Exploring Light Therapy, Stem Cell Activation, and the Future of Health with David Schmidt

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here. Today I'm joined by a very special guest, David Schmidt, founder and inventor of the LifeWave technology and LifeWave company. David, thank you for joining me.

Thank you, thanks for having me, great to be here.

So I have to start with my story for how I found out about you, your product It was 2 years ago, my friend Anita Brannon came to me and said, I have this amazing product. You have to try it. It's amazing. It's based on light therapy. It's right up your alley. And I was very busy under a lot of pressure building a practice, seeing lots of sick, difficult cases. And, uh, I get a lot of requests for people to, to look at their products. And so I took about 2 months to finally get back to Anita and I was absolutely floored by what happened with the product once I started to recommend it to friends and family and use it myself. I was very skeptical at first because the whole premise seemed almost too good to be true. And then we started to have the results roll in, and 2 years later, it's a huge part of my practice. It's one of the mainstays of what we do to get people the results that we, we get them. And so I'm excited to talk to you today about the technology. And I like to always start by asking people who they are and where they're from.

My name is David Schmidt, and I am the founder of LifeWave, uh, chairman, and I'm an inventor at heart. I think I have somewhere over 150 patents, uh, at the moment. I am a husband, a father, have an amazing family, and I've been incredibly blessed in my life with so many things that would give God thanks for So many blessings that are too numerous to name. And, but extraordinarily grateful for LifeWave. It's been an amazing 22, 23-year journey now. And all the lives that we've been able to touch around the planet is really incredible. It's heartwarming and moving.

And where are you from?

Oh, I'm from New Jersey originally, New York, New Jersey area.

And now you live in Florida, right?

Now I live in Florida. I've done some globe hopping in terms of places that I've lived. I've lived in the Midwest, in Southern California, in Florida, and my wife lives in Denmark. So I commute back and forth between Florida and Denmark.

Hmm. I did not know that. Okay. So I want to jump right into talking about light. And the first question I want to ask you is, where did you get the idea to use light to heal people?

So this came back— I was in my 20s and I had been very, very fortunate to be going to Pace University in Westchester. And I did my first 4 years in computer science and management. I had been a very good student in all my science classes in high school, and I had thought about getting a degree in biology. And my guidance counselor pushed me towards computers. And so I got out of, I got out of college and I worked for a company designing medical devices. And I thought, I really have to go back to school to get a degree in biology. So I went back to Pace and I became friendly with the chairman of the biology department. Dr. Bill Ventura, and I had a concept for treating cancer cells, and he had a lab that was, was free. So he said, okay, well, if you can get the money and the resources, then you can use my lab. So I said, great. So I got a grant from a company in New Jersey. I had a working relationship with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that donated animals, and I began to do investigation into C1300 and TBJ neuroblastomas. My basic thought was that because the cell membrane of a cancer cell is substantially smaller than a healthy cell, I wanted to see if I could, based on resonance, select the cancer cell membrane using a resonant magnetic field. And this work was actually successful. So essentially this resonant magnetic field would depolarize selectively the cell membrane of cancer cell without harming the healthy tissue. This didn't really go over very well with some of the PhDs that were at Pace. And I didn't get any further than doing 2 years of animal testing, which was extremely interesting. But this really showed me that you could influence the health and vitality of the cells with energy, as opposed to having to introduce a drug or a nutrient. So this set me on a path to exploring all different types of energy-based therapies, including light therapy. Light therapy had been around for thousands of years and could be, you know, applied very usefully in a number of different ways. So in the '90s, now fast forwarding a couple of decades, I have been developing power generation technology for the U.S. Navy. And I got invited to be part of a design team for one of the Navy's next-generation mini subs. And I wanted to see if I could create technology to improve the survivability for the crew. And the first thing that came to mind was that the crew is going to be going on missions where they have to stay awake 30, 60 hours at a time. So how do we improve their energy naturally, keep them awake naturally. So I thought, okay, I want to come up with some kind of device that can cause an increase in energy production in the cell. I thought, okay, I want to try this with light and use the body's own infrared body heat as a power source so we don't have to use an active electronic device. So that was the, the genesis of this.

