EFR 755: Red Light Therapy For Reducing Inflammation, Pain Management, Gut Health, Brain Health and Improving Sleep with Forrest Smith

0:00:00 - Chase I'm so excited to dive into a concept that I think is very important, but I don't know if it's as top of mind for a lot of people as it should be or for those that it is. Are they doing the right things? Because there's a lot of information, a lot of misinformation, and so I'd love to just start off with the recovery. What is it? Is recovery just another health trend right now, or is it really as important as everybody's making it out to be?

0:00:28 - Forrest For me, recovery is the difference between progressing and not progressing. I think one of the things that you can kind of base this around is, if you look at performance enhancing drugs as an example, one of the things they really do is help you recover faster. We've been in the photobomodulation or light therapy space for some time now and we're starting to see from a medical standpoint, from a research standpoint, people are starting to look at is this a performance enhancing device?

0:00:56 - Chase Really, yes, really. It's kind of going that far. That's right, it's that good, all right.

0:01:00 - Forrest Well, one of the reasons why, though, is that there's a couple of things that you trigger when you exercise. There's adaptations that you trigger for strength increase, for power increase, for hypertrophy, but there's also some negative impacts, and so some of the things that hold you back from being able to push yourself further from a training standpoint are muscle inflammatory markers, and we track a couple of these that we impact directly seroactive proteins, creatinine kinase and we reduce both of those by high double digit percentages, so 60 to 80% on average, and that's meaningful, and some of the questions we get around this are if you're reducing this muscle inflammation, are you reducing the adaptations that I'm trying to trigger as well? That's an important question. It's kind of logical.

0:01:51 - Chase Yeah, it's logical.

0:01:52 - Forrest It's the question for it. But actually these muscle inflammatory markers are not impacting your hypertrophy, they're not impacting your power generation. They're just essentially slowing you down and in some cases they can actually create larger systemic issues. Endothelial tissues impacted. You reduce the amount of shear stress. You can your body. The flexibility of your endoth cardiovascular endothelial tissue is a really good health marker for which I want to get into that in a little bit.

0:02:19 - Chase I actually found some really amazing data and talking points around endothelial cells as well as angiogenesis. That I was really kind of eye opening for me.

0:02:28 - Forrest I love it. I think it's a. You know, it's one of the kind of a lot of times when you're looking at things like pharmaceuticals, you look at the side impacts, the byproducts of these chemicals in your system and they're not extremely well thought through and you see a lot of negative byproducts of these, Like what would be an example of that. So with pain, we deal with kind of inflammation related pain for a lot of our consumers, for a lot of our users, and with things like NSAIDs, you see cardiovascular tissue stiffening. You see an increase across the board, whether you're six or 60 of 30 to 50% increase risk of cardiovascular disease if you're taking NSAIDs like ibuprofen chronically, which is high and I don't think it's commonly known. I think this is.

0:03:15 - Chase This is something where that's surprising, for me even you know, on the age discrepancy. You know you would think as we age and maybe you know cardiovascular system wears down, vessels wear down or they're not as resilient, I would maybe get more behind that. But to hear that something even as young as six years old, when we should be, you know, more developmental, more resilient, have better cardiovascular health, that's very just kind of like I'm taking it back by that.

0:03:40 - Forrest So it is an increase on your underlying risk. So if you have a kind of if you imagine, at six years old you're point zero, zero, zero 1% because you are in a healthier point of life and you're typically have less, you know, higher shear strength, less stiffening of the cardiovascular tissue. But if you increase that zero, zero, 1%, roughly as in that that's kind of more of a kind of a placeholder example by 30 to 50%, it's not as impactful. You're not. You're still going to see not huge outcome changes because of that. But if you're 60 years old and your baseline risk is higher, increasing it by 30 to 50%, by taking and I think that the key for this is the education piece when you think about doctors and the respect they command and when they prescribe you something that this is a gold standard gift that they've given you.

This is something that you're listening to the authorities and saying I'm using best practices, why would? Why would I not take my ibuprofen every day? And what's just generally not known about this is that liver damage risks stomach endothelial tissue ulcers cardiovascular endothelial tissue and then some of the brain impacts that come from this as well are just not very well known, that they're reducing of neuroplasticity over time from chronic use of.

0:04:57 - Chase So that's in brain health. Now, that's right, wow.

0:05:00 - Forrest And so what we see is this, this kind of existing paradigm of okay, it's reasonably inexpensive to do this from a cash out of pocket standpoint, but what do you? What does it cost you long term relative to your health? And so you're almost doing the opposite of preventative health by taking these insides over time and again. These are, these are what people are coached into by their physicians, because it's what physicians have been coached into by their schooling, and I think it starts from an educational problem. But it's also one of those things that's just inertia that the the alternatives to this have not been fantastic until now, but now we have a really good one where we not only are we offering a inflammation reduction, we're offering a pain reduction that's higher, this clinically tested and repeatedly confirmed as more effective than these drugs.

And you know, our goal as a company is to increase the quality of life for the largest number of people we can in the most substantial and measurable way we can. And we've picked a very interesting segment with our first product of neuromuscular pain and inflammation, because pain is really hard to measure. It's not one of those things where you have. There are a couple of ways of objective measurement for chronic pain that require a laboratory. But in general, the idea of measuring pain is things like the visual assessment score which is essentially a zero to 10, the smiley faces right, yeah, how do you feel today?

0:06:23 - Chase Yeah, yeah, yeah, which?

0:06:25 - Forrest is kind of almost the definition of subjective.

