← The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Stress burns mitochondria out rapidly. So high stress jobs, you're taking years off your life. We already know these things. It's just now we know why.
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Tom Benson, welcome to my podcast.
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A
Nice to be here. We live to be 90 because our body is constantly supplementing the mitochondria through the bloodstream. Without that, we'd only. Maybe we'd only live 20, 25 years. Let me talk about mitochondrial transplantation. People say this sounds like Star Trek.
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B
It does. If someone experiences mitochondrial dysfunction, what can that look like?
- [00:29]
A
Smoke kills mitochondria by the billions. We really need something to help us get over the hump. But we're just gonna. This is gonna sink our healthcare system eventually. Mitochondria as a part of the healthcare system is just non existent. I believe it is a coming revolution in medicine. There's no doctors anywhere and I talk to doctors every day and they're like, we had no idea. This is not in the textbooks. This is really that new.
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B
Tom Benson, welcome to my podcast.
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A
Thank you. Nice to be here.
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B
Yeah, I'm really excited for this. I came across you because one of the doctors I follow on X had reposted some news about your company, my trx and I read the website and I've been doing some research into mitochondrial dysfunction and I was like, this is wild. And I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard of it, but I suppose it's pretty cutting edge. And I reached out to you and you agreed to come on, which is amazing. So I have a whole bunch of questions for you. This is going to be very good. But before we get started, do you want to give a brief background about who you are, what it is you do, what it is you've done that kind of thing, right?
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A
Sure. So, yes, I am CEO and founder. Co founder of my tricks. I have been starting tech companies for a long time. I used to do. I had a couple software companies long ago and then decided that was boring and went back into physics, which is where my first work was, and ended up working in doing a couple startups. I ended up working at Stanford Linear Accelerator, which is. I'm, I'm in the Stanford area. So that's the big, the big linear accelerator up on the hill that all the, all the kids go to on their school breaks and we were studying mitochondria and other molecular components, biologics and I got interested in mitochondria. And then about six or seven years ago I was reading and came across the concept of mitochondrial transplantation, which was Just this brand new thing which sounded crazy to me. I'm like, no, that's impossible. And the more that I read it, the more that I realized that this is real and started digging into it and found out that it was this breakthrough research and so decided to start matrix to try to get that commercialized and developed. So.
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B
Okay, well, let's get into it. We were just talking about headphones. This is a less important part. But, but you said you're not wearing wireless headphones, is there? I don't know whether like I, I'm very into this mitochondrial dysfunction information because it seems like the problem behind so many chronic diseases now, but I'm still wearing wireless EarPods or AirPods. Is that, is there actual evidence that they're bad? Is that something I shouldn't do if I'm already worried about mitochondrial dysfunction?
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A
Ah, you're, you're, that's, that's, that's like the far edge of what I know.
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B
Okay.
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A
I wear them just because I'm, I'm a little bit. Well, you know, I don't really, I just somehow don't like the idea of the, of the radio waves in my ear. I also use, I use plug in earplugs for my cell phone. And I would, would have been the first person 10 years ago, I would have been the first person to say, oh, that's nonsense. You know, radio waves, you know, they can't do anything. But I don't know, I mean, we're fighting out how delicate mitochondria are specifically and that there is some research that magnetic and radio waves do have an impact on the metabolism and on the body, but we just don't really, we don't really know. So.
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B
Okay. Okay, well, let's start off with like, what is, what is mitochondria? What is mitochondrial dysfunction and what does mitochondrial transplantation look like?
- [04:48]
A
Well, first of all, what are mitochondria? Right. I think a lot of people know that, but mitochondria are these tiny little, they're organelles, which means they're little, they're little things that float around inside your cells and they are literally where all the energy is generated in your cell. And so if you look at a mitochondria, it's a tiny little thing about the size of a mo. Bacteria. You typically have a couple hundred of them per cell and they actually have little molecular spitting turbines. They're really like little turbine jet turbines that are spitting and generating energy for the cell by burning glucose and oxygen or, or fat and oxygen. So they're kind of the last, last mile of your, of your digestive system. You know, you have all these nutrients that you bring into your digestive system and they go floating around in your blood. Your cells can't use them unless they're combust. They're combusted into usable energy. And that's what the mitochondria do. And that's 95% of the energy in your cells comes from mitochondria. They're extremely complicated. We've, we've been in, they've been in our, in our cells for a billion and a half years. That's really why we exist at all. The mitochondria were kind of the key thing that cells needed to develop into larger organisms. So yeah, you're about, we're all about 10% by weight mitochondria.
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B
So it's a huge, yeah, it's crazy
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A
huge amount of your body. Okay. So when Yoda says we are energy beings, it's true. We are energy beings. Okay. We're a little, we've got these little, these little jet turbines running our cells. So it's pretty amazing.
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B
Yeah. So what, so what happens, like if someone experiences mitochondrial dysfunction? What can that look like?
- [06:47]
A
Well, first of all, we all experience mitochondrial dysfunction eventually because we are born with a set of mitochondria. Actually our egg, the egg cell, when it's first fertilized, has about somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 mitochondria in it, I should say, mitochondrial DNA. Each mitochondria has three or four copies or five copies of a tiny little ring of DNA. That's just the control system for the, for the furnace. Right. It's like a little, a tiny little ring of DNA. Teeny weeny, just controls the engine. And we're born with those pretty much perfect. So think of yourself at when you're born of having 100% perfectly functioning mitochondria. And according to what we've seen in recent research, that declines slowly at the beginning when you get to be 55, 60 years old and starts going, declining really quickly. Then the DNA in the mitochondria actually becomes damaged just from stress and usage and eventually it just stops working properly. So it's almost like a battery. You know how batteries in your cell phone go bad after you use them for a couple years and they just stop holding a charge? It's kind of similar to that. By the time you're 90, that mitochondrial decline has just basically become a cliff and you just boom. And, and we think that that is one of the primary reasons, one of the two main reasons that we get old is that our mitochondria just degenerate. Okay. So that's the first thing. We all have mitochondrial dysfunction eventually as we get older. And that's one of the reasons why you get weak, you lose muscle. You can't. I mean, you know, you get old, you get weaker. Right. Your energy level is going down. If you look it up, the estimate is 50 to 60% decline in energy production in your body by the time you're 90. So it's really big. The other thing is they're also very, very delicate and they're easy to kill. So when you get poisoned, most poisons actually kill your mitochondria. That's the first thing to go. If you get radiation, if you get exposed to radiation, radiation kills mitochondria because they're very, very fragile. And so basically what that means is that if you. Oh, it's smoking. Smoke kills mitochondria by the billions.
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B
Okay, what about nicotine? Is it the toxins in smoke or is it.
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A
I don't know for sure. I'm not.
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B
Okay.
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A
But I know they've done studies, they've looked at mitochondrial quality, and you could. I mean, like, there's the line decline. And if you look at smokers, their line is down there, right? So it's like.
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B
Yeah, okay.
