Pain-Killing Without Pharmaceuticals: Is This The Most Powerful Wearable Red Light Therapy That Exists? The Kineon Move+ With Forrest Smith

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast for photobiomodulation.

The key is the dosing. The key is how are we delivering these photons to these photoacceptors. It's kind of like pharmaceuticals in that way. We are using photons to add energy into molecules where that's going to trigger a downstream signaling effect. And to do that, you have to be very specific and direct in how you're adding these different molecules.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. Well, folks, I'm pretty stoked about my guests on today's show. We had dinner on a rooftop in Mexico several months ago, almost a year ago, in San Miguel de Allende. Beautiful city. His name's Forrest Smith, and Forrest is a former pretty extreme athlete, rugby player, crossfitter, and wound up getting into some pretty interesting technology that he studied up on in China and beyond. And I'm just going to leave that there as a big mystery that he and I are going to get a chance to talk about later on because I love the stuff that he actually brings to the world in the realm of what's called photo biomodulation. Oh, yeah, photobiomodulation. A mouthful. Anyways, as you listen in everything that we talk about, including more information on this Kineon technology that force has brought to the world, you can find@bengreenfieldlife.com Kineon podcast and Kineon is spelled K I N kian, E o N. So. BenGreenfieldLife.com Kineon Podcast Forest welcome to the show, man.

Thank you so much. It's great to see you again and super excited to talk to you today.

Yeah, yeah. It's been a little while. You. Do you remember the name of that restaurant we had dinner at in San Miguel de Allende?

I'll have to look it back up, actually, but it was very good. Really good.

Excellent. One of the best meals I had there. Yeah. Yeah. How long have you lived in Mexico, by the way?

I've been in Mexico for about three years now. And this is going to sound funny, but I typically live in China. I left China. I've been in China for almost 20 years, building innovative hardware and technology companies and manufacturing, basically because it was the middle of the supply chain. And I speak and read and write fluent Chinese. But when Covid kicked off, it seemed a little bit unsettling. So I took my family. It looked like they were going to lock the country down. And so before they could, I took my family, my two boys and my wife, and started traveling. And when we did, the assumption was we'd be traveling for a couple of months and then come back to China to our normal life and house and dog. And what happened in reality was the borders were shut, our visas were canceled, the flights were canceled, and we had to find a new place to live almost overnight. And so, having just been in Mexico to visit, we picked out six cities in Mexico to try out and ended up settling down here.

Man, I know you have a pretty interesting history of how you got into China in the first place, but how far are you from San Miguel de Allende, where we met up for dinner?

Between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic.

I was talking with a guy who's actually pretty well known in the health sector. I won't drop his name right now because I don't know if he wants to be busted for this or not, but he believes that there is going to be a pretty big recessionary event in America and honestly, beyond. And I asked him, we were walking on the beach. I asked him this question. I said, well, if you could go anywhere in the world to live in the safest place possible with the most amount of freedom possible, if you. If there were some kind of a global or even national recession, where would you go? And he said, mexico. He said, it's just super easy to get a visa or even an alternate citizenship. That it is very friendly as far as a place for taxes, for business, et cetera. But what are your thoughts on that?

I've loved it. I was in China for almost 20 years, and I spent a lot of time traveling around Asia for work. And I did not anticipate that getting to Mexico. I was going to be able to find a good place to set up and do the same level of business that we were doing from China. The world's a lot smaller now, and Mexico is super friendly. We're up. It's been great for my training. I'm up at central Mexico. Many of the cities are above 7,000ft up. So if you're doing cardiovascular training, I've got my assault bike and my Echo bike here in the house that I do kind of aerobic, anaerobic training on. And so if you're training at some level like this, it's. It's really helpful from the elevation up. From a business standpoint, it's been great. The schools are really good. I've got two boys, 8 and 4, and they're, they're loving the schools here. They actually shifted from fluent Chinese to fluent Spanish now, which is, it's amazing to see those small changes in day to day life. But from a lifestyle and work standpoint it's been amazing. And I think it's going to get more and more so because you're seeing a large shift from China being a huge supply chain center for the world to people finding that there's a lot of uncertainty around China and Asia right now relative to that and trying to find a space to be able to supplement their supply chain. And I think Mexico is benefited by that quite a lot. And the currency even out the dollar's been very strong, but the currency here is actually outpacing the dollar.

No kidding.

And I think it's reflective of what's happening with the growth with the country.

Wow. Interesting. By the way, you mentioned two bikes. The assault bike, which I'm familiar with was the other one you said, the Echo bike.

That's right, that's right. So the assault bike I started on with my CrossFit training. The Echo bike is made by Rogue, who's a big kind of barbells and plates and lifting equipment racks etc manufacturer and they made their own heavy duty. It's actually a band. So there's a chain like a normal bike chain driving the assault bike. There's a belt driving the Echo bike and because of that it's a little bit quieter. It's more difficult from a calorie standpoint. So if you're comparing one to one on the calories, I find that it's a little bit slower to take over those calories but it's really a well constructed bike.

Interesting. Also look it up. The Echo bike. And that's by Rogue, you said?

That's right.

Okay, got it. Now you originally, speaking of fitness, were big into was it rugby or CrossFit that you got into first?

So I got into CrossFit by way of rugby. I was about 37 or 38 and my neighbor was, was the president and kind of head of the local rugby club in South China in Guangzhou, the city level team. And I'd played American football growing up and I missed the contact but I hadn't played a contact sport in 15 or 20 years. But he got me back out there with rugby and it just ignited something. It's a great sport. The social side of it is amazing and it really plugs you in with a lot of people who are doing fun and interesting things. And so I by way of getting back into rugby, I realized I had to get back into better shape. The rugby team was training CrossFit and so I got into, I came to CrossFit, both rugby and CrossFit in my late 30s.