0:06:28 - Chase Because that will potentially even change over time. Maybe something right here right now is an eight, but unfortunately it goes untreated or it's unsuccessful in treatment, and then over time you just get used to it and now it's the same pain, but your ability to relate to it lowers because it just becomes your norm. It doesn't actually change the pain level, it's just your association to it and vice versa. That's exactly it.

0:06:51 - Forrest That's exactly it, and there's also kind of the neurological piece of it and there's also a biochemical piece of it.

And again, what are we measuring? We're kind of measuring a number of different things that come back to it to kind of one watershed metric, and nobody's really developed this metric yet. And I think one of the interesting things that's been happening over the past few years, we have a friendly company called Wavie that does electrical measurements of the brain and they use external stimuli audio and visual, external stimuli to measure the changes that pain makes in communication speeds that are under, that are kind of under your conscious levels of regions of your brain, and so people are trying to get their arms around. How do you, how do you quantify pain? And I think we're working something in a similar direction with our next product from a, a measurement standpoint for the brain, from an optical measurements, and I think as we move forward we'll see these, this, a more robust picture come to light from combining this electrical, optical and ideally chemical. But I think the chemical will come by way of the optical.

0:07:55 - Chase Yeah, absolutely. And so before we kind of get into a lot more of the tech which you guys are watching, the video we got to check out, we'll kind of get into more examples here. I brought some show and sell with with my Kenny on device let's wrap up this kind of concept of recovery. So now the listeners were aware of recovery. Maybe we're taking, you know, non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, like you said, or just now, hopefully that word is more top of mind for the listener. Before we get into unique applications to work on recovery, what are just some general modalities that you may because I mean, you're a high performer, you're running a company, you're a very athletic guy what are some modalities that you have found success and that you think, in general, most people would have success, success with by just implementing in a regular basis for recovery.

0:08:39 - Forrest So for me, I kind of try to approach most things from an 80 20 type proto principle perspective and focus your energy on where you're going to get the highest return. And for me the highest return is sleep.

So if your sleep is good, you're recovering muscle inflammatory markers, general, general inflammation in your system. You know muscle growth, you know power indicators, strength indicators, everything that's. That's one watershed where you, if you're hammering your sleep, well, if you can get your head around that, then the results and the returns from that are as high as anything that you can put your time into.

0:09:12 - Chase Now, when you say sleep, are you keep breaking down for us even a little bit more? Are you saying quantity, like we need more sleep and we need better sleep, or is it kind of like a dynamic duo Dynamic duo, a kind of regular as much as you can, so keeping your sleep times as regular as you can.

0:09:27 - Forrest One of the things that we've also noticed with photo by modulation that's been very well kind of documented from a medical literature standpoint, is that when you sleep your brain clears out a lot of waste material the lymphatic system.

0:09:39 - Chase That's exactly these glial cells. It's like the, the. It's like sending your brain through a washing machine or a car wash. You know it'll actually condense down in size. It'll get to work, scrub everything and then flood it out through the lymphatic and lymphatic.

0:09:51 - Forrest That's exactly it. And and. However, if you're not getting enough sleep or if the sleep is not regular enough or or not deep enough, there's a number of different kind of markers for this, and again we're still kind of this is one of the most exciting is just a small, a small ad d branch off here, this is one of the reasons that it's so exciting to be in the tech hardware space relative to this right now is that we're starting to see things like.

We're starting to see things like inox the guys are doing great nitric oxide and and muscle oxygenation sensing. We're starting to be able to see more of this data coming back out of our body and interpret it in a more meaningful way because of the advances from both a hardware and a machine learning standpoint, and for us, we're finding that same thing as when you pull more data out.

You can find both intuitive ways, paths through that, but also kind of a more data driven way to kind of improve these high leverage points. But back to sleep. When you're not getting enough sleep, those, that Glimphatic system, those glial cells, are just not as effective.

And so one of the things we found with photobiomodulation is it has a protective effect and that you can increase the, the glimphatic function of your brain when you aren't getting enough sleep really and so treating prefrontal cortex in particular and then treating your sinus areas around your face, has been shown in a number of different studies, shown and then kind of confirmed in a number of different studies. Like using during sleep or before sleep or just in general, yes, so if I, if I so, when I'm traveling, for example, I haven't, I Don't have the, the fully adapted version of how to get my sleep.

0:11:25 - Chase I was sharing with him earlier about my my hack for jet lag using a fly kit.

0:11:29 - Forrest Yeah, but I'm signing up for that Immediately again, this is one of those high leverage points. It's, it's, you know two pieces of that. You have a high leverage point of sleep relative to what's happening in your body from recovery standpoint. Within that you have a high leverage point of what sleeps doing for your brain, and so, again, that's that's where we kind of focus on with the. The photobiomodulation is this transcranial piece for treating that prefrontal cortex and then the sinus areas and you see the waste Materials processing.

So if I, if I, for example, don't sleep very well tonight in the morning, tomorrow, to increase the the processing of that waste and not leave it there for extended periods of time, you can use a photobiomodulation prefrontal cortex and on your sinus areas.

0:12:11 - Chase This is, um, I'm just having like a my brain's lining up right now, because this is one of the things I love most about understanding how we work physiologically, biochemically.

We often think the thing is the thing like, oh, I'm not performing well, I'm not training well, I'm not recovering well because I didn't get enough sleep. We, that's just like the surface level thing. What's really happening is, yeah, you didn't get enough, or you didn't get enough quality sleep, but because of that, your body, your brain, really is not then able to Get rid of what it needs to get rid of, and you're literally then waking up, training again, traveling again, living again, sitting with this metabolic waste, extracellular waste in some way, toxins, yes, which is going to then just, I mean, it's literally a one-way valve, the lymphatic system, so it's From top-down system. Your then the rest of your body then is just stuck with kind of dealing with this on top of the demands of Everyday living, on top of the demands of your training schedule, and so the thing is never the thing. I've come to realize that's right, it's a sum of a lot of different parts?