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A
And if you stop smoking, it comes back up, but it doesn't come all the way. And so a lot of these things can be permanent if you get cancer and you take chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is just destroys mitochondria. It's designed to destroy mitochondria. That's actually what they're. That's what chemotherapy does. Okay. So the point is that you can kill off your mitochondria earlier, in which case you don't make it to 95 or whatever the normal lifespan is. You're going to only make it to 75 if you have very high stress. Stress. Stress burns mitochondria out rapidly. Okay. So high stress jobs, you're taking years off your life. And we all know this. All. We already know these things. It's just now we know why.
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B
Interesting.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Okay. I. I've always wondered because I've, like, I've done a bunch of research into medications, and I know that there are certain medications will. Where they'll say, you know, it impacts lifespan. And I always thought that was odd. If someone takes it for a certain period of time and then stops taking it, then why would it impact the end of their life? And it's because of this finite amount of mitochondria.
- [10:58]
A
Right? Yeah. I mean, my gosh, I want to say, by the way, I should have said this at the very beginning. Everything that I'm telling you right now is based on our research and our hype, our working hypothesis. You will find other people who will say they don't believe any of this. So just so you know, this is our theory within my tricks of how this all works.
- [11:18]
B
Okay, okay, that's fair. I have read, though, like, there was a study just recently published in March out of China, I want to say, like, Guangzhou. I'm probably pronouncing that. Guangzhou, China, where they were doing mitochondrial injections into the brain of mice with Parkinson's. Reversing Parkinson's.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
So this isn't.
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A
We've done that with Alzheimer's in our own. In our own company. We. We did a bunch of injections where we saw the brain tissue actually regenerating in the, in the area that you associate with Alzheimer's.
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B
Did you inject that? How did you get that to the brain?
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A
Okay, so let me just, Let me talk about mitochondrial transplantation.
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B
Okay, okay, okay. One thing at a time here.
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A
No, no, that's. That's okay. And, and, and people say this sounds like Star Trek, and the truth is, it does. It is kind of like Star Trek. I mean, so what. And so what happened was it used to be people always thought, well, mitochondria just kind of sit in the cells and whatever the cell needs to do when it just makes it. And so there wasn't really any way for us to do a lot for them except make sure they have the right nutrition. That's not very hard, though. It's easy to get. Mitochondria are very flexible. And as long as you're eating a kind of a normal diet with enough reasonable amount of vitamins, your mitochondria are fine. Okay. But what somebody discovered almost about 10 years ago was that you could take mitochondria out of cells into the outside world, isolate them as a tiny little bit of fluid at a test tube and re. Inject them back into the body, either into the bloodstream or directly into the muscle or any number of ways. It turns out that mitochondria are extremely mobile within the body. They move around constantly. And nobody knew that. Like, that is not in any of the textbooks that you see in high
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B
school is that outside of a cell.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Cells. Cells actually trade them, okay. They literally trade them like, like player, like, you know, baseball cards. They just they hand them back and forth between themselves. They are being delivered through your bloodstream at all times. You are getting a continuous flow of supplemental mitochondria in your bloodstream right now and mine billions of mitochondria. In the next five minutes, there'll be a billion mitochondria that have been transferred from our bone marrow to the rest of our body. Okay, just pulled out my. Pulled out the. That's the problem with having a cord on your earphones. I wave my hands around and then I pull them out. So mitochondria are transplanting through your bloodstream. Literally. They're like a supplemental flow of mitochondria that your body is sending out to the tissues to kind of keep them full with fresh mitochondria. And that's what we call the mitochondrial cycle of the body. We believe that there is a very, very well designed distribution system for ratioing young, healthy mitochondria out into the outer parts of the body, the brain, the heart, the, you know, muscles, in order to keep us alive longer than we normally would be. Would we, we would live without that. We'd only, maybe we'd only live 20, 25 years, but we, we live to be 90 because our body is constantly supplementing the mitochondria through the bloodstream. Okay, imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that up on max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture.
- [15:23]
B
There's always that one professor who's like, oh, man, you know, you gotta take this one professor.
- [15:27]
A
They're the best. But at Peterson Academy, it's all of those. That one professor, I'm still paying off College from 10 years ago. And I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.
- [15:39]
B
It's very common nowadays for students to be in thousands and thousands of dollars of debt. It breaks my heart, the interest rates
- [15:47]
A
that are just going to keep on piling up on them.
- [15:49]
B
For an education that doesn't entirely serve
- [15:51]
A
them, you are stuck in the room. You have to do a particular set of courses. I have to convince myself to stay focused.
- [15:57]
B
It's just pretty dry with Petersen Academy. It's a fraction of the cost. And, and you get access to all these different topics.
- [16:05]
A
It goes anything from sciences, nutrition, why we get sick, all the way up to history. Tons of courses, tons of really good lectures.
- [16:12]
B
I'm always looking for high quality educational content.
- [16:15]
A
Peterson Academy provides it all. The instructors are amazing.
- [16:18]
B
They're so well known in their field
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A
that you Just want to pay attention. The more I access, the more I listen, the more I learn, the more
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B
I want to learn.
- [16:25]
A
I just keep expanding, and I just want more. Traditional universities can sometimes ground you down. Peterson Academy will be able to scratch that itch of you wanting to learn and continuing to grow as a person. I can't wait to see where Peterson Academy goes.
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B
There's just so much potential, and it's just the beginning.
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A
I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.
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B
You just kind of have to focus on what's going to actually change your
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life, stop paying attention to what things are supposed to look like, and actually.
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B
Actually aim for something, and you might just stumble across something like Peterson Academy. So you said, like, one quick question. You said, like, from an egg, we get 300 to 500,000, but then you said that there might be a billion moving around.
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A
Right.
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Is that because they're. Are they created in bone marrow? Like, where do these come from? Or does each cell create its own?
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A
Well, in the body, cells are, yeah, the cel. The mitochondria, but the stem cells, specifically. So all the cells create. Can create mitochondria. But. But all the cells out there, like muscle cells, they create mitochondria, or they refurbish. They actually. They kind of rebuild them every three months. Mitochondria wear out really fast. But this. But the. But the skeletal muscle and the heart and all those organs, they're not very accurate at creating the mitochondria. And they tend to create a lot of errors in the code because they. They're working frantically, like, especially. That's why it's bad. If you're under stress. If you're under stress, your cells tend to replicate much more quickly, and they do a sloppy job on the mitochondria. So they get. They get. They get damaged. The bone marrow, in our view, is kind of the factory that is preserving the heritage of the best mitochondria and creating fresh, younger mitochondria and sending those out to the body in order to replace the ones that get burned out. And that's all coming from the stem cells in the bone marrow. Okay. Specifically, the stem cells create platelets. Each platelet has five mitochondria. Anywhere between five and 10 mitochondria, you create 100 billion platelets per day from your bone marrow, and then you retire 100 billion at the end of 10 days. And at the end of their lifespan, the platelets, before they go off to be recycled, they squirt out Their mitochondria in these little extracellular vesicles and the other cells.
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B
That's crazy.
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A
The other cells pick them up.
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B
That, that's crazy. I don't, I don't know if that's just like the nerd in me. I took cell biology a long time ago, which was my favorite course in university because it was so, like, well designed and complicated. But I didn't, I certainly didn't learn about platelets delivering mitochondria.
