The Quantlet: The World's First Wearable That Uses Cold & Light To Shut Down Inflammation, Enhance Sleep, Improve Cognition & Amplify Performance.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, when people aren't getting enough sun, the gantlet as an example, by radiating blood. It's not the only way to do it, but certainly one of the most elegant ways that I've seen will ultimately enable you to create that circadian reset because it has an effect on ultimately and primarily serotonin, but all the way down to melatonin. So when you shine the appropriate frequencies and intensity of light onto blood or vessels, you actually can vasodilate them. And the mechanism through which that happens is the release of nitric oxide.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And unless you've been living under a rock lately, you may have heard the rumbles about this brand new wearable that it seems everybody in the biohacking industry is talking about. And it's got kind of a funky name. It's called the Quantlet, but it's described as the world's first wearable that uses cold and uses light to shut down inflammation, enhance sleep, improve cognition and amplify performance. Which sounds like quite a claim for something that you would wear on your wrist and probably would have been something that I would have completely ignored until I saw that. A guy whose opinion I highly respect and a guy who I've had on the podcast multiple times, was involved with the invention of this thing, Dr. Jack Cruz. And while Dr. Jack Cruz is not my podcast guest on today's interview, the the other guy, the other co inventor of this particular wearable is on the show with me. And today we're going to delve into the nitty gritty science of what exactly this thing is. Whether it works, how it would work, everything you need to know about it, and why you'd want to wear something on your wrist that produces cold and light. So my guest today is Ruben Salinas. And Ruben is a Harvard MBA graduate. He's an inventor, he's a medical devices entrepreneur, and he's an angel investor. And he's got a track record of product development, things like spectroscopy, medical devices and diagnostics. He was actually featured in the upcoming documentary film called Supercharged along with Dave Asprey, Wim Hof, Abel James, and of course Dr. Jack Cruz. So Reuben is an avid biohacker himself. He's the CEO of Parsagan Diagnostics, which focuses specifically on the development of diagnostics and in the women's health arena. And he was also chairman before that of powermedic, which was a medical laser company. And before that he held an engineering position at GE Healthcare and GE Lighting. So he spent quite a bit of time in the medical space and specifically the biomedical engineering space. And his latest venture is this wearable device, this thing called the Quantlet. Now we're going to be delving deep into the science. We'll try not to get our propeller hat spinning too fast for you, but I guarantee you're going to, you're going to learn quite a bit on this show. If you want to access the show notes, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com QuantLetPodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com QuantumLetPodcast how do you spell quantlet? I'm glad you asked. It's actually Q U A N T quant L E T LIT Quantlet. Quantlet. So BenGreetfulFitness.com QuantletPodcast is where you can access the show notes for this episode or if you just want go straight over to the Quantlet page and just delve right in. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comQuantLet so BenGreenfieldFitness.com QuantLetpodcast or BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantLet I will shut up now and welcome my guest Reuben to the call. Ruben, how you doing man?

I'm doing fantastic Ben. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. Well, I'm very, very curious because I've seen the photographs, have not yet worn the Quantlet, but I'm curious how this thing even evolved. What's the story behind the invention of the Quantlet?

Sure thing. Well, I've been working on a wearable low level light therapy or photobiomodulation. Let's just call that PBM for short device for some years now. And I've been experimenting with light since in the late 90s as a lighting engineer at GE Lighting. I learned about the effects of irradiating blood but also any part of the body that really is not healthy with red or infrared light and getting Some pretty material effects, as has been demonstrated in a lot of literature, primarily coming out of China, Russia, Eastern Europe, some in Western Europe, but a lot less so in the US until Harvard started to get up and running in that field through a researcher who's actually European, but ended up here at Harvard. In any case, last year at a biohacking event with Dave Asprey, I met Dr. Jack Cruz, whom you've mentioned, and we started talking about light and some of his other protocols, including cold thermogenesis and the idea of taking this wearable lighting device that I was working on and expanding its capabilities to also playing with thermal regulation, with managing temperature.

So before you talk to Jack, you were looking at photobiomodulation. So using light to affect blood.

That's right, exactly right. And photobiomodulation, just to be very clear, is not exclusively acting on blood, but it is believed that that is the primary mechanism of action because it's been used for everything from stroke through traumatic brain injury, through to wound healing, et cetera. And the mechanisms are understood to a certain extent. There's still a lot of debate, even amongst the world experts as to exactly how it works. And the reason I sustain, and probably many others, is that it works at different levels in different ways. But ultimately biology reacts to light. And you've been doing a lot of work on light and wakefulness as an example, or circadian rhythms. And so we know that light definitely has an effect on the body and on biology. And this is just one way in which it has it.

Okay, got it. I want to ask you more about light in a little bit, but first of all, let's return back to the story. You met Dr. Jack Cruz when you were working on this wearable that was going to use light to irradiate the body in a healthy manner.

That's right. And I've been evolving the use of these things. If you walk around my house, I have a lab, hopefully at some point you'll be able to see it. And in this labworkshop, I've got multiple embodiments and iterations of different types of devices. I've got a sauna, much like the one that you use, full spectrum sauna that I've actually retrofitted with near infrared, military grade reflectors, and then a tanning bed that's been modified to use red, IR and blue. So this was a wearable that I could take with me, especially on long flights, because I do have a lot of transcontinental travel and irradiating. The blood has Shown to have certain effects, rheological effects in the blood. Rheological means separating the particles, making the blood a little less thick, so thinner, almost like aspirin would do. And when you fly, there is a dehydration effect that comes from the dry air, which ultimately impacts blood thickness. And if you're irradiating the blood, you can actually get rid of that without necessarily having to stand up and go to the bathroom a million times.

Really?

Yeah.