Were you exposed at any point to the work of men like Robert O. Becker, who did some pioneering work with electromagnetic medicine, especially the use of bone stimulation devices?

Very much so. I, I became very familiar with Becker's work, uh, Royal Rife's work. I was building Rife machines along the way. Um, yeah, I, I tried to learn as much as I could about every type of energy medicine therapy, whether or not it be based on light, sound, electricity, magnetism.

You mentioned that the cancer cells had a smaller membrane or surface area, I believe you said, than healthy cells. And it reminds me of the fact that mitochondria in cancer cells, if I recall correctly, have lost the cristae and normal healthy structure of mitochondria. Is that related to those cellular surface area changes. And how do you take a concept like that, this big, um, sort of, uh, spatial just observation, and take that from a laboratory observation to a bedside intervention with a light therapy device? Because that seems to me like a huge gap, and I just wonder, how did you bridge that gap conceptually?

This is an interesting story. The best experience you have as an inventor is a flash of insight. It is something to be incredibly grateful for. It's like a download from, you know, God Almighty. So, you know, you give thanks to God when these moments occur. But it is— it literally happens as a flash of insight. Not all the time, but most of the time. And what I mean by that is, um, I was trying to think through this problem, and I had been working on a project that seemingly would be unrelated. Um, I had been working on a turbine, uh, for producing emergency power that didn't have any blades, and instead it used a vortex flow through this engine to extract, uh, power. From combustion gases. And we were very successful. Myself and my team were very successful at producing this device. So I was driving at the time, I had a laboratory in Dahlonega, Georgia, and I was driving home around the mountains and around Lake Lanier in Georgia. And the flash of insight that I had was that there must be vortex flow within a living cell. And I had a particular rationale for thinking that part of this has to do with the chirality of amino acids and sugars, that they're capable of interacting with light. What I found out later, which is much later, which is part of my current research, is we're using chromophores in a completely new way. To target the release of light to specific tissue in the body. I'd be happy to kind of get into that because I'm incredibly excited about the implications of this research. But basically, I came up with this idea that if you could create circular polarized light, that it would establish a communications channel between a device and living cells. And so when we're talking about LifeWave, while it's true that it does stimulate the skin with low levels of light. That is kind of the consumer pedestrian explanation. It does not disclose most of the details of actually what's going on, because it's just, would be confusing, I think, for most people, and they don't need that much technical information. But essentially what happens is I take amino acids and sugars, I processed them in a way to create a phenomenon called circular polarization of light. You can actually see this if you took a solution of the crystals that are in the patches and run light through it, you can see the pattern that it leaves, and it looks like a circular vortex. And what we found was that this could, this could transfer photons over into the cell and cause specific genes to express to turn on production of energy in the mitochondria, as well as turn on production of specific peptides. So I know that's a little bit far from the question that you asked, but I think it's really to say that when you start with a problem, you try to distill it down into the most simple forms possible. And then as you go about the design process, at least for me, I often get a flash of insight where there's a door that opens and I say, "Oh, okay, I can go in this direction.

That might work." It just seems to me like you're operating with a completely different map of how human and really any cell operates, taking into account properties of light that most people never even hear about. Even for me, having read, I can't tell you how many books, popular books, but written by people with a deep education in the topic on quantum biology, physics. You know, I'm, you know, Meredith Oak. I'm one of her faculty at the Quantum Biology Collective. So I teach clinicians about some of these things. But, but I can tell from your work that there's things about light and how it interacts with life that are not in my experience or knowledge. And it's so interesting I mean, I could talk to you about this for a long time, and I don't know if I want to today, but it's just, I mean, am I correct? Are there a lot more properties of light than we're taught about in school or in popular textbooks, articles? Is there just more packed into these little tiny photons than we could even possibly imagine?