- [19:24]
A
This is, I'm telling you, nobody knows this because it's so new. This actually was discovered by our chief scientists. A guy up in Quebec discovered this at his lab. He's very, very, he's a, he's an amazing scientist. And they discovered, oh, platelets give off mitochondria when they're, when they, when they're at the end of their lifespan. Like nobody knew. And then we went in and we, and we did some studies where we said, well, what happens to them after they're, they're given off? What we found out is within five minutes, almost all of those have been absorbed by all the nearby cells. Because they're in these little vesicles. They have little targeting molecules on them and all the other cells go, oh, yum. I'm going to grab these. See, mitochondria are like money. If you see a hundred dollar bill in the street, it's not going to be there for long. Okay. Mitochondria are like money. They're very, very hard to make and they're really important. And so the cells will grab them and pull them in. And that's all been, that's all part of evolution from a billion years ago. That's a, what they called an evolutionarily conserved process. Same thing, same thing in the brain. There are specialized little vesicles of the brain. The mitochondria are manufactured in star cells and other types of cells in the brain. They get put into vesicles and, and they float over to the neurons and the neurons grab them and use them. And then when they burn out, they put them into other little vesicles with different receptors and float them back to be re. Rebuilt. Okay, that's your brain.
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B
That's.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Crazy. If I hadn't done the amount of reading on mitochondrial dysfunction and these kind of things before I reached out to you, I don't know if I could even believe this.
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A
You think that I was so.
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B
It's so. Well, it's hopeful and futuristic and it sounds too good to be true until you start linking all these Weird chronic diseases being like, well, why are there so many people, so many people who are sick with like multisystem failure. It's not just their brain, it's not just mental illness. It's chronic fatigue. It's painful, like what hits the whole body. And why are there so many kind of un. Untreatable disorders? Like people talk about chronic, chronic Covid, like long Covid is a big thing.
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A
Lime disease like Covid destroys mitochondria. It is a proven fact. They, the study, the papers came out two, two years ago. Covid destroys mitochondria on a massive basis.
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B
So it just hit some people like, some people got hit harder and ended up with long Covid and they don't want to do it.
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A
I mean, there's many other things. The thing about mitochondrial dysfunction is it's kind of like it's always there in the background. But it may, it may not be the main reason, but it's a contributing factor for so many things. Okay, if your energy levels go down, what happens when we hit 55, six years old? People start getting Alzheimer's, they start getting Parkinson's, they get als, they get arthritis, they get, you know, all these diseases, right? If they get or. And cancer, of course, your odds of getting cancer at 60 are like 10 times more than when you're 30 because your mitochondria have gotten weak and they can't power the immune system anymore to keep the, keep all the cancer under control. There's also other things that cause cancer that have nothing to do with mitochondria. But it's like, it's like a car that's all beat up, that's riding out of fuel. Well, it's beat up, it doesn't work very well, and it's running out of fuel, you know, Right. You, you could fix all those things. So that's the thing about mitochondria is they may not be the main reason, but they're always a contributing factor in all these diseases. Okay, and what you're saying, what you're getting to is that we as a society are not dealing with this at all. There's no doctors anywhere. And I talk to doctors every day and they're like, we had no idea. The scientists have no idea. This is not in the textbooks. This is really that new where, you know, mitochondria as a part of the healthcare system is just non existent. And so it's a revolution. And I believe, I believe it is a coming revolution in medicine.
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B
So, yeah, so do I. Are there any doctors using this. That, you know of, like in any way.
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A
Yeah, I mean, we, we're the. So that the people who discovered mitochondrial transplantation, that was about 10 years ago, they've been using it in human patients at a very, very small scale like this. This was originally used for heart surgery on. On babies. The guy who invented this did it because he wanted to restore some of the damaged tissue in the heart when he was operating on these children. And so it's. It wasn't just. In that case, it wasn't chronic disease. He was doing it to fix an injury. Okay. There are Northwell Health, which is one of the. It's actually the biggest hospital chain in New York state. It's a 23 hospital chain. Their whole system is working on this. They've got projects going to look at how to use this in the emergency room.
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B
Really?
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A
People have heart attacks. If you have a heart attack, give you a big jolt of fresh mitochondria, they get into the heart and you could bring back a bunch of that tissue. There's been studies on stroke victims, very successful. They've used it for skibic wound healing. There's people using it for burns. There's people using it for. For chronic diabetes wounds. You know, you smear. Smear it on. You smear it on a wound on the outside of the body and put a band aid over it. And the mitochondria are in the. The gel that you put on there. And they get into the tissue and they. And they.
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B
Whoa.
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A
Yeah, it's like that, that. Remember the Hunger Games? You know, they had. She had this little jar of cream and she put it on and it made the wound magically disappear. It's science fiction kind of stuff. Okay. The biggest problem is that when people hear all this, they. They think, oh, my God, this is, you know, you guys are crackpots.
- [26:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, I mean, yes, obviously that's what it sounds like, but if you actually, like, read the studies and think about. Does make sense. Like, it does make sense. It just. I guess in nature you wouldn't have this huge influx of mitochondria. So it's science fiction, as in, like, the body can produce it with stem cells.
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A
Right.
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B
And you can slowly heal, but you wouldn't ever have a paste with a huge dose of mitochondria to heal things.
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A
Well, actually, when you get sick, if you get an infection or if you get cancer, the number of mitochondria that are put loaded into each platelet doubles. That's been proven. And so the body is responding. It Sends more mitochondria when they're needed to fight an infection. And then people always say, well, why doesn't it just keep sending that number all the time? Because it's rationing, because that has a limited quantity. See, so the body is constantly trying to adjust. Like it doesn't want to use them up too fast, but it also needs to keep you alive.
- [27:09]
B
So that makes sense.
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A
Really interesting. So what we can do then, as doctors is say, okay, well, we can. We can. We could take them from the outside world. Either get them from donors or get them. Hold on. Waving my hands around again. So what I was saying was that the idea of mitochondrial transplantation and what all these. All of. All these researchers are. Researchers are testing is that we could take mitochondria from potentially from donors, or more likely, we grow them in a. In a bioreactor, which is what we're focused on primarily. And then you could have your bioreactor growing a new mitochondria for you. And if you get sick, you could. You could get a big. A big chunk of them. And even if you're elderly, you know that you could basically make your immune system much stronger until you get rid of whatever that illness is. So. Or if you're in the hospital, they can have bags of transplantable mitochondria. If somebody comes in who's been, you know, a soldier or a firefighter or somebody who's. Who's been badly injured, they could give them in the mitochondria to help them heal faster.
- [28:29]
B
Okay, I've got. Let me see. I've got a bunch of questions, but where should I start? Okay, if you would. So say you can grow mitochondria in a bioreactor. You. You need an original source of them. Right. So would someone have to do a bone marrow transplant? Or does it have to be bone marrow? Or could it be a muscle or something?
- [28:51]
A
And then we're not 100% sure yet, but I think we could get. Right now we're just getting them from the blood. So we do a blood. You get stem cells from the blood. But, you know, that's all that's like. That's still big research. There's a lot of work going into it right now, but that. But the best guess is you do it from a blood transplant.
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B
I mean, that sounds a lot more comfortable, to be honest. Bone marrow transplant.
