The Cure For Aging Nobody Knows About...Yet

One of the people on our board of directors is a former astronaut. We've got a whole idea of what's going to be needed for people going to Mars and people going to to the moon.

There's a couple studies showing that a mismatch of mitochondrial DNA with nuclear DNA equals animals that don't thrive. The way nature keeps us from aging too quickly in our mitochondria is just by giving us a ton of them in the beginning. We have 500,000 copies of the mitochondrial DNA in each egg cell. We're going to try to fix their mitochondria, grow a bunch of those, and then flush out their bad ones and replace them with good ones. Wow. When you fix them, are you crispering them, or how do you do that?

This is Tom Benson, a molecular biologist who's been asking one bold question for over a decade. What if we could take out your tired old mitochondria, give them an upgrade, and put them back in better than before? From reversing disease to enhancing human potential, he's working at the edge of what's possible for science to ever accomplish.

If you want to be a good skier, you want the Eskimo mitochondria. If you want to be a really good long-distance runner in the Olympics, and you want the Ethiopian mitochondria. If it's okay to fix mitochondria that have some problems, and reintroduce them, can I take my perfectly good mitochondria, give them some superpowers, and then introduce them back in?

You're listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. This is an episode that I am so excited to do for you. And the reason is that I have fantasized about upgrading my mitochondria for 25 years. It's been uh just a thing where I understand I have unusual biochemistry in my cells and I understand how mitochondrial networks work. I'm a network engineer by training. And Tom Benson, who's our guest today, well, you're a scientist, an inventor, tech entrepreneur, and you've only started three high-tech Silicon Valley companies, and now you're working on a company called Mitrix. Am I saying right, Matrix? Mitrix. I just read about Mitrix. Mitrix. Yeah. All right. And you're looking at, oh my gosh, can we take mitochondria, harvest them, restore them, and transfuse them? And the answer is yes, we can. and I want to do it. How do I sign up?

So, I always tell people, I say, "My goal is to pump as many younger versions of your mitochondria back into you as we can get in there." I'm not trying to be too like I'm not like saying, "Oh, I'm going to put, you know, I could send them maybe I can send them to specific organs, but I'm not we're not going to treat try to be too tricky in the beginning." We're just trying to do the basics. And the basics is, you know, for people who haven't seen any of this data before, what what aging scientists have really come to grips with is that aging is caused by the accumulation, we think it's caused by the accumulation of damage to the genetic structure of mitochondria and the nucleus. Okay? So, they're both declining as you get older and older and older. And of course, the nucleus is better protected and it's more care. It's got better quality control. So maybe it ages slower. The mitochondria is simpler and you start out with zillions of copies of it. The nature, the way nature keeps us from aging too quickly in our mitochondria is just by giving us a ton of them in the beginning. We have 500,000 copies of the mitochondrial DNA in each egg cell. 300,000 to 500,000. And it's just sheer numbers. That's just the way like like you know the nucleus has got this whole different system of quality control for mitochondria. It's just sheer numbers. Okay. And the other thing I always tell people is to remember that you are 10% mitochondria. 10% of your body is mitochondria. Okay. So you're a and they're all running like crazy generating energy and they're little they're like little jet they're little jet turbons buzzing away and you know so you when when says we are energy beings it's really true we are energy beings okay luminous beings are we not this crude matter if it wasn't for all that energy we'd all just collapse into a pile of a puddle of goo right so um those mitochondria are there. Yeah, I mean your Buddhist friends are right. It's that's all these things are going to come together. Um and the science supports it. The other thing I always like to mention is that but the mitochondria are a billion years old and for the first for the first 500 million years it was just single cell animals or maybe two or whatever it is 400 million years. So they had fourund million years to perfect themselves. And then we came along. They built us like we were built by the mitochondria. Okay? Yes. So yeah, these are these are the things to remember.