I think what I might say is, first, I might find water more interesting than light, uh, and the interaction between water and light. Water to me is incredibly unusual, and a scientist could probably spend their entire career studying water and maybe not learn all the properties. And then the interaction between water and light is unusual. But from my, my perspective on light is that first, um, If we take the Bible literally, um, we, we can see relationships, uh, between things that would— might normally not be self-evident. And, and we did— I think there were several experiments that really helped in my understanding of light. One of them was, um, we created— and this is— I wouldn't recommend this because it's rather dangerous But we took a— we took an electrolyzer and we made hydrogen, and then we pulled a vacuum on the system and we created a hydrogen plasma. So we took an evacuated tube and filled it with hydrogen gas and then energized it with high voltage. But then what we did was in this chamber, we had an arrangement of magnets, which we had the, the magnets form the electrodes, and we caused a high voltage discharge, about 45,000-volt discharge between the two, and we created a vortex, um, using this hydrogen plasma. Then we did that with another set of magnets and plasma, and what we wanted to do was simulate the counter-rotating hydrogen atoms that exist in the DNA. So we've got, we've got a hydrogen atom that sits right down the center of DNA, and we know that the DNA zips and unzips through cell replication. Well, what's interesting is that, um, there are photons of light that are emitted right in that, um, right in that area between the hydrogen atoms. And what I— my hypothesis based on our experimentation is that, um, this is a bridge to the ether. It's literally where, right in the center of our DNA, it's literally where spirit and flesh meet. And these are highly coherent pulses of light that Beverly Rubik named biophotons. And then these biophotons initiate thousands of biochemical reactions within the cell. So these signal induction and signal transduction effects that we see in communication with the cells all get their origin in light. And incredibly, this is initiated right at the center of DNA. So, uh, and that— those photons are modulated by, uh, by the biochemistry of the cells.

I didn't know you knew Beverly Rubik. I met her during COVID Oh, uh, Dr.

Rubik, we met back in 2005, uh, at a party in San Francisco where we had— there was a group of scientists that got together, and then, uh, we became friendly, and she ended up doing one of the first LifeWave, uh, studies.

Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah, she's fantastic. As you already know, incredibly, incredibly smart.

So fast forward from 2005 and the initiation of your work with the DOD for the energy enhancer patches, uh, we've got the X39 patch now. That's the patch that I've seen have the most, uh, profound effects. It's the one I lead with because of that. I'm really curious to hear when— because I know things that go from bench to bedside, it all sounds great, but there's always that, well, what's going to really happen when we start deploying this in clinical practice? And I'm curious, when— what was it like? What was the moment like when you realized you really had something as powerful as the X39 patch?

Is incredible. Exhilarating. It was, you know, an entirely new door that opened up. And I would say at that moment, I didn't know how high up was going to be for the company. So to frame this, I had just gotten through about 10 years of stem cell research, which had gone incredibly well. We had done a number of clinical studies with Dr. Norm Shealy, where we successfully regrew peripheral nerves in patients with diabetic and idiopathic neuropathy. We had done some in vitro work with Dr. Glenn Ryan, and then importantly, we had done stem cell research at the National University of Ireland in Galway with Dr. Tim O'Brien and his team at the Regenerative Medicine Institute. And basically the premise was if we could create an electromagnetic field of a specific shape, that we could initiate communication with stem cells that existed in the human body. Let's say at the time we were working with mesenchymal stem cells and increase their motility rate and increase the production of growth factors like VEGF. So we could take someone that, let's say, was over the age of 60, where we get impaired stem cell function, and get those stem cells to function like younger, healthier cells. So, uh, very first study that we did, uh, we hit statistical significance, and we found that without having to inject stem cells into the body, that, um, we could use energy. As a means for improving the health of the stem cells. So, we had 10 years of research in this, and the problem was it needed to get— go through approval through FDA or any regulatory body. It was gonna be very expensive and could only be administered by medical doctors in hospitals or clinics. And we really needed to have something that was inexpensive safe, and anybody could use and would be affordable. And so the X39 came out of that 10 years of work in trying to resolve that issue. And the moment that we came out of studies and we knew what the product could do, and then we started having people use the product and start seeing these remarkable results, I thought, okay, I have no idea where this train is going right now, and how high is up, but I know this is going to be incredible. And every day has been exciting since that moment in the middle of 2018.

That's great. That's basically what I, what I expected to hear you say. Were there any cases you're comfortable sharing just anecdotally from those early days where you thought this is something really profound and, and game-changing?