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A
Well, I mean, if you've. If you've got somebody who's got Alzheimer's, for instance, well, I mean, you know, it might be worth it to Put it to a bone marrow. But the key is that you've got to figure out some way to grow more of them because you can, you know, whatever they have in their body, they're already using. They're already, you know, by the time you're 60, 70 years old, you're already low on your inventory. So it's all about fighting a larger source of mitochondria. Your bone marrow just can't keep up after a while. That's what aging is. Your bone marrow just runs out of steam. And so we have to supplement it with an external source.
- [29:51]
B
This doesn't sound as crazy when you've done research into stem cells and what they've been used for. Yeah, right. Is there, is the reason, do you think the reason stem cells have been useful is primarily because the stem cells have mitochondria in them. So you're kind of doing a mitochondrial.
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A
Yeah. Stem cells literally are mitochondrial donors. And that's been shown many times. If you. They've studied it where they see the stem cell comes up, and if there's a cell, it's a stem cell that comes near, a cell that is needy, that needs help. Let's say it's been damaged in some way, the stem cell will stop and it will build a little tube and it will start sending mitochondria to that other cell. And you could see them, you could see the mitochondria going down the stoop. It's amazing. And they've done this over and over again. And if the cell is not in need, the mitochondria, the stem cell doesn't stop. And so it's literally like mitochondria, stem cells are like roving repair trucks. And if they see a broken down car, they come over and they give it a jump start. It's basically what stem cells do. So.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah. It's a cr. That's amazing. What stem cells are their factories, and they build all these. And it isn't just mitochondria. There's other things too. There's growth factors and all this other stuff.
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B
But then the reason that they might not be as effective for some people maybe is because it's not the same dose as getting, well, mitochondria.
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A
So if you get a couple hundred million stem cells, that's. That's not enough to cure anything significant. That's the problem. The problem, stem cells is not that they don't work. There's just not enough of them. You need trillions, not billions. Okay. You know, you've got about a Quad, you've got about 10, quadrillion, mitochondria in your body. And by the time you get to be 90 years old, you've probably lost 40% of those or 50% of them. And so the numbers are huge. And so that's our, that's the nice thing about mitochondrial transplantation is that you can do it in really, really, really large quantities.
- [32:04]
B
Wow. And that must be what, what they're doing when they're doing this, trying to save tissue during, during organ transplants.
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A
Right.
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B
Is it's a large. So do they say with a pediatric heart, are they harvesting from blood and then growing outside of the body to create a bunch more or.
- [32:23]
A
No. In the case of the pediatric surgery, they actually just take a little bit from the leg muscle, from the kid's leg muscle. It's a self transplant. And remember that when there are kids, their mitochondria are healthy. It's just in a case of this heart surgery, the heart cells have been damaged and so the mitochondria have died off and the body just doesn't have enough time to get new ones in there. And so the surgeon is just taking some from the leg and inserting them into the heart. And that works, works great. In somebody who's 60, 70 years old, that probably wouldn't work as well because the ones you get from their leg are not in very good shape.
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B
That makes sense.
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A
So you have to know. Go ahead.
- [33:04]
B
How, like, how many places is this being done? Because I, like, I hadn't heard about it. So is it one hospital? Is it just a few hospitals in the US Is it all over the world? In a few places?
- [33:14]
A
All over the world. It's all over the world. There's probably 10 or 15 locations now in the United States that are experimenting with it. Major places. Stanford has three or four different groups that are studying it. Harvard, Walter Reed Hospital, University of Washington, University of Kentucky has a whole center that's doing mitochondrial transplantation. So it's actually very big.
- [33:35]
B
Wow.
- [33:36]
A
Oh, yeah. And there are, there's our company, which is really kind of the US And Canada, and then there's another startup in Switzerland and there's another one in Israel and there's one in Japan. So there's a lot of companies popping up, trying to figure out various ways to make this, you know, to scale this up.
- [33:56]
B
Okay. Okay. Interesting.
- [33:58]
A
Oh, it's really happening. The first, I'll just say that Northwell Health, which is this big hospital chain in New York, a year ago today, they had the first ever mitochondrial transplantation conference there in Long Island.
- [34:14]
B
Oh, that sounds so interesting. People are like, hidden. Or is that online? Can people watch that?
- [34:21]
A
You can go on YouTube. It's all on YouTube.
- [34:24]
B
What was it called? I'm going to write it down.
- [34:25]
A
First Annual Mitochondrial Transplantation Conference. And it was at Northwell Health, I think it was Hofstra University Research Center. And there's the head of emergency services for that entire hospital group, guy named Lance Becker. Dr. Becker is. He's pushing this. As for a national rollout. They want to get this in all the emergency rooms.
- [34:52]
B
That's crazy. Okay, so this is very. The reason that this sounds crazy is because it's just super new. Like, I read some studies. I read. I think I found a study talking about maybe from 2012, talking about, in theory, we could do this kind of thing with mitochondria. But all the other studies I've read are from 2020. Some of them are from you guys. And they're not all of them, but, like, quite a few are from. You guys are from like 2024 and 2025 and this year. And then.
- [35:24]
A
So it's. It's an. It's like the wave. You know, everything comes in waves, and it's definitely starting to crest at this point. It's. It's happening very quickly. We're getting a lot of. There's a lot of publicity floating around. There was a big article in the Economist and Scientific American. And I mean, we have. And our team. I'll just brag. I mean, we've got some of the best scientists on the West Coast. Really, they are the best. We've got a guy named Mike Snyder as our co founder, who runs the. Used to run the genetics department for all of Stanford. He started like 15 companies.
- [35:57]
B
Wow.
- [35:58]
A
We've got Scott Parazinski, who's a space shuttle astronaut, who is on our board. We've got a bunch. We've got some celebrities. We've got all these major scientists who are all at everybody. As you know, scientists like to go with something that looks new and exciting. So that's why we've had a lot of great people have jumped in because they just. They say this has a lot of. This has a lot of potential. We want to help it happen.
- [36:23]
B
So, so what you guys are. Are focused on so people know that this works, but the problem is quantity.
- [36:32]
A
Right.
- [36:33]
B
Because you don't want to get a donation from somebody and steal their mitochondria. Like, that's not ideal.
- [36:38]
A
Right. And there's not enough donors in the world to do this, you need a lot of mitochondria. That's the problem.
- [36:44]
B
Yeah. So then what, what's the solution to that? This is what you're working on, right? This is what we're working on.
- [36:50]
A
Well, we have two, we have two things that we're doing. First of all, we have opened up a few clinics. Just a week ago, we opened up some clinics in, in California, Texas and Florida where we're going to be doing some really simple early mitochondrial treatments.
- [37:06]
B
Okay, that's a week ago. That's so funny. I was looking into this. I found out about mitochondrial transplantation. It was like, wonder who's doing that? And then found you four days ago. I didn't realize you opened the clinics like a week ago. Yeah, this is, it's crazy how like new this is. It's wild.
- [37:27]
A
That's.
- [37:27]
B
Anyway, sorry, continue.