That would come in super handy for me because I'm constantly traveling home from events where I'm beating up my body and I'm very, very worried about blood clots when I travel back from these things. And I typically will double dose on fish oil. I'll take proteolytic enzymes, drink copious amounts of water, and then get up to stretch a lot on the plane. But one issue with that is I short myself on sleep when I'm already a lot of times tired. And I'd rather be curled up in the corner in my chosen window seat sleeping, rather than having to choose an aisle seat and get up and down multiple times.

There you go. And you know all of the little secrets, right? Like the aisle seat, etc. And so I was doing, I still do about 50% of travel to Europe. One of our offices is in Germany. The other one is in Paris for the company that I run on a day to day basis, the diagnostics company. So I spent a lot of time on a plane and that has a dramatic effect. And instead of doing everything that you've talked about, the water, I don't think you'll meet anybody. Even Cruise has said, I've never seen anybody drink as much water as you do. But ultimately it wasn't enough. And when I started doing the irradiation, different embodiments, and I can send pictures of these, you can put them on the page there. I started to see that I was not only not feeling tired, dehydrated, I was sleeping better and I was more than anything avoiding the jet lag. And it was quite interesting because that's what triggered me to have a discussion with James Carroll. And James Carroll is one of our advisors. He is the CEO of another laser manufacturing company, probably the most well known and the most evidence based of them all. He introduced me to Mike Hamlin, who is professor at Harvard Medical School and worldwide expert in low level light therapy, also one of our advisors. We started talking about the effects of blood and that's how ultimately it all came together. But Jack introduced this nuance, this nuance of temperature modulation. And he mentioned to me the Stanford glove. Stanford had done some research on improving athlete performance by cooling the body down ever so slightly by reducing core body temperature back to normothermia. Not making it hypothermic, but rather just putting it back to normal temperature when it had been affected through intense bouts of exercise. So when you exercise very intensely, you get a hyperthermic effect. Your body heats up, and you can see that very clearly through a FLIR camera, an infrared measurement camera as an example. But your body has these built in radiators, and they're at the face, at the hands, and at the soles of the feet. Your skin also is a radiator, and ultimately you're trying to diffuse and basically exchange some of that heat out to your environment, and that's why you heat up. Well, Stanford took advantage of the hand arteriovenous anastomosis, which is, again, a mouthful. We'll just call it the AVA for short, to cool the body in between sets. As an example of people performing weight bearing exercises, but not exclusively weight bearing could be any type of exercise. What they showed is that by applying cold to the hand, they could create, in effect, a heat exchange that was enough to bring core body temperature back down to normal. The challenge was that, as you know, when you apply cold onto a physiologic surface, a body surface, the blood vessels tend to constrict, and so blood flow actually gets shunted away from the skin or the surface by virtue of those blood vessels constricting, becoming smaller.

Right.

So you get the opposite effect. So what they did in this embodiment of their research, ultimately, was pull a little bit of a vacuum from the glove and basically put the hand onto a pad and then pull vacuum from the entire pad structure within which the hand was housed. And that's how they got the vessels to remain open or patent and the blood flowing, and then they could create that heat exchange. The problem is with that.

Right, so you're getting vasodilation and cooling at the same time.

Well, it's technically not giving you vasodilation as much as it is avoiding vasoconstriction. So it's keeping the vessels open and avoiding the collapse that would normally happen from applying coal.

Right, gotcha. Now, real quick, before you talk about the problem with that, I should tell you, I haven't told you about this before, but I wrote a big article for Lava magazine about three years ago called Hacking the Heat. And I went to the to compete in the half ironman World Championships in Las Vegas, which were at about 108 degrees. And for this, for the run port or for the cycling portion of that race, I wore head coolers and arm coolers infused with xylitol that when you get them wet, cool the surface of the body. And then for the actual run portion of that race, I used a body cooling vest. And then one of these ice. It's like a palm cooled ice pack that you run with while you're holding the actual pack itself, along with of course, the same arm sleeves and the head sleeve that I was wearing during the bike portion. One thing that. And I did the whole write up in Lava magazine, you could do it. I'll link to it in the show notes for people who want to read it. But one of the things that happened, interestingly you talk about the vasoconstriction, is that my speed began to actually decrease during the half marathon because a the vest was causing me to lose a lot of the blood flow out to the areas of my body that I need for upper body rotation and blood flow to the shoulders I was running. And then this palm cooling thing that I was holding, I couldn't really tell if it was working or not. It got warm after about 40 minutes and I just had to wind up tossing it. I didn't really notice much of an effect from it, but I've been very, very interested ever since that experiment in ways that one could cool the body during exercise because I see the benefit. But I hadn't told you about that experiment before, but for you or the listeners, I'll put a link to that one in the show notes if you want to, if you want to read my old school way of achieving some of this stuff and thanks for making.

