The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - Mitochondrial Transplants Heal Cells ｜ Tom Benson Ep 234

00:00:00.000 Stress burns mitochondria out rapidly, so high-stress jobs, you're taking years off your life.

00:00:05.560 We already know these things, it's just now we know why.

00:00:08.600 Tom Benson, welcome to my podcast.

00:00:10.720 Nice to be here.

00:00:11.540 We live to be 90 because our body is constantly supplementing the mitochondria through the bloodstream.

00:00:16.200 Without that, maybe we'd only live 20, 25 years.

00:00:19.420 Let me talk about mitochondrial transplantation.

00:00:21.840 People say, this sounds like Star Trek.

00:00:23.680 It does.

00:00:24.480 If someone experiences mitochondrial dysfunction, what can that look like?

00:00:28.980 Smoke.

00:00:30.000 It kills mitochondria by the billions.

00:00:33.040 We really need something to help us get over the hump,

00:00:35.820 but we're just gonna, 0.50

00:00:36.660 this is gonna sink our healthcare system eventually.

00:00:38.900 Mitochondria as a part of the healthcare system

00:00:41.640 is just non-existent.

00:00:42.780 I believe it is a coming revolution in medicine.

00:00:45.580 There's no doctors anywhere,

00:00:47.440 and I talk to doctors every day,

00:00:48.940 and they're like, we had no idea.

00:00:50.780 This is not in the textbooks.

00:00:52.180 This is really that new.

00:01:00.000 Tom Benson, welcome to my podcast.

00:01:03.040 Thank you. Nice to be here.

00:01:05.240 Yeah, I'm really excited for this. I came across you because one of the doctors I follow on X

00:01:11.120 had reposted some news about your company, Mitrix. And I read the website and I've been

00:01:18.400 doing some research into mitochondrial dysfunction. And I was like, this is wild. And I couldn't

00:01:25.360 believe that I hadn't heard of it, but I suppose it's pretty cutting edge. And I reached out to

00:01:30.300 you and you agreed to come on, which is amazing. So I have a whole bunch of questions for you.

00:01:37.680 This is going to be very good. But before we get started, do you want to give a brief background

00:01:41.540 about who you are, what it is you do, what it is you've done, that kind of thing?

00:01:46.420 Right. Sure. So, yes, I am CEO and founder, co-founder of Mitrix. I have been starting tech companies for a long time. I used to do, I had a couple of 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 of startups.

00:02:12.020 I ended up working at Stanford Linear Accelerator, which is, I'm in the Stanford area.

00:02:17.900 So that's the big linear accelerator up on the hill that all the kids go to on their school breaks.

00:02:25.860 And we were studying mitochondria and other molecular components, biologics.

00:02:33.900 And I got interested in mitochondria.

00:02:36.720 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.

00:02:51.780 I'm like, no, that's impossible.

00:02:53.800 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 just breakthrough research.

00:03:04.960 and so decided to start Mitrix to try to get that commercialized and developed.

00:03:13.080 Okay. Well, let's get into it. We were just talking about headphones.

00:03:17.880 This is a less important part, but you said you're not wearing wireless headphones.

00:03:21.860 I don't know whether... I'm very into this mitochondrial dysfunction information because

00:03:29.520 it seems like the problem behind so many chronic diseases now, but I'm still wearing wireless

00:03:38.220 ear pods or AirPods. Is there actual evidence that they're bad? Is that something I shouldn't

00:03:43.640 do if I'm already worried about mitochondrial dysfunction? That's like the far edge of what I

00:03:50.780 You know, I wear them just because I'm I'm a little bit.

00:03:56.420 Well, you know, I don't really I just somehow don't like the idea of the of the radio waves of my ear.

00:04:02.300 I also use I use plug in earplugs for my cell phone and I would would have been the first person 10 years ago.

00:04:09.660 I would have been the first person to say, oh, that's nonsense.

00:04:11.980 You know, radio waves, you know, they can't do anything.

00:04:15.680 But I don't know. I mean, we're fighting out how delicate.

00:04:18.980 at mitochondria are specifically, and that there is some research that magnetic and radio waves

00:04:27.400 do have an impact on the metabolism and on the body, but we just don't really know.

00:04:33.740 Okay. Okay. Well, let's start off with what is mitochondrial dysfunction,

00:04:44.020 and what does mitochondrial transplantation look like?

00:04:48.140 Well, first of all, what are mitochondria, right?

00:04:51.160 I think a lot of people know that.

00:04:52.740 But mitochondria are these tiny little, they're organelles, which means they're little things that flow around inside your cells.

00:05:02.960 And they are literally where all the energy is generated in your cell.

00:05:07.920 And so if you look at a mitochondria, it's a tiny little thing about the size of bacteria.

00:05:12.660 You typically have a couple hundred of them per cell.

00:05:14.980 and they actually have little molecular spitting turbines.

00:05:21.500 They're really like little turbine, jet turbines that are spitting

00:05:25.640 and generating energy for the cell by burning glucose and oxygen or fat and oxygen.

00:05:32.840 So they're kind of the last mile of your digestive system.

00:05:40.200 You have all these nutrients that you bring into your digestive system

00:05:43.280 and they go floating around in your blood.

00:05:44.980 Your cells can't use them unless they're combusted into usable energy.

00:05:50.800 And that's what the mitochondria do.

00:05:53.380 And that's 95% of the energy in your cells comes from mitochondria.

00:05:57.940 They're extremely complicated.

00:06:01.900 We've been in, they've been in our cells for a billion and a half years.

00:06:07.880 That's really why we exist at all.

00:06:10.640 The mitochondria were kind of the key thing that cells needed to develop into larger organisms.

00:06:17.920 So, yeah, you're about, we're all about 10% by weight mitochondria.

00:06:21.500 So, it's a huge.

00:06:22.260 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:06:23.280 Huge about of your body.

00:06:24.500 Okay.

00:06:25.540 So, when Yoda says we are energy beings, it's true.

00:06:30.600 We are energy beings, okay?

00:06:33.360 We're a little, we've got these little jet turbines running our cells.

00:06:38.300 So, it's pretty amazing.

00:06:39.260 Yeah. So what happens if someone experiences mitochondrial dysfunction? What can that look

00:06:45.860 like? Well, first of all, we all experience mitochondrial dysfunction eventually because

00:06:53.420 we are born with a set of mitochondria. Actually, the egg cell, when it's first fertilized, has

00:07:01.920 about somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 mitochondria in it. I should say mitochondrial

00:07:08.520 DNA. Each mitochondria has three or four copies or five copies of a tiny little ring of DNA that's

00:07:14.980 just the control system for the furnace, right? It's like a little, a tiny little ring of DNA,

00:07:22.060 teeny weeny, just controls the engine. And we're born with those pretty much perfect.

00:07:29.980 So think of yourself at when you're born of having 100% perfectly functioning mitochondria

00:07:37.480 And according to what we've seen in recent research, that declines slowly at the beginning.

00:07:44.800 When you get to be 55, 60 years old, it starts going and declining really quickly.

00:07:49.080 The DNA in the mitochondria actually becomes damaged just from stress and usage.

00:07:56.480 And eventually it just stops working properly.

00:07:59.500 So it's almost like a battery.

00:08:01.100 You know how batteries in your cell phone go bad after you use them for a couple of years

00:08:04.940 and they just stop holding a charge?

00:08:06.480 it's kind of similar to that

00:08:09.080 by the time you're 90

00:08:11.440 that mitochondrial decline

00:08:13.340 has just basically become a cliff

00:08:15.780 and you just boom

00:08:17.100 and we think that that is

00:08:18.900 one of the primary reasons

00:08:21.400 one of the two main reasons that we get old

00:08:23.680 is that our mitochondria just degenerate

00:08:25.920 okay

00:08:26.760 so that's the first thing

00:08:30.020 we all have mitochondrial dysfunction

00:08:31.440 eventually as we get older

00:08:32.960 and that's one of the reasons why you get weak

00:08:35.680 You lose muscle, you can't, I mean, you know, you get old, you get weaker, right?

00:08:39.600 Your energy level is going down.

00:08:41.860 If you look it up, the estimate is 50 to 60% decline in energy production in your body by the time you're 90.

00:08:50.640 So it's really big.

00:08:53.680 The other thing is they're also very, very delicate and they're easy to kill.

00:08:58.880 So when you get poisoned, most poisons actually kill your mitochondria.

00:09:03.240 That's the first thing to go.

00:09:05.680 If you get radiation, if you get exposed to radiation, radiation kills mitochondria

00:09:11.120 because they're very, very fragile. And so basically what that means is that if you,

00:09:17.840 oh, it's smoking. Smoke kills mitochondria by the billions. Okay.