- [37:30]
A
I'll just say the biggest problem with any medical treatment like this is that, you know, the medical system is slow. Right. It's just the way it is. And they said, I think somebody calculated it takes 17 years for any new thing to work its way through to the point where the doctors actually start using it. Right. And so when I started Matrix, that was exactly why I started the company. I said, I'm not willing to wait 17 years because how many people are going to die? You know, and there are children, there's babies that have mitochondrial damage from birth. They're born that way. There's about 10,000 children in the world who have damaged mitochondria from birth and they die. I mean, it's fatal and it's awful. And so, you know, I'm not willing to wait around and let them have no hope. So we, we decided with Matrix, it's like, no, we're going to push this. We want this to happen faster. And sometimes that causes chaos. But, you know, you have to, I feel like you have to push things, otherwise you're not doing a job. So, yes, we're opening up these clinics and I'm sure other people will be as well. And there's hospitals that are, they're doing. We just did some early safety trials. We have a whole volunteer group of, of elderly people who are. Just love the idea of being the volunteers or being the, the test pilots for the world. You know, I have a guy who's 91 years old, who's a quantum physics professor and has written science fiction books and is just brilliant. And he is our, kind of our oldest volunteer. And then I have Another guy who's 71, who is one of our test pilots, and we just. We also just completed a whole series of safety trials with them, and we found that it was safe. So that's where. That's where the world is at right now, is trying to get it. Trying to get it to the point where we can actually start delivering it to people.
- [39:32]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Is there. Okay. I. I read a study last week, I think it was just published, on ketogenic diet inducing hypomania or mania in some people who were depressed, who hadn't experienced that before. And I was thinking, well, you know, maybe their body is constantly trying to create more energy for their brain, and when they suddenly get flooded with ketones, they kind of spike and get too much energy. Is that kind of thing? I mean, I guess it's hard to say, but is that kind of thing a potential possibility if you do this giant infusion of mitochondria?
- [40:11]
A
All kinds of. We have to be very careful because if you take someone who has low energy and you give them this gigantic infusion all at once, I mean, we. This is not a natural thing. Like, so we don't know what's going to happen. Think of. Think of being the first people to ever do a heart transplant. Sixty years ago, when I heard the first hard tract, they didn't know how to do it. They didn't know what was going to happen. Like, and they had to experiment and just see, you know, and. And, you know, I think the first one. The first person passed away, but then I think the second person on. They were able. They figured it out and they were able to keep them alive. So this is a major medical procedure, and you have to treat it. You have to treat it very carefully. This is not something. It's not like a pill. This is. You know, you need doctors to do this, so.
- [41:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, for sure. But you've done. Okay, so you have some mice studies.
- [41:08]
A
Yes.
- [41:08]
B
And what kind of, like, levels of mitochondria can you inject into mice safely or have it appear that way anyway?
- [41:19]
A
Yeah, we could do pretty much huge amounts. So we are doing. We've done mouse ejections for years where we've done as much as 1% of their total mitochondria per injection.
- [41:37]
B
Whoa. And how many injections are you giving these super mice?
- [41:42]
A
20, 30, you know, over the course of a year. We just wanted to see how much we could do. And these are elderly mice. They're like, 24 months old, which is pretty old for a mouse. And they do live longer, although we don't. We don't really look at their lifespan because I don't think mice are that useful. But the most interesting thing was that was you give them these injections and you see significant increases in strength and endurance and oxygen consumption and cognition. You see, as I mentioned earlier, you see that the brain actually, some parts of the brain actually regenerate. And that gets back to this question of that. This question of is, are neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and also mental health problems like even potentially autism, although that's, that's not. Hasn't been studied, but schizophrenia. They found, they, they did a study of people with schizophrenia, and they found out that they had deficient mitochondria in the area where that is cause causing their schizophrenia. And so there's all these questions now about that. We, could. We, could we help with mental illness as well. But as you were just saying, it's like, if you just give somebody these gigantic doses, could that cause them to go too far? And the answer is maybe so. We have to be careful. You know, I keep telling my test pilots, I'm like, don't run out and start lifting weights that you haven't done before because your muscles are not ready. You may feel really energetic, but your muscles haven't rebuilt yet. Your tendons are still weak. So we're gonna probably have to treat them like astronauts coming back from the space station, you know, when they, they take them through and they give them all these rehab exercises to bring them back to where they can, where they can walk around on the earth. So.
- [43:39]
B
Well, it makes sense in theory that this could be used on mental disorders because, like, the evidence now that ketogenic diets help is overwhelming, honestly, if you actually look into it for serious mental disorders. And then there's people like Chris Palmer from Harvard, and it's like, yeah, it's a brain energy problem. And so why, why wouldn't it work for that?
- [44:03]
A
Yeah, Dr. Plumber's doing amazing work. There's a lot of other people looking at that too. And yes, the thing about ketogenic diets is they affect mitochondria. When you, when you change your nutrient, you change your glucose levels, the mitochondria are forced to adjust and it causes them to kind of, you know, it causes them to readjust, and that's good for them. See, and so that's why I think ketogenic diets, you know, historically, people who fast usually show a lot of benefit from it because they're. It helps the mitochondria Kind of shake out the cobwebs. That's what I always call it. The other one that people have been experimenting with is red light therapy. And yeah, it is. There is evidence that, that certain wavelengths of light caused the mitochondria to just work a little better. It's not permanent. It's not a permanent fix. But as long as you've got that red light on you, you're warming up the mitochondria and the muscles and they, and they just, they work a little more efficiently.
- [45:07]
B
So is that like the. I, I was reading about that yesterday because I was looking into a red light bed, I don't know, to see if that would help my dad out, which sounds lovely. I was like, it's not going to be a cure, but like, it certainly won't hurt. Is there a certain. Is that the 810 nanometer wavelength that.
- [45:25]
A
Right. There are certain wavelengths that'll go through the outer part of the skin and get into the muscle. That's what you want. It's 8, 10 and 6, 50. I think you can. And you. Those, these things are cheap. You can get them on Amazon for 45 bucks. You can get a. I have a couple. I use them if you got a back, if you got back pain. I don't use Motrin anymore. I use one of these red light panels. And I found it works really well.
- [45:50]
B
I used when I was really sick, when I had arthritis and I was on a bunch of medication and before I was on a diet, my mom was doing. She. She's a like massage therapist. She has a degree, but she's a massage therapist. And then she brought all these lasers home. And this was in 2000 lasers. 10. And, and we were like, okay, mom, you've brought your magical lasers home. Like, this was a very. This might have been 2,000, like eight. This was.
- [46:18]
A
She was way ahead of the time. Way ahead of the time. Because that, that's back when nobody believed any of this stuff. So your mom.
- [46:25]
B
Well, we, we certainly didn't believe her. And it took like. So she's feeling rather now. But I didn't, I. So she put them on me to try to help with my arthritis. And I was just like, mom, this is like trying to throw water onto a forced fire, like, like a drop onto a forest fire. This isn't. So I didn't believe it because it didn't help. But when I got my arthritis under control and then went into like psych med withdrawal when I stopped all my medications, I was using the red light on my head and, and on my like skin when I was getting rashes and I could actually feel it. And this was a Bioflex laser.
- [47:02]
A
Yep.