Oh wow. But leading up to that point you hadn't been doing a lot besides playing football early on.

That's right. I was actually, I had done some type of almost bro science, bro splits type gym lifting, you know, back and biceps one day and kind of legs the next day or something like this, trying to stay in a little bit of shape. But I hadn't really done any metabolic conditioning in some time. And this, you know, that was really kind of more down to the fact that I've always been building startups and, and as part of that time is limited. You're, you're always kind of working seven days a week and it's, it's a little bit more stressful. And what has come to find or come to turn into over time has been the metabolic training has become a bit of a stress relief or mitigation strategy for me and it's been introduced by way of CrossFit. But now with different types of training modalities around this, there's kind of functional bodybuilding and a number of different types of programming that you can find. But for me the main thing was keeping the metabolic training has become more and more important to offset kind of age related injuries and really kind of buy in for the cognitive benefits of this. Because I do see a lot of the neurocognitive benefits from this in the literature, but also just from a daily basis, you feel that much better from an affect and mood standpoint.

You mean when you're doing the metabolic training?

That's right.

Okay, yeah, I agree. I have a great deal of evolution as far as what I've experienced in my own fitness routine. Like this morning's workout was about three 15 minute yoga flow sessions in the sauna with a five minute cold plunge in between each under the red light. So I basically was just doing red light, heat and cold. And for me that's actually pretty metabolically stimulating and honestly somewhat demanding workout if you're holding yoga poses and doing kind of like isometrics with an elevated heart rate and then hitting the cold and going back and forth. But of course a big part of that for me as, as far as my longevity and fitness and the way my joints feel is the red light component. And you and I geeked out on that when we met up in Mexico because you use red Light quite a bit, right?

That's right. I have an old MCL and meniscus tear in my left knee. And one of the things that we've seen as we've been in this kind of red light and laser therapy space for a little bit now with developing products and getting them out for people is that inflammation that you see generated from old injuries that you might trigger. So I might be doing box jumps or doing double unders or something like this as part of my normal training and trigger inflammation in this old injury. This tissue, if you don't treat it and this inflammation, if you don't treat it, doesn't stay local. And it's really dangerous long term from a cardiovascular standpoint because it does things like decreasing, decrease the shear strength that your cardiovascular endothelial tissue can manage. And that's really highly correlated with things like severe cardiovascular events and all cause mortality being one of those things that, that's driven by. It just, it's better to deal with these things faster and in the near term as you can, because it's just something that, you know, both we, we've done some measurements actually with NFL players relative to their cardiovascular oxygen delivery for regional impairment as an example. So if you, if you see a guy who's had an ACL tear even eight or 10 years later after he's gone back to playing full time competitive impact Sports like the NFL, his quad above his injured knee will be 1 to 2 degrees cooler than the, the healthy. And that's because of the cardiovascular system being impaired. It's, it's really, you know, it's one of those things that's really coming out in the literature over the past two to five years where this, this inflammation from that local injury is spreading through the body and it's, it's not happening overnight. It's something that, that takes time. But you see the regional impairments being, being cardiovascular delivery and you're seeing things like this inflammation, mediating stiffening of the cardiovascular endothelial or your blood vessel walls. What they call shear strength is a good measure for this, which is basically you're measuring how much pressure that the blood flow going through these blood vessels puts on them. There's a friction kind of shear strength is what they call that, for how much pressure it's putting on it kind of from a perpendicular standpoint. And that's substantially stiffened and lowers your shear strength resistance for your cardiovascular endothelial tissue. When you have chronic inflammation. That could be a knee, it could be a shoulder, it could be an old injury in your lower back. It impacts you both, again, kind of regionally, locally, regionally, but also systemically.

This is really interesting. This is actually the first time I've ever heard that regional inflammation from something like an injury or a chronic condition could in a way spread systemically and affect endothelial tissue or the cardiovascular system in other areas of the body. You know, it's been in the past year that I've become very aware of the endothelial glycocalyx. I interviewed a couple folks from a cardiovascular supplement company called Calroy about this and I'll put a link to that in the show notes because we geeked out on this endothelial glycocalyx quite a bit in that episode. But I learned that you can support the endothelial glycocalyx with things like red light minerals and most notably during that interview, sulfur based compounds, glutathione, N, acetylcysteine, various seaweed derivatives, et cetera. And so it's really interesting now that you're talking about managing the hypoxia, the inflammation and the cytokine production in these areas that might have been injured as a way to support more global endothelial tissue. That's super interesting. Now, have you come across, Forrest, any information that might indicate that not properly managing or allowing chronic inflammation to continue in an injured or beat up area of the body could also result in any type of elevated calcium scan scores, plaque deposition, anything like that in the heart?

Right now we're drawing lines from correlations to correlations, but there has recently been a couple of studies digging into these mediating factors. So how we see these really high correlations between local inflammation and this cardiovascular endothelial stiffening, and with that stiffening, there's a high correlation to these plaque deposits. And so you're kind of making logical leaps to that. So I don't want to say, I don't want to say that we're, we've seen these mediating factors. We have found the mediating factors for inflammation where we found the correlation with the, the endothelial tissue stiffening. I haven't seen as far as my research, a smoking gun for these mediating factors from the that to the plaques. But there is a very high correlation between the stiffening and the plaque deposition.