00:09:24.160 What about nicotine? Is it the toxins in smoke or is it?

00:09:29.280 I don't know for sure. I'm not. But I know they've done studies. They've looked at mitochondrial

00:09:34.000 quality. And you could, I mean, like there's the line decline. And if you look at smokers,

00:09:39.080 their line is down there. Right. So it's like, yeah. Okay. And if you stop smoking,

00:09:43.840 it comes back up, but it doesn't come all the way. And so a lot of these things can be permanent.

00:09:50.160 If you get cancer and you take chemotherapy, chemotherapy is just destroys mitochondria.

00:09:56.640 It's designed to destroy a mitochondria. That's actually what they're, that's what chemotherapy

00:10:00.180 does okay so the point is that you can kill off your mitochondria earlier in which case you don't

00:10:09.720 make it to 95 or whatever the normal lifespan is you're going to make it to 75 if you have a very

00:10:15.700 high stress stress stress burns mitochondria out rapidly okay so high stress jobs you're taking

00:10:23.660 years off your life that's and we all know this you know it's all like we already know these things

00:10:30.460 it's just now we know why interesting yeah okay i've always wondered um because i've like i've

00:10:38.680 done a bunch of research into medications and i know that there are certain medications will

00:10:43.220 where they'll say you know it impacts lifespan and i always thought that was odd if someone takes it

00:10:49.520 for a certain period of time and then stops taking it, then why would it impact the end of

00:10:54.080 their life? And it's because of this finite amount of mitochondria. Right. Yeah. I mean,

00:10:59.100 I want to say, by the way, I should have said this at the very beginning. Everything that I'm

00:11:03.640 telling you right now is based on our research and our working hypothesis. You will find other

00:11:10.240 people who will say they don't believe any of this. So just so you know, this is our theory

00:11:15.320 within my tricks of how this all works. Okay. Okay. That's fair. I have read though,

00:11:20.960 like there was a study just recently published in March out of China. I want to say like Guangzhou,

00:11:29.080 I'm probably pronouncing that, Guangzhou, China, where they were doing mitochondrial injections

00:11:33.480 into the brain of mice with Parkinson's, reversing Parkinson's.

00:11:38.360 Absolutely. We've done that with Alzheimer's in our own company. We did a bunch of

00:11:45.280 injections where we saw the brain tissue actually regenerating in the area that you associate with

00:11:51.280 Alzheimer's. Did you inject that? How did you get that to the brain? Okay. So let me talk about

00:12:00.020 mitochondrial transplantation. Okay. Okay. Okay. One thing at a time here. No, no. That's okay.

00:12:04.500 And people say, this sounds like Star Trek. And the truth is- It does. It is kind of like Star

00:12:10.940 track i mean uh um so what and so what happened was it used to be people always thought well

00:12:19.140 mitochondria just kind of sit in the cells and whatever the cell needs to do when it just makes

00:12:23.560 it and so there wasn't really any way for us to do a lot for them except make sure they have the

00:12:29.620 right nutrition that's not very hard though it's easy to get mitochondria are very flexible and

00:12:34.060 as long as you're eating a kind of a normal diet with enough reasonable amount of vitamins your

00:12:39.360 mitochondria are fine, okay? But what somebody discovered almost about 10 years ago was that

00:12:49.140 you could take mitochondria out of cells into the outside world, isolate them as a tiny little bit

00:12:56.540 of fluid in a test tube, and re-inject them back into the body, either into the bloodstream or

00:13:03.580 directly into the muscle or any number of ways. It turns out that mitochondria are extremely

00:13:09.840 mobile within the body. They move around constantly. And nobody knew that. Like that

00:13:16.400 is not in any of the textbooks that you see in high school. Is that outside of a cell? Yeah.

00:13:22.160 Yeah. Cells actually trade them. Okay. They literally trade them like baseball cards. 0.54

00:13:33.580 They hand them back and forth between themselves.

00:13:36.800 They are being delivered through your bloodstream at all times.

00:13:40.500 You are getting a continuous flow of supplemental mitochondria

00:13:44.740 in your bloodstream right now and mine.

00:13:48.420 Billions of mitochondria in the next five minutes.

00:13:51.000 There'll be a billion mitochondria that have been transferred

00:13:53.380 from our bone marrow to the rest of our body.

00:13:58.580 Hold on.

00:13:59.400 Just fold out my...

00:14:03.040 hold out the that's the problem with having a cord on your earphones

00:14:08.080 i wave my hands around and then i pull them out so so you uh mitochondria are transplanting

00:14:16.000 through your bloodstream as a as a literally they're like a supplemental flow of mitochondria

00:14:22.160 that your body is sending out to the tissues to kind of keep them you know full with fresh

00:14:29.520 mitochondria okay and that's what we call the mitochondrial cycle of the body we believe that

00:14:36.960 there is a very very well designed uh distribution system for rationing young healthy mitochondria

00:14:48.960 out into the outer parts of the body the brain the heart the you know muscles in order to keep

00:14:55.280 us alive longer than we normally would be kept would we we would live without that we'd only

00:15:00.400 maybe we'd only live 20 25 years but we live we live to be 90 because our body is constantly

00:15:07.360 supplementing the mitochondria through the bloodstream okay imagine your favorite lecture

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00:15:19.120 the best way i could describe a peterson academy lecture there's always that one professor who's

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00:15:36.720 also still questioning the value that i got out of college it's very common nowadays for

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00:15:46.320 rates that are just going to keep on piling up on them for an education that doesn't entirely serve

00:15:51.200 them you are stuck in the room you have to do a particular set of courses now have to convince

00:15:55.840 myself to stay focused it's just pretty dry with peterson academy it's a fraction of the cost and

00:16:01.840 you get access to all these different topics goes anything from sciences nutrition why we get sick

00:16:08.480 all the way up to history tons of courses tons of really good lectures i'm always looking for

00:16:13.280 high quality educational content peterson academy provides it all the instructors are amazing they're

00:16:18.400 so well known in their field that you just want to pay attention.

00:16:21.520 The more I access, the more I listen, the more I learn, the more I want to learn.

00:16:25.440 I just keep expanding and I just want more.

00:16:27.840 Traditional university can sometimes ground you down.

00:16:30.320 Peterson Academy will be able to scratch that itch

00:16:33.600 of you wanting to learn and continuing to grow as a person.

00:16:36.800 I can't wait to see where Peterson Academy goes.

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00:16:43.600 I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:16:47.040 You just kind of have to focus on what's going to actually change your life.

00:16:50.960 Stop paying attention to what things are supposed to look like and actually aim for something.

00:16:55.980 And you might just stumble across something like Peterson Academy.

00:17:03.340 So you said like one quick question.

00:17:05.980 You said like from an egg, we get 300 to 500,000.

00:17:11.080 But then you said that there might be a billion moving around.

00:17:14.760 Is that because they're, are they created in bone marrow?

00:17:19.560 Like where do these come from?

00:17:20.700 Or does each cell create its own in the body?

00:17:24.340 Well, cells are, yeah, the cells create the mitochondria, but the stem cells specifically.

00:17:29.780 So all the cells can create mitochondria.

00:17:32.880 But all the cells out there, like muscle cells, they create mitochondria or they refurbish.

00:17:38.400 They actually, they kind of rebuild them every three months.

00:17:41.480 Mitochondria wear out really fast.

00:17:43.880 But the skeletal muscle and the heart and all those organs, they're not very accurate at creating the mitochondria.

00:17:53.120 And they tend to create a lot of errors in the code because they're working frantically.

00:17:58.960 Especially that's why it's bad if you're under stress.

00:18:01.060 If you're under stress, your cells tend to replicate much more quickly and they do a sloppy job on the mitochondria.

00:18:08.000 So they get damaged.

00:18:10.400 The bone marrow, in our view, is kind of the factory that is preserving the heritage of the

00:18:19.460 best mitochondria and creating fresh, younger mitochondria and sending those out to the body

00:18:25.380 in order to replace the ones that get burned out. And that's all coming from the stem cells

00:18:30.540 in the bone marrow. Specifically, the stem cells create platelets. Each platelet has five

00:18:38.820 mitochondria, anywhere between five to 10 mitochondria. You create a hundred billion

00:18:45.000 platelets per day from your bone marrow. And then you retire a hundred billion at the end of 10 days.

00:18:51.940 And at the end of their lifespan, the platelets before they go off to be recycled,

00:18:56.940 they squirt out their mitochondria and these little extracellular vesicles and the other

00:19:01.560 cells pick them up. That's crazy. I don't know if that's just like the nerd in me,

00:19:08.820 I took cell biology a long time ago, which was my favorite course in university, because

00:19:14.160 it was so well-designed and complicated, but I certainly didn't learn about platelets delivering

00:19:23.700 mitochondria.