- [47:04]
B
And it, that was the first time where I felt it and I was like, oh, I can feel a little bit less pain. It wasn't like a. Not big magical cure, but it was a little bit less pain. It was like, interesting.
- [47:15]
A
That's right. And that's exactly what I found. I use it 15 minutes a day on our sore spot. I have. It's like, it's not magic, but it, it just, it's like a, it's almost like a heating pad really. And you know, it warms you up. And of course I know a lot of people now are saying, oh, you don't need to do that. Just go out and lay in the sun for 15 minutes. And that's probably true. You know, I mean sunlight has all these same frequencies in it. So there's a lot of people who, they've done a lot of research showing that, that I grew up in the 70s and we were all tanning all the time. That was back when you. Oh yeah, you got to have the perfect tan. So. And now everybody's like, oh no, we're going to get skin cancer. So it's, it's one of those things that, that kind of switches back and forth every 10 years.
- [48:02]
B
Yeah, well, the. Staying out of the sun. I'm not sure if I really believe that I stopped getting sunburns when I went on the carnivore diet. But even before that, when I was on the Paleo diet, when I just cut out processed foods, I stopped burning, which I was like, I don't know what that's about. Anyway, let's get back to the kind of like science fiction part. So I feel like in the future would it be possible to have some sort of like to go to the doctor, have them taken in a blood take the, take your blood, put it into some sort of bioreactor that you just have or you store somewhere and then whenever you're sick you can take some from that. Is that the idea?
- [48:47]
A
That's the idea.
- [48:49]
B
Wow. Kind of like stem cell, like, I guess this is kind of like cord banking. Like when you have a baby you can send like I, I've never done that. Cuz I was like, I don't know how I feel about that. If it's even worthwhile, I'm not sure. But like you can store your, your cord like blood when the baby's born. For future stem cell Use. So it's.
- [49:11]
A
And the mitochondria like a way better the mitochondria. And cord blood is like the best quality mitochondria on the planet, of course, because it's so young. Right. And so. Yeah, that's a great idea, except the trick that we have to, we have to figure out, and that's what we've been working on, is taking your 80 year old stem cells and converting them back into a younger version. So we want to make your 80 year old stem cells 20 again or 15 years old so that you don't have to bank it when you're a kid. You could just take whatever you have and make it younger. Okay. Which is very complicated. That's where the real biology gets really complicated. But we think we can do it and then it becomes a question of can we grow enough mitochondria to provide, you know, an entire population. Because you can't just have this be, you know, this will be so useful that everybody's going to want it. And so the, our, our company mission actually officially is to build mitochondrial factories all over the world and pump them out by the kiloton. Like we want tons of mitochondria and we want to supply all the hospitals so that it.
- [50:28]
B
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [50:30]
A
A standard supplement for anybody who needs it. Just anytime you need to, you can go to the hospital and get a bunch of mitochondria.
- [50:38]
B
So your concern is really with the bioreactor.
- [50:42]
A
Yeah, well, the bioreactor that makes showing, figuring out how to do the administration. So we have, we have doctors who are practicing with this, trying to figure out do we inject it directly into the muscle, do we do it intravenously, do we do blah, blah, blah, you know, how do we do it, how do we measure it? I mean there's just all the details of how to do this as a medical treatment.
- [51:04]
B
Yeah, people are still trying to figure that out. With stem cells you can get the IV infusions, you can inject it directly into a joint. You can do it where the injury is. There's somebody, some neurologist that's doing exosome, like ultrasound exosomes into the brain. They're trying to do that for a treatment. And I still think they haven't exactly figured out. I know like my parents experience was they did IV stem cells that my mom thought helped her dry eyes. My dad didn't think did anything, but he had some elbow pain and he had an injection there and it got rid of his elbow pain. My mom, my mom actually had much more success with it with like old arthritic damage. And she started gardening again. And this was. It's not active arthritis anymore, but it was like just joint damage. And she started gardening again after. So she's had. And then they went to. I don't know if you've heard of Dr. Zhao. He does like, stem cell training or something. I. I didn't know anything about him.
- [52:09]
A
What you're talking about. Yeah, right. Retrain.
- [52:10]
B
I don't know so much about that. I don't know if that, like, I don't know anything about that. It looks interesting, but they went and did that. I don't know. It's pretty new, right? We need a lot. We need a lot more research. I like this mitochondrial. I like the mitochondrial idea.
- [52:26]
A
Think of the mitochondria. Think of the mitochondria as being the next generation of stem cell therapy. That's really what it is. People say, well, how does this relate to stem cells? They say, well, this is a stem cell therapy. The only difference is that we're not injecting the stem cells into you. We're keeping them outside and squeezing out the mitochondria, which are the kind of the effective ingredient. We're injecting the mitochondria into you, and actually it's mitochondria and exosomes. And so stem cells you keep outside. Because there's some risk factors with stem cells plus the quantity that we're talking about doing something that is literally a thousand times higher doses than the current stem cell therapy. So it's a thousand X. And that's why your mom got a little benefit, because she was right up. Most stem cell therapies are just kind of right on the edge of being beneficial. It's just not enough. You just need more. If she'd gotten 10 or 20 injections, she probably would have gotten a lot more benefit out of it. But those are expensive and they can be. There's risks because there's. There's DNA in the stem cells that can go bad. There's no DNA in mitochondria that can go bad. So it's a much safer way of doing it. Okay. And they're so concentrated that I could get a thousand X into a single shot. If that was a stem cell and I gave you that many, it would probably kill you. So it's just mitochondria are just a kind of the next generation of stem cell therapy.
- [54:03]
B
Wild.
- [54:03]
A
Yeah.
- [54:04]
B
And so who do you think is like out of anybody in the world who's the most ahead in this.
- [54:10]
A
We are.
- [54:10]
B
Research wise. Yeah, I mean, I like that answer.
- [54:15]
A
I, that's, that's our goal. I mean, of course others would, would argue that because they think they're ahead. But, you know, that's my answer as a CEO where. But, you know, a lot of us, we're all going after slightly different variations. There's different ways of doing it. There's a lot of different ways of doing it. And so everybody's kind of picked a little piece of the puzzle and we're all trying to optimize that piece of the puzzle. And I mean, look, I talk to my competitors all the time. We're very friendly because, look, nobody's. We're not worried about competing with each other. We're worried about just getting the world to accept this at all. That's always the challenge, right? That's like when you're in the frontier. You don't worry about the guy next door, he's your friend. What you worry about is can you get anybody from the outside world to even acknowledge your existence? And that's the problem with mitochondrial transplantation. It's just getting any attention at all from the world. Any kind of, you know, go ahead.
- [55:15]
B
It seems, it seems like pretty. It seems easy to explain given stem cells. Now, stem cells are still considered fringe, but that's mostly from people who don't know what they're talking about, to be honest. But. And because they're not a, you know, they're not a cure all, you can't inject them into somebody and then they all see benefits, you know, so it, it's tricky. But talking about them as like the kind of upgraded or extremely upgraded stem cell infusion kind of.
- [55:47]
A
That should be stem cells and PRP and all those kinds of, those kinds of treatments. They've always. The biggest problem is that they, they're, I think that they're just not quite strong enough because you're always on. Not quite. Did I get a big enough dose to make a difference? Right.