0:13:12 - Forrest Yeah, and I think there are. And again, this comes just comes back to how exciting it is to be in this space right now when you can start kind of, you know, looking at this meat machine where we're driving around, truly and like taking apart the, taking apart the engine a little bit, as it were.

0:13:26 - Chase There's, um, I have a my notes here. I'll share in the show notes for everybody. Actually, while we're on the topic of photo by modulation, red light therapy and sleep, there was this, an amazing study I found around, I think was in the uh, the Rio Olympics years ago um, yeah, uh, the impact of wavelengths of led light therapy on endothelial cells. I'll, like I said, lincoln, the show notes, but basically, this is now you're an Olympic athlete. The 1% difference matters to you.

It might not matter for us here, but you know, maybe for somebody listening, but even still just being aware of, okay, I'm in a different environment, I'm in a different time zone, I'm in a different, you know, elevation, like we're talking about earlier.

Uh, I'm out of sync in some little way, even though the rest of my training, the rest of my life, the rest of my healthy habits are more or less kind of locked in.

What they were finding was that the time then that they were getting to perform, like they were getting slotted for their Competition, was not what they trained in, or they're in a different time zone, and it's like the middle of night and their body supposed to be asleep by just using this photo by modulation, the red light therapy, basically, it was kind of like it was jump starting circadian rhythms or Resetting it in a little bit. So I mean just the hacks that are possible with this To reset something that's going to help your recovery, help your training. But let's be honest, if we can, on time, as often as possible, maintain that circadian rhythm, that sleep and rise schedule, even when we're halfway across the world or having to perform in odd hours, that I think is the ultimate hack. 100, because that's going to rip on the everything that you do, how you think, cognition, performance, mood, um, I mean everything.

0:15:06 - Forrest No, that's exactly right, and I think you know kind of add on that a little bit. There's. There's um With uh sleep and with kind of your circadian rhythm. There's a lot you can do to manipulate it and it's a whole subject of its own.

But one thing that we have notice is that it it's impacting by way of your vagus nerve is the main mediator for this Different parts of your body by way of your organs, and so one of the things we've seen in the literature recently and has been very interesting for us from a photo by modulation Therapeutic standpoint, is the connection between. We've kind of known about the, the gut brain connection for some time. What we're seeing right now is this kind of addition of gut brain, kind of plus organ and so, uh well, with uh liver as an example, you, you see your gut brain liver connection as an axis right now for Turning on and turning off.

0:15:54 - Chase That makes total sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've never thought about this, but yeah, literally everything's connected to that.

0:16:00 - Forrest Yeah, and so so the enzymes that you're getting into your gut, kind of the. One of the things that we've seen with this is the ability to impact what's known as, and we'll be launching a product for the gut next year.

That's dialed in specifically for dosing to reduce inflammation in the gut. But you can also improve things just by kind of Uh, oftentimes when you have inflammation in your gut, you have kind of joints, of those in the kind of gut endothelial tissue that don't kind of butt up and then, as tightly as you'd like to see them and, uh, when they don't, you increase Inflammation in the area. Your digestive profile isn't as good from from what you see. But there's, there's some things that are happening. This is another thing that just comes back to like what an amazing time to be alive, um, but the omics, and in this case, uh, generally, generally, kind of the metabolomics for the gut is the the biggest thing, okay, okay, so there's, there's a bunch of different new measurement methodologies, um and uh, you know, unfortunately they still kind of for for gut. Most of these require the poop studies, uh, which is not the not the most fun study to go do, but the uh.

What you get back out of this now though, is is uh, you can classify.

0:17:07 - Chase It's a masterclass of exactly what's going on in your gut, yes, and therefore, in a way, your immune system as well. Yes, that's exactly.

0:17:13 - Forrest Yeah, and so, uh, all that, to say, uh, we've, we've kind of identified um Three, well four now, uh, different wavelengths of uh, infrared light that are a little bit longer than what's been Uh, and this, this all kind of goes back to our model that we've built around. Dosing with uh, with light, is very similar to kind of dosing with pharmaceuticals, insofar that you're you're essentially trying, you, you can't change something that you don't change chemically, you can't impact something that you don't change chemically.

And what you do with light is you impact a number of photo acceptors, uh, at different depths of tissue, and the different wavelengths allow you to penetrate to those different depths and interact with these different molecules. Um, but it kind of goes back to our general 80 20 look at things Uh, when you're impacting signaling molecules, what's coming downstream from those can really be, uh, powerful impacts. And so for an immune system, um, we are building out some studies for this next year on using these different, these four different wavelengths of infrared to be able to modulate immune Immune system responses, uh, and then test them relative to this.

But what's been crazy about that is the gut is is the best place to to really kind of interact with that, oh yeah yeah, when you add the gut plus brain, it's synergistic, it's additive, so it's, and so you get these logarithmically better outcomes for people relative to their, their immune responses, and it's, it's really powerful. And I think you know we're looking at things where, um, there have been studies for substantial, substantially positive outcomes on asthma, um, from, from, not from treating your lungs, but from treating your gut and brain. Oh, wow.

There's a number of different studies in this space right now, um, and it's it's generally termed remote photo biomodulation. So photo biomodulation, white therapy, uh, remote photo biomodulation how do we treat tissue and impact non local tissue? And it's um, we're seeing some really Interesting results from this and it's it's kind of giving us a better idea as to what's mediating these effects.