Yeah, the mechanism of action would certainly make sense. Now, stepping back, big picture, when it comes to this idea of using red light therapy on injury, like you said, I think you had for your knee, I believe, is this something that you initially got into as a part of your involvement with CrossFit and rugby, or were you interested in red light therapy prior to that?

Actually, oddly enough, my mother brought this to my attention. She finds a lot of kind of ahead of the curve type things. And in my previous role, I founded a LED lighting and controls business. And we spent a lot of time in the supply chain going to different fabs and kind of upstream providers of these technology pieces of that business and spent a lot of time in really understanding how the core technology works. And as an expert in that space, my mother was, was interested to understand is this red light therapy something that is real or is this just snake oil that somebody's, you know, somebody's out there peddling? And my, my first reaction was this has gotta be snake oil because it's, it's claiming a number of, claiming the ability to treat a number of different pathologies that would be difficult. How, how do all these pathologies share a similar kind of mechanistic foundation? But one of the things that we found is that there are a few different signaling molecules that are triggered in the body. So, long story short, I went in and I couldn't find something that proved this was a snake oil, which was annoying to me. And so I spent more and more time digging back through the medical literature trying to understand what the mechanisms were. And this was years ago in the, the medical literature has expanded out since then, but we've started and our team contribute to an ongoing database of photobiomodulation, or light therapy studies that's up in the 7000s now, where different studies are tracking different aspects of the treatment of the different pathologies, of the mechanisms of mediation of these effects of these outcomes. What we found though, is that we trigger a few different photoacceptors in the body. And those photoacceptors can be triggered by different wavelengths and are optimally triggered at different frequencies and at different powers. And so at Kenion, that's one of the things we spend a lot of our time on in the tens of thousands of hours at this point is modeling how light distributes through tissue. And I think this is something that's very unique about our team. And our approach is most photobiomodulation companies that we've seen have really focused on what we consider engineering dose measurements or metrics. And as an example, that would be things like joules per centimeter squared. You're looking at things like irradiance and power density, which is essentially how much light is coming out of a device or an emitter. And how much light is going into a tissue. What we found is a better way to approach this and has allowed us to build a much more effective dosing model is start from the start, backwards, start from the results that you want to implement. And what we've done with that is said, okay, we know these photoacceptors exist within this depth of tissue in this general volume. How do we model how the light and the photons that we're delivering reach and optimally trigger these signaling molecules that were, that we're targeting in the body? And there were some existing models, one of them is called a Lambert Beer that we've used from our modeling internally and upgraded kind of standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were. But these models essentially show how photons distribute through tissue. And with our understanding that we have now for where these photo acceptors exist and where these reservoirs of them are and what, at what scale they exist at these depths of tissue, we've now modeled what's optimal for delivering photons to these. And what was important for us to do with the back end of this to be able to make sure that we're not just kind of doing mathematical models, you know, in the, you know, building castles in the, in the clouds as it were, is putting in feedback loops, positive feedback loops from measuring the physiology in real time. And there's some people in this space that I have to mention here that have been doing some great work. Evan Paikon over at in Knox, we're using their devices from a serum nitric oxide measurement standpoint to help us baseline if our model says this is what we should. So as an example, one of the things that we're targeting inside the body is hemoglobin. When we interact with hemoglobin with near infrared light, we reduce the affinity of nitric oxide for that hemoglobin and it dumps a bunch of nitric oxide in the blood. We can now measure that with devices like the in NOx. And that gives us a feedback loop to say we were expecting this level of nitric oxide in the blood. And here's what we found. Our model's broken somehow. So our castles that we've been building and our mathematical abstracts that we've been building are not reality based. And so we, we used those to baseline what we were doing from a modeling standpoint. And they've really helped us dial in a powerful dosing model that again, that we feel is very different from anything we've seen either on the clinical or the commercial side with photobiomodulation Yeah, I.

Haven'T mentioned it yet on this podcast, but this Kineon, that's your company that you developed, is currently a wraparound red light therapy device that is used on joints. At least that's the current model that exists. That's how it's used. I have a couple of them. I put them on my knees sometimes in the morning. Used them on my elbows before a tennis tournament last week. I know that you probably don't like it when I say this, but I put it around my neck sometimes to radiate all the blood going through my body when I want a full body red light treatment without actually turning on a full panel. And so it's an interesting device, but in terms of what you learned as far as nitric oxide production from this N nox, and you did say there was one other person you're going to mention, so I want to make sure you get a chance to if you still want to. But as far as what you found in terms of tissue penetration of red light and the activation of these so called photoacceptors, which I assume is the cytochrome complex, you can correct me if I'm wrong on that. And nitric oxide production, what did you actually find that needed to be altered or changed or optimized as far as the way that people get exposed to red light or the way that people use red light or the form of red light that they use?

What we've really tried to do or what we found from these measurements is that targeting internal tissue, there's a certain amount that you can do with targeting kind of surface level tissue. And so if you're finding devices out there with laser, excuse me, with LEDs versus lasers and panels as an example, it's great for things like increasing type 2 collagen, reducing wrinkles, and wound healing things at the surface level of the tissue? What we found by being able to treat more internally by using lasers and kind of these next generation VCSEL lasers in specific, is that the dosing that you can target for this is much more optimized. And you're working on the 3D version of the treatment model versus kind of this 2D surface version. And just to kind of give a little bit of context to that, lasers emit light in a very direct, in what they call collimated manner. LEDs emit in a Lambertian pattern. And the Lambertian pattern actually initially means that these LED chips emit in 360 degrees. But what you'll see from an electronics part is that those LED chips are packaged in a cup of a surface mount package. That usually limits these to about 120 degrees, which is still extremely broad. And it's just hard to target. It's hard to. It's hard to. For photobiomodulation, the key is the dosing. The key is how are we delivering these photons to these photoacceptors? It's kind of like pharmaceuticals in that way. With that said, if you don't know how, if you can't measure or you can't model how you're delivering that, then you can't really promise outcomes because the outcomes are basically a sine wave. And so it's called the Arndt Scholz curve or the biphasic dose curve, where as it increases, as you increase the dose level, the outcomes and the beneficial outcomes increase until you hit a peak, and then beyond that point, it goes back down. And so you don't know. If you don't know how you're delivering or if you can't measure how you're delivering these photons effectively, then you don't know. You're at the top of this peak. You could be anywhere on there. And this is something where we. I don't particularly like to bag other people's products, but with LED panels as an example, I don't mind, man, nobody's.