Many. I would say many. Uh, I would say the first one is the most memorable. Uh, well, it was one of the first ones, I should probably say that. So, uh, David Jumper, who's become a good friend of mine, and he's been with LifeWave since the very, very beginning back in 2004. Uh, his wife Spira— and I'll only share this because he has shared this publicly, so I'm not violating any confidence— His wife, Spira, had come down with this debilitating disease, and they're both getting to be around in their late 50s, and she has to be on a couch all day because she's in so much pain, and she has, she has so much fatigue and low energy. And they're both thinking, we've been incredibly successful in our lives, we're getting ready you know, towards the age when most people are retiring, and quality of life for her is terrible. So she had gone through this for a long time, and during July of 2018, I sent them samples of X39, and the first day that she put the patch on, her pain was gone, and within 3 weeks, all of her symptoms were gone, and it was like it never happened. And David had said to me, "I'm gonna work the business 24/7 because everyone, everyone needs this product." And that's exactly what he did. We had some incredible testimonials. I remember it was in August of 2018, There's a woman in Denmark who is a brand partner for LifeWave. She's in her 60s, and her mother was 93, and she was going through a number of very significant health challenges. And so her daughter thought, uh, okay, I'm gonna give my mom X39 and maybe it's going to help her have some more energy and get rid of her pain and make her feel well. Well, 2 months later, she was like a different person, and it looked like— if you saw the photo, she looks 20 years younger, uh, within that 2-month period of time. So there's many, many, many, uh, examples where things were coming in, people would wear the product Scars would disappear. There are some people where they would regrow an entire head of hair after being bald, you know, which we don't make any claims on. Yeah, injuries that were many, that were 10, 20 years, people had injuries that all of a sudden healed. So many things like that.

It's funny you mentioned individual results vary. Of course, this is, you know, this is life. I hope everyone's realized that individual results vary by the time they're listening to this. But I'm very curious. I don't know why, but as a, as a clinician, I'm so fascinated by why some people respond, but I'm more fascinated by why some people don't. And as the inventor, I'm so curious to hear your thoughts on why, why we get this huge variability in results and how do we— and I've got my own convictions based on my practice and experience with the product— but how do we minimize that, uh, failure to respond and maximize the likelihood that people will get these kinds of life-changing results.

Yeah, you know, I would say this is the most difficult part of being a clinician because you have all the knowledge about what's going to help your patient, then you send them home, and the question is, are they going to do what you told them to do? Uh, right, that's the tough part. So I'd say first, we look at the basics. How much stress does someone have in their lives? Because that— some of that is manageable and some of that isn't. Do people have a routine where they're getting proper rest, proper hydration? Are they staying away from stimulants? How many pharmaceutical drugs are they using? Are they smoking? Do they use excessive alcohol? What's their diet like? Are they getting proper nutrition? Are they exercising regularly? So it's really, I think what we found is those basic things is what you analyze and you scrutinize first, because if you can get people to exercise, you know, just basic stuff, get a proper amount of sleep, supplement where they need to, to fill in some of the holes, which is a big thing we can talk about. Have a healthy diet and hydration, that's going to cover a lot. I think if you look at the literature, very consistently what you see is people that have deficiencies of potassium and magnesium, this leads to an extraordinary number of problems, speaking physiologically. So even, even in many cases, I think if people hydrate properly take, uh, calcium, potassium, and magnesium supplements. That can be of an enormous value and, and covers a huge area.

That's what we've seen work in the practice in a nutshell. And, you know, the funny thing is there's so many nuances to it, and some of it is about, you know, you mentioned whether or not patients will go home and do what's recommended. I've found very much so that it's also a matter of Do they even realize what they're actually doing, or are they being honest with themselves or us? Uh, people can be very, um, they, they just lack awareness of basic things like how much food are they eating, which then determines depending upon their food choices, how much magnesium or potassium they're getting. So we help them figure all that out. And that's part of why we get such good results with the patches in conjunction with what we do in the practice. So I want to jump back a little bit into the science, and then I want to talk actually about the, the model of LifeWave's growth and business structure. So you've mentioned, and I, I've learned this of course from many other people than, than yours, just yourself, that water can store light and that light structures water. And you've mentioned in a podcast with Meredith, uh, that there are domains of water and that— and you've alluded to this, if you didn't say it outright, I don't recall exactly— that we can, uh, basically program water with light in such a way that we can also control when that light will be released. And that fascinated me and excited me because of what I know about how light structures water. And I'm so curious, how can we, how can we manipulate these very primordial fundamental properties of water and light?