My work easy here, by the way, because that's precisely what happens. That's called either vasoconstriction and, or blood shunting. Right. So I'm an emt. I don't know if I don't remember if you mentioned that at the beginning or not, but as an emt, one of the first things that they teach us in emergency medicine is if you've got a patient that's either hyperthermic, meaning heat stroked, or hypothermic, meaning frozen or freezing to death, first thing to do is to try to bring them back to normal thermody. Now you have to do that in a very regulated way, but you have to do it quickly enough to sustain life. So what happens in a hypothermic event as an Example is the hands, the arms, the legs, all of your extremities become less profused by blood because blood shunts to your core to protect your organs. Okay? Because if muscle dies, okay, so be it. But if an organ fails, then you've got a huge problem. Okay? So the body's initial mechanism in an event of hypothhermia or in a hypothermic episode is to shunt blood back to the core and to the brain. Okay? Now in hyperthermia, it also tries to do something similar, but ultimately when you talk about the surfaces, you're right. The biggest organ in your body we know is the skin. And that's the perfect thermal radiator under the appropriate conditions. The challenge with something that has like these sleeves, xylitol, that's mostly a sensation which actually has not only a psychological effect, it does have somewhat of physiological effect, but you're talking a very small portion, probably a tenth of what you would see from something like the Stanford cooling glove or what we're trying to achieve with the quantlet. I mean, we're removing, just so you understand, in orders of magnitude in measurements, we're removing almost 60 watts of heat. It's tremendous amount of heat that's being generated and transported throughout the body by the blood. And the idea is that the blood is everywhere, right? The blood is an integral part of the system. And we can talk about the Chinese medicine point of view here in a second. But it's moving all substances, including pro inflammatory substances like interleukins and cytokines all throughout the body. It's also moving oxygen, good stuff, around the body. So if you're irradiating it and cooling it, it has a systemic effect. It's not just a localized effect. And we're going to get to that in a little bit, I'm assuming. But ultimately, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, just to get very clear here, the most amazing part in what is actually part of our patent where patent pending product is the unique combination you said at the beginning of light and cold. Interestingly, light and certain frequencies of light have an effect on nitric oxide. And you know, nitric oxide really well, probably better than most people. Nitric oxide is a natural vasodilator and it is released by the endothelium, the inner part of blood vessels, and it's also carried by the actual red blood cells or erythrocytes in your blood. So when you shine the appropriate frequencies and intensity of light onto blood or vessels, you actually can vasodilate them. And the mechanism through which that happens is the release of nitric oxide. And that's huge because we avoid the need for a mechanical vacuum assist to keep the vessels patent, we capitalize on light's effect. And here's the beauty. Light is not just acting on. No, it's actually acting on mitochondria and ATP and cellular energy and has a dramatic effect on blood as a whole, which we'll talk about little by little here. But ultimately, by combining the two, we're maximizing the synergistic effect. And I'm a big fan of synergy.

Yeah.

You know, if you can do two birds with one stone, if you can kill two birds with one stone, that's what I want to do. Or even three or four. Yeah.

It is very interesting because normally, as you've already already alluded to, you would, in response to cold to an extremity, get vasoconstriction. And so when you're talking about nitric oxide release and vasodilation, reducing blood thickness, et cetera, you usually wouldn't see those happening at the same time as cold, which is why. And I want to get into, in a little bit about how this even works, like how you make it cold and where the light comes from and everything like that. But continuing on with the use of light and this concept of photobiomodulation, why would someone actually want to induce this nitric oxide release in addition to vasodilation? I think most of our audience knows vasodilation is like Viagra for your body. You get increased blood flow, better oxygen delivery, et cetera. But what exactly happens as a result of that? Or are there other things that occur that would be a good reason to do something like light therapy?

Absolutely, there are several things that actually happen. And so let's look at no as an example. So no, you've seen people using, perhaps you've used it yourself, nitric oxide supplements.

Right.

And this is the pump, they call it, these supplements that when you're doing some form of resistance training, will really make your blood vessels, your veins pop out and make you look like a monster, which I appreciate. And ultimately that's the effect of no. And vasculature. And what that's doing is it's enabling blood to get everywhere. Okay, Everywhere. And remember, blood. And one particular component of blood, which is red blood cells, actually carry oxygen. So if you're oxygenating tissue and perfusing, as it's clinically termed, optimally, then you are going to, by definition, get the most out of your musculature. And training obviously improves the ability to deliver oxygen. And one of the things I'm a big fan of your work on is hyperthermia and applying heat through sauna and other means, because that makes you more able to oxygenate as well. It has a dramatic effect. Well, you don't have to just do that. In fact, I think there is value in doing both cold and heat. We'll talk about that later. But let's go back to the light, because that is your question. So nitric oxide dilates vessels. It gets blood everywhere. Blood is carrying these red blood cells that carry oxygen. It gets into the tissue where it's most needed when the demand is there, especially under physical performance and strenuous exercise. But ultimately, the other thing that's happening is that we're enabling all of these cells in the blood, beyond red blood cells, as well as a component in red blood cells called heme, to capitalize on another effect. And the effect is primarily, not exclusively, but primarily driven by red and infrared light. This is where pbm, or photobiomodulation, comes in. What happens is a lot of these cells outside of red blood cells have mitochondria. Mitochondria are these organelles, these little things floating around in the cell that are the energy factories of the cell. In mitochondria, there is a substance, an enzyme called cytochrome C oxidase, which is part of the electron transport chain or the process called Krebs cycle, through which ATP is actually created. ATP is adenosine triphosphate. It doesn't matter what it is, what it means, and ultimately everybody should care about, is that that's the source of energy for the cell and ultimately for the body. Well, when you are using red and infrared light, there is this fourth step in the electron transport change, which is called cytochrome C oxidase. And. And that one reacts through the impingement of photons from red and infrared energy and then creates electron flow from there. It makes electron flow actually happen much more effectively. The other thing that it does is it removes back to nitric oxide, nitric oxide from the terminal chain and enables oxygen to come back in. So all in all, what it's doing, it's accelerating the flow of electrons, which ultimately means energy. Energy is being released through irradiating the blood, but also cells in the skin and the actual blood vessels, both veins and arteries, to give you that extra boost.

It's essentially, it's very similar to photosynthesis in. You got it in plants, you know, people I don't know like, I always like to think about how we are like trees. You know, I'm looking out my window right now as I'm talking to you and I've got all these things, these trees and plants outside and it's a clear blue sky, right? So these things are getting irradiated with sunlight right now and they are producing energy as a result of that. I've even talked in a previous podcast a couple of months ago about new research that shows that humans, when they're eating a plant rich diet and getting lots of chlorophyll in their diet, can actually generate some ATP just from direct exposure to sunlight. But this, this light that is produced by the quantlet, it's not necessarily the same as stepping out into the sun, is it more like a very targeted laser that it's producing?