Listening except you and me anyways, so go for it.

All right. It's extraordinarily hard to model or to understand what your dosing is, because if you move 2 inches forward or 2 inches back, there's the inverse square law, which means that you're making, essentially by moving 2 inches forward or back, you're making a massive dosing difference, particularly for internal tissue.

Okay, interesting. Now, I have a few questions for us. When you say photoacceptors, what are you referring to?

Molecules? Where. So we don't, we don't use, we use lasers, we don't use ablative, and we don't, we use non ionizing lasers, which means that we're not heating up the tissue. And expecting ablative, typically is using, like lasers like you'd see lasers on sharks for Dr. Lasers to cut things typically. But heating up tissue is what ablative lasers do. Ionizing radiation is something where you're moving electrons around, kind of knocking them out of place. And that's what you see with things like UV and kind of these shorter wavelength radiation emissions, gamma radiation, these type of things. What we're doing is we are using photons to add energy into molecules where that's going to trigger a down downstream signaling effect. And to do that you have to be very specific and direct in how you're adding those, adding that energy into these, these different molecules. There are certain molecules so cytochrome C oxidase that you mentioned in the, the electron transport chain is one of these. Hemoglobin is one of these. Hemoglobin. It's interesting, I didn't really know this until we started working on these type of products and photobiomodulation is a technology, but hemoglobin is really close to chlorophyll and it's chemical makeup. So what you're. But all that to say there are these existing molecules that we can target and that we know the specific wavelengths and that we're dialing in better over time the dosing that they need from a light energy interaction to be able to trigger downstream signaling. And so what do I mean by downstream signaling? When we're triggering cytochrome C oxidase, for example, in the electron transport chain, there's a number of impacts of that. So electron transport chain kind of feeds into oxidative phosphorylation from an energy generation standpoint. And there's, there's kind of four phases of this electron transport chain. The cytochrome C oxidase piece of this can be a bottleneck for the amount of energy that your cells can generate. Essentially when you can generate more energy, it's not just the ATP and energy that you're generating at an increased level. There are because your cells and these cellular functions are so interlocked. The signaling that happens when you increase that energy production means that you're also reducing reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress as an example. So there's a number of knock on effects to anything that you do from a molecular level and the signaling in your cells and and very similar for nitric oxide released within, both within the cell, but also extracellular nitric oxide that really has some beneficial effects for your cardiovascular tissue. And so that's kind of what we're talking about with the interaction with those photoacceptors triggering signaling downstream.

And when you talk about the benefits peaking after a certain treatment time or level of exposure to LED lasers or both. When you say there's a drop off or parabolic curve or inverse U when it comes to the benefits, do you mean that it would be excess stimulation of some of these photoacceptors that would result in almost like a spillover free radical production effect with too much nitric oxide, too much ATP produced, et cetera.

That's right. There's a cap for how much you can trigger from these signals. But what we find the other side is hotspotting as an example. And we get questions quite often, why aren't you guys using Class 3 or Class 4 lasers? And we have to. A lot of our job is education. We're using Class 1 lasers. We were planning on actually using Class 2 lasers in our commercial and home use devices. Those are easy enough to get through fda. And we were actually down the process of getting them through the FDA from a clearance standpoint when we did some internal testing that showed really unequivocally that the dosing that we were providing through one, and this is going to be kind of rough order of magnitude, so it won't be exact, but roughly 1,200 milliwatts part from a laser standpoint was less effective than that same 200 milliwatts broken between five different emitters.

Wow.

And so that, that triggered us to go back and relook at the model. And it makes sense when you actually look at how the light distributes through the tissue. So what we see a lot is when people have a Class 3 or Class 4 or even the Class 2 devices is that a lot of the tissue that they're trying to dose effectively is being overdosed. And you may look at. And one nice thing about photobiomodulation is there's not really an overdose where you go back down below zero. Basically what it does is when you overdose with the light, you just don't get the results that you're expecting. It's not, it's not doing anything damaging. It's just you're not getting the benefits that you would like to. But what we found is with these, with this light distribution is that there's a balance to be had for the power. It's not just the most powerful lasers are going to provide the best results. It really is almost a communication mechanism with these molecular level photoacceptors in the body.

Okay, this is interesting. Now what about if you have. Because I've talked about this before on the podcast after reading a fascinating book about melanin in the skin and this pigment that can be in the body and its interaction with photobiomodulation or photons of light. But upon reading that, even though that was focused on like a dark blackish compound similar to what you'd find in like Shilajit, I've also seen some evidence that photocyanins, like the blue greens that you get from algae like spirulina and chlorella, for example, or even as you're probably aware of, because a lot of people are doing this now, Methylene blue could increase the activity of the electron transport chain in response to red light therapy, potentially also while reducing endothelial nitric oxide synthase. So excessive nitric oxide production. Have you messed around with that at all? Like use your devices in conjunction with methylene blue or shilajit or blue green algae or anything like that that you'd.