00:19:24.420 I'm telling you, nobody knows this because it's so new.

00:19:27.960 This actually was discovered by our chief scientist, a guy up in Quebec discovered this

00:19:35.260 in his lab. He's an amazing scientist. And they discovered, oh, platelets give off mitochondria

00:19:42.960 when they're at the end of their lifespan, like nobody do. And then we went in and we did some

00:19:49.800 studies where we said, well, what happens to them after they give it off? What we found out is

00:19:55.540 within five minutes, almost all of those have been absorbed by all the nearby cells because

00:20:01.060 in there. They're in these little vesicles. They have little targeting molecules on them

00:20:04.920 and all the other cells go, oh, yum. I'm going to grab these. See, mitochondria are like money.

00:20:12.980 If you see a hundred dollar bill in the street, it's not going to be there for long. Okay.

00:20:18.820 Mitochondria are like money. They're very, very hard to make and they're really important. And

00:20:22.780 so the cells will grab them and pull them in. And that's all been, that's all part of evolution

00:20:28.460 from a billion years ago.

00:20:29.740 That's what they call

00:20:30.820 an evolutionarily conserved process.

00:20:34.700 Wow.

00:20:35.180 Same thing in the brain.

00:20:36.320 There are specialized

00:20:37.300 little vesicles of the brain.

00:20:39.580 The mitochondria are manufactured

00:20:41.240 in star cells

00:20:44.780 and other types of cells

00:20:46.460 of the brain.

00:20:47.160 They get put into vesicles

00:20:48.420 and they float over to the neurons

00:20:50.480 and the neurons grab them

00:20:52.340 and use them.

00:20:53.640 And then when they burn out,

00:20:54.600 they put them into

00:20:55.160 other little vesicles

00:20:56.040 with different receptors

00:20:57.020 and float them back.

00:20:58.460 to be rebuilt. Okay. That's your brain. That's crazy. If I hadn't done the amount of reading

00:21:08.560 on mitochondrial dysfunction and these kinds of things before I reached out to you, I don't know

00:21:12.460 if I could even believe this. It's so, well, it's hopeful and futuristic and it sounds too good to

00:21:22.460 be true until you start linking all these weird chronic diseases being like well why are there so

00:21:30.440 many people so many people who are sick with like multi-system failure it's not just their brain

00:21:37.660 it's not just mental illness it's chronic fatigue it's pain like what hits the whole body and why

00:21:44.520 are there so many kind of untreatable disorders like people talk about chronic chronic covid like

00:21:51.220 Long COVID is a big thing. Lyme disease.

00:21:55.060 COVID destroys mitochondria. It is a proven fact. The papers came out two years ago. COVID

00:22:02.300 destroys mitochondria on a massive basis. So it just hit some people, like some people

00:22:09.100 got hit harder and ended up with long COVID and they don't know what to do with it.

00:22:12.880 I mean, there's many other things. The thing about mitochondrial dysfunction is

00:22:16.380 it's kind of like, it's always there in the background, but it may, it may not be the main

00:22:20.940 reason, but it's a contributing factor for so many things. Okay. If your energy levels go down,

00:22:28.720 what happens when we hit 55, six years old, people start getting Alzheimer's. They start

00:22:34.380 getting Parkinson's. They get ALS. They get arthritis. They get, you know, all these diseases,

00:22:40.500 right? And cancer, of course, your odds of getting cancer at 60 are like 10 times more

00:22:48.700 than when you're 30 because your mitochondria have gotten weak and they can't power the immune

00:22:54.440 system anymore to keep all the cancer under control. There's also other things that cause

00:23:00.040 cancer that have nothing to do with the mitochondria, but it's like a car that's all

00:23:06.040 beat up that's running out of fuel. Well, it's beat up. It doesn't work very well. And it's

00:23:11.020 running out of fuel, you know, right. You, you could fix all those things. So that's the thing

00:23:17.640 about mitochondria is they may not be the main reason, but there are all those, a contributing

00:23:21.960 factor in all these diseases. Okay. And what you're saying, what you're getting to is that

00:23:31.040 we as a society are not dealing with this at all.

00:23:35.640 There's no doctors anywhere.

00:23:37.740 And I talk to doctors every day.

00:23:40.060 And they're like, we had no idea.

00:23:43.480 The scientists have no idea.

00:23:45.220 This is not in the textbooks.

00:23:47.000 This is really that new.

00:23:50.060 Where, you know, mitochondria as a part of the healthcare system

00:23:53.960 is just non-existent.

00:23:56.300 And so it's a revolution.

00:23:57.880 And I believe, I believe it is a coming revolution.

00:24:01.040 in medicine. Yeah, so do I. Are there any doctors using this that you know of, like in any way?

00:24:12.040 Yeah. I mean, so the people who discovered monoclonal transplantation, that was about

00:24:17.380 10 years ago, they've been using it in human patients on a very, very small scale. This was

00:24:24.000 originally used for heart surgery on babies. The guy who invented this did it because he wanted to

00:24:29.820 restore some of the damaged tissue in the heart

00:24:33.100 when he was operating on these children.

00:24:36.000 And so it wasn't just, in that case, it wasn't chronic disease.

00:24:40.320 He was doing it to fix an injury, okay?

00:24:43.860 There are Northwell Health,

00:24:46.940 which is actually the biggest hospital chain in New York State.

00:24:50.980 It's a 23-hospital chain.

00:24:53.020 Their whole system is working on this.

00:24:54.960 They've got projects going to look at how to use this

00:24:58.120 in the emergency room.

00:24:59.820 Really? People have heart attacks. If you have a heart attack, give you a big jolt of fresh

00:25:05.800 mitochondria, they get into the heart and you can bring back a bunch of that tissue.

00:25:09.740 There's been studies on stroke victims, very successful. They've used it for

00:25:14.800 iscemic wound healing. There's people using it for burns. There's people using it for

00:25:19.720 chronic diabetes wounds. You know, you smear it on a wound on the outside of the body.

00:25:29.820 and put a Band-Aid over it and the mitochondria

00:25:31.700 are in the gel

00:25:33.840 that you put on there and they get into the tissue

00:25:35.880 and they...

00:25:37.120 Yeah, it's like that...

00:25:40.920 Remember

00:25:42.260 the Hunger Games, you know, they have...

00:25:45.420 She had this little jar of cream

00:25:47.460 and she put it on and it made the wound magically 0.74

00:25:49.760 disappear. It's science fiction

00:25:51.120 kind of stuff, okay?

00:25:54.520 The biggest problem is

00:25:55.680 that when people hear all this, they think,

00:25:57.500 oh my God, this is, you know,

00:25:58.820 you guys are crackpots yeah i mean i mean yes obviously that's what it sounds like but if you

00:26:05.360 actually like read the studies and think about it it does make sense like it does make sense

00:26:12.860 it's just i guess in nature you wouldn't have this huge influx of mitochondria so it's science

00:26:20.340 fiction as in like the body can produce it with stem cells right and you can slowly heal but you

00:26:26.260 wouldn't ever have a paste with a huge dose of mitochondria to heal things. Well, actually,

00:26:32.820 when you get sick, if you get an infection or if you get cancer, the number of mitochondria that

00:26:39.280 are put loaded into each platelet doubles. That's been proven. And so the body is responding.

00:26:47.540 It sends more mitochondria when they're needed to fight an infection. And then people almost say,

00:26:54.140 well, why doesn't it just keep sending that number all the time? Because it's rationing,

00:26:58.140 because it has a limited quantity, see? So the body is constantly trying to adjust,

00:27:03.600 like it doesn't want to use them up too fast, but it also needs to keep you alive.

00:27:09.160 That makes sense.

00:27:10.160 Really interesting. So what we can do then as doctors is say, okay, well, we can take them

00:27:19.420 from the outside world, either get them from donors or get them.

00:27:25.740 Hold on a second.

00:27:27.560 Waving my hands around again.

00:27:35.680 So what I was saying was that the idea of mitochondrial transplantation

00:27:39.360 and what all of these researchers are testing

00:27:43.220 is that we could take mitochondria from potentially from donors

00:27:47.680 or more likely we grow them in a bioreactor,

00:27:52.260 which is what we're focused on primarily.

00:27:54.820 And then you can have your bioreactor

00:27:56.920 growing a new mitochondria for you.

00:27:58.840 And if you get sick, you could get a big chunk of them.

00:28:03.640 And even if you're elderly,

00:28:05.480 you could basically make your immune system much stronger

00:28:08.600 until you get rid of whatever that illness is.