Actually it's LEDs. We're using LEDs in a very specific type of LED which is highly efficient, produces significant amount of photonic energy and it's very power efficient as well. And we are producing it in multiple frequencies. So this is one of the secret sauces, if you will, part of our patent. So we have light in the red and infrared, which as I've mentioned already have a known effect documented for over 40 years in the literature on the CCO or cytochrome C oxidase, which is that fourth step in the ATP production chain. But ultimately there is an effect of a bluish frequency and a purplish frequency which is UVA and blue as well as a green. Because in Russia as well as in China, when they started irradiating patients bloods intravenously, this is an invasive procedure by the way, through a catheter, special catheter, they started to see dramatic effects and they're coming from similar reactions to what I've described, but not exclusively on the CCO and ultimately on ATP. They have to do with the actual photoelectric effect. So most of the explanation that comes around red and infrared energy and its effect on that ATP that I've described already is a photochemical effect. Well, there's a photophysical effect as well, and that is release of energy that's coming straight out of action of these higher energy photons in the blue, ultraviolet and even green on the metallic atoms that are part of, as an example, heme, which is in red blood cells, but not only in red blood cells. So it can get pretty, pretty propeller ahead. And you know, to answer your question, the gantlet is using multiple frequencies and it's doing so in a very elegant way for a variety of reasons, but ultimately to keep. To summarize, the vessels patent without necessarily using a vacuum and keeping your hand free. So that was one of the big things about the Stanford glove, right? You look at it, you have to use it between sets.

It's freaking huge.

It's huge. It's impractical. It is.

It's like in the movie Zoolander where the guy's a hand model and he wears this giant glass thing around his hand to protect his hand because he's a hand model. But it's bigger than that. It goes all the way up the wrist.

And it does so because you have to actually create a seal to get that appropriate amount of vacuum. It's not a whole lot of vacuum energy or pressure rather, but it's definitely enough to where you have this monstrosity attached to your hand. And I'm a big fan of elegant packages. So wearables need to be elegantly designed and need to fit in. And ultimately what we were trying to do is something that you don't have to take on or off too often while you're trying to maximize its effect. For example, during exercise, we can get into how and when to use it in a minute. But ultimately the small package that this comes in is not only there because we wanted to get the same effect on cold and light, we wanted to get it there together and in the place of the body where we could get the maximum effect with minimum surface area. And that was the wrist.

That makes sense. And one thing I wanted to ask you is with photobiomodulation, the use of light, and then I want to have a chance to delve into cold here in a minute. But with light, normally the exposure to light would affect sleep deleteriously. That's why normal sleep hygiene, you'll see people being given recommendations to sleep in the dark or to avoid their exposure to blue light, iPads, et cetera, prior to bed. It would seem to me that bombarding your wrist with light would somehow disrupt sleep. But what you've told me in some of the white papers I've seen that you've sent over is that there is some kind of a positive effect of sleep when using LED light on the wrist. How exactly does that work?

Yeah, and that's an incredible one. In fact, nobody's been able to explain it to me in a satisfactory way. Beyond people in Russia, James Carroll, Mike Hamlin at Harvard, everybody has a slightly different opinion. But here's kind of what Everybody agrees with. Okay. And that is that there is an absolute systemic effect from the blood and from irradiating the blood, I should say. So we're irradiating it at the wrist because it's very surface level, and we can get to it with the different frequencies without worrying about those frequencies getting misdirected. Because if you're using blue and green directly onto tissue, it scatters for the most part. Unless you're really surface, very little is going to get all the way to the blood. The wrist happens to be a place where we can actually do that fairly elegantly. Now, what you're describing in light and its effect on melatonin is tied to how the entire circadian biology, circadian rhythm, is set in the body. And ultimately, one of the things that affects that is serotonin and how serotonin is being released, and also, for all intents and purposes, how ATP is actually circulating in your blood. So one of the effects that Harvard Medical School has been more and more trying to experiment on. They haven't published anything yet, but Hamlin's lab is working on this, is there is a hypothesis that the effect of red and infrared energy on platelet ATP, the mitochondria within platelets, which happen to have a lot of them, actually starts having a pretty profound circulation effect that goes all the way into the brain. And so you've had somebody recently on your podcast talking about intranasal PBM or photobiomodulation, and there's some claims there.

The laser that you stick up your nose. That's right.

And so it's actually an led. To be very clear, it's not a laser. And this sounds good when I say laser. It does. It does. Well, the laser was the one that you were sticking up your nose, evidently, when you were younger. But these are LEDs, and the claim there is that they're going straight into the brain. Well, Hamlin doesn't believe that. I don't either. I don't think there's enough power there. But we certainly believe there's an effect on the blood. Specifically, we believe there's an effect on platelets and the ATP of platelets, and that's ultimately getting all the way through into the brain and having an effect on serotonin. Now, you know, serotonin has an effect on melatonin, the chain. We can go on and on and get into the specifics of it, but ultimately, if you're keeping blue and UV out of your eye. Okay. And you're putting that photonic energy into your blood. So it does what it's supposed to be doing naturally in an organism that assuming that you're working with biology, not against it, by getting sunlight when you need it, then you're going to be resetting your rhythms much more appropriately than not. So when people aren't getting enough sun, the gantlet as an example, by irradiating blood, it's not the only way to do it, but certainly one of the most elegant ways that I've seen will ultimately enable you to create that circadian reset because it has an effect on ultimately and primarily serotonin, but all the way down to melatonin. And I've experimented on this different ways, but I mentioned when we were talking about the jet lag effect and I was just incredibly shocked when I started to see that I wasn't jet lagged at all. And I've been on and off different forms of coffee and caffeine, caffeine in particular, just experimenting what works best. And nothing has worked as well as this has. Now I mentioned James Carroll earlier and James is the CEO of Thor Photo Medicine and he travels probably more than I do. And he has developed a light bed and this light bed exclusively uses red and infrared energy and he uses it right before travel every time and has told me that he has seen similar effects. Now nobody has been able to explain with precision what is the effect on melatonin, but in China in particular, and the intranasal guys do talk about this and they reference the studies they have seen circulating melatonin after some intranasal, but not only intranasal blood irradiation. And so it just kind of resets you in a way and it's hard to explain it in simpler terms but. But we do know that it starts primarily with serotonin and we've posted a video about James talking about this on our Vimeo channel and it's on our website as well.