So this started, uh, this started back a number of years ago, and I'll tell you the story so it makes sense. Um, we were doing these experiments where we were regrowing tissue, uh, regenerating damaged nerves. And in some cases, I'll give you one specific example. We had, uh, I have 23 different versions of a technology called a double helix conductor. And in one of them specifically, we would take planaria and you, with the planaria, you can cut the tail off and it will regenerate a new tail in about 16, 17 days. It takes about 10 hours for that cut to heal. Were able to treat the planaria with a very specific type of electromagnetic field, and the cut healed in real time, less than 15 minutes, as opposed to 10 hours. And we were able to regenerate the tails in about 17 hours, 16 to 17 hours, as opposed to 16 to 17 days. And I was discussing this with Dr. O'Brien, and he said the endoplasmic reticulum can't synthesize proteins this quickly. So there's something else going on here, uh, that, that, that has to be discovered. So I thought, okay, I want to try this. I, I had a concept that what was going on was that we were actually— I thought we were inducing a transfer of electrons into the mitochondria, um, to make more ATP. But then I thought, I'm going to go one more layer down. What if what we're doing is we're increasing the number of electrons under the valence shell of an atom, of an element? And so there's a theory, or maybe it's a hypothesis in physics, that if you took an element like aluminum and you have, uh, you have the valence electrons and there's a number of inner shells of electron orbitals, that the actual number of electrons could be infinite, that we may not actually know, uh, the total number of electrons on those inner orbitals. This is coming from some physicists that I've spoken with. And I thought, okay, maybe we're increasing the number— as, as controversial as this would be— maybe we're increasing the number of electrons in the atom of everything, of what everything is made of. So to test this, we got inorganic crystal systems, and we took one as a control and we took the other and subjected to this electromagnetic field. And the crystals being treated by the electromagnetic field grew more rapidly, and they also oriented themselves in the direction of the coil. So we, we showed that we could increase growth rates on a completely inorganic system, and that this had nothing to do with the mitochondria. Okay, well, what do you do next? So I thought, um, I'm going to take something extremely basic, uh, which was tin. Let's take a— let's take a number of different metals like tin, bismuth, antimony that have low melting points, and what we'll do is we will create a passivation layer that we can observe. So Uh, we took as an example tin, we combined it with oxygen in the presence of this field, and instead of getting a gray tin oxide, we got gold. This was a gold-colored metallic oxide that looks identical to gold. So we sent this material out to EAG Eurofins and we performed what's called X-ray diffraction. And then we were able to compare this material to a database of 60,000 materials, and they validated that this was a completely new material that never existed before. And what we, what we did was we were able to change the angle at which the tin and the oxygen were bound to one another, and that explained why we were able to change the color, since this had to do with changing the reflection of light. So then I thought, if I could do this with water— hydrogen is a metal and has a metallic state. Hydrogen exists as a metallic form. So what if we took water, electrolyzed it, and split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and then in the presence of this energy field and a catalyst, reassemble the hydrogen and oxygen, but now we've inserted energy between the bonds and we have a new form of water. And, uh, that worked. And I got a number of patents on that and, uh, was able to eventually, after about 6 years, create a machine that you can put— instead of a big laboratory monster, now you have a machine that you can put on your desk that makes this, uh, that makes this special light-infused water.

And that's coming in July.

That's coming in July. And, and then, you know, the question is, well, if you can do this, what wavelengths of light do you put in the water? And, uh, without taking up, you know, all the time here to get into it— and I would be happy to go into as much detail as you like— but The short answer is, um, I wanted to find out why species like lobsters were not aging and unravel that code and then put that, that code of light into the water so people could drink the water and become younger. That was the goal.

I can't tell you how excited I am to try the water machine, and I'll leave it at that because we could go on about the water for the rest of the hour.