0:19:11 - Chase That's fascinating, I I just want to go back a little bit and kind of define our terms. Um, we've mentioned endothelial a couple times and just to kind of paint the picture for the listener Maybe is unaware of this, I'm just pulling from a online google definition here. The endothelial cells form a single cell layer that lines all blood vessels and regulates exchanges between the bloodstream and the surrounding tissues. Signals from the endothelial cells organize the growth and development of connected tissue cells that form the surrounding layers of the blood vessel wall, so basically everywhere. Yes, this is why this is so important.

0:19:44 - Forrest Yes, and it's also just to kind of add on that as well there's been I would say recently, but over the last 10 years a lot more research into the fact that our Cardio pulmonary system is not a kind of two gas system. It's been kind of traditionally thought of as carbon dioxide and oxygen, and what's coming to light is that there's a huge role for Nitric oxide in this.

0:20:08 - Chase Yes, yeah, yeah, and this is something I had down I really wanted to get into because it's fascinating. I want to put this in the notes as well for everybody go back in. I think last year I had dr Lou Ignaro on the show. He won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nitric oxide. An older gentleman, great guy, amazing conversation. Just understanding the necessary role that NO plays in the body and how and why it's produced, but also how we can stimulate more. The downstream effects are Amazing. It seems that this red light therapy, photo bi modulation, has an effect on NO production and it seems to release more of it. That's what I was kind of finding in the literature. Can you shine a light on that Please?

0:20:48 - Forrest yeah, absolutely. Why is that?

0:20:55 - Chase important and you know, we know what are the benefits you, we can see from more in.

0:20:58 - Forrest Oh so just just to kind of Provide a little more context for it. You have different types of, you have different. There's many different functions for nitric oxide in the body and Because of that you have different ways to generate these. The methods for generating are generally called nitric oxide synthesis, and so you have an endothelial nitric oxide synthase, for example, which one of the more powerful ones because it actually generates a lot more before it, but then the other ones before it has to kind of be essentially recharged.

0:21:30 - Chase But, it's been a key and, oh, has a very quick half-life in the body. So, yeah, that's why it's important to stimulate the right amounts in the right frequencies. That's exactly, yeah.

0:21:38 - Forrest Yeah, and one of the other ones that we're seeing now, though, is mitochondrial Nitric oxide synthase. So you have, you have and this is one of the ones that we interact with, and there's there's there's still kind of Fleshing this out.

You know it's a difficult biochemistry to pull together, but there's been some assumptions made and tested around this over the recent years that kind of have let us know that Essentially in embedded in. So there's again. So you got a few different versions of, of synthases. The endothelial is very powerful, creates a lot of of, or releases a lot of nitric oxide into the bloodstream, and that nitric oxide acts as a Dilation factor for your, for your, blood vessels. And why is that important? So you can deliver more blood. Essentially, it's, it's pretty damn important.

Yes, yeah, that's a good thing, people, that's a good thing, yeah and it also is is, you know, one of those things that drops off over time, so as you age, you create less of this and so generating more is is really important. One of the things we also see and this is this is a yeah, this will be a multi branch kind of nitric oxide discussion, but it because it's really kind of a deep and powerful subject relative to the overall physiology discussion. But, um, one of the things that you see also from an injury, I understand point and we, you know this, being in this space and spending so much time in the medical literature has really kind of given us a good perspective to how Powerfully bad inflammation is for your body. Please say that again. Please go back, say that again, really like and and not.

It doesn't stay local, it it goes regional and kind of systemic and the. The impacts of this are all negative, really just not good and and chronic inflammation, it's just a scourge, it's it really. It stays around for decades if you don't treat it properly, and it can, it can really generate kind of bad outcomes from a cardiovascular standpoint, from a muscle performance standpoint, from a gross standpoint, brain, yeah, I mean really across the board, there's nothing that it impacts positively this chronic inflammation.

0:23:37 - Chase I'm making a prediction now that I feel like in In 2024, inflammation is gonna be the new trending thing. I guess I feel like just the progression we've had in wellness over the last several years is, you know, we've gone from a lot of different hacks, you know, cold plunge and recovery, like we've been talking about, and you know, even focusing on, I feel like gut health has finally kind of gotten like the niche focus and attention it deserves, beyond just oh, let me eat more fiber and probiotics. You know there's a lot more going on, like we've been talking about, with a vagal nerve and connection to every organ in your brain. But inflammation, I think, is gonna be the most crucial point we're looking at next, for all the things you just said daily living, chronic pain management but those inflammatory markers, like they get worse over time, they affect everything, especially when we look at all calls mortality.

0:24:21 - Forrest Yes, and I think one of the things is this most so that's that's super exciting a that you have this inflammation, this trend towards inflammation. Education, because right now is not there and you, you see these things where you know what, what people really understand from there.

0:24:36 - Chase Their inflammation is the pain by the time is at a painful point, but it's more than just pain. That's a mission, more than just pain. Yes, go back to what you brought up earlier. You know CRP C reactive protein, is like the predominant inflammatory marker for the body. That will wreak havoc on your health and longevity If you don't get it checked out.

0:24:50 - Forrest Yes, and I, yeah, we've seen some interesting things in some of the studies We've done. That, I think, is a good, good indicator or kind of educational piece for this. We've done some studies and there's larger ones. We've done some internally to kind of validate these, the ones we. We took this from. I was a 3,500 Person study, observational study, on NFL players who had those who had torn an ACL and had surgery on it and those who hadn't.