Consume orally only with methylene blue to date. And I think that was essentially based around, and there have been a couple of studies on that in the last two years, I believe essentially around we're, you know, with, with light, we're targeting. One of the targets we have from a photoacceptor standpoint is that third phase of the four phases of electron transport chain with methylene blue. And what you see with that is if we, if we remove this third phase of electron transport chain as a bottleneck, then the bottleneck moves somewhere else. And often what you'll see is it moved that fourth phase and the fourth phase is impacted by methylene blue. So what you look at is these synergistic impacts that you can have by removing multiple bottlenecks from this energy production system.

Well, for example, I used a methylene blue product. I think the one I used was called BioBlue this morning before I did red light therapy mixed with cold. And I've always felt that I have more energy and even it seems a little bit of a clearer head. And arguably, even though this is difficult to measure acutely, better mitochondrial response when I'm using one of those compounds or all three of them in conjunction with red light. So yeah, I would recommend if you get a chance, you should mess around with the shilajit or the blue green algae as well, because they seem to produce a similar effect. And research is a little scant on this idea of humans being able to photosynthesize like plants in response to red light, especially with certain nutrients in the body. But I think it's just a very interesting area to experiment with and explore. So you were talking about this law of diminishing returns and the fact that you reach a certain point where you don't really get any additional benefit and may get diminished returns. But what would be a treatment time like with your wraparound device? How long would you put it on to actually get that beneficial dose or that ideal dose?

So essentially we've dosed this around 15 minute uses and you can do that twice a day, morning and evening, if you have a very serious tissue damage, some kind of acute issue from an inflammation standpoint, or if you've had a long term kind of tissue damage. So for me, again, this goes back to my tor meniscus that still generates inflammation in my knees, particularly when it's triggered from training. And so whenever it's triggered, I'll use it twice a day, 15 minutes if it's not triggered. One of the things that the light therapy does very well is helps you grow healthier soft tissue. So increasing the rate of chondroblast proliferation, increasing type 2 cartilage, type 2 collagen, and increasing the rate of growth for your soft tissue like cartilage and ligaments. We also get a lot of questions about that and the literature is fairly specific about how that operates because it sounds like an incredible claim that we're going to increase the rate of growth for cartilage. But typically, just to kind of provide a little context for that, typically what we see is there's a homeostasis in your joints for production of cartilage and then degradation of cartilage. And when you have increased levels of inflammation, it reduces the cartilage production and increases the degradation rates. And so you're just out of, out of balance. This isn't magically making cartilage appear. What it's doing is reducing that inflammation so that your degradation rates slow and your proliferation rates for these chondroblasts and increase. And this from an expectation standpoint is a month scale process. So it's something that you'd want to continue doing regardless of how the inflammation and pain have been reduced. Continue doing this to help kind of remodeling your soft tissue in the near term.

I didn't know there was a dosing effect. That's interesting. That's actually really good to know. I've been using mine every day. Of course, I also do some infrared sauna and we'll use these red light panels in the morning sometimes. But the kineon I've been using on at least one joint every day. When you talk about the inflammation effect, though, it might sound kind of paradoxical to people for us, because you mentioned the drop in tissue temperature in the quad muscle above the knee that could result from a knee injury or chronic inflammation in the knee. And then you talk about the use of something that could theoretically heat tissue like LED and perhaps more notably lasers and that reducing inflammation. But a lot of people think ice to reduce inflammation and then associate inflammation with Heated tissue, but it sounds like that's not the case.

Yeah. So inflammation just to draw a couple of delineation points there. There's acute inflammation, which typically is bringing kind of positive factors to the area to help repair tissue damage. There's also chronic inflammation. And one of the things that we've seen is that although we've been kind of told Rice, rest, ice, compression, elevation, we were younger in sports and things like this, it actually doesn't work. And the doctor who actually invented or coined the term Rice has kind of recanted it and come out with a lot better data. And to his credit, he didn't have that data at the time that they were trying to roll this out as a gold standard treatment. But what you do see is comparing tissue protection for icing something versus using the light and laser therapy to bring additional healing factors to the area. It's night and day. There's. And I'll provide you a link. We have a PDF that we've pulled together, I think four or five different clinical trials that had good microscopy work. And you can see in kind of one to one comparison the difference in, in the protective effects from the light therapy and the laser therapy versus the cold treatment, the cryogenic treatment.

Now, are you actually saying that cryotherapy, cold water, immersion, et cetera, would be almost like contraindicated in an inflamed or injured state? Or are you saying that it's not as powerful as something like red light therapy or a combination of LED and lasers to reduce inflammation?

So I would say in general, contraindicated. What we do see from cold therapy is, at least from my, and I spend a little bit less time in that than I have in photobiomodulation is the brain impacts. There's some kind of nice impacts on your brain from a molecular standpoint that you get from cold therapy, but it does reduce. So if you're doing cold therapy after your, you're doing hypertrophy or strength training, you're probably doing yourself a disservice. And if you're doing it for injury recovery, you're probably doing yourself a disservice. If you're doing it again for kind of the neurological impacts. There are some very powerful neurological impacts that are great for you from a brain standpoint. But that's the most recent literature that I've seen on it is again, from an injury recovery or hypertrophy standpoint, it's really not very beneficial.

