, hormones are such a powerful leverage factor for your body that if you are triggering substantial changes in your hormone profiles, then you could have significant risk from that. And they just need to do the testing. And this is what's come out from it, is they have now, which is great because we're seeing really awesome things. And again, these are 2022, 2023 studies, and a couple of them were actually-- one of them was just from August. And so, it's awesome to see that and be able to talk to people who, again, my business partner, one of the things that we found is we started this around joint pain, because we felt like all of us had joint pain. And this is something where it does impact your life, and it can put you in a negative spiral, and it's really high, especially chronic joint pain is very highly correlated with depression.

And so, the idea is to empower people to get away from pharmaceuticals in a meaningful way and give them a solution that, again, is going to put out the fire in the kitchen versus just taking the batteries out of the fire extinguisher, out of the fire alarm. So, it's great to see where we can apply this. Two things that we've seen actually very recently is, one is my partner can use this for his Hashimoto thyroiditis, which is a thyroid specific autoimmune disorder. And so that's one where we can say, “Hey, let's apply it to this and get him healthier from this.” But our other partner, Max, has irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease and our gut product is able to actually treat that and reduce the inflammation and give him a better quality of life. So, it really kind of starts-- a lot of this is just great to be able to see again coming back to our mission. Great to be able to see people's quality of life change from work that we've done.

Melanie Avalon: Wow, I love that. No, I'm just thinking now how I'm going to get this for my mom. She has a lot of, a lot of joint pain. What I think great about it is, I think she would actually, especially like thinking about how you can just hold this in all different areas and such. I think she would actually use it. It's hard for me to get her to actually use stuff, but awesome. A few other questions I thought of. This is kind of out there, but does the light have any effect on third party things? So, for example, if you were to shine it on your food, would it do anything to the food then when you ate the food would be more anti-inflammatory? That's like way out there. 

Forrest Smith: What you'll see, though, is they are doing blood irradiation studies with this right now, and those are inconclusive from what I've seen. They may have something new that I haven't seen, but those are inconclusive to date of people who are going through things like kidney transplants and they're having their blood processed outside of their body. One of the things they've been testing is, “Oh, well, if your blood Is outside of your body, can we treat that with this type of laser therapy?” And then as it goes back into you, you get healthier. And so, I think the jury is still out on that one, but you ask the best questions. I'm going to have to take some notes and send you the latest I can find on that. 

Melanie Avalon: What about treating your pets? 

Forrest Smith: Yes, absolutely. Treat your pets. Many of our team are pet owners and our pets are getting older. I've got an Australian Shepherd who's, I think, 11 now, and they have these hip issues, and she is just bounding around like a puppy now. She was starting to kind of be slower getting up and down off of the beds and sofas and things like this, but we treat her, I would say, three or four times a week now with her hips, and she's gotten kind of full range of motion back and is 100% functional again.

Melanie Avalon: Now that I think about it, just because I've been talking about red light and near-infrared for so long, I've had so many listeners send in pictures of their experiences with red light and near-infrared. And I think the most common picture people send in is pictures of their pets with the modular devices, because the animals will just flock to it. They'll go and sit by them. So, I think it's very telling that they intuitively know something's going on there. 

Forrest Smith: Yes. And she loves it now. We've got it to wear-- at first, sometimes they can be a little bit, like, skittish about it, but after they kind of do it the first time, all of our dogs from our company, our internal folks who have dogs, they just get into it. They really love it. 

Melanie Avalon: So, I grow cucumbers in my apartment. Should I shine light on them? 

Forrest Smith: You can. There're different types of light profiles for them where I think it's red and blue. So interestingly enough and it's the chlorophyll that interacts with the light, kind of like it normally would in nature. But one thing, I didn't know until I kind of looked into the biochemical structures or the chemical structures of these molecules was chlorophyll is not that different from hemoglobin. It's actually a lot closer than you'd think. 

Melanie Avalon: Mm-hmm. It's like magnesium is the difference, I think. 

Forrest Smith: Yes. Which is wild, because you think about hemoglobin being the fount of life and delivering oxygen for us and then plants are really not that far off from this. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, no, that's really, really crazy. I don't know if you know anything about this, but have you read, I know there are studies on this though about how it affects deuterium levels. 

Forrest Smith: I have not read that. Deuterium levels. 

Melanie Avalon: It's funny because I've done quite a few episodes on deuterium depletion. Are you familiar with that whole world? 

Forrest Smith: No, I'm not. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so basically, it's a version of hydrogen, and long story short, there's basically, like, protium, which is what we think of when we think of hydrogen. Then there's deuterium, which is a heavy isotope of hydrogen, and then there's hydrogen, like hydrogen bomb stuff. But in any case, a lot of people who studied deuterium believe that it's a primary cause in a lot of our diseases today, because it basically doesn't, to use very casual terminology, fit properly in the mitochondria so it kind of affects how everything functions. And so, you can do deuterium depletion protocols where you drink deuterium depleted water. That's what I'm drinking right now actually. The majority of the studies are on chemotherapy and cancer, and it improving, like, cancer patients on deuterium depletion protocols increasing chemotherapy outcomes. But it's interesting because the first time I ever heard about it was before I even had interviewed people about deuterium and it was interviewing the founders of Joovv like one of my first episodes way back in the day. And they mentioned that red light had an effect on deuterium. So, that's a whole rabbit hole. 

Forrest Smith: That is super interesting. I'm going to have to dig into this and send some more notes. Have another Q&A on this. 

Melanie Avalon: I'll actually put that out there if listeners would like to submit questions, because, yeah, if you're open to it, I'd love to do Q&A in the future. Oh, and then maybe it would be after the gut product has come out and we could talk more about that. 

Forrest Smith: That'd be awesome. That'd be amazing. I'd love to kind of go in and if they've got specific questions about the gut or the brain products that are in development, or just kind of neuromuscular pain, inflammation with the MOVE+, we spend thousands of hours in this, and I'd love to kind of apply that wherever we can. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. So, listeners, you can go to kineon.io. And you can use the coupon code MELANIEAVALON for 10% off sitewide and free shipping. So definitely take advantage of that. One last question I have to ask. This will probably come in with Q &A. Do these devices emit significant EMF? The product line I'm actually developing is an EMF-blocking product line. 

Forrest Smith: That's awesome. So, no, not significant when they pair or when you signal them so when you turn them on, they signal from one to the other. But it's a really minimal level of EMF on those. And I can send you over the testing that's done with these and some of the EMF testing kind of done with physiology in general. But, yeah, very minimal signaling EMF between them and when they're already paired or they're already on, they no longer need to do that. Or if they're in their case, they no longer need to do that. So, it's really just kind of like when they're out of the case and set there, they need to know if one of them is waving to the other one and saying, “Turn on.” So, there's, again, minimal signaling out of that. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. So, it's just during that brief magical moment where they're talking to each other for like a hot second, no pun intended. Okay. Awesome. Well, this has been absolutely incredible. I think now listeners understand why I just had to have you on and you're just so knowledgeable. It just blows my mind. How can people best follow your work and get the latest updates and all the things? 

Forrest Smith: So, if you come to our kineon.io, you can connect us in through whatever you like, Facebook, Instagram. We have a Facebook group where we spend a lot of time with our community, answering questions and providing videos and different protocols and information studies that we're running and different things like this. That's probably one of the best places you can do it. But, yeah, check us out at kineon.io. And one other thing that I will say is that both my partner, Tom, and I, it's our first direct to consumer business. And so, we really just want to connect with our community. And we've put our Calendlys out there so that really, if anybody's having trouble or doesn't understand anything about the device or just wants to talk us through expectations, we're available to connect with us directly as well, because that's our mission, is to help you move the needle on the quality of life. And if we're not doing that, raise a hand and we're happy to jump in with you. 

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Do you like the DTC world? I love it. 

Forrest Smith: I do, I do I really just like connecting with people? Because I think most people want reasonable things and interact with a reasonable way around it. And occasionally you run into a bad apple, but it's not enough to spoil the bunch. It more highlights how awesome people are in general versus kind of pulls you down into the guys who are approaching things with a less proactive or optimistic outcome. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. No, I love it so much. That's appropriate because actually, the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it relates to mindset and things that we are just talking about, what is something that you're grateful for? 

Forrest Smith: Oh, where could I stop it? [chuckles] I might be on here for another couple of hours. Grateful for our community who have been so amazing and to share their stories with how this changed in their lives. Grateful to have a team that's been committed in with us from the start on making something amazing happen, and grateful to be able to wake up every day just excited to work on something that's going to do something so positive for the people around us. And I think that's about as short as I could keep it. But yes, I really grateful for the time you spent with me today. And there's so much more to do in this space. And we're so excited about what's happening. Hopefully that comes through the kind of passion and optimism we have relative to what we can do with getting people away from the poor choices they have with pharmaceuticals and really give them something that they can move forward with their quality of life. 

Melanie Avalon: No, I love that so much. And I am so grateful for what you're doing. And now I totally forgot. I think we actually first, even before our last lost episode, we had a phone call where we first connected about all this, and I could tell then I was like, “Oh, wow. A, he gets his stuff. B, he's passionate. C, you're just really doing incredible things.” And that was before I think I even had the device. And now I'm just so inspired because, like I said, “I was primarily using it on my knee, but now I'm just going to use it all the places.” 

Forrest Smith: Love it, love it. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. [chuckles] This is so great. So, again, for listeners, kineon.io coupon code MELANIEAVALON will get you 10% off as well as free shipping. Thank you so much, Forrest. This was so, so amazing. I hopefully can't wait to have you back in the future, and I look forward to everything that you're doing. 

Forrest Smith: Super excited about it. Thank you so much, Melanie. 

Melanie Avalon: Thanks. Have a good day.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]