I'll put a link to that video for people who want to dive in a little bit more deeply on a little bit of the science. I've actually got four different videos that I'm going to include in the show notes. One with Professor Michael Hamblin, one with James Carroll, the Quantlitz Light Module developer. Another interview with you, Ruben, on the Quantlet protocol. And then I know you guys have your Indiegogo going on right now as well. So I'm going to link to that video too if people want the shownotes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com quantletpodcast but I want to make sure that I get into the cold with you a little bit here. I know that you met Jack. You're already developing a wearable that would allow you to get all these effects of photobiomodulation you've just talked about without necessarily sticking something up your nose. And then you started to delve into the cold. And you've talked a little bit about the Stanford cooling glove. But can you clarify one more time the difference? Like how you could get the cold effects with something much smaller than that glove and why you would want to be exposing your body to cold via a wearable?

Absolutely right. Happy to do it. So we use something called a TEC or a thermoelectric cooler. And a TEC is a sandwich, for all intents and purposes. On the one side, it gets cold. On the other, it gets hot when you circulate an electrical current through it. So imagine that there is, on the bottom side of your wrist, when you wear the gauntlet, this little box, if you will. And that box has three components, primarily, but not exclusively. One is a thermoelectric cooler, which has this cold plate that is right next to your actual wrist, your veins, your arteries. And trying to be as close to the blood as possible so that through the action of not only convection but also conduction, we can remove some of the heat that's coming through in blood. See, the thing with blood is it's moving, right? So you have to grab it, cool it, and then release it, which, unless you're physically invasive in the body, you can't technically do. So you have to try to remove as much heat as you can as it's flying by. And here's the thing. The speed with which it flies by doubles when you're under strain, physical strain. And you can measure that through cardiac output. Well, we put this cold plate right from the thermoelectric cooler right next to your blood. The other side of that gets really, really hot because it's extracting not only the heat that is necessary to create that cold plate, but also the heat that's coming from your blood. So we need to pull that heat as quickly and as strongly as we can. And this is where the magic first started. So in my lab, I iterated different designs for not only a heat sink, but also a heat sink combined with a ventilation element, a fan, that ultimately enabled a very, very efficient heat exchange to happen. So the trick with the device, yet again, is we needed to keep it short and small, short on your forearm and small so it fit on the traditional surface area of the wrist. We don't have different sizes for men or women, so we needed to keep the package within a size that made sense for both. And we were able to basically maximize the effect of using electricity through this tec, combined with this very efficient heat sink and fan design that ultimately pulled as much heat as we could from that very, very small surface area. And it worked. Much to our surprise, we were able to pull, in some instances, up to 60 watts of heat. And the Stanford guys were pulling 65 in the best of experiments.

So we're talking about being able to massively reduce your core temperature while you are, say, running or cycling.

That's right. That's right. And I just want to make it very clear we're not trying to cool you beyond normothermia. We're trying to restore normothermia 98.6 from when it goes up because of the strenuous exercise.

Wow, that's really cool as far as the cold goes. But do you feel like. Does your hand actually get cold? Do your fingers get cold? Do you lose circulation, stuff like that?

Well, that's the whole magic, right? The idea is that you would feel very little. You feel a sensation much probably very similar to what you felt with.

The.

Sleeves that you were working with. And recently I posted a video and you and I exchanged some info on that, where I had a friend of mine take an infrared camera, a FLIR camera to my palms. And I was wearing the quantlet on one hand, and I was performing pretty strenuous exercise on this piece of equipment called the ARX machine, where you can quantum quantify your output. So for three months, I did nothing because I wanted to make sure physically, because I wanted to make sure that I could see what kind of a performance gain I would get on certain exercises in terms of strength. And we'll talk about some of the things that have been observed from blood irradiation and other studies. But I also wanted to show with this FLIR camera what the difference in the temperature of my palms was. Okay. At least visually. And they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, a video a million. And that's why I decided to do this. And so one of the things that's incredible is that as you're gripping something, when you're doing weight bearing exercises, let's say weights, dumbbells, as an example, the mere act of gripping has a vasoconstricting effect. So circulation actually does reduce all the way to your fingers by virtue of you basically gripping and ultimately vasoconstricting and impeding blood flow. So what you want is blood to come back as quickly as it can, and it will naturally, because again, your radiators are at the palm of your hand. But it's a lot more, let me call it, synergistic with your body's natural mechanisms to have some other way of removing the heat from the blood that's coming to be basically heat exchanged through your palms. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do. So we were able to do it again in that very small package and using these TECs. And the effect is called for anybody who wants to look it up. It's called the Peltier effect. And these are no different than what you would find in one of those portable refrigerators. If you're camping, for example, or carrying drinks in your car, and you plug in this little refrigerator or drink cooler or even drink heaters, they use the same technology.

It's called the Peltier effect. P, L, T, I, E, R. That's correct. Okay, got it. I'll put a link to that in the show notes for people who want to check out what the Peltier Effect is and delve into that. When you were talking just a second ago, you mentioned that you use this using one of these ARX machines, which I've done a podcast with them before. It's a super duper hard exercise machine. What were the biggest takeaways?

Well, the biggest takeaway was that my actual output was quite dramatic, and my gains and strength from the 3 months pre and post that I did were quite material. Now, you know, you. You and I know this is not a clinical trial, right? This is just an experiment. It's a case study to see what can happen and what it could.