Yeah. And I think there's some subtle nuances to what you just said. For Example, I always get my head under to activate the mammalian dive reflex when I'm in cold water to get some of those neurological and vagus nerve toning benefits that you mentioned. We obviously know about the control of glycemic variability or blood glucose for a long period of time afterwards in response to cold, as well as, for example, the reason a lot of people do it, the conversion of metabolically inactive white fat to more metabolically active heat generating brown fat. I would agree with you that you see if you'd use it post workout or even in a situation of injury or excessive inflammation, not the type of effects that you'd want and potentially a deleterious effect in terms of mitochondrial proliferation or satellite cell hypertrophy or something like that. But if you dig into those studies, you're getting pretty cold for a significant period of time. And I actually think that light amounts of cold therapy, cold air exposure, some cold water swimming, staying away from the extreme shivering effect, there's actually, and you can look at some of the literature, for example, I would say most of the data I've seen on this is in the National Journal of Strength Conditioning Research with CWI or cold water immersion that isn't excessively cold and doesn't result in a muscle tissue temperature drop of I believe 1.5 Celsius or more, which is pretty significant, actually does give you a reduction in inflammatory markers and a reduced rating of perceived exertion. But we're talking about the difference between a 10 minute ice bath soak and a quick 5 minute cold shower after workout. So I think the dose is the poison when it comes to cold and whether or not it'd be contraindicated, if that makes sense.

No, it makes perfect sense. I think as in most things, the devil's in the details. And for your body that detail is dosing. And I think you nailed it there. That's the same thing for us, the same thing for most things. I also see a lot of pushback on photobiomodulation for people who say, hey look, these early studies from the 90s showed that it wasn't effective for this or that. If you go back and look at those relative to what the correct doses are, they just didn't know at the time we didn't have that kind of data available and I'd love to see. And this actually kind of brings us to one of the things that we'll be working on launching over the next 12 to 18 months is what we haven't seen or we haven't had as a Species is really this window into what the responses are and our ability to track and make behavioral changes around that. And I think this is one of the things that we're super excited about is we've been working on and have just applied for some very prestigious grants for a brain device, which is a near infrared spectroscopy device, a functional near infrared spectroscopy device, or broadband near infrared spectroscopy device, depending on how specific you go on the technology side. But I think one of the things that we've seen in the recent past is emitters and sensor technology from a hardware standpoint have made these huge leaps and bounds over the last 10 years, but really over the last two to five years. And they're unlocking things from a sensing standpoint where we can start putting better feedback loops around measurements and objective measurements relative to what we're doing and what we're triggering in the physiology. And I think for us, that's super important. One of the reasons we're committing to it is our mission as a, as a company and as a team is to increase the quality of life for the largest number of people we can in the most measurable and substantial way we can. And when you're doing things like our first product, the move plus, you're triggering changes physiologically that impact pain and inflammation. Inflammation you can measure, you can take blood draws, and we've got good data on that. Pain is a very subjective thing. It's really hard to measure in the body. And we would love to be held as accountable as possible to our commitment as a mission. That's why we have two pieces of accountability in there. How many people are we able to impact with this technology and then how is that technology able to impact them? So we assume that if we can do both of those in an increasing and improving way over time, that we're doing our jobs correctly. But if you're measuring something like pain, and it's a subjective scale, like a visual assessment score, which is essentially 0 to 10, how do you feel? It makes it more difficult and it gives you a less robust feedback loop. And so we've taken the initiative to go out and start developing these spectroscopy products that allow us to measure more effectively hemodynamics, a couple of specific molecules and, and really, most importantly is metabolic dynamics in the body and how those perform. And I feel like this long term is, is really one of the most powerful things that we'll see in the next 10 years, whether it's our company or whoever's bringing it to market are these measurements. How do we, how do we measure and take objective metrics out of what's happening in our body relative to these different treatments and behavioral changes.

Yeah. A new acquaintance of mine is working on something very similar to magnetic resonance imaging, Magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Probably similar to what you've just described for analyzing blood metabolites non invasively, like glucose, lactic acid, ketones, et cetera. So I, I absolutely think that there's a lot that can be done in the field of non invasive measurements. But when you're talking about near infrared spectroscopy, are you referring to the ability to say, utilize some type of head worn or intracranial or intranasal device and use that to actually take measurements and deliver appropriate treatment modalities based on the measurements?

That's right. That's essentially what we're developing is we have brain modules that we're developing on one side and dosing relative to what we're seeing from other sensors and from blood draws that we have available now. And then on the other side we have this kind of array of sensors which actually now that I think of it, you could think of as kind of an array of whoop sensors around your head as an example. But instead of just measuring heart rate and heart rate variability, which are related to a number of different health metrics, but are related in a very ancillary and indirect way, we're measuring things very direct. And the key one for us from a neurological tissue standpoint is how is this neurological tissue behaving from a metabolic standpoint? Because one of the things that we've seen again more and more in the medical literature over the last five to 10 years is there's an extremely high correlation. And we would already argue causation from our team between metabolic dysfunction and metabolic impairment and a number of different neurological, behavioral pathologies. And so medical, you know, as an example, major depressive disorder, bipolar, certain types of dementia, cognitive decline, there's addiction, even has a very high, we don't know addiction from a causation standpoint. I would say correlation, high levels of correlation there. But what we're seeing though is that how your brain generates and distributes and uses energy shows can be measured to show different patterns and these patterns correlate to pathologies. And again with this transcranial methodology that we have for treating those, how do we dose that? How do we dose that on a personal level? And you know, I think the measurements long term for us, what we're, the investments we're making into the measurements from a spectroscopy standpoint give us a. It turns on the lights in a dark room so that we can dose most effectively. And then we can also provide people feedback loops relative to their own behavior and different. It's not just the transcranial photobiomodulation that's going to be able to impact these dietary, exercise based, other behavioral based implications are there. And I think we'll see, really, it gives you a steering wheel for the car that we're kind of just blindly going down the road in now, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it's way beyond just this idea of type 3 diabetes or blood glucose being elevated or high amounts of glycemic variability being associated with Alzheimer's or dementia, early onset particularly, but more along the lines of what I believe the guy's name is, Chris Nelson, I think is a guy. I've heard talk about the link between metabolic dysregulation and psychological dysregulation. And you're right, there's a lot more than just risk of diabetes when it comes to bipolar add, ADHD like symptoms, schizophrenia, and a lot of things that surprisingly are related to either the metabolism brain axis or the gut brain axis. And it sounds like you're almost, you know, kind of creating a scenario in which photobiomodulation marries neurofeedback and has a baby.