It's funny back when mitochondria first kind of became a thing around 1990 really. We started talking about it, right? I had chronic fatigue syndrome and my career was taking off in Silicon Valley. I'm like, I think I have a power plant problem here. So I just became obsessed with mitochondria and all the things you can do. And we we have a very similar view now from what you just said. One of the things that that came across my awareness is that you can look at mitochondria as the the wiring diagram, right? Um and then you also have the physical infrastructure like the walls and the building which is nuclear DNA, right? And there's a couple studies showing that a mismatch of mitochondrial DNA with nuclear DNA equals animals that don't thrive. And the study was done in sparrows. Right. Right. So you're growing mitochondria, large numbers of them in a vat. Right. Right. Now, are you growing my mitochondria or are you growing someone else's? No. No. Your mitochondria. So I I want like who would whose mitochondria would I want? Like I I want Well, all right. Let me tell you here. Here's my I'm going to tell you something that's very speculative. I actually have one of our volunteers for our group actually went out and did a mitochondrial study. You can get these for 140 bucks. You can get your mitochondrial hletype, right? And this person did a mitochondrial hletype and they found out that they had Inuit Eskimo mitochondria literally. Okay, they had the same type as as the Eskimos and and so I said, "Do you get do you get like overheated really or easy?" and she said, "Yeah, because I I have this theory that that mitochondria have very subtle little changes that they've evolved as we've as the human race migrated around the world. If you take a mitochondria from an Ethiopian and a mitochondria from an Eskimo, they have different energy production. Yes. Levels and they keep though. So if you want to run they the So the point is if you want to be a good skier, you want the Eskimo mitochondria. If you want to be a really good long-distance runner in the Olympics, then you want the Ethiopian mitochondria. Okay? Because they're going to produce different amounts of waste heat. It makes so much sense. And the the difficulty is that if you have say the Ethiopian sourced uh mitochondrial DNA, but you have a hardware package that's northern European, you're probably not going to perform as well as if there's a better match. I I think I think that when the when the when conception happens, there's this magic where the nuclear DNA builds itself from the two from the two, you know, male and female the chromos. rearrange and then it's got to negotiate with the mitochondria. And of course, the mitochondria comes straight from the mother. There's no male or female mitochondria. It's all maternal. And so, it's like two different worlds. They're alien species because the mitochondrial DNA is a bacterial DNA and our nuclear DNA is a chromosonal DNA. And they're completely different chemistry even. Okay. So I think there must be some sort of negotiation process and and maybe mixing a northern European nuclear DNA with a mitochondrial uh an Ethiopian mitochondrial DNA maybe it might be a great combination you know it can be both and and since there is no really it's very rare to find oh I only have you northern European or you know South American DNA our DNA has been mixed pretty effectively so we all have random building diagrams and then we just want a wiring diagram that matches it, right? And my theory, and this is very speculative, but it was in my fertility book. Um, the only cells that have a 100,000 up to 600,000 mitochondria are ovarian tissue. So, I think those mitochondria have all that power and all that compute because they're trying to decide which egg to drop based on the environment around. So like this is the egg that will thrive at this latitude with this kind of sunshine, this kind of nutrient, this kind of temperature and then that egg selects the right sperm which is a source of half the nuclear DNA and like that's how it has to work at least in my engineering view of things. Right. Well, that's that's very speculative. So of course yeah, I I won't go there. I have a I have so much speculation already that people nail me for. I'm going to let you enjoy that one. And um Oh yeah, I get nailed all the time. It makes me laugh and then I just make fun of their mitochondria. I just your we your mitochondria are weak. Um but yeah, so back to your question, our goal is to build an external bioreactor and to take somebody who's 85 90 years old and take their uh mitochondria and actually what we're doing is we're taking their stem cells. We take them from their body but they've got so they have damaged old mitochondria. Okay. Also we could take people there are kids who are born with mutated mitochondria from birth and it's horrible. They don't they don't live. I mean, it's a fatal disease and it's completely incurable and it runs in families and uh so from my perspective curing a kid with damaged mitochondria from birth and curing a an adult with damaged mitochondria from just living long enough to accumulate all that damage. That's for me really the same job. Okay, it really looks the same. Here's a question though. If the child has a genetic problem, if you culture mitochondria with a damaged problem, are you just making more damaged mitochondria?