Have you asked Renita about it? Because Renita and Scott have, uh, both had, uh, this water now.

Uh, you know what, I haven't asked her for her personal testimony. I have spoke— I did listen to your interview with Meredith where you spoke about it, and now I'm mixing up my conversations though. I don't remember which of these are public knowledge and which of these are not. And it's, it's— well, the reason I think that's important is, as you know, I think often of Ephesians 6:12, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and the worldly governors, the rulers of the spiritual darkness of this world. And there are a lot of people who want to prevent us from getting wonderful technologies like this out. So maybe we'll talk about that on another podcast soon. But suffice it to say, I'm very excited about the light machine, and I will strongly recommend people who are listening to this who want more to listen to— and when, when this comes out, Meredith's second episode with you will have dropped, and people need to tune into both of those because we've, we've just scratched the surface here today. I think one of the things that's most fascinating about hearing you speak about light and biology is I think, and most people wouldn't realize this just from, from hearing it, a lot of what we're talking about challenges or overthrows experimentally what's taken as dogma and settled science in the biological sciences, which is part of what's so exciting about it and also why there's so much hope for me right now, even though medicine is in a sort of a very dark place, I would say, because we have these technologies coming out thanks to people like you. I wanted to ask you today, why did you choose network marketing for LifeWave?

I originally was opposed to network marketing, and, uh, I, you know, most people that start network marketing companies have some type of history in the business, and I didn't. I actually hadn't had a good experience with it. I was with, uh, I had gone to college and a friend of mine said to me, hey, I'm going to this meeting and, uh, you know, why don't you come with me? It could be fun. I said, all right, sure. And it was, uh, it was a meeting for, um, a water filter company. You know, I'm going back many years now. And, um, so they were trying to get me to join this thing And I was asking all kinds of technical questions about their water filter that they couldn't answer. And so I didn't end up joining. But, you know, that's, I think, how I thought of network marketing. And so back in 2002, when I started LifeWave, I had been thinking about putting the patches into a retail store like GNC, or doing radio advertising or TV advertising. I actually had approached GNC and I had a deal with them, but I eventually turned that down in favor of starting the network. I thought about putting it on an infomercial and doing it, advertising it that way. So during those first 2 years of 2002-2004, in addition to setting up manufacturing, doing studies, exploring how to possibly market this new technology. And I had the experience where I had spoken with a business friend about the patches. He took it to someone, then took it to someone else that got it to a medical doctor in Texas who got it to a medical doctor in California. Who got it to Coach Richard Quick at Stanford University. And, and then Richard was an amazing, amazing human being. And we put patches on his Olympic swimmers and got amazing results. That all happened because of networking. And then it became— started to become obvious to me that this was going to be the path forward. So I reluctantly, I reluctantly decided to go the direction, and it's been incredible ever since.

I have a similar story. I'll be telling it on an upcoming podcast with my mentor in network marketing, Richard Brooke, who I think you'd really like. And that was one of my initial hesitations about the product. But what I've observed is that the product is so novel that the idea of running an ad for it, you know, people are used to getting ads for supplements, they're used to getting ads for medications. They're used to getting ads for all these things. When you first approach someone with this product and you explain to them that it's a patch the size of a postage stamp that they put on their body and has all these profound impacts, it takes them a while. You have to nurture the relationship. And there is a certain amount of faith that goes into trying it that I haven't seen. You know, patients come to me as a functional integrative medicine doctor expecting supplements. And so they don't think anything of, well, this supplement is $100, this one's $200, this one's $300. The next thing I know, the patients are on $1,000 worth of supplements, right? We try to keep it below that because we don't find people get the best results on the most supplements, uh, but it takes some time to really educate people about this. And so I, I can see why it's working, because once people understand the value, it's a no-brainer to go ahead and add this to whatever else they're doing for their health and their wellness, or frankly to replace a lot of what they're doing with this, because I have patients all the time who— they're tired of taking supplements, the supplements are not working. We pivot to the patches, we get better results faster and more sustainably over the long haul. So my next question for you is, what's your vision for the impact that the company is going to have around the world in the coming years?