0:25:15 - Chase I'm sure you had no problem finding people to fill that.

0:25:17 - Forrest Yeah, quite a few, quite a few yeah.

0:25:20 - Chase I've had some on the show.

0:25:23 - Forrest And it's such a bad one though, because you it's yeah, it's invidious. What you find is that you have you have this traumatic tissue damage.

You have a surgery which gives you more traumatic tissue damage and you think, alright, I'm gonna go through rehab and then, fix this and probably take some level of pharmaceuticals in the meantime to reduce the pain and inflammation that I have, because that's that's the gold standard of this what you find is Ten years later you know and again we've kind of gone and evaluated this with infrared cameras the, the legs, so regional Blood delivery is impaired, and so you see, this quad will be one to two degrees, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it's massive from a blood delivery standpoint.

I is one to two degrees colder than the healthier leg, wow. And so not only that, you see a 50% increase in severe cardiovascular disease, and so it's what we've been able to kind of track down from a biochemistry standpoint is that that inflammation never really goes away, and like you said it only gets worse and so what they see that as.

0:26:21 - Chase And then you get the unwanted downshim effects. Yes, compensation, other blood vessel issues, cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary issues. It's literally just a matter of time.

0:26:29 - Forrest And I think this is the part where the education comes in from kind of intervention standpoint. The intervention that's kind of standard for this right now is take your ibuprofen, take these painkillers, and what that does is essentially removes the batteries from the fire alarm while the fire in the kitchen is still burning. And so you see these guys, and not only is that damaging your cardiovascular system but your actual cartilage, your soft tissue in your joints, and not just that local joint. Everything is degrading at kind of like a 10 X rate here and roughly two extra other joints, but your soft tissue is degrading system wide at a faster rate because you're not paying attention to the fire in the kitchen.

0:27:08 - Chase I want to highlight I'm going to try to try to. He's definitely much more man than I, but try to connect some other dots to a bigger picture. Here we're talking about longevity like the issue here and now that we need to focus on, but how it actually, how it has negative implications for the rest of your health, the rest of your life. Peter to you, yes, outlive, love his work, yeah, his work around. Kind of looking at the studies of longevity, one of the primary indicators for are you going to suffer in older age or have a harder time or even make it to older age beyond a bunch of other things like CRP inflammation, was leg strength. Looking at particularly femur density, bone density, that when that degrades you are way more susceptible to injury. And what happens when we're old and we fall because we have poor leg strength, poor quad strength, low femur density, we bust a hip. Once that happens, I think it's like 60%, 70% higher likely of just death for any reason. In a matter of what 18 months or something crazy.

So let's go all the way there, to that end of life scenario, and go back to treating it here. This is what we're talking about.

0:28:14 - Forrest This is where it starts. That's exactly it, and we do have a number of older users for our products, and what we found with them is that it's a spiral If you have pain in your joints, then you move less. If you move less, then your joints get worse. If your joints get worse, you take more NSAIDs. Your cardiovascular system gets impacted, your joints are impacted and it's one of the reasons why we called the company Kenyon. Kenyo is Greek for movement.

0:28:41 - Chase And the key for this is let's get these people back into movement.

0:28:44 - Forrest You can literally give them years on their lives and functional, more active years than they had beforehand on their lives. And again, my team gives me a hard time because I bring this up in every discussion.

But our mission is to increase the quality of life for the largest number of people we can, in the most measurable way we can. And it's tough with pain, but when you can say all-cause mortality goes down when you're using this kind of treatment, and all-cause mortality goes down double that when you use this kind of treatment, plus some kind of rehab or recovery, for again, I think you nailed it the hips.

0:29:17 - Chase When you start seeing.

0:29:19 - Forrest You have a few things that impact older folks for their balance. One is your inner ear starts drying out. You have this kind of balance, point there that starts drying out, so you can't balance quite as well. Your vision starts being impaired as well, so you can't see to kind of course correct for this as much, and you start losing kind of your lower body strength and with sarcopenia and muscle wasting.

0:29:43 - Chase Yeah, I want everybody right now, if you're watching the video, tune in with me here. This is like, if you can do this test right here, right now, you're good. You need to, just that's. Peter Atea talks about it. Looking at leg strength, looking at bone density. Dr Kelly Starrett in his latest work, talking about longevity as well. That's one of the most basic, simple tests we can do as a humans to see am I going to have to suffer with everything that you just talked about or not?

0:30:10 - Forrest It makes sense. There's also some good interventions that are coming to light right now, I think e-centric training with things like the flywheel training. There's a couple of different companies out there. Vitruvian out of Australia does a really cool product that's if you think of. Have you seen the ARCS Fitness devices?

0:30:25 - Chase No no.

0:30:26 - Forrest They're really nice. They're AI driven kind of variable load lifting or kind of resistance training devices, but they're $70,000. So it's hard to find them.

0:30:36 - Chase That's a little bit more than this at home light therapy device I got yes, damn. But speaking of, I've got this here on the video for you guys. I'm going to check it out and this is the Move Plus. This device I have been, I've kept it in my backpack and my travels. It stays out with me every morning. This is something I've been using predominantly for well, correct me if I'm wrong. Well, this worked through clothing. Here I'm wearing long sleeves, but ideally you want to kind of have it on skin contact. That's right.

0:31:03 - Forrest You can do it through clothing if it's unavailable or it's too cold out or whatever otherwise. But yeah, if you can get it on the skin, it's ideal.