Like AN N equals 1.

That's exactly right. It's citizen science at its best. But ultimately, what I. My intention was, you know, there could be a placebo effect because I believe in my own Kool Aid, right? I'm drinking my own Kool Aid. I believe in my own technology. And there could be me just pushing harder the second time around when we're trying to look at the output three months after no exercise. But the reality is very difficult to actually show that with a thermal camera in your hands. Like, for example, using the placebo effect to show a definitive change in temperature in one palm but not the other, that's a lot more difficult to do. And therefore, to me, the FLIR element was probably the more important part of the two things that I saw in the arx. So I got the gains in the ARX exercises in a couple of them. We only did a short set of the big five. But ultimately, and more importantly, the change in the color temperature was quite dramatic. It was interesting. The gent that was actually running the RX for me and with me and filming didn't know anything about the device. So he basically knew one thing when he started filming. The FLIR will show much more whitish, yellowish, brighter colors, if you will, when it's hotter and it's in the video. You'll see when he's looking at both palms, he very quickly realizes, wow, one's a lot cooler than the other. Without really knowing what the gauntlet actually was doing until I explained it thereafter.

Yeah, yeah, I saw the video, and it's pretty apparent that one of your wrists is colder than the other. One of your hands is colder than the other when you're wearing this and you're doing the exercise. But then you put a cooling device on the other hand, too, right?

That's right. And that's where I wanted to get. Because that was your question. And I haven't forgotten it. I just want to take us there little by little. So I put on this. They sell them on Amazon. I'm sure you can find them in multiple places. But it's, for all intents and purposes, a little ice device that goes around your wrist and purports to cool you down by creating a heat exchange.

That was the one I wore for that magazine article.

Amazing. And I don't know what your experience was, but what you can see very clearly in the video is it definitely cools you down at the wrist.

Right.

It's black when you see the video with the flir. Camera. Camera. But my hand is actually wider. And the reason is quite interesting. Remember what I talked about happens with vessels? They vasoconstrict. So that doesn't shunt all blood flow. It's just shunting blood flow from where the cold is being applied. But the hand, the biology of the body, is still trying to cool that blood. So that's why my palm was even brighter, because it's trying to capitalize on that anatomy of the hand, that arterial venous anastomosis, or ava. And that's why it lit up more, because I was artificially basically putting on the bigger vessels right on my wrist, cold that constricted them, and then blood had to get around that, and it did through all these other capillaries. And you could see it and then so what I did in the end is I took off the device and I wanted to show that there's no anatomic difference because we're all different. Right? Even your left hand to your right hand may have a built in difference. The quantlet off of my right hand and I put the cooling element on my right forearm and you can see that my hand is still very lit up on the right side. So this is at the very, very end of the actual exercise routine. And fundamentally what I think most clearly is shown in that example is that we have a very different effect in the temperature of the blood that's arriving to the palm of the hand. So the palm of the hand is still going to do its job. It's still going to act as a radiator.

You're just helping it. And it's what you would expect. Except the difference is that this thing's actually working. Whereas those other palm cooling devices, except the Stanford Cooling glove, which is the size of a freaking refrigerator, they aren't really working to reduce the temperature. They're just like this cold thing that you're holding, basically.

That's right. And it actually is creating more harm than good. That's the issue. Right.

That's also getting, you're getting vasoconstricted. That was the issue too is like I could like my extremities weren't functioning properly because there was so much vasoconstriction. So now with the cold and the generation of the cold, just correct me if I'm wrong. There's no ice, there's no water. You're actually putting this thing. Okay, that's right.

It is basically using electricity and this pelter effect by way of the thermoelectric cooler. It's to create that heat exchange.

I've got some practical questions for you. Now. I know that the science goes even deeper than we've talked so far when it comes to light and cold. If you were Dr. Jack Cruz, who I was interviewing, this podcast would probably be three hours long already. But you're being concise. No offense, Dr. Cruz, if you listen in. But Reuben, you're doing a good job being very concise with this stuff. So I appreciate that anyways though. So how long do you wear it for? Is this something that you just wear all day long? Do you wear it while you're sleeping? Do you wait until you exercise on and put it on like you would your running shoes? What's the actual usage like?

The short answer is it depends. The long answer is that it depends on what you're trying to do with it. So there are two categories. Basically there's the performance category, which would say that in an ideal scenario, you would start wearing the gauntlet 30 minutes pre exercise to get both light and cold into your body and blood. And again, an ideal scenario post exercise for 30 to 60 minutes. And the effect there is going to be one of reducing muscle fatigue and boosting recovery post exercise, which you and I know, for people like you, that's incredibly, incredibly good because you're trying to get up and running back to training and recover the quickest you can. Well, that's the intent of doing it post exercise. The intent of doing it pre is so you can maximize the effect of that particular workup. Now, most experts, even in photobiomodulation, don't agree. For sports medicine in particular, what is the best. And Hamlin talks about this in the video that you're going to post. But ultimately I do see, especially with my Brazilian scientific advisor, Dr. Meneguzo, she's telling me, undoubtedly you want to do it pre and post. Now they're more focused on the light. However, we're seeing the same thing on the cold. You know, they're. There are effects that are seen to be better when you're pre cooling certain muscle surfaces pre exercise. But if you're going to be sprinting, for example, you shouldn't be cooling at all. And so when you're doing endurance type work, you absolutely want to do some pre cooling tremendously.

Now. Okay, so just if I may complete.

Very, very quickly, unless you have a very performance question.

Yeah, quick question about performance. Like you said, you shouldn't wear it before sprinting. Would that also mean you shouldn't wear it before weight training?