You know, we are, um, looking to form relationships with partners where we can do as much good as possible. And we're looking out over the next 5 to 7 years. So for example, we donated money to the Ocean Cleanup to remove microplastics from the oceans. We've donated money to Convoy of Hope and Red Cross so we can help people in need. We've had this drone program which is 4 years now this month, where we're intending to have used these, this drone technology for search and rescue missions, delivery of medical goods and so forth. And so, because we're growing so rapidly and we're very quickly approaching becoming a billion-dollar company, I want to think about what is the lasting impact that we want to have on people and also for the planet? And I've kind of come to the conclusion that given everything that's happening in society with AI and robotics and some of the enormous changes that will occur in the coming years, um, that there's two things that we— I think would be really important for me to do now for the business. The first one is to make LifeWave a multi-generational company. So invent, develop, and put out to market new technologies that make this company sustainable 10, 20, 30 years into the future. And, uh, that technology is going to be an in addition to the light therapy products, which we have another 7 years to release.

Wait a minute, I want to clarify something you just said. Do you mean you have 7 more years of products lined up that are just waiting?

Yes, these are technologies that exist. Uh, some of them are patented, some of them we haven't, and, uh, it's a matter of putting them into manufacturing and getting them out to market. But it'll be like the water machine where the area that I really want to focus on now is releasing light inside the body. So both topical application of light, but release of light inside the body. And we're finding some truly incredible things, which is essentially, if I were to summarize it, It's the ability to take light and direct it to a specific part of the body to accelerate healing in the kidneys, the liver, the brain, you know, wherever it's needed. That's the future of where we're going with light therapy. On, on the other side, on the business opportunity, I've spent years in power generation, some professionally and then some as a hobby. And, uh, the drone that we have has a completely novel power generation system. And so the plan is that over the next, uh, 5 years or so, we would, uh, adapt that technology to power people's homes. It's a completely new form of green energy. So you would have this device, it would generate, uh, 20 kilowatts. And it would power your home, charge your electric vehicle, and you'd have enough power left over to sell back to the grid to earn an income. And those are going to be major projects that we'll have in the coming 5, 7 years. And then, you know, in the process, in addition to that being great for business, there's an enormous enormous number of benefits that occur for any country that would implement this. It decentralizes the, uh, the grid for power generation, so that makes it less susceptible to terrorism. In the event of emergencies like hurricanes, when the grid is down, people still have power, they can still get around, and, uh, it's completely clean, so we can get away from burning coal and nuclear. So, uh, this is where I want to take things.

That's incredibly exciting. And I think most people don't realize that the energy grid here in the United States, even which has purportedly excellent infrastructure, it's estimated that if the grid ever went down for a prolonged period of time, 90% of Americans would perish from privation, which is really sobering and part of why this sec— this sort of technology is essential for really stability and security. So I'm excited that's where we're headed. It took you 20 years to get to where you are and to create the kind of exponential growth LifeWave's now experiencing. What do you think was key in creating that exponential growth?

Gotta have the Lord, and nothing happens without God, I think I would say. Um, I'm delighted that the first 15 years were as difficult as they were. Uh, I'm It was, you know, we spent 15 years hovering between $20 and $40 million a year in business. So, you know, we were successful and had a nice business, but we could never kind of break out of that. And there was a lot of infrastructure that we needed to build, a lot of things that we weren't doing right that we had to correct. And if we hadn't had that 15 years to develop a foundation, we never would have been able to have the success that we have today and have that platform. So, I'm incredibly grateful that we went through those really difficult times and had the time to build the infrastructure. It was a true blessing.

And remind me, when did you switch to the network marketing model?

We've always been network marketing.

Oh, it was straight from the beginning.

Yeah, straight from the beginning. 2002, the company started, and then 2004, we began sales. So, we've always been a network marketing company.

Understood. Okay. This is, from what I can see, one of the greatest wealth-building opportunities for people, everyday people, practitioners, anyone who's interested in jumping in and getting involved with the company. And we'd love if you're listening to this and are interested to have you join our team. There will be a link below the show wherever you're listening to get in touch with us. And join so you can represent the products and get them at a wholesale price. And I've been wanting to ask you, why did you decide to create such a generous compensation plan for your distributors?