00:28:13.040 Or if you're in the hospital

00:28:14.500 and they can have bags of transplantable mitochondria

00:28:17.220 If somebody comes in who's been, you know, a soldier or a firefighter or somebody who's been badly injured, they could give them the mitochondria to help them heal faster.

00:28:28.820 Okay, I've got, let me see, I've got a bunch of questions, but where should I start?

00:28:35.020 Okay, if you would, so say you can grow mitochondria in a bioreactor, you need an original source of them, right?

00:28:43.740 So would someone have to do a bone marrow transplant or does it have to be bone marrow

00:28:48.640 or could it be muscle or something?

00:28:50.720 Yeah.

00:28:50.800 And then-

00:28:51.960 We're not 100% sure yet, but I think we can get, right now we're just getting them from

00:28:56.380 the blood.

00:28:56.880 So we do a blood, you get stem cells from the blood, but that's all, that's like, that's

00:29:03.040 still being researched.

00:29:04.080 There's a lot of work going into it right now, but the best guess is you do it from

00:29:07.680 a blood transplant.

00:29:09.080 I mean, that sounds a lot more comfortable, to be honest, than a bone marrow transplant.

00:29:13.740 plan. Well, I mean, if you've got someone who's got Alzheimer's, for instance, well, I mean,

00:29:19.000 it might be worth it to put a real bone marrow. Yeah, yeah. But the key is that you've got to

00:29:24.860 figure out some way to grow more of them because whatever they have in their body, they're already

00:29:29.080 using. They're already, by the time you're 60, 70 years old, you're already low on your inventory.

00:29:36.400 So it's all about finding a larger source of mitochondria. Your bone marrow just can't keep

00:29:41.760 up after a while. That's what aging is. Your bone marrow just runs out of steam.

00:29:46.900 And so we have to supplement it with an external source.

00:29:50.880 This doesn't sound as crazy when you've done research into stem cells and what they've been

00:29:55.520 used for. Do you think the reason stem cells have been useful is primarily because the stem cells

00:30:03.860 have mitochondria in them? So you're kind of doing a mitochondrial?

00:30:06.740 Yeah. Stem cells literally are mitochondrial donors. And that's been shown many times.

00:30:15.800 They've studied it where they see the stem cell comes up. And if there's a cell,

00:30:20.400 it's a stem cell that comes near a cell that is needy, that needs help. Let's say it's been

00:30:26.900 damaged in some way. The stem cell will stop and it will build a little tube and it will start

00:30:32.660 sending mitochondria to that other cell and you could see them you could see the mitochondria

00:30:37.700 going down this tube it's amazing and they've done this over and over again and if the cell

00:30:42.580 is not in need the mitochondria the stem cell doesn't stop and so it's literally like the

00:30:48.580 mitochondria stem cells are like roving repair trucks and if they see a broken down car they

00:30:55.700 come over and they give it a jump start it's basically what stem cells do so wow yeah it's

00:31:01.140 It's amazing. Stem cells, they're factories, and they build all these. And it isn't just

00:31:08.640 mitochondria. There's other things too. There's growth factors and all this other stuff.

00:31:15.540 But then the reason that they might not be as effective for some people

00:31:18.720 maybe is because it's not the same dose as getting mitochondria.

00:31:22.860 So if you get a couple hundred million stem cells, that's not enough to cure anything

00:31:28.620 significant that's the problem the problem stem cells is is not that they don't work

00:31:32.460 it's just not enough of them you need trillions not billions okay you know you've got about a

00:31:40.860 quad you've got about 10 quadrillion mitochondria in your body and by the time you get to be 90

00:31:46.700 years old you've probably lost 40 of those or 50 of them and so um the numbers are huge

00:31:55.100 And so that's the nice thing about mitochondrial transplantation is that you can do it in really,

00:32:01.000 really, really large quantities. Wow. And that must be what they're doing when they're doing

00:32:06.940 this, trying to save tissue during organ transplants. Right.

00:32:11.060 Is it's a large... So do they, say with a pediatric heart, are they harvesting from blood

00:32:18.920 and then growing outside of the body to create a bunch more or...

00:32:22.820 know. In the case of the pediatric surgery, they actually just take a little bit from the leg

00:32:27.180 muscle, from the kid's leg muscle. It's a self-transplant. And remember that when there

00:32:34.300 are kids, their mitochondria are healthy. It's just in a case of this heart surgery,

00:32:39.600 the heart cells have been damaged. And so the mitochondria have died off and the body just

00:32:45.140 doesn't have enough time to get new ones in there. And so the surgeon is just taking some

00:32:50.340 from the leg and inserted them into the heart. And that works. Works great. If somebody who's

00:32:55.200 60, 70 years old, that probably wouldn't work as well because the ones you get from their leg are 0.66

00:32:58.900 not in very good shape. That makes sense. So you have to know this. Go ahead.

00:33:03.520 How many places is this being done? Because I hadn't heard about it.

00:33:09.160 So is it one hospital? Is it just a few hospitals in the US? Is it all over the world in a few

00:33:14.180 places? It's all over the world. It's all over the world. There's probably 10 or 15 locations

00:33:17.900 now in the United States that are experimenting with it, major places.

00:33:22.040 Stanford has three or four different groups that are studying it, Harvard, Walter Reed

00:33:27.260 Hospital, University of Washington, University of Kentucky has a whole center that's doing

00:33:32.300 mitochondrial transplantation.

00:33:33.860 So it's actually very big.

00:33:35.600 Oh, yeah.

00:33:36.500 And there's our company, which is really kind of the U.S. and Canada, and then there's another

00:33:44.040 startup in Switzerland, and there's another one in Israel, and there's one in Japan.

00:33:47.900 So there's a lot of companies popping up, trying to figure out various ways to scale this up.

00:33:55.740 Okay. Okay. Interesting.

00:33:57.740 Oh, it's really happening. I'll just say that Northwell Health, which is this big hospital

00:34:04.140 chain in New York, a year ago today, they had the first ever mitochondrial transplantation

00:34:11.340 conference there in Long Island.

00:34:13.500 Oh, that sounds so interesting. Is that hidden or is that online? Can people watch that?

00:34:20.540 You can go on YouTube. It's all on YouTube.

00:34:22.540 What was it called? I'm going to write it down.

00:34:25.260 First Annual Mitochondral Transplantation Conference, and it was at Northwell Health.

00:34:30.460 I think it was Hofstra University Research Center. There's the head of emergency services

00:34:39.420 for that entire hospital group guy named lance becker dr becker is he's pushing this as for a

00:34:47.500 national rollout they want to get this in all the emergency rooms that's crazy okay so this is very

00:34:55.100 the reason that this sounds crazy is because it's just super new like i read some studies i read i

00:35:01.500 think i found a study talking about maybe from 2012 talking about in theory we could do this

00:35:08.460 kind of thing with mitochondria but all the other studies i've read are from 2020 some of them are

00:35:14.220 from you guys and they're not all of them but like quite a few are from you guys are from like 2024

00:35:20.540 and 2025 and this year and then so it's it's it's it's like the wave you know everything comes in

00:35:27.740 waves and it's definitely starting to crest at this point uh it's it's happening very quickly

00:35:32.700 we're getting a lot of, there's a lot of publicity floating around. There was a big

00:35:38.020 article in The Economist and Scientific American. And I mean, we have, and our team, I'll just brag,

00:35:44.440 but we've got some of the best scientists on the West Coast. Really, they are the best. We've got

00:35:48.860 a guy named Mike Snyder, who is our co-founder, who used to run the genetics department for all

00:35:54.060 of Stanford. He started like 15 companies. Wow. We've got Scott Parazynski, who's a space shuttle

00:36:00.900 astronaut who is on our board. We've got a bunch of, we've got some celebrities. We've got all

00:36:06.580 these major scientists who are all, and everybody is, you know, scientists like to go with something

00:36:13.280 that looks new and exciting. So that's why we've had a lot of great people have jumped in because

00:36:18.640 they just, they say, this has a lot of, this has a lot of potential. We want to help it happen.

00:36:22.980 so so what you guys are are focused on so people know that this works but the problem is quantity

00:36:32.000 right because you don't want to get a donation from somebody and steal their mitochondria

00:36:37.060 like that's not ideal right and um there's not enough donors in the world to do this you need

00:36:41.880 a lot of mitochondria that's the problem yeah so then what what's the solution to that this is what

00:36:48.080 you're working on right we're working on it well we have two we have two things that we're doing

00:36:52.000 First of all, we have opened up a few clinics. Just a week ago, we opened up some clinics in

00:36:58.800 California, Texas and Florida, where we're going to be doing some really simple, early

00:37:04.220 mitochondrial treatments. Okay. That's a week ago. That's so funny. I was looking into this.