- [56:06]
B
Oh, so sorry. So, prp. So if. Can you explain PRP for people who don't know? It's used in cosmetic stuff all the time. But, but what's prp?
- [56:17]
A
Wrinkle injections. Now PRP is what's called platelet rich plasma. And that's where they take a little bit of your blood. They isolate out the platelets. Sometimes they do what's called activation, where it causes the platelets to clot and then you inject it back into elbow joints. They use them for Cosmetic stuff. They do use them for wound healing. In some cases, platelets are full of magical ingredients. And so what you get out of that platelet injection is useful. But the problem with the PRP is it's not very much. So it's back to the whole thousand x thing. You need a thousand times more than what you can get out of one of those PRP treatments. And also it doesn't work very well on old people. And now we know why. Because the mitochondria and your platelets when you're older are not very useful. They're not high quality.
- [57:11]
B
Wow. So, okay, that's interesting. I've always wondered if PRP was worth trying out just even one of those, like, I think they're microneedling facials. I was like, you can do one with prp. That seems good. But it was like, what are in platelets that are useful?
- [57:24]
A
But we're probably the answer. We're probably going to do facials and. And regal work at our clinics actually. Because it's a. It's a good use for mitochondria.
- [57:36]
B
Well, honestly too just for getting into the public like red light. It was picked up by a lot of plastic surgeons.
- [57:43]
A
Yeah, right.
- [57:44]
B
They're like use red. Same with hyperbaric oxygen. Like the plastic surgeons seem to be. They're on the edge of what makes people look better quickly.
- [57:53]
A
Right.
- [57:53]
B
So that's not a bad place to start.
- [57:56]
A
I think mitochondrial injections will be very powerful for cosmetic stuff. But again, where do you get them from?
- [58:01]
B
From. Yeah.
- [58:03]
A
So that's. That's the challenge. That's where you have to have that bioreactor.
- [58:08]
B
Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay, let me just see. I didn't even look at any of my notes, but I feel like we
- [58:18]
A
covered like I could go on for three hours on this, so you'll have to stop me.
- [58:23]
B
I will, I will, but I want to just make sure I didn't miss anything. Covered some risks. And the risks are. We don't know. We need more research, kind of. But that mice seem to tolerate large doses very well.
- [58:38]
A
Look, I just want to say this. I. You know, we all talk among each other in this field. It's like nobody has ever had any problem of any kind. Every single person who's has mitochondrial transplantation. It works fine. No negative reaction, no danger that we could see. And we just finished a trial where we were doing really big doses. They were fine. These were. They. They came away. They felt like a million bucks. So.
- [59:07]
B
And is these. Did you. You guys just came out with A human. Did you do a human test?
- [59:13]
A
Yeah.
- [59:14]
B
What was the recent thing? Okay, so what did that look like?
- [59:17]
A
We did what's called escalating dose tests using mitochondria that we got out of platelets. Okay. They're not bioreactive mitochondria yet. That's kind of phase two as we're going to move to the bioreactor version. But for the first one, we just used platelets, mitochondrial platelets, and we started really, really small with little injections in the arm. And we looked to see if there was any in, you know, any kind of rash, and there wasn't, so we did another one. So we did four larger injections each time in a 71 year old and a 91 year old, and it worked great. No, absolutely no problem of any kind. We did blood tests, we looked at their, all their hormones and their cytokines and all their blood chemistry and we saw no problem at all.
- [60:06]
B
Did they feel it?
- [60:07]
A
Could they, could they?
- [60:09]
B
Yeah. Was the dose high enough for them to feel anything?
- [60:11]
A
Like, did they felt. They felt, generally they felt good for a week after, but that's, that could be placebo effects. So, you know, you know, we don't. I tell people, I say we're not, we're not going to release any data about efficacy until we have better data. I mean, that's, you have to be very careful. This was just for safety. It was, it was called a preliminary safety trial and it seemed to go off just fine. So. And there are, there are doctors who are, want to treat children and they're looking at the safety data and using it to justify trying that same treatment for some of these children. So it's all, it's all, you know, has value to this kind of.
- [60:50]
B
Oh, yeah, for sure. Okay. Wow. So the next step after this, the safety data, that's when you start doing human trials. And is your plan to do these escalating doses there, but at much higher doses?
- [61:05]
A
Yeah, much bigger. And so for instance, a typical unit of, of mitochondria, for us, a typical unit is 300 billion mitochondria. That is, that is a U. We consider that to be a unit of mitochondria. And wow, we were doing like up to a half a unit. That was the most we did in our safety trials and no negative impact whatsoever. Everybody felt great afterwards so that we'd get into multiple units, larger and larger doses.
- [61:38]
B
So interesting. And maybe like, in an ideal future long term, like if this comes to fruition and people can like, have their own mitochondria in bioreactors. Right. Maybe what people want to do is a small amount every day, you know, just to boost themselves up, you know, these large amounts.
- [61:58]
A
That's what people say. Well, how long is the treatment going to be? Of course, everybody wants to know how expensive it's going to be. Like. Well, nobody knows. I mean, we, we're doing everything by hand. So it's horribly expensive now because we're having. We do it all by hand. I've got a bunch of lab technicians sitting there with test tubes, you know, on wearing the, you know, the hood and all that. And that's just not the way to do this. You need equipment to automate it if you're going to do this on any kind of large scale.
- [62:25]
B
Yeah.
- [62:25]
A
Otherwise it just takes too long. So how much does it cost? Nobody knows. We won't know until we build the equipment and try to automate this and do it on some kind of large scale. Right now where it's like building a car from scratch. Well, that's going to be very expensive because building cars from scratch is expensive. You need a. You need mass production. So that's our, that's what we want to get to next is the mass production environment.
- [62:52]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, how else are hospitals going to use it as treatment?
- [62:57]
A
Right.
- [62:58]
B
They can't.
- [62:59]
A
Right, right. And. And if you have an emergency room, for example, well, you're not gonna have time for a bioreactor. So you need to subway to freeze the mitochondria in bags. And maybe you have five. There's mitochondria have different, what's called haplogroups, kind of almost like blood types. So maybe you do the same thing as they do with blood where you have, you have like 10 different varieties and somebody comes in and they've been injured and you do a quick test and you give them the closest mitochondria they have and it helps them, it helps them heal faster. I mean, think of the military applications for the military. Oh, yeah, right.
- [63:37]
B
Yeah. So that the haplo. Okay, that was one of the questions I wanted to ask is like. Yeah. Do you need to be specific? Like can. You said you can do transplants where somebody can donate them.
- [63:49]
A
Yes, but.
- [63:50]
B
But it needs to be the same haplotype.
- [63:53]
A
Well, that's something that's actually very important to mention. I'm glad you brought it up. Your mitochondrial DNA is identical to your mother and your grandmother and your great grandmother. Mitochondrial DNA are passed down strictly through the female line because they're ancient and there's no male or female. It's just like bacteria. Right. And so you and all of your cousins, like if you had a sister who had children, those children will all have exactly the same mitochondria as you do. Okay. So that is considered to be autologous, which means it's the same as breaking it out of your own body.
- [64:36]
B
Wow.