You know, that happened from the very beginning, uh, because I didn't really know very much about network marketing. I, I knew about the power of it just from personal experiences, but, um, I, I couldn't have told you back in 200 '03 what a compensation plan was or a binary or anything like that. So, you know, I began talking to people about it, trying to learn about it. And the thought that entered my mind is we have— and now this is going back in the context of 2004— we have a product with only a few studies. Nobody knows who I am. This is completely new science. It's really out there compared to what was in mainstream back then. So I think we need to give people an enormous financial incentive to go and invest and put their time into building the business. And, um, you know, we have about a 51-52% payout, uh, and company like Herbalife, I think, is down around 37%, uh, other network marketing companies around 43%. So this was way on, on the generous side, um, but I wouldn't have changed a thing because it's the fact that we were so generous with the payout, uh, has definitely contributed to our longevity, no question about it.

I think it's very wise I think what I see happening and why network marketing has such a negative reputation is that people are taking products that are not particularly good. They are using knockoff ingredients that are not premium in quality. And so it's a race to the bottom and you have no money to pay distributors with. And so then they just resort to the kind of unethical behavior that has given it a negative reputation. And frankly, the fact that the product at LifeWave is is as good as it is and gives people the results it gives them while also compensating the people who are working to represent the product effectively and appropriately is why I'm here. And so I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be working with you on this project.

Oh, thank you. You know, another way to look at it, I, I kind of think of this as a sports team, right? So if I'm the owner of the sports team you would pay, like, let's say, a basketball team, you might pay 50% of your revenues out to the athletes. And I know the owners often complain. It's like, they're the ones that are bringing people in. You know, you want to see LeBron James and, you know, back in the day, Michael Jordan and so forth. So, you better be compensating them appropriately. So, I kind of look at it that way is that I don't have a company without our brand partners. So, this has to be a symbiotic relationship. We've all got to win in this and be a family. So, I'm grateful that we have the payout that we do.

Absolutely. And my last question to you today, Amway, perhaps the most well-known network marketing company in existence and the original. So to speak, has been stuck at $8 billion for 10 to 15 years. What do you intend to do differently for LifeWave to maintain its forward momentum and exponential growth for longer than that?

Innovation. I happened to meet the CFO of Amway back in, uh, September, and, um, they were excited about having 2% growth, um, in 2024 over 2023, and they were hoping they could have another 2% growth in 2025. And, you know, when you're at $8 billion a year, 2%, you know, is a lot of money. But the industry is going through, you know, really a cataclysmic change right now. And many companies like Beachbody, Rodan and Fields, they've had to drop out of the channel and they're looking at, well, What new product can I introduce? How can I change my compensation plan? They're looking at these things and they're not thinking about innovation the same way that LifeWave is. So our approach to this is, and what, what got us here is to develop new technology that hasn't existed before, turn that into products, validate it with clinical studies, patent it to make it exclusive, and then make it exclusive to LifeWave. That's the formula. So that when we come out with a new product, uh, let's say in this case in July, it's going to be the water machine. We already have 6 clinical studies that we've completed. So when we go to the market, we can be proud of that and share those test— those clinical studies with our field. It's already patented and it's already going to be exclusive. We're not going to be private labeling this product to any other companies, and we'll distribute it globally. So, and of course, there's nothing else like it, and it, it works immediately. So this has worked for us, and that's going to be the pattern that we follow in the coming years. So when we have, for example, all right, I'll tell you this. When we have, for example, a skincare system, we're gonna have a new type of light therapy for the skin. And we don't simply wanna reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles. We want to create younger, healthier skin. So we want to be bringing to market products based on this technology that are producing effects that you can't get anyplace else, and they enrich people's lives.

Absolutely. It makes perfect sense. I'm so glad you're running the company this way. I would not be involved if it weren't for the fact that I think your leadership is everything I could have asked for.

Ah, thank you. That's really kind of you to say.

Thanks for joining me again. I look forward to meeting some of the people listening to this. The link below to get in touch with us and join our team is there. We look forward to meeting you. Thanks, David, again for joining me.

Thank you, Dr. Stillman. Appreciate it.