00:37:11.260 I found out about mitochondrial transplantation and was like, wonder who's doing that. And then

00:37:17.400 found you four days ago i didn't realize you opened the clinics like a week ago yeah this is

00:37:23.480 it's crazy how like new this is it's wild that's anyway sorry well continue i'll just say the

00:37:30.600 biggest problem with any medical treatment like this is that you know the medical system is slow

00:37:35.560 right it's just the way it is and and they say i think somebody calculated it takes 17 years

00:37:41.240 for any new thing to work its way through to the point where the doctors actually start using it

00:37:45.080 right and so when i started my tricks that was exactly why i started the company i said i'm not

00:37:51.160 willing to wait 17 years because how many people are going to die you know and there are children

00:37:58.360 there's babies that have mitochondrial damage from birth they're born that way there's about

00:38:03.640 10 000 children in the world who have damaged mitochondria from birth and they die i mean it's

00:38:09.720 fatal and it's awful and so you know i'm not willing to wait around and let them have no hope

00:38:17.000 so we we decided with my tricks it's like no we're going to push this we want this to happen faster

00:38:23.240 and um sometimes that causes chaos but you know you have to i i feel like you have to push things

00:38:30.600 otherwise you're not doing a job so um yes we're opening up these clinics and um i'm sure other

00:38:39.000 people will be as well and there's hospitals that are they're doing we just did some early safety

00:38:45.640 trials we have a whole volunteer group of of elderly people who are just love the idea of

00:38:52.360 being the volunteers and being the the test pilots for the world you know um i have a guy who's 91

00:38:59.640 years old who's a quantum physics professor and has written science fiction books and is just

00:39:06.680 brilliant, and he is kind of our oldest volunteer. Then I have another guy who's 71 who is one of

00:39:14.360 our test pilots. We also just completed a whole series of safety trials with them,

00:39:20.360 and we found that it was safe. So that's where the world is at right now, is trying to get it

00:39:27.960 to the point where we can actually start delivering it to people.

00:39:30.040 yeah i yeah is there okay i i read a study last week i think that it was just published on um

00:39:40.040 ketogenic diet inducing hypomania or mania in some people who were depressed um who hadn't

00:39:48.260 experienced that before and i was thinking well you know maybe their body is constantly trying

00:39:53.840 to create more energy for their brain and when they suddenly get flooded with ketones they kind

00:39:58.340 to spike and get too much energy. I guess it's hard to say, but is that kind of thing a potential

00:40:06.680 possibility if you do this giant infusion of mitochondria? We have to be very careful

00:40:12.740 because if you take someone who has low energy and you give them this gigantic infusion all at

00:40:19.060 once, this is not a natural thing. We don't know what's going to happen. Think of being the first

00:40:27.440 people to ever do a heart transplant 60 years ago for the first heart transplant they didn't

00:40:34.520 know how to do it they didn't know what was going to happen like and they had to experiment

00:40:38.680 and just see you know and and you know i think the first one the first person passed away but

00:40:44.880 then i think the second person on they were able they figured it out and they were able to keep

00:40:48.620 them alive so this is a major medical procedure and you have to treat it you have to treat it

00:40:54.680 very carefully. This is not something, it's not like a pill. This is, you know, you need doctors

00:40:59.800 to do this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But you've done, okay, so you have some mice studies. Yes. And

00:41:08.460 what kind of like levels of mitochondria can you inject into mice safely or have it appear that way

00:41:16.640 anyway. Yeah, we could do pretty much huge amounts. So we've done mouse injections for years

00:41:30.200 where we've done as much as 1% of their total mitochondria per injection.

00:41:37.220 Whoa. And how many injections are you giving these super mice?

00:41:41.800 20, 30, you know, over the course of a year.

00:41:46.280 So we just wanted to see how much we could do.

00:41:49.520 And these are elderly mice.

00:41:51.420 They're like 24 months old, which is pretty old for a mouse.

00:41:54.740 And they do live longer, although we don't really look at their lifespan

00:41:58.660 because I don't think mice are that useful.

00:42:00.820 But the most interesting thing was that you give them these injections

00:42:04.700 and you see significant increases in strength and endurance

00:42:10.000 and oxygen consumption and cognition.

00:42:14.060 You see, as I mentioned earlier,

00:42:17.080 you see that the brain actually,

00:42:18.820 some parts of the brain actually regenerate.

00:42:21.780 And that gets back to this question of,

00:42:24.000 this question of is,

00:42:25.920 are neurodegenerative diseases

00:42:27.580 like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

00:42:29.880 and also mental health problems

00:42:33.220 like even potentially autism,

00:42:36.180 although that hasn't been studied,

00:42:38.340 but schizophrenia they found they did a study of people with schizophrenia and they found out that

00:42:43.460 they had deficient mitochondria in the area where that is cause causing their schizophrenia

00:42:48.420 and so there's all these questions now about that we could we could we help with mental illness as

00:42:55.720 well uh but as you were just saying it's like if you just give somebody these gigantic doses

00:43:02.700 could that cause them to go too far?

00:43:06.720 And the answer is maybe.

00:43:08.500 So we have to be careful.

00:43:10.020 You know, I keep telling my test pilots,

00:43:12.460 I'm like, don't run out and start lifting weights

00:43:15.140 that you haven't done before

00:43:17.100 because your muscles are not ready.

00:43:19.100 You may feel really energetic,

00:43:21.360 but your muscles haven't rebuilt yet.

00:43:23.120 Your tendons are still weak.

00:43:25.100 So we're going to probably have to treat them

00:43:27.160 like astronauts coming back from the space station,

00:43:29.500 you know, when they take them through

00:43:30.820 and they give them all these rehab exercises to bring them back to where they can walk around on

00:43:36.520 the earth. Well, it makes sense in theory that this could be used on mental disorders because

00:43:42.860 the evidence now that ketogenic diets help is overwhelming, honestly, if you actually look into

00:43:49.580 it for serious mental disorders. And then there's people like Chris Palmer from Harvard and it's

00:43:57.000 like, yeah, it's a brain energy problem. And so why, why wouldn't it work for that?

00:44:02.800 Yeah. Dr. Palmer's doing amazing work. There's a lot of other people looking at that too.

00:44:08.480 And yes, the thing about ketogenic diets is they affect mitochondria.

00:44:12.900 When you, when you change your nutrient, you change your glucose levels, the mitochondria

00:44:18.400 are forced to adjust and it causes them to kind of, you know, it causes them to readjust and

00:44:25.480 that's good for them, see? And so that's why I think ketogenic diets, you know, historically

00:44:31.540 people who fast usually show a lot of benefit from it because it helps the mitochondria

00:44:38.460 kind of shake out the cobwebs. That's what I always call it. The other one that people

00:44:43.720 have been experimenting with is red light therapy. And there is evidence that certain

00:44:51.300 wave lengths of light, cause the mitochondria to just work a little better. It's not permanent.

00:44:57.280 It's not a permanent fix, but as long as you've got that red light on you, you're warming up the

00:45:01.220 mitochondria and the muscles, and they work a little more efficiently. I was reading about

00:45:09.780 that yesterday because I was looking into a red light bed, I don't know, to see if that would

00:45:15.160 help my dad out, which sounds lovely. I was like, it's not going to be a cure, but it certainly

00:45:20.260 won't hurt. Is that the 810 nanometer wavelength? Yeah, right. There are certain wavelengths that

00:45:26.760 will go through the outer part of the skin and get into the muscle. That's what you want. It's

00:45:31.120 810 and 650, I think. These things are cheap. You can get them on Amazon for 45 bucks. I have

00:45:40.240 a couple. I use them. If you've got back pain, I don't use Motrin anymore. I use one of these

00:45:46.580 red light panels and i found it works really well i used when i was really sick when i had

00:45:53.520 arthritis and i was on a bunch of medication and before i was on a diet my mom was doing

00:45:59.900 she she's a like massage therapist she has a degree but she's a massage therapist and then

00:46:05.620 she bought all these lasers home and this was in 2010 and and we were like okay mom you've brought

00:46:12.380 your magical lasers home like this was a very this might have been 2008 this was she was way

00:46:18.260 ahead of the time that was way ahead of the time because that that's back when nobody believed any

00:46:23.160 of this stuff so your mom well we we certainly didn't believe her and it took like so she's

00:46:28.220 feeling rather vindicated now but i didn't i so she put them on me to try to help with my arthritis

00:46:34.880 and i was just like mom this is like trying to throw water onto a forced fire like like a drop

00:46:39.440 onto a force fire this isn't so i didn't believe it because it didn't help but when i got my

00:46:44.060 arthritis under control and then went into like psych med withdrawal when i stopped all my

00:46:49.960 medications i was using the red light on my head and on my like skin when i was getting rashes and

00:46:57.880 i could actually feel it and this was a bioflex laser yep um and it that was the first time where

00:47:05.000 I felt it. And I was like, oh, I can feel a little bit less pain. It wasn't like a magical cure,

00:47:11.480 but it was a little bit less pain. It was like, interesting.