Okay, so we we take their stem cells, we put them in our gadget, our our biorect, step one is we have to fix the mitochondria. Okay, so I don't want to grow a bunch of 90-year-old mitochondria and just pump them back in. That's not doing any good. I have to find a way to reverse the age of the mitochondria to make them 20 or 30 or something. And then you try to push as many of those as you can into the 90-year-old body. And then you end up with maybe 60 on average. You know, you're kind of it's like mixing black paint, white paint. You're never going to get perfectly white again, but you can get it to gray. Okay? And so we're trying to trying to flush out all the old mitochondria. In the case of the children, it's exactly the same thing. We're going to try to fix their mitochondria, grow a bunch of those, and then flush out their bad ones and replace them with good ones. Wow. When you fix them, are you crispering them or how how do you do that? That's I can't talk about that. That's okay. Got it. That's that's the secret sauce. That's the secret sauce. And it's so I mean, we're talking way on the edge of edge of science right now. So, it's the coolest stuff, though. Okay, I got to ask. Yeah. If it's okay to fix mitochondria that have some problems and reintroduce them, can I take my perfectly good mitochondria, give them some superpowers, and then introduce them back in? Maybe 50 years from now. I, you know, we have to right now, that's why I always tell people, I'm focused on one thing at a time. Okay, I respect that. Just doing what's in front of us is plenty. Okay. Um and and the other thing people always ask is they say well if you're doing it the autotogalus approach autotogalus means that you're growing someone own mitochondria and people always say well that's going to be very expensive and it is because it's just a lot of work involved. What about just mass producing mitochondria which means you would have to find a generic version of the mitochondrial DNA that would not hurt people. And I mean if someone's in the emergency room and they've had a heart attack you know you're not going to care. They're going to give them whatever you have on hand, right? And by by the way, emergency room doctors are starting to look at this for all kinds of emergency. It would make sense. And you look at blood sepsis, you know, when someone goes into septic shock, it's mitochondrial network shutdown. Put in some young fresh ones in there and watch what happens. Right. Well, I wrote a whole paper about that, about curing curing sepsis in mice with mitochondria. We did that. Wow. Two and a half years ago. So, look on our website, you'll find the paper. Paul Allen would still be here today um if this was further advanced. So Paul Allen would still be here today maybe and I I always I always feel sad when I say that because yeah, I mean you you know oh gee if we just had this but I mean you just you can't think about that too much you just have to go on. So the allergenic question is I think eventually in order to scale this up really on a global basis. I mean, I think everybody over the age of 55 at minimum should get mitochondrial supplements. I think it's like a vitamin. I think everybody should just get it. I couldn't agree more. And I've I've had my stem cells taken out, my bone marrow and my fat cells. I've had them culture expanded, reintroduced, and I've had my ENK cells taken out, culture expanded, and introduced to give me a young a young uh immune system. And why wouldn't we do it with mitochondria? The the mitochondria literally are just a variation of what you just told me. I mean, the techniques we're using are the same as what you just described. Okay. Except we're just doing it optimized for mitochondria, which means when you got a stem cell treatment, you probably got, you know, maybe 150 million stem cells, right? Y we figured that that's about 3 days worth of youth. Okay, it's unfortunately most stem cell treatments, they're great, but they're just not enough. Okay? And so what we're trying to do is say we're going to do trillions trillions of mitochondria which is the equivalent of 5,000 stem cell treatments. That's the goal. Um but that's you know a challenge of course to pull that off. But if we can pull it off then instead of three days of youth maybe we can get years right or I say youth I mean health you could say health. Same thing right? Yeah. So they they kind of go together. Health span. I'm one of the few people that like really is our goal actually just health span. I would like to live twice as long with my health. So health span to me is like it's a weak goal. Come on. It's it's a little bit of a wishy-washy term that somebody invented in order to be politically correct. Okay. Exactly. I use it all the time and my my people are like, "Oh, Tom, you got to be more careful. You don't sound like you're being too extreme." But people in the no when you say health span, what are you really talking about? We're talking about life extension and everyone knows extension. Yeah. Yeah. Or at the very least, you know, we're going to be 60 up until we're 100 and then, you know, I don't know who, nobody knows what's going to happen. But like when we do the tests in animals, we don't actually spend a lot of time worrying about lifespan. What we do is focus on can we reverse their their physical age in the moment. So, can I take a mouse and give it a and we do this all the time. give them a whole bunch of mitochondria and maybe exosomes too. And then can I look a month later and see that that mouse has became 30% stronger and 30% better cognition and can knock out sepsis? And we've done all three of those things. We've done strength, we've done cognition, and we've done immune system function. And they all work.