0:31:09 - Chase So I'm using it here. If you guys again check the video, and it's just super easy you adjust it, you put it on over a joint, over a muscle. I had several months ago a dumb deadlift injury where I was training outside and I wanted to finish the set and it started raining and so my grip slipped, coming up, and so I kind of struggled to keep the grip and therefore all of that load I think it was like 400, four or five what's four plates? I'm drawing a blank right now 410, four or five, excuse me. And so all that kind of fell on my forearm and I heard and felt this rip, this tear. I was like, oh man, I think I just tore my bicep and but it turns out it was actually it was partial bicep tendon and forearm tendon. And since then using this just manage those kind of just nagging like, like aches and pains and kind of syphonous has been a game changer.

I've had injuries before where I'm like it's going to hurt for a lot longer, this I've been able to jump back in way quicker. I haven't gotten back to the deadlift game yet, just maybe it's more of a mental thing, but just the difference that I feel and kind of that chronic, like little aches and pains. But then also, knowing all the things that I know now from what you just shared with us but my own personal research and stimulating blood for blood flow, there we go, excuse me. And stimulating mitochondrial health and simulated nitric oxide and just reducing inflammation, like I know it's also helping in a myriad of other ways. In what? Five to 15 minutes a day, that's right. Yeah, that's exactly it.

0:32:39 - Forrest By the way, if you if you want a kind of input on different protocols, you can use the kind of rehab back into it. Sam Dancer, we were just with him. Amazing human being guy is fitness man on earth.

0:32:52 - Chase Oh, okay, and cross cross games, right, yes, okay, yes.

0:32:55 - Forrest Absolutely An animal of a, an athlete, but also just a really, really good human being towards bicep, uses devices to kind of recover and rehab and come back into it and swears by it. Now he's traveling everywhere, but he had a great protocol for it. He does, he does a an interesting kind of clean he's, he's, he's just like again, a ridiculously strong being yeah so most of us couldn't get over 300 pounds with a. With a regular clean he can kind of do it with a dinosaur claw. Pull one, like where he's.

0:33:24 - Chase He's actually kind of he's half curling it oh they throw us on his T rex arms, and then he's under it.

0:33:30 - Forrest But, like you know, 300 plus pounds type of thing is pretty impressive. Wow, but he's, he's. Yeah, he had a great, great experience with it. You know he's got a $30,000 device at his house that just sits and collects dust right now because he can take this and use it more effectively and this you're saying he has replaced with a $30,000 recovery device.

0:33:48 - Chase He replaces $30,000 recovery dice with this.

0:33:50 - Forrest Okay, wow, so he can he can travel and and use it more effectively and he's just been a great kind of spokesperson for us about it because he's he's seen really good results for it. I think this is one of the things where, especially when you're recovering from traumatic tissue damage like that, there's a really meaningful outcome that you can see for it in the short term, which?

0:34:07 - Chase keeps you into the maintenance of the program for the long term.

So I mentioned I was using this for an injury recovery. Now it's just kind of part of my regular recovery routine. What are the benefits that someone could find from a device like this photo by modulation, red light therapy? Let's say maybe they don't have an injury, but anyone listening to my show here is an active person in some capacity. They're not going to the CrossFit games maybe some of them are, but we're just trying to take care of our bodies. But look as we do that we're more susceptible to injury, more susceptible to inflammation, especially as we get older.

0:34:36 - Forrest Like what are just kind of the general applications and benefits of something like this If people are training heavily and especially high intensity training, reducing the recovery time, reducing delayed onset, muscle soreness, the carotid kinase and CRP reduction just means that you can go back in. And it's not that one of the things that's been really interesting in this, in this research around this space, and particularly the guys at Innox, Evan Pycon and his team, from physiology standpoint are just amazing. But what you see is that is not necessarily a mental thing that you're like. Sometimes you're like all right, I trained really hard today and you get back into like oh, I just can't.

It's your physiology that's impaired and this reduces that impairment on your physiology and means you can just get back in and get after it harder. So you mentioned earlier and I think this is one of the things that we really see as a kind of core concept for the benefits for this is percent differences. If it's a single digit percent every day, that's still meaningful. Let that add up over a couple of years and see how the differences are.

0:35:35 - Chase How many of us again, for just kind of the general active person which I would kind of say where I'm at now in my life, how often does that just small percentage of I'm so sore or like I'm maybe afraid of a flare up of an old injury keep us from making the choice that we maybe want to make and that's going to the yoga studio, going to the gym, hell, even just taking a walk. Again, as we age and as we bang ourselves up more, it's that mental block of I don't want this to happen again, or I don't want to be sore for my flight, or I don't want to be stuck in doms out the wazoo, not be able to pick up my kid, kind of thing. I mean more of the life influence matters in our decision making process now to train and be able to have better recovery, I think, than ever.

0:36:22 - Forrest Yes, no, I 100% agree and I think that's exactly it. I personally, my use case for it is if I have anything where it's kind of middleweight, high reps, high volume, so if we do you know like over what, over 10 reps. So I'm thinking kind of like if I'm doing 200 front rack lunges or something like that I know my, my quads and my glutes are going to be sore, and not in a nice way like this.

0:36:47 - Chase That's one of those ones. We can fight through it, but it's going to hurt tomorrow.

0:36:51 - Forrest This. This meaningfully and substantially and noticeably decreases that muscle soreness and also just gets you back into like I could. I probably wouldn't go back in and do that same heavy volume, but I might go row the next day where I wouldn't put in a as aggressive rowing program or something like this the day after I did that. Now I can, and so it just lets you kind of steer your, your programming in a more aggressive way, if you like to. The other things I use it for are I've got an old torn MCL tournament. It's just to kind of give an idea of different things that will flare up from box jumps or from rope jumping or something like this occasionally and that used to take me, you know, a couple of weeks to get back in full 100% and now it's two or three days. I use it daily on my gut. I've just noticed a better kind of more positive outlook.