00:47:15.080 That's right. And that's exactly what I found. I use it 15 minutes a day

00:47:18.520 on a sore spot I have. And it's like, it's not magic, but it just, it's almost like a heating

00:47:26.540 pad really. And it warms you up. And of course, I know a lot of people now are saying, oh,

00:47:31.900 you don't need to do that just go out lay in the sun for 15 minutes and that's probably true you

00:47:36.940 know i mean sunlight has all these same frequencies in it so uh there's a lot of people who should

00:47:42.620 they've a lot done a lot of research showing that that i grew up in the 70s and we were all tanning

00:47:48.460 all the time that was back when you oh yeah you gotta have the perfect tan so uh and now everybody's

00:47:53.980 like oh no we're gonna get skin cancer so it's it's one of those things that that kind of switches

00:47:58.940 back and forth every 10 years yeah well the staying out of the sun i'm not sure if i really

00:48:06.800 believe that i stopped getting um sunburns when i went on the carnivore diet but even before that

00:48:13.260 when i was on the paleo diet when i just cut out processed foods i stopped burning which i was like

00:48:19.500 i don't know what that's about um anyway let's get back to the kind of like science fiction part

00:48:25.140 so i feel like in the future would it be possible to have some sort of like to go to the doctor

00:48:33.900 have them taken in a blood take the take your blood put it into some sort of bioreactor that

00:48:40.720 you just have or you store somewhere and then whenever you're sick you can take some from that

00:48:45.880 is that the idea that's the idea um wow kind of like stem cell like i guess this is kind of like

00:48:52.740 cord banking. Like when you have a baby, you can send, like, I've never done that because I was

00:48:57.260 like, eh, I don't know how I feel about that. If it's even worthwhile, I'm not sure. But like

00:49:02.580 you can store your, um, your cord, like blood when the baby's born for future stem cell use.

00:49:10.920 So it's like a way better. The mitochondria in cord blood is like the best quality mitochondria

00:49:16.340 on the planet, of course, because it's so young. Right. And so, yeah, that's a great idea. Except

00:49:22.220 The trick that we have to figure out, and that's what we've been working on,

00:49:28.000 is taking your 80-year-old stem cells and converting them back into a younger version.

00:49:36.680 So we want to make your 80-year-old stem cells 20 again, or 15 years old,

00:49:40.900 so that you don't have to bank it when you're a kid.

00:49:43.660 You can just take whatever you have and make it younger, okay, which is very complicated.

00:49:48.640 And that's where the real biology gets really complicated, but we think we can do it.

00:49:54.840 And then it becomes a question of, can we grow enough mitochondria to provide, you know,

00:50:02.380 an entire population?

00:50:03.700 Because you can't just have this be, you know, this will be so useful that everybody's going

00:50:08.640 to want it.

00:50:09.540 And so our company mission actually officially is to build mitochondrial factories all over

00:50:18.480 the world and pump them out by the kiloton. Like we want tons of mitochondria and we want to supply

00:50:25.860 all the hospitals so that it becomes a standard supplement for anybody who needs it. Just

00:50:33.020 anytime you need to, you can go to the hospital and get a bunch of mitochondria.

00:50:38.000 So your concern is really with the bioreactor?

00:50:41.780 Yeah. Well, the bioreactor and also figuring out how to do the administration.

00:50:47.720 So we have doctors who are practicing with this,

00:50:50.820 trying to figure out, do we inject it directly into the muscle?

00:50:54.520 Do we do it intravenously?

00:50:56.200 Do we do blah, blah, blah?

00:50:57.340 You know, how do we do it?

00:50:58.800 How do we measure it?

00:50:59.840 I mean, there's just all the details of how to do this as a medical treatment.

00:51:03.680 Yeah.

00:51:04.560 People are still trying to figure that out with stem cells.

00:51:07.280 You can get the IV infusions.

00:51:09.140 You can inject it directly into a joint.

00:51:10.960 You can do it where the injury is.

00:51:12.580 there's somebody some neurologist um that's doing exosome like ultrasound exosomes into the brain

00:51:20.600 they're trying to do that for treatment um and i still think they haven't exactly figured out

00:51:25.940 i know like my parents experience was they did iv stem cells that my mom thought helped her dry eyes

00:51:33.300 my dad didn't think did anything um but he had some elbow pain and he had an injection there

00:51:39.520 and it got rid of his elbow pain um my mom my mom actually had much more success with it with like

00:51:46.120 old arthritic damage and she started gardening again and this was it's not active arthritis

00:51:50.900 anymore but it was like just joint damage and she started gardening again after so she's had

00:51:57.660 and then they went to um i don't know if you've heard of dr zhao he does like stem cell training

00:52:06.280 or something. I didn't know anything about him. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, right.

00:52:09.920 I don't know so much about that. I don't know if that, like, I don't know anything about that.

00:52:14.260 It looks interesting, but they went and did that. I don't know. It's pretty new, right? We need a

00:52:19.520 lot more research. And I like this mitochondrial, I like the mitochondrial idea. Think of the

00:52:26.740 mitochondria, think of the mitochondria as being the next generation of stem cell therapy. That's

00:52:30.980 really what it is. People say, well, how does this relate to stem cells? And I say, well,

00:52:34.580 this is a stem cell therapy. The only difference is that we're not injecting the stem cells into

00:52:40.460 you. We're keeping them outside and squeezing out the mitochondria, which are the kind of the

00:52:46.380 effective ingredient we're injecting the mitochondria into you. And actually it's

00:52:50.100 mitochondria and exosomes. And so the stem cells you keep outside because there's some risk factors

00:52:58.280 with stem cells, plus the quantity that we're talking about doing something that is literally

00:53:03.520 1,000 times higher doses than the current stem cell therapy. So it's 1,000x. And that's why

00:53:12.600 your mom got a little benefit because most stem cell therapies are just kind of right on the

00:53:20.400 edge of being beneficial. It's just not enough. You just need more. If she'd gotten 10 or 20

00:53:26.800 injections, she probably would have gotten a lot more benefit out of it. But those are expensive

00:53:31.260 and they can be, there's risks because there's DNA in the stem cells that can go bad.

00:53:37.440 There's no DNA in mitochondria that can go bad.

00:53:40.260 So it's a much safer way of doing it, okay?

00:53:44.380 And they're so concentrated that I could get 1,000x into a single shot. 0.84

00:53:50.520 If that was a stem cell and I gave you that many, it would probably kill you.

00:53:55.100 So, it's just, mitochondria are just kind of the next generation of stem cell therapy.

00:54:02.320 Wild.

00:54:03.220 Yeah.

00:54:03.780 And so, who do you think is, like, out of anybody in the world, who's the most ahead

00:54:08.660 in this?

00:54:09.600 We are.

00:54:10.420 Research-wise.

00:54:11.560 Yeah?

00:54:12.460 I mean, I like that answer.

00:54:14.960 That's our goal.

00:54:16.280 I mean, of course, others would argue that because they think they're ahead.

00:54:22.360 But, you know, that's my answer as a CEO.

00:54:25.100 Um, we're, but you know, a lot of us, we're all going after slightly different variations.

00:54:30.480 There's different ways of doing it. There's a lot of different ways of doing it. And so

00:54:34.200 everybody's kind of picked a little piece of the puzzle and we're all trying to optimize that piece

00:54:39.740 of the puzzle. And I, I, I, I mean, look, I talk to my competitors all the time. We're very friendly

00:54:46.340 because look, nobody's, you know, we're not worried about competing with each other. We're

00:54:51.040 worried about just getting the world to accept this at all. That's the challenge, right? That's

00:54:56.200 like when you're in the frontier, you don't worry about the guy next door. He's your friend.

00:55:00.840 What you worry about is, can you get anybody from the outside world to even acknowledge your

00:55:04.500 existence? And that's the problem with mitochondrial transplantation is just getting

00:55:08.620 any attention at all from the world. Any kind of, you know, go ahead.