How much does it cost with the research levels you're doing now to do this for a human? Is this like a half a million dollar thing? We don't we don't even know. I mean, there's no way to say right now. So, it's that's like saying, "How much is it going to cost to go and rebuild some old castle in Scotland somewhere?" Well, nobody knows. You got to go look, you know? It's like nobody's tried it before. So, ah, this is so cool. It's right now it's about getting the funding to do the research and get the the first I mean, we want to do five people and um just to do the first five people. I mean, that you know, that's expensive. But that's true of any I mean, people are out blowing billions of dollars on all kinds of longevity ideas. So this is yeah, this is a very well-founded idea that's worthy of funding if anything ever was. That's my argument. Yeah. I've done um consulting work for multiple longevity venture funds and um have invested in some things in the space and this is the kind of thing that's worth packing. You know what's very interesting? I'll just say one thing about funding having now been through it. Of course, I wasn't in biotech, so I don't know. I I didn't know what I was getting into when I started the biotech thing. You know, we've we've raised about $4 million, which is very little, and we've kept it very small, very tight, you know, fastm moving, small team, the whole bit. My experience is that there's this huge difference, and maybe you've noticed this, there's a huge difference between people, it's kind of about 55, 60 years old. there's a cut off and the people who are younger are focused on other kinds of longevity which is appropriate for them which is things like you know extending what I already have which is very inexpensive and so I I'm a big believer in that right like take care of the mitochondria you have now okay because that's the cheapest way to get longer health span just take care of what you have like if you smoke you're taking 10 years off my your life right there okay whether you lung cancer or not, you're you're you're just nuking your mitochondria when you smoke. Um, if you're stressed, like stress destroys mitochondria. And and we all know it instinctively, uh, because we we can see it in day-to-day life, you know, people who have stressful jobs. And and the people who live to be 105 are usually some guy who's like, you know, a hardware store owner in in some little town somewhere that's just kind of has an easygoing life or he's a farmer or something and doesn't worry about things. Okay. So, uh before 5560 that's where most of the investment goes and then to get the what we're doing is really for people who are elderly. Okay. To reverse it, right? is reversing is much harder and it's much more complicated. And so we're focused on people who are 75, 80, 85 years old. That's that's our volunteer crowd. And those are mostly the people who in who invest is people who want it for themselves. You know, it seems like a lot of the the most disruptive and biggest swing for the fence longevity things are go through that same path. And I've also done gene therapy. um you know that's not cheap but I'm willing to overpay for it uh because I want the I want it to work now versus later because I I feel like any longevity thing you can do earlier in life the better off you are because it's very cheap when you're 16 to keep your healthy mitochondria and it's very expensive when you're 65 to get them to be 16 again. So the highest ROI comes earlier in life. That's right. Yeah. Going backwards is really expensive. We're going to get there. I think I'm convinced we're going to do it and it will I think it's going to give us much longer lifespans and I think it's worth it because obvious of health care is so expensive and and the cost of all these diseases. The good thing about mitochondria is that there's thousands of uses for them in traditional medicine anyway. Like I'm working with people who don't have anything to do with longevity. They're just trying to cure Parkinson's. Oh yeah. Okay. And Parkinson's is a very good and ALS and you know we've looked at um retinal diseases even glaucoma. It turns out glaucoma may be very much a mitochondrial disease. And so there's all these opportunities that are not related to longevity. They're just traditional medicine. And so but you still need a bioreactor because you need there's no real sources of mitochondria for all these great cures. So we need the bioreactor one way or the other.

I was just talking with a friend who has Parkinson's and is a billionaire and uh I'm like you don't have Parkinson's, you have a mitochondrial disorder and Parkinson's is a symptom of mitochondrial weakness and it's the expression of the mito or premature mitochondrial weakness. Exactly. And it just so happens the most energyintens of the brain that makes dopamine, your mitochondria failed there first because you have a systemic mitochondrial problem. Let's address mitochondria. So I think when your technology matures and becomes available, huge numbers of incurable diseases will magically become curable because mitochondria are foundational to so many things. Right. Right. I I I am careful not to say magically because you know I don't want you know this it's complicated. We don't know yet but the opportunity is huge and we should be chasing it. Um the other one is that I've been I I have some people in my group who who for example have fuoricquinone toxicity which is which is cypro okay there's actually in statins there's quite a few drugs that damage mitochondria and we're not paying attention to that okay and there are people who have become absolutely damaged their lives are destroyed at age 25 age 35 I mean I know some people and it's horrible. And so, um, there's this whole world of pharmaceutical interaction with mitochondria that we have not been really carefully looking at as a as a in medicine and we have to because we're leaving behind this trail of these of these disabled people.

It's funny at the the biohacking conference uh last year um the guys at Mi Health launched their product, their mitochondrial um health assay. Oh yeah. No, I I we're we're we've got one of those big Okay. You have to be working with uh Haml Patel, the PhD behind that, and he's been on the show as well. Um because this really does feel like the future, and you know, Sachin Panda's work around light and mitochondria. So almost every bio hack that I'm I'm teaching people are around signaling to the mitochondria what you want them to do so that they'll do it. And it's really changed my cognitive function, all my markers of aging. And I I do all this stuff, but it seems like everything I do affects mitochondria. Like, oh, testosterone affects mitochondria, you know? Um, everything. Mitochondria make testosterone. Exactly. And estrogen, too. Right. And, uh, melatonin. A lot of people don't don't think about cellular melatonin. That's a big deal, right? And, uh, they actually don't make glutathione, but they power glutathione production that they they then use. And like, it's such an elegant system. And it's it just seems eminently hackable um from the perspective of someone's like how do I increase performance and availability of distributed systems which is in my entire career before I turned biohacker. Right. Right. And and I also mentioned that like your friend with the Parkinson's why does one person get Parkinson's and another person gets ALS and another person gets early onset Alzheimer's and somebody else might get early sarcopenia or whatever. Uh, you know the thing is what they found out and actually the paper just came out two weeks ago. There was this great paper that said that it's absolutely you cannot predict the distribution of mitochondrial function in the body. Mitochondria kind of randomly scatter when we're when we're embryos and sometimes some bad ones get in there and they get replicated and you end up with a bunch of bad ones in one organ and you end up with good ones in another organ. Oh wow. It's chaotic. And so we're going to be at the point where I think we need to well first of all we need to do nationwide mitochondrial testing. And so your mi screen we we have a test that we've been working on that is actually looks at the amount of deletions and and damage in the nuclear in the mitochondrial DNA. Oh wow. Uh and we we have a whole like program where we've been doing that. We're going to use that as one of our as one of our tools for our process. And um but even that like even if you look at the DN let's say you look at the mitochondria from a blood sample it's going to be completely different for the mitochondria from a urine sample or from a skin sample or from you know a spit sample. The mitochondria in different parts of your body are all at different levels of health and we think that they're actually being supplemented by the bone marrow. The bone marrow is kind of the source of truth in in our model. The bone marrow stem cells are what are kind of creating all the mitochondria that it's using to supplement the rest of the body where they're getting burned out. And this is what most people don't understand. The mitochondria in your cell, they may not last more than 10, 20 years and they get burned out because they're under stress. You're running from, you know, predators, whatever you do when we're in the jungle, right? When you're an animal, you're you're under stress all the time. And that causes your mitochondria to replicate too quickly to accommodate the the emergency. But when they replicate really quickly, they get damaged really quickly. Their mitochondrial DNA gets it's lossy. You get you get a lot of errors and and like transcription errors. It's like a hard disk with a lot of bad sectors. Okay? And the bone marrow is the source of all the replacement mitochondria that the body is using to replace the ones that are going bad. And our theory is the reason human beings live to be 85 90 years old. Whereas an analopee the same size as us analopes only live to be about 30 okay at best. I think the reason is because our bodies are been have been programmed to ration the mitochondria more carefully and to reduce the size of the skeletal muscles and do all these things because for humans long life is a real is a real survival advantage. Okay. And so I think that evolution has been programming mitochondrial usage for all the different species and like we're going to find all this stuff out. It's going to be amazing. I think the the the finding out as you said the network administration aspect of mitochondria in the body right I've been doing a lot of work on signaling mechanisms and and people who are not network engineers you wouldn't you wouldn't know that when you pick up a phone there's an entirely separate network called SS7 that's setting up your call and it's invisible to you like I don't know there's a connection there but all the switching all the stuff that happens mitochondria have a bunch of different ways of signaling and we use light and photon and electricity and heat and vibration um and ex exoomes. Lots of exosomes. Yeah. Lots of exo and just hormones. Chemical signaling is kind of a big thing too. Right. Right. And so there's this beautiful like Martin Peard I think writes about it the best. There's this beautiful whole garden community. It it's like people who've made kombucha, you get that scobby or you make sourdough and you have the perfect ferment. We're the same. We're we're a big scobby there and there's all these variables that we can change. And are you familiar with Dr. Vich's work? No, I'm familiar with Peard. He's great. I don't know about Vich. Dr. Vch studied with Hans Krebs and spent 40 years studying mitochondria and ketones and um this show was the last uh last interview he ever did in his 80s before he passed. and he talked about how ionizing radiation when you fly is so bad for your mitochondrial DNA, but that the presence of ketone bodies is protective against that. It's like we cannot go to space until we hack our mitochondria