Open it up and lay it across tight as you can together and then just kind of clip them. There we actually have an extension kind of strap for it right now that I can send you?

0:37:46 - Chase What do you notice from the great thank you, yeah, what do you notice from the gut health application? Just feel better.

0:37:50 - Forrest I just feel more that it's. I haven't tested myself for this, but from the medical literature it should be increasing dopamine, and which vast majority is created in the gut. That's right, yeah, that's right. And decreasing inflammation there. And so I just I feel better on a daily basis and I have kind of just kind of generally, you know, more positive outlook on things which is always a plus.

Yes, which is great, especially if you know you're building a new business. Entrepreneurialism is a high risk, high, high reward space, but it's a lot of stress in general. You have to have some level of management tools in place, and this is one of them that I do.

0:38:23 - Chase Being able to craft out the habits, the hacks, if you will, the tools, the resources, product services, whatever that looks like for you, the person listening, watching, being able to do that so that you can feel as good as possible in any and every situation. Personally, that's what I'm after. You know, that's the whole kind of concept of living a life ever for it is being aware of these things that work for you, so that you don't have to as much or as often compartmentalize these things that you know work. It's like what can I do to build the most solid foundation, the most bulletproof foundation of making me and keeping me feeling good, so that I don't have to work as hard over time as I age to get back to that feeling of that same baseline? You know, yeah, no, I love it.

0:39:03 - Forrest And it also provides you additional resilience. I think we both kind of travel a bit and you know it does take it out of you if you're not managing yourself. But it's nice to come back into a space where you have those habits where you have that kind of baseline that you feel comfortable in and that you can kind of build robustness and resilience into your, into your physiology I do have.

0:39:22 - Chase I do have another question around this unique application Is it possible to use from my example here, you know I am still kind of working around again more of a mental block working around this bicep and forearm injury Would wearing this during a training session where maybe I am pulling, focusing on grip strength or even, you know, engaging bicep, would wearing it during give me any extra edge compared to after in my recovery?

0:39:50 - Forrest So there has been some performance benefit that has been catalogued in different medical studies, but typically they don't. Nobody's really had it to wear until these, until these kind of devices are now in the way to wear. So it hasn't been tested during but ahead of time. So if you say five minutes ahead of time, they have tested before training session. That's right. Wow, wow, okay. And really that comes back to they're doing primarily cardiovascular training, that they've tested this with and seeing it's like an internal warmup. Yes, that's right. That's right.

0:40:20 - Chase Wow, you see rowers have a.

0:40:23 - Forrest They do essentially ramp tests or or critical power tests type type thing, and they see better outcomes for performance standpoint.

0:40:30 - Chase All right. Well, after we're done here, I'm going to train.

0:40:34 - Forrest So I'm wondering if this is going to try it out, I'm really curious.

0:40:37 - Chase now I've thought about that. This has been incredible for us. I'm so fascinated by where we're at in the world now and especially what you guys are doing at Kenny on, for just bringing bringing the science and the clinical evidence and clinical applications to the world, but being able to translate that and show us hey, here's real world application, here's what we see in the science. But we know this is really what your life looks like and what you need and what you want and just where we are in terms of access, information and lower barrier to entry. In terms of costs as well, I mean for what something like this does and what we would need even just a few years ago. See sessions over. I mean, you've already shared. You know we're talking tens of thousands of dollars and usually only accessible to high performers, athletes or people with much larger budgets than me. But this device, like I said, is so easy, convenient and I found a lot of value out of it. I still do. It's been everywhere with me.

0:41:34 - Forrest So, thank you guys, thank you so much.

0:41:37 - Chase And, like I kind of already said, you know, this kind of helps us paint the picture of being able to feel happy, feel good and keep building and maintain the life that we want and just everyday living, living an active life, so that we can move forward in life. How does something like this, how do you, how does your mission, help us move ever forward? What does that mean to you?

0:41:58 - Forrest To me it's that same thing we talked about earlier is make those percent changes each day. And for us as a team, it really comes back to our core mission, which is improving quality of life in a measurable way, and we're taking steps in that way from a technology standpoint, with our new sensor package we're putting together that's measuring human dynamics and metabolic dynamics in the body and that will provide us a feedback loop.

0:42:21 - Chase Don't tell me that I don't need to nerd out anymore.

0:42:23 - Forrest I got too many things I'm trying to look up and study, but bring it on anyway. The main thing is we have the ability now.

0:42:32 - Chase And.

0:42:33 - Forrest I think, again, it's one of the things that's so exciting to be in the space that we're in right now to really challenge what's been available from a data standpoint relative to how we measure ourselves. And then how do we build in, how do we justify, how do we kind of put feedback loops on these different processes that we're using so that not only do we start with these kind of 80-20 Pareto principle high-leverage approaches, but then even within those steer them in a way that makes it even more high-leverage. And again, that comes back to where we're building out our spectroscopy systems over the next couple of years. And just finished I mentioned before you jumped on a couple of Department of Defense grant applications. I think we have a very good shot at winning with these kind of new ways of measuring. I think you've nailed it with inflammation. One way of kind of the other side of the coin for inflammation is metabolic health and I think when we We've seen a lot of that.

0:43:28 - Chase That was another thing I think this year has been very trendy in an important way is metabolic health, and I had some amazing guests to kind of cover that as well. But again, it's the thing is never the thing. We talk about metabolic health because of its reduction in inflammation. Yes, yes, that's it.