No. In fact, for weight training you do want to wear it again 30 minutes because remember, the effect of cold is going to be very, very subtle. And even with sprinting, I was talking about general cooling. Okay, General cooling, like in a ice tub or something like that, a vest. You definitely don't want to do that before sprinting with the gantlet. The effect is so subtle, you really aren't going to see the cold effect as much as you're going to feel the light effect. And that's going to have its primary effect on oxygen transfer and oxygen transport.

So it's always going to delight and cool at the same time. I couldn't turn one on the other off or something like that?

Actually, you can. And we'll get into the protocols here in a little bit. But the idea is that you have a preset number of protocols. One is performance based, the other one is wellness based. And in performance there's two general categories, pre exercise and then post exercise. The pre has 30 for both, the post has 30 to 60 for both. And then you titrate depending on what you're finding works best for you. So Dr. Mineguzo has seen some athletes that do better when they're cooling and irradiating several hours after exercise. And in some other athletes she's seeing that it's better to irradiate immediately after exercise, about an hour after. And so the idea is that the quantlet has these pre programmed protocols and then through the app you can actually start titrating and saying, well, what if I only do cold, what if I only do light? What if I reduce the intensity of the cold? What if I actually change the light frequencies or the timing and the intensity of the light frequencies? So you start titrating once you get familiar with it. And the idea is that the software starts building and then you can report onto the app what works best. And over time it starts creating through machine learning what is best for you. And it's going to be different for everybody.

Okay, gotcha. Is there going to be any damage if I use like obviously you wouldn't lay in a tanning salon or a tanning booth all day long. Even if I stay in my infrared sauna all the time, I don't think that's necessarily good for you to just be like constantly bombarding. Same thing as sun, right? You wouldn't want to just like stay out in the sun for 12 hours in a row. So what happens if you forget to take it off? If you leave the light on all day, would that be a bad thing?

So we have built in fail safes and at the end of the day, people can override whatever they want if they're wanting to biohack something. But the beauty of red and infrared is it's very difficult to, let's call it, OD on them, but it is possible. So when it comes to PBM or photobiomodulation, there's something called the biphasic dose response. And what that says is that a little at the right frequency is good. A lot is actually counterproductive. So you'll find out right away if you're doing too much. But it's not going to be too much to the extent that it actually hurts you. It's just going to not give you the results that you're looking for you're going to feel tired, lethargic, you're not going to be recovering fast enough. So that hopefully will be self correcting. Much like when you go to a gun range and don't wear your ear protection.

Right?

That's self correcting. People forget that once.

Okay, got it. I have a big issue with most of the wearables out there. There's only one I think in the past year that I've said that I'd wear and it's this Oura ring because it's got an internal built in computer that allows you to put it into essentially airplane mode. So that when you're measuring heart rate and respiration and stuff like that via quantification, you aren't subjecting yourself to Bluetooth or to wifi or to other forms of electromagnetic radiation. What's the deal with this thing? How safe is it? Is there WI fi, is there Bluetooth? Like what kind of signals does it produce?

Absolutely great question. So the idea was you can imagine having Jack involved in the development. He wanted basically, yeah, he'd freak out.

He'd totally freak out.

And I'm the same way, by the way, I just told you earlier that I'm in a location of suburban Boston that's quite materially away from the non native emf. But ultimately what we designed this thing to do is to be able to operate under what we call manual mode. So it has one button and one switch. The switch is for Bluetooth on and off. Okay. It only uses Bluetooth. And the manual mode allows you through this one other button to power through one to multiple clicks, the program that you're looking for. All right, so imagine if you want program two, which will obviously teach you what program two is. You can click it twice, boom, boom, and then you're on your way. But the idea of the Bluetooth being built in is that when you want it, you can turn it on through that switch and ultimately through the app, then start titrating, as I mentioned earlier, the light frequencies, the intensities, the durations for both the light and cold, turning one off, one on, that sort of thing. So it'll be basically emitting Bluetooth only when that switch is turned on and when you're trying to do some form of programming. But to wear it, once you've estimated what program works best, or you're just going to go with the default programs, you don't need to turn that thing one single time. You can just go into manual mode. One click, two click, three click and go.

Okay, All Right, got it. And is it actually quantifying anything or is it just. It's generating the light and the heat. But this isn't one of those things that like is telling you calories burnt and steps taken and stuff like that?

No, not really.

Wearable goes. Right.

The idea is that this is one of those wearables that's actually doing something to you, not measuring things.

Yeah, that's the way I understood it. And that's actually why, that's, that's why we're talking because I get completely bored with most of the other ones.

Exactly right. And, and so, but the idea is that we do have a couple of sensors on board and. Oh really? Yes we do. We have a couple of sensors. One I can't talk about just yet. You'll like it. That's all I can say. Well, actually, let me tell you, because I can't hold. Actually looks at heart rate variability for a very specific reason.

I figured, figured you were going to.

Say that and you can imagine why. But ultimately there is some Chinese data that shows that low level light therapy has an effect when applied to blood on hrv and there are dramatic effects from hrv. I don't have to tell you, I don't think, I hope not. But the other sensor is temperature. Right. Because we want to be sensing at the skin level what's happening and we need to be titrating to that temperature measurement and ultimately telling you, hey, here's what we're seeing. Once you've got this thing on, based on what's happening to your own body temperature as well as what's the actual surface temperature at the skin level because the body is sensitive and one of the things that's incredible is that in the wrist we have these temperature sensors. So a good friend of mine was telling me when I started to describe the gantlet to him, oh, my grandfather used to put us at the faucet when we were hot in the summer in Italy and he would have us run cold water on our wrists, cool down in the summer. Well, the reason that he was doing that is a. Because it may have had an effect on blood temperature and ultimately core body temperature. Doubtful. But probably more because the sensors ultimately have an effect on how you experience heat or cold on your body. So if you're in a very, very hot environment or you're working out and you're feeling the heat coming to your face, which is the first place you'll probably feel it, you can actually get an alleviation of that symptom. So it is more psychological than not. It is a neurological effect, but it's not yet acting on core body temperature. And that already makes you feel really good. In fact, there is a device out there, hasn't come out yet, but it purports to give you the sensation that you're in an air conditioned room, even if you're walking around in Disneyland in 110 degree weather. Well, ours will do that and it'll do a whole lot more, but. So those are the initial sensors.