Yes, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. We want our devices to be the most powerful and effective devices on the market with regards to the physiological impacts. And I think you've nailed it there. The gut brain. And we're also seeing some literature in the gut brain plus organ. So gut brain plus liver as an example is a really well documented axis for being able to impact a number of these different things. And yeah, the neurology that we'd like to be able to see, again, for us it's about measuring that quality of life change. When you see people with dementia, when you see people with Alzheimer's and Lewy Body syndrome and Parkinson's, and again with major depressive disorder and chronic anxiety. These are things that present in a way that indicates that we can positively impact them with therapy, with treatment. And we want to be able to optimize how we do that so we can optimize the outcomes for people because we really see that as a way to impact their quality of life.

Yeah, I own a couple of devices like the V Lite. They have several different alpha and gamma based photobiomodulation devices, intracranial and intranasal. I have actually over here, you can't see it in the video, but I've Got this neuronic helmet on my desk which uses a slightly higher wavelength. I think it's up in the 1000s for that one. And then even though both of those are one way streets compared to what you've just described, the only device I know of that's currently measuring brain electrical activity and delivering both neurofeedback cues like lights and sounds, or I'm sorry, sights and sounds on an app that's gamified. Very similar to clinical grade neurofeedback where you'd, I don't know, fly a spaceship with your mind and the spaceship will alter course or ignition will stop coming out the back of it. Once your brain strays into unfavorable brainwave patterns or brainwave patterns you're trying to detrain. The device I've been messing around with a little bit does that, but then combines it with actually a little bit of photobiomodulation. That one's called the Sensei. Have you come across that one at all?

I have seen this insight. I think the ones that we've seen that have been, I would say kind of more as the pro version and we've actually been interacting with them and one of their board members and getting, connecting with their science team is the Wavi Wai. I can send you through a link for it. They do essentially what you're saying as well, which is kind of triggering, using external, in their case lights and sounds to trigger subconscious or unconscious responses and measuring those, the kind of the time frame that those happen between different regions of the brain and when you have a baseline for those and you know, what they should be, then it allows you to measure things like, you know, is this person in chronic pain and you know, is the therapeutic modality that we're working with them on impacting that positively because a lot of times, again, people been looking for pain measurements for a long time. This is one where you're actually starting to see it come to fruition. And I think our experience right now is that electrical sensors for the brain are a much more mature technology. The kind of building block pieces that you needed to get there were, were available much earlier. And right now we're seeing machine learning applied to those in a more effective way to be able to build a meaningful picture out of the data that's there. I think what you're measuring with those holds, and again this is opinion, not a fact, but holds a little bit less data than we are going to see from what these new building blocks of these new types of lasers and these new Types of sensors, silicon photomultipliers. And these avalanche photomultipliers are giving us tools that haven't been there and unlocking a way for us to apply machine learning in a higher resolution and larger data way than is available with the electrical sensors.

Yeah, I'm excited to see what you develop, man, that's actually super cool. So you and I keep in touch. So I'll stay tuned. But back to the Kineon, which obviously already exists. People can obviously already buy it. I have a couple. In terms of how you've designed it, you obviously did a pretty good job explaining the combination of LED and lasers being superior to that of like say a full body red light panel or a spot treatment red light panel using LEDs. But is there anything else unique that you did when developing the Kineon to scratch your own itch or to satisfy a need in the market that you saw?

Well, really what we were trying to do is offer people a meaningful alternative to pharmaceutical solutions. So NSAIDs are really not good for your body kind of short or long term.

You mean the non steroidals like ibuprofen, Advil, etc.

That's exactly it. If you, if you have to take an ibuprofen, you know, once, once a year, then it's probably not going to hurt you too bad. If you're, if you're taking ibuprofen regularly for knee pain and shoulder pain and lower back pain, which a lot of our older users are taking this not. And they're taking this in very substantial doses very regularly. And they have no idea that there's a cardiovascular impact from a risk increase from this longer term, which is, is not insubstantial. It's, you know, as best we know now, it's in the 30, roughly 30 plus percent regardless of if you're 6 or you're 60, your increase of cardio increased risk of cardiovascular disease from ongoing ibuprofen or end stage use is increased by over 30%. So it's meaningful. But our assumption in creating these devices was that this technology already works. There's $15,000 devices in clinics. The reason that people aren't using them is that they need to use it every day to get the right level of dosing and to get the best optimal outcomes.

Which by the way, I don't want to interrupt you too much, but that's really important. I have not talked about that before, nor have I heard about that remodeling effect. Just because I'm using the Kineon right now to Work pretty hard on knee and right elbow. That means a lot to me because I've probably been three or four days a week hitting the same joint. And this is just, I mean, if I learn one thing alone from this, show that daily use, that means a lot. But go ahead and continue.