00:55:15.060 it seems it seems like pretty it seems easy to explain given stem cells now stem cells are still

00:55:22.820 considered fringe um but that's mostly from people who don't know what they're talking about to be

00:55:27.640 honest um but and because they're not you know they're not a cure-all you can't inject them into

00:55:33.300 somebody and then they all see benefits you know so it's tricky but talking about them as like the

00:55:40.020 kind of upgraded or extremely upgraded stem cell infusion kind of that should be stem cells and

00:55:49.080 prp and all those kinds of those kinds of treatments they've always the biggest problem

00:55:54.640 is that they they're i think that they're just not quite strong enough because you're always on

00:56:01.900 not quite did i get a big enough dose to make a difference right oh so sorry so prp so if can you

00:56:09.960 explain PRP for people who don't know? It's used in cosmetic stuff all the time. But what's PRP?

00:56:16.600 Wrinkle injections. Now, PRP is what's called platelet-rich plasma. And that's where they take

00:56:22.920 a little bit of your blood. They isolate out the platelets. Sometimes they do what's called

00:56:28.820 activation where it causes the platelets to clot. And then you inject it back into

00:56:32.780 elbow joints. They use them for cosmetic stuff. They do use them for wound healing in some cases.

00:56:39.960 platelets are full of magical ingredients. And so what you get out of that platelet

00:56:44.140 injection is useful. But the problem with PRP is it's not very much. So it's back to the whole

00:56:52.800 thousand X thing. You need a thousand times more than what you can get out of one of those PRP

00:56:57.260 treatments. And also it doesn't work very well on old people. And now we know why, because the 0.52

00:57:02.520 mitochondria and your platelets when you're older are not very useful. They're not high quality.

00:57:10.700 Wow.

00:57:11.640 Okay.

00:57:12.420 That's interesting.

00:57:13.360 I've always wondered if PRP was worth trying out.

00:57:15.960 Just even one of those, like, I think they're microneedling facials.

00:57:19.160 I was like, you can do one with PRP.

00:57:20.600 That seems good.

00:57:21.260 But I was like, what are in platelets that are useful?

00:57:24.280 But that's the answer.

00:57:25.280 We're probably going to do facials and wrinkle work at our clinics, actually, because it's a good use for mitochondria.

00:57:34.720 honestly too just for getting into the public like red light it was picked up by a lot of

00:57:42.680 plastic surgeons yeah right they're like use red same with hyperbaric oxygen like the plastic

00:57:47.800 surgeons seem to be they're on the edge of what makes people look better quickly right so that's

00:57:54.180 not a bad place to start i think mitochondrial injections will be very powerful for cosmetic

00:57:59.320 stuff but again where do you get them from yeah so that's that's the challenge that's where you

00:58:04.520 have to have that bioreactor yeah okay cool okay let me just see i didn't even look at any of my

00:58:13.960 notes um but i feel like we covered like i could go on for three hours on this so you'll have to

00:58:22.000 stop me i will i will um but i want to just make sure i didn't miss anything

00:58:27.720 covered some risks. And the risks are, we don't know, we need more research, kind of.

00:58:34.560 But that mice seem to tolerate large doses very well.

00:58:37.680 Look, I just want to say this. We all talk among each other in this field. It's like

00:58:43.440 nobody has ever had any problem of any kind. Every single person who does mitochondrial

00:58:49.840 transplantation, it works fine. No negative reaction, no danger that we could see.

00:58:55.340 and we just finished up trial

00:58:57.660 where we were doing really big doses.

00:59:01.300 They're fine.

00:59:02.880 They came away, they felt like a million bucks.

00:59:06.520 And you guys just came out with a human,

00:59:12.120 did you do a human test?

00:59:13.560 Yeah.

00:59:13.820 What was the recent thing?

00:59:14.840 Okay, so what did that look like?

00:59:16.860 We did what's called escalating dose tests

00:59:19.680 using mitochondria that we got out of platelets, okay?

00:59:23.360 they're not bioreactor mitochondria yet that's kind of phase two is we're going to move to the

00:59:28.260 bioreactor version but for the first one we use you platelets mitochondria from platelets

00:59:33.400 and we started really really small with little injections in the arm and we looked to see if

00:59:38.280 there was any in you know any kind of rash and there wasn't so we did another one so we did four

00:59:44.080 larger injections each time in a 71-year-old and a 91-year-old.

00:59:52.480 And it worked great.

00:59:54.780 No, absolutely no problem of any kind.

00:59:56.880 We did blood tests.

00:59:57.940 We looked at all their hormones and their cytokines and all their blood chemistry, and

01:00:02.680 we saw no problem with them.

01:00:05.580 Did they feel it?

01:00:07.480 Could they?

01:00:08.580 Yeah.

01:00:08.880 Was the dose high enough for them to feel anything?

01:00:11.340 Not really.

01:00:11.820 They felt generally, they felt good for a week after, but that could be placebo effect.

01:00:18.380 So, you know, we don't, I tell people, I say, we're not going to release any data about efficacy until we have better data.

01:00:24.840 I mean, you have to be very careful.

01:00:27.160 This was just for safety.

01:00:29.180 It was called a preliminary safety trial.

01:00:32.500 And it seemed to go off just fine.

01:00:34.620 So, and there are doctors who 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, you know, has value to do this kind of work.

01:00:49.920 Yeah, for sure. Okay, wow. So the next step after this, the safety data,

01:00:56.880 that's when you start doing human trials. And is your plan to do these escalating doses there

01:01:03.280 at much higher doses? Yeah, much bigger. And so, for instance, a typical unit of mitochondria for

01:01:11.240 us, a typical unit is 300 billion mitochondria. We consider that to be a unit of mitochondria.

01:01:19.920 And so we were doing like up to a half a unit.

01:01:23.600 That was the most we did in our safety trials and no negative impact whatsoever.

01:01:29.020 Everybody felt great afterwards.

01:01:31.780 So then we'd get into multiple units, larger and larger doses.

01:01:38.960 Interesting.

01:01:39.680 Interesting. And maybe like in an ideal future long-term, like if this comes to fruition and

01:01:45.900 people can like have their own mitochondria in bioreactors, maybe what people want to do

01:01:52.120 is a small amount every day, you know, just to boost themselves up rather than these large

01:01:57.760 amounts. That's what people say. Well, how long is the treatment going to be? Of course,

01:02:01.640 everybody wants to know how expensive it's going to be. It's like, well, nobody knows. I mean,

01:02:05.700 we're doing everything by hand. So it's horribly expensive now because we do it all by hand. I've

01:02:11.100 got a bunch of lab technicians sitting there with test tubes, you know, wearing the hood and all

01:02:17.180 that. And that's just not the way to do this. You need equipment to automate it if you're going to

01:02:22.340 do this on any kind of large scale. Otherwise, it just takes too long. So how much does it cost?

01:02:30.020 Nobody knows. We won't know until we build the equipment and try to automate this and do it on

01:02:35.020 some kind of large scale. Right now, it's like building a car from scratch.

01:02:39.580 Well, that's going to be very expensive because building cars from scratch is expensive. You

01:02:43.300 need mass production. So that's what we want to get to next, is the mass production environment.

01:02:51.900 Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, how else are hospitals going to

01:02:55.340 use it as treatment? They can't, right?

01:02:58.980 Right. And if you have an emergency room, for example, well, you're not going to have time

01:03:03.300 for a bioreactor. So you need to some way to freeze the mitochondria in bags. And maybe you

01:03:09.980 have five, there's a mitochondria have different, what's called haplogroups, kind of almost like

01:03:15.660 blood types. So maybe you do the same thing as they do with blood where you have, you have like

01:03:19.660 10 different varieties and somebody comes in and they've been injured and you do a quick test and

01:03:24.920 you give them the closest mitochondria they have and it helps them, it helps them heal faster.

01:03:30.080 uh i mean think of the military applications for the military oh yeah they're amazing right

01:03:35.920 yeah so that the haplo okay that was one of the questions i wanted to ask is like yeah do you need

01:03:42.900 to be specific like can you said you can do transplants where somebody can donate them yes

01:03:49.480 but but it needs to be the same haplotype well that's something that's actually very important

01:03:55.720 to mention. I'm glad you brought it up. Your mitochondrial DNA is identical to your mother

01:04:01.980 and your grandmother and your great grandmother. Mitochondrial DNA are passed down strictly through

01:04:07.860 the female line because they're ancient and there's no male or female. It's just

01:04:13.120 like bacteria, right? And so you and all of your cousins, like if you had a sister who had

01:04:22.480 children. Those children will all have exactly the same mitochondria as you do. Okay. So that

01:04:29.200 is considered to be autologous, which means it's as safe as breaking it out of your own body.