Awesome. Dude, I gotta get one of these. Okay, I'm curious, especially when it comes to me using one. Tell me how this thing would hold up if I like had it in water or if I were doing a workout where it's like brushing up against stuff, hitting walls. Is this one of those things that was designed by a bunch of nerdy scientists that's gonna fall apart? Well, thankfully, when an athlete starts to.

Use it, yeah, I'm not a hardcore athlete like you are, but I'm out there as a first responder with a lot of military and police first responder guys doing some pretty funky stuff. And we designed the device to be water resistant at first, not waterproof. The reason it's not waterproof is because of heat exchange. It's really difficult to manage heat exchange in a package that's completely IP rated for submersion. But the guys that are actually working on the actual product development upon our funding through the Indiegogo campaign, helped me design another device, ruggedized device called the Streetlab Mobile. And this was a portable spectrometer. You mentioned it in the beginning that I had some spectrometry experience and we developed this for special forces and first responders that were in hazmat teams. And what, what this thing ultimately taught us is a lot about heat dissipation and how to create a not only very robust design that could be dropped from three feet down onto concrete and nothing would happen to it. All the way through managing the heat generated by the spectrometer, we're applying the same engineering to this particular device. So it's going to be ruggedized to the extent that you can bump it around in the gym. Nothing's going to happen to it. And it's water resistant. So if sweat gets onto it, that's no problem whatsoever. You can't go swimming with it, but you probably wouldn't want to anyway.

For what we've learned, there really wouldn't be a need because the water, when you're swimming would be keeping your body cool. So if I was going to use this during a triathlon. I'd keep it in Transition Area 1 and put it on while transitioning from the swim to the bike, for example. Okay.

That would be a great place to do it at. And I just wanted to make it very clear the team that's actually working on this has a lot of experience with ruggedized devices. One of the reasons that I picked them to help us bring this to life.

Rugged is the word I was looking for. Because that is important to me and I know to many of our listeners. Okay. I know that we could probably talk for a long time about photobiomodulation, cold thermogenesis, and why it's so frigging cool that you can now put both together on your wrist. I'm stoked about this. And just full disclosure to the listeners. I don't own one yet. I'm talking to Ruben because I wanted to find out a little bit more about this before I take a deep dive. Now I'm ready to. So tell me and everybody else, how do we get one? What do we do?

Absolutely. So we're going to be doing an Indiegogo campaign. You've already mentioned it a couple of times. Through this Indiegogo campaign, we're basically looking to do a couple of things. We have decided that for us to make this a worthwhile device, we need to get it to as many people as possible. So in the Indiegogo campaign, we're going to have, by necessity, a limited number of them. We still haven't the exact number, but it's going to be less than 400, it looks like, and there's a variety of reasons for that, but they're going to come in through the campaign and be sold for less than $600. Rough and tough. Now, when we go full production after the campaign is over and sometime in mid-2016, this thing will be available for purchase on our website. Well, after the Indiegogo campaign, then you can probably get it for around $750. The final pricing won't be available until then, but when we developed it, we gave the team a goal that we needed to be able to price this at less than $500. And we're not quite exactly there, but we certainly got it close enough. So when we do the Indiegogo campaign, you'll be able to get in in line for the first ones. And one of the cool things that we're doing with it there is one of the perks available, as they call it, includes some pre and post testing. I'm working with a lab company here in Boston. I've used them for my own biohacking experiments and they're going to be putting some packages together for pre and post usage of the beta units so one can actually get to see the effect and actually measure it, and it's going to be pretty nifty. Those discussions are still ongoing, but by the time this goes live and the Indigo campaign is kicked off, it'll be all described on the campaign website. There are basically two prototypes in existence right now. One I have and the other one is actually being tested by some pretty interesting folks. Let's just call them Men in Black for now. The first one cost me eight, $18,000 to make, wasn't very cheap, so we definitely dropped the price quite a bit. The second one, I'm just going to tell you, my wife is pretty irritated about the fact that I funded it myself, but it is what it is and therefore the Indiegogo campaign really is focused on helping us get the costs to manufacture down. This is all basically from components that are custom made for the most part.

Well, obviously I'll be reporting on the results when I get one, so. BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantlet is the link to the Indiegogo campaign that'll help them track traffic that's coming from this particular podcast. If you use that link, it always helps out. And then also if you just want to go to the Show Notes and check out a bunch of the videos and the research papers and some of the details that Reuben and I have talked about, you can go to ben greenfieldfitness.com quantletpodcast and again, quantlet is Q U A N T L E T. Quantlet sounds like something out of Harry Potter. Sorry Ruben. Anyways though, as far as you go, Ruben, I actually need to get you back on the show sometime because there are so many things you glossed over, like your tanning bed and your biohacking chamber and all that stuff that I would love to delve into more deeply with you on a future show. So, so plan on being a return guest.

Excellent.

But in the meantime, thanks for coming on and sharing this with us. I am incredibly excited about this. Again, I get pretty glossed over in the eyes when it comes to all these different wearables that are emerging. But occasionally I come across one that I think is both cool and also healthy. And this is pretty cool. This one does something to you, like you said, rather than just measuring your body. So ultimately, BenGreenfieldFitness.com QuantLetPodcast if you want to delve in, ask questions, comments, thoughts, et cetera. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ruben Salinas signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Thanks Reuben.

Thank you very much.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.