- [64:36]
A
Because. Because they're identical. So you can get, in theory, it's very, very safe to get donations from sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles. And again, they're doing these treatments for these children with mitochondrial mutation diseases. That's the kind of thing they're looking at doing. It's just bringing in the family members and doing this try to. You're trying to get these kids to have more healthy mitochondria. You're not going to get them perfect, but you can get them away out of danger. And if you can get enough from the family and you can keep injecting them, you might be able to push these kids over to where they can have fairly normal lives. Okay. So, yes, that's when you would use family mitochondria. But it's also possible that other people who even aren't in your family, that it might be compatible. We just don't know yet. There might be mitochondria that are like a typo in the blood. You know, blood type O can be used by anybody.
- [65:33]
B
Yeah.
- [65:34]
A
It may be that that's true for mitochondria too. We just don't know yet.
- [65:39]
B
Wow.
- [65:39]
A
Yeah. It's amazing amount of work that needs to be done on this. So.
- [65:47]
B
Yeah. Can. Okay. Where should people go to find out more about what you do?
- [65:55]
A
Well, go to our website, Mytrics Bio. We actually have a lot of information on there. It's a good. We, we built it so that people could kind of learn. Right. And if you just go on the web and you just put in mitochondrial transplantation, you will see lots of stuff popping up, lots of papers. Every week there's something new. It's all over the world now. So you could go on YouTube. I've given a bunch of YouTube speeches and there's also all these conferences. The, the mitochondrial convention was, was all put on YouTube. So you can watch those.
- [66:33]
B
Yeah, that's cool. I'll link. So I'll, I'll link the website Mytrix Bio and grab a few interesting studies and I'll try to find a link to that and that first annual conference to stick in the description for anybody listening. But I think, I think from everything I've learned from the ketogenic diet, from my exposure to mold, which brought up like I. I couldn't figure out, you know, why is it that when I went on a ketogenic diet, well, meat diet, and cut everything out and got better, why did my original symptoms come back when I was exposed to mold, even though I didn't change my diet and was like, what's happening? That's the same. Something the same is happening. And then how does that interplay with ketosis? Why does ketosis help? And then the link is finally, oh, mitochondrial dysfunction from all these different. There's so many things that attack the mitochondria that, like, they're very delicate.
- [67:34]
A
Very delicate.
- [67:34]
B
Yeah.
- [67:35]
A
And we don't even know yet. We know that there's some drugs that will burn out your mitochondria prematurely. And there's people. You and I have talked about this already. We talked about ciprofluorquin loans.
- [67:46]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [67:47]
A
Which are very damaging to mitochondria. And there's people whose lives have been ruined. A lot of people.
- [67:55]
B
It's called being floxed. And it's hor. It's horrible right there. Yeah. Anybody listening? There are lots of antibiotics that you can take if you have an infection. Do not take fluoroquinolones. So that's like ciprofloxac. Anything that says unless you're dying, unless it's the only antibiotic you. You can take and you're dying. But like, they're prescribed for UTIs, right. All the time. And there's other antibiotic classes you can take. They're given and they're really risky.
- [68:28]
A
Nobody pays attention to it because usually that is put off 10, 20 years down the, down the road. See, that's the problem with mitochondrial damage. A lot of the time you don't notice it until 10 or 15 years later. Suddenly, one of your tendons, like with your flocks, it's just one of your tendons just breaks. Like people have their Achilles tendon just tears for no reason. And then. And then they start getting muscle damage and tendon damage all over their body. And before you know it, they're bedbound. It's really awful. Or they get premature dementia. You know, I'm. I'm really worried about premature dementia as a potential outgrowth of all these mitochondrial, you know, injuries thing.
- [69:11]
B
Yeah, well, and we have. My family has a lot of experience with psych med. Neurological dis. Like injury, which has been brutal. And that's from like long term psych meds and that. Like. Yeah. This is a big problem.
- [69:26]
A
We have a lot of people that stuff is doing in the long term. That's the problem.
- [69:31]
B
No. And it's not going to be pretty and it's going to affect a lot of people. So maybe there'll be some solutions, because right now there's no, there's really no solution. Once you experience that level of damage from a medication or even like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. I've seen some promising things with ketogenic intervention, which is probably because it works on mitochondria, but that doesn't. It's not just a cure. Once you get to that stage for everyone. Some people I've seen, like the rare case of reversal for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, but by the time you're at that stage, like, you need a lot of help. So we need something that offers more help and we need to stop damaging ourselves so badly.
- [70:15]
A
Yeah.
- [70:15]
B
And other than living.
- [70:17]
A
Let me, I'll just, Let me. I want to throw out one little thing here about, you know, kind of the big picture, the political picture. You know, this is so new. And there's, there's. I mean, there's, like you could. Like I said, there's a few dozen people researching this. It's happening all over the world. But there's, but there's, but there's no support for this at all. It's being talked about a lot, but this, you know, if you look at the amount of disability in our economy, if you look at the number of chronic diseases, the number of people are disabled, a lot of that is because we're good at saving people's lives, but we're not so good at a lot of those cures, damage their mitochondria afterwards, and so they end up being kind of in this state. And anybody who has chronic fatigue syndrome or long Covid can tell you, I'm alive, but I have zero energy. I can't get up. I can't move around.
- [71:13]
B
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
- [71:14]
A
And people who are floxed, the same thing. And those numbers keep growing. And so we got this, this just kind of built in long term group of people who cannot care for themselves, can't earn a living. They're disabled, they can't live, Their families are being impacted. You know, you know, all these things, we really need something to, to help us get over the hump or we're just gonna. This is gonna sink our health care system eventually. So I really think this is a significant national imperative, I guess I would call it.
- [71:51]
B
I, I agree. I Like I've been talking about with my audience, like about psych med damage and the fact that like one out of every five or six, depending on the data, people is on one of these medications that long term seem to cause mitochondrial dysfunction and neurological injury that is almost untreatable. That's like, that's a huge percentage of, percentage of our population. And then mold exposure too. We, we figured like the approximation from the specialist there is 20% of people are really ill. Those are probably people who are also on site, take meds. And it's like if, if there's one, if one in four people are chronically ill, that's their entire family is taken out. Unless you just ditch them, which it's really bad. It's really bad and it's going to get worse. Like I don't know what things are going to look like in five years,
- [72:47]
A
but it's going to get worse. Because I mean, if you think about it, people say, well, this wasn't happening 40 years ago. That's because people didn't live as long as. I mean the truth is a lot of this is just related to aging. We live longer. We have much better medicine now we're saving people who normally would have died 40 years ago. They die of a heart attack. Now we bring them back, right? All the people who used to be, they die of cancer. Now we bring them back from cancer. But they're not really whole, as you said, they're disabled. They're not able to take care of themselves. And so, and of course people are getting older. In general, the population's getting older. So all these trends are converging.
- [73:29]
B
Yeah, definitely. Well, I think your company is very promising and very interesting and so thank you for your time.
- [73:38]
A
My pleasure.
- [73:39]
B
Like I said, I'll link a bunch of studies. I'll link your website below for anyone who's listening. But yeah, nice meeting you. Thank you very much for coming on.
- [73:46]
A
Yes, yes, my pleasure. Sam.