01:04:35.560 Wow. Okay. Because they're identical. So you can get, in theory, it's very, very safe to get

01:04:40.960 donations from sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles. And again, they're doing these treatments

01:04:47.660 for these children with mitochondrial mutation diseases.

01:04:52.420 That's the kind of thing they're looking at doing.

01:04:54.180 It's just bringing in the family members

01:04:55.660 and keep doing this.

01:04:58.420 You're trying to get these kids

01:04:59.880 to have more healthy mitochondria.

01:05:02.700 You're not going to get them perfect,

01:05:04.100 but you can get them away out of danger.

01:05:06.520 And if you can get enough from the family

01:05:08.080 and you can keep injecting them,

01:05:09.480 you might be able to push these kids over

01:05:10.980 to where they can have fairly normal lives, okay?

01:05:14.320 So yes, that's when you would use family mitochondria.

01:05:17.660 but it's also possible

01:05:19.880 that other people

01:05:22.220 who even aren't in your family

01:05:23.580 that it might be compatible

01:05:24.780 we just don't know yet

01:05:26.100 there might be mitochondria

01:05:28.540 that are like a typo

01:05:29.720 in the blood

01:05:30.320 you know blood typo

01:05:31.460 can be used by anybody

01:05:32.640 yeah

01:05:33.620 it may be that that's true

01:05:34.920 for mitochondria too

01:05:35.840 we just don't know yet

01:05:36.980 wow

01:05:38.840 yeah

01:05:39.400 it's amazing

01:05:41.220 amount of work

01:05:43.440 that needs to be done

01:05:44.660 on this

01:05:45.800 yeah

01:05:47.420 Yeah. Okay. Where should people go to find out more about what you do?

01:05:54.980 Well, go to our website, mytricks.bio. We actually have a lot of information on there.

01:06:00.780 We built it so that people could kind of learn, right? And if you just go on the web and you just

01:06:08.100 put in mitochondrial transplantation, you will see lots of stuff popping up.

01:06:12.240 um lots of papers every week there's something new it's all over the world now so um you could

01:06:21.980 go on youtube i've given a bunch of youtube speeches and there's also all these conferences

01:06:27.760 uh the the mitochondrial convention was was all put on youtube so you can watch those yeah that's

01:06:33.980 cool i'll link so i'll link the website uh my tricks.bio and grab a few interesting studies

01:06:42.220 uh and i'll try to find a link to that and that first annual conference um to stick in the

01:06:48.780 description for anybody listening but i think i think from everything i've learned from the

01:06:55.300 ketogenic diet from my exposure to mold yeah which brought up like i i couldn't figure out

01:07:01.320 you know why is it that when i went on a ketogenic diet well meat diet and cut everything out

01:07:06.580 and got better why did my original symptoms come back when i was exposed to mold even though i

01:07:13.500 didn't change my diet and i was like what's happening that's the same something the same

01:07:17.640 is happening and then how does that interplay with ketosis why does ketosis help and then

01:07:23.260 the link is finally oh mitochondrial dysfunction from all these different there's so many things

01:07:29.800 that attack the mitochondria. They're very delicate. They're very delicate. And we don't

01:07:35.560 even know yet. We know that there's some drugs that will burn out your mitochondria prematurely.

01:07:41.420 And there's people, you and I have talked about this already. We talked about Cipro,

01:07:45.160 fluoroquinolones, which are very damaging to mitochondria. And there's people whose lives

01:07:51.600 have been ruined. A lot of people. It's called being floxed. And it's horrible.

01:07:58.780 right there yeah anybody listening there are lots of antibiotics that you can take if you have an

01:08:05.380 infection do not take fluoroquinolones so that's like ciprofloxacin it's anything that says unless

01:08:12.320 you're dying unless it's the only antibiotic you you can take and you're dying but like they're

01:08:18.040 prescribed for utis right all the time and there's other antibiotic classes you can take

01:08:23.000 they're given and they're really risky um i feel the same way nobody takes attention to it because

01:08:30.320 usually that is put off 10 20 years down the down the road see that's the problem with

01:08:35.660 mitochondrial damage a lot of the time you don't notice it until 10 or 15 years later suddenly one

01:08:41.840 of your tendons like with your flocks it's just one of your tendons just breaks like people have

01:08:47.080 their Achilles tendon just tears for no reason. And then they start getting muscle damage and

01:08:53.620 tendon damage all over their body. And before you know it, they're bed bound. It's really awful.

01:08:59.420 Or they get premature dementia. I'm really worried about premature dementia as a potential

01:09:06.360 outgrowth to all these mitochondrial injuries. Yeah. Well, and we have, my family has a lot

01:09:14.000 of experience with a psych med neurological disc like injury which has been brutal and that's from

01:09:19.860 like long-term psych meds and that like yeah this is a big problem we have no idea what all that

01:09:27.740 stuff is doing in the long term that's the problem no and it's not going to be pretty and it's going

01:09:34.400 to affect a lot of people so maybe there'll be some solutions because right now there's no there's

01:09:39.420 really no solution once you experience that level of damage from a medication or even like

01:09:45.060 Parkinson's Alzheimer's I've seen some promising things with ketogenic intervention which is

01:09:50.280 probably because it works on mitochondria but that doesn't it's not just a cure once you get

01:09:56.740 to that stage for everyone some people I've seen like the rare case of reversal for Parkinson's

01:10:02.780 alzheimer's but by the time you're at that stage like you need a lot of help so we need something

01:10:09.740 that offers more help and we need to stop damaging ourselves so badly yeah other than living let me

01:10:17.660 i'll just let me i want to throw out one little thing here about you know kind of the big picture

01:10:24.540 the political picture you know this is so new and there's just i mean there's like you could

01:10:30.140 Like I said, there's a few dozen people researching this.

01:10:33.020 It's happening all over the world, but there's no support for this at all.

01:10:38.560 It's being talked about a lot.

01:10:41.440 But this, you know, if you look at the amount of disability in our economy, if you look

01:10:47.420 at the number of chronic diseases, the number of people are disabled, a lot of that is because

01:10:52.920 we're good at saving people's lives, but we're not so good at that.

01:10:57.240 a lot of those cures damage their mitochondria afterwards. And so they end up being kind of in

01:11:03.460 this state. And anybody who has chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID can tell you, I'm alive,

01:11:10.180 but I have zero energy. I can't get up. I can't move around. And people who are floxed,

01:11:15.400 the same thing. And those numbers keep growing. And so we've got this just kind of

01:11:21.640 built-in long-term group of people who cannot care for themselves, can't earn a living,

01:11:30.600 they're disabled, they can't live, their families are being impacted, all these things.

01:11:36.620 We really need something to help us get over the hump, but this is going to sink our healthcare

01:11:42.740 system eventually. So I really think this is a significant national imperative, I guess I would

01:11:50.040 call it i i agree um i like i've been talking about with my audience like about psych med damage

01:11:58.220 and the fact that like one out of every five or six depending on the data um people is on one of

01:12:05.000 these medications that long term seem to cause mitochondrial dysfunction and neurological injury

01:12:10.360 that is almost untreatable that's like that's a huge percentage of percentage of our population

01:12:17.620 And then mold exposure to we've figured like the approximation from the specialist there is 20% of people are really ill. Those are probably people who are also on psych 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.

01:12:44.800 I don't know what things are going to look like in five years.

01:12:47.780 It's going to get worse because, I mean, if you think about it, people say, well, this wasn't happening 40 years ago.

01:12:52.800 That's because people didn't live as long.

01:12:54.920 I mean, the truth is a lot of this is just related to aging.

01:12:58.680 We live longer.

01:13:00.300 We have much better medicine now.

01:13:02.480 We're saving people who normally would have died 40 years ago.

01:13:05.540 They die of a heart attack.

01:13:06.640 Now we bring them back, right?

01:13:08.160 All the people who used to be, they die of cancer.

01:13:10.660 Now we bring them back from cancer.

01:13:12.140 But they're not really whole. 1.00

01:13:14.800 You know, they're, as you said, they're just disabled and unable to take care of themselves.

01:13:20.660 And so, and of course, people are getting older in general. 1.00

01:13:23.880 The population is getting older.

01:13:25.400 So all these trends are converging.

01:13:28.540 Yeah, definitely.

01:13:30.700 Well, I think your company is very promising and very interesting.

01:13:35.780 And so thank you for your time.

01:13:37.780 My pleasure.

01:13:39.360 Like I said, I'll link a bunch of studies.

01:13:40.940 I'll link your website below for anyone who's listening.

01:13:42.960 but yeah nice meeting you thank you very much for coming on yes yes my pleasure

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - May 20, 2026

Mitochondrial Transplants Heal Cells ｜ Tom Benson Ep 234

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