0:43:41 - Forrest And there are benefits to the metabolic side as well, but I think one of the things we're seeing right now is things like continuous glucose monitors and, again, kind of whoops straps where you're using PPG sensors. These are an example and they've done a great job with it. I'm not bagging anybody else's product, but they're using a PPG-type technology that's been in pulse ox type situations in a hospital for decades. Ppg is what for us, plethysmography is the short version of that.

0:44:12 - Chase Oh, wow, okay. But basically it's got like a light that you're talking about, the lights in the background. It's got a number of different LEDs and photodiodes.

0:44:23 - Forrest So what's happened over the last five or 10 years, though, is that you're not real. So LEDs were great. Some solid state emitters are a really good thing to be able to build into a system versus to having to use halogen lamps, so you should only do it in the lab. What's happened recently, though, is that you're also looking at things where laser manufacturing has gotten much more inexpensive and has been adopted more broadly for cell phones, a number of different things, so lasers are a better emitter if you want to, for example, shoot something for measuring internal light.

0:44:56 - Chase Right, yeah, I was seeing a lot of this in the research on understanding red light therapy, and photobiomodulation was really like laser seemed to kind of be more the golden standard and it was what they used to study, but it was also so expensive and so unrealistic for anybody else in the real world to really have access to.

0:45:13 - Forrest Yes, well, until until now really really only the last two, when we started designing our product, which we started really kind of manufacturing, delivering what? September, august, september of last year, when we started designing it, the lasers that were available were 20 times more expensive than the ones we're using right now. But you have, you know, there's a couple of different things. When mobile phones and LiDAR systems for autonomous cars start adopting this type of technology, it starts getting micronized, the volume of it starts increasing and the price goes down. So you have that kind of inverse effect.

Yeah, and we're seeing the same thing with a couple of new versions of lasers now. The vertical cavity surface emission lasers that we're using for our devices for therapeutic side will also be able to leverage those and one other type of laser for a spectroscopy system where you shoot the laser in and then you measure it back out with these photo diodes. But the photo diodes are also being upgraded. So you have you have these silicon photomodal pliers, which are kind of too expensive for us to kind of launch right now with our spectroscopy system, and in the last three or four years they're dropping off a cliff because they're being picked up by larger volume industry. So what that allows us to do is have the hardware to be able to build much higher resolution, much better signal brain measurements, and so, if you can kind of think about, like, how an fMRI works, you get to see the inner workings of the brain and what's happening there in real time. In real time. But it's a humongous $2 million tube.

And what we're doing with spectroscopy just is going to use near infrared to be able to make that something that people can wear. Wow, and having a 3D map of how you're. So what people have used in the space, in the, in the labs, previous to now has been hemodynamics. So how does how does hemoglobin, how is hemoglobin a proxy for energy usage in your brain? And you can you can pull together a mathematical case around that, but it's not great resolution and what we really like to see is something where you're looking at a combination of hemodynamics and then mitochondrial function, and so in the mitochondria, one of the things that we interact with. So hemoglobin is a competitive nitric oxide and oxygen binding molecule. There's and it has a heme core, which is something that that actually we know how it interacts with infrared light. Oh, interesting, when you do the same thing. There's a. There's a enzyme in the phospholipid bilayer, the electron transport chain of your mitochondria, called cytochrome c oxidase. That has a very similar reaction, but there's just less of it in the in the body.

There's hemoglobin everywhere. Cytochrome c oxidase is just kind of less volume of it, and so you have to have a much higher resolution scan or spectroscopy take for being able to read that up. We're just now getting to the point where we can kind of start measuring that metabolic functionality and then mapping it over with this that's huge.

That's huge. But it's crazy because you you a lot of the things that you see from a behavioral standpoint. Come back to this metabolic piece where we're. Inflation again is the backside of this coin. But different types of dementia, yep, alzheimer's, lewy body syndrome, major depressive disorder, bipolar chronic anxiety all of these have different maps. So, how we can see that in the brain. So long story short.

0:48:33 - Chase Yeah, I get a little bit overly excited about it, very important and very exciting, and I'll give everybody some other great resources. Check out on this stuff to your point around mitochondrial health I'll link in the show notes for everybody to go back and check. I forget the episode number with Chris Wrench, founder of Amazentus. Creates this amazing product called Timeline nutrition, my topure and also for masterclass on metabolic health and brain health even mental health and chronic inflammation disease. Check out the episode with Dr Chris Palmer around the brain energy theory Amazing book as well Brain energy If you haven't checked it out. It's just he makes this very bold claim and backs it up with a lot of amazing science about how mental health, really mental illness is, really metabolic disease. He's wrong. He's not wrong. The data really really supports that.

0:49:20 - Forrest And I think there are some, some things to still be done from a research and kind of medical trial standpoint to really prove that out fully. But you know we're we have a high confidence level in that. You're starting to see that more and more, and particularly as you get these better pictures that you can, you can do with the increasing levels of specificity that you can see in this.

0:49:40 - Chase Well as all this tech grows and evolves. I definitely can't wait to have to get back on the show sometime or just even dive deeper on this stuff Again. Kenny on the move plus has been an amazing asset to my just general wellness, but especially recovery. So you guys definitely got to check out Kenny on and what they're up to and the new devices coming out of the new applications. It's just access and cost and ease is really, really meeting us, meeting the consumers, in a big, big way now and definitely helps us move forward quite literally. So for us I say thank you, man, thank you.

0:50:12 - Forrest Thank you so much for having me Really appreciate it.