No, thank you. It's a great point. The daily use ongoing, whether or not you're in pain, it really makes a big difference from a tissue remodeling standpoint. But from a design standpoint, how we came about with the product is we wanted, we, we saw $15,000 devices in a clinic and said why aren't people using this if they can take this instead of pharmaceuticals? And the reason is it's too expensive and it's not very convenient and you need to, you need something that people can use conveniently to be able to commit to this from a long term use program. And so our goal was to get it under $500, which we've done for home use and to be able to make it wearable and to be able to still meet the dosing necessary to have clinical level outcomes. So regrow your tissue faster, reduce your inflammation, reduce the pain and stop taking the drugs that can increase your all cause mortality and also directly increase your cardiovascular disease. And that's what our goal was with it. And so we've made a wearable Device that's under $500 that you can use at home. And it works for recovery, it works for reduced inflammation and pain. And it also. One of the things that from a recovery standpoint that I think as a high achiever and I believe ongoing athlete you'd be interested in is the muscle inflammatory markers that we reduce. There's two that we track and have seen great impact for. And we work with a number of different kind, top tier athletes, NFL, NBA, but particularly in CrossFit where they really hammer their bodies intensely and hard and want to get back into training very quickly. C reactive proteins and creatinine kinase are both good markers that we reduce by 60 and 80% relative to what you would have from these training sessions.

Wow, it's amazing and I understand the effect now that you've explained these photoacceptors and how they actually work from an inflammatory standpoint and the heating of the tissue. Would it work through clothing by the way, or does this seem to be against bare skin?

Ideally against bare skin. We've dosed it optimally against bare skin. And there's one other thing that you get from against bare skin as well, which is they Call the blanching effect, which is essentially as you compress the skin, it removes some of the surface level hemoglobin from the area that would be absorbing these wavelengths otherwise. And so it gets it further into the internal tissue.

Can I tell you something interesting? And I realize this is a total off label use, but like I mentioned, I've used, I have a couple Kineons and I love the idea that you could wrap one around left knee joint, right knee joint. Again, I've used it on both elbows prior to tennis matches now, but I've wrapped it around my neck. I realized that potentially a choking hazard. You probably can't make those claims as a company, but based on the idea that it could irradiate blood traveling through the carotid artery and also have an effect on the vagus nerve and on my cervical spine which frankly gets sore, I have repeated this now I think I've got over 10 times that I have found this effect. A full body flushing, almost like a niacin flush type of response to that. Have you ever heard of such a thing like a full body flush in response to red light therapy targeted to just one area of the body?

I hadn't, but we also don't really have people using on their neck and there's a huge volume of blood going through there and you are dumping nitric oxide into this blood very fast as it's coming through with these lasers. So it makes sense. It's just not something we actually heard about. I can check with our team and see if we can keep an eye open for that as well.

I find it very interesting. I mean I honestly like a flush. Like I like it when you take a pre workout like arginine or citrulline or nitric oxide or even tadalafil or Viagra and you get this wonderful Russian energy and blood flow. So yeah, you can now market your device as wearable Viagra for us. For those who want to experiment off label, off label around their neck.

I love it. I love it. I'm sure we're going to get a knock on the door from that one.

Yeah, exactly. Hopefully not from someone who's in trouble having choked themselves with a Kineon. Well, you know, it's a very interesting device. How many people are getting more than one and using it simultaneously like I've been doing? Is that pretty common? I mean I know that's pushing close to $1,000, but I'm just curious if you guys package up a couple or do anything like that.

We are running a what we've seen is actually a lot of folks working on kind of a pay it Forward model. And so we're just labeling it that like, you know, I've sent some to my folks. We see a lot of folks kind of working on this for their family members or if you know somebody, your friend has a knee problem or just had a shoulder surgery. So what we're doing right now is reducing the price for the season for people who want to gift the devices to people who have problems. Again, our mission is to help move that needle from a quality of life standpoint and we felt like this was a really good way to do that from an alignment.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't know if this podcast will come out before Christmas or not, but either way, if you're listening right now, just go to the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com kineonpodcast k I n E O N awesome pictures there, what it looks like, as well as links to some of the other things that Forest and I have talked about. But if you have questions or comments or feedback or you want to get a hold of Forest or me, just leave your comments over there. You know, even if you want like to get more than one or get some for a friend or whatever. And if for some reason that deal doesn't exist, I'll make sure you get taken care of. Because I actually really like this device. I mean, I had one before you and I met up in Mexico for us, but I didn't really know how to use it or why it was different. I honestly thought it was just like a cheapo slap on LED device. And now that I understand more about it, even after this interview, like I. I'm very excited, I'm going to start using it even more. I think it's a fantastic device, man. So nice job.

Thanks so much. Really appreciate the support. And we'll have to get you one of the gut ones. We have the gut and vagal tone ones that are coming out early next year. We'll get you some of those early as well just to get your feedback on it.

I would love to give feedback. Vielight, that other company I mentioned, they have a gut and a Vegas. I have it, I've used it and you know me, I'm the guinea pig. So I actually like to test and compare a lot of these devices. So I would be happy to check it out and give you feedback and even, I suppose, competitive comparison. So yeah, absolutely. Well, folks, that's about all the time we have with Forrest Smith from Kineon it's the Kineon move, the red light that moves with you that does a great job at crushing pain drug free. And you can check out the show notes and get a Kineon for yourself with a special deal if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com that's BenGreenfieldLife.com K I N E O N Podcast Forest thanks so much man. That was amazing.

Thank you. Great to see you.

All right folks, I'm Ben Forrest signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week. Want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup, cutting edge research and articles, my top recommendations for everything that you need to hack your life, and much more. Visit BenGreenfieldLife.com. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is in indeed something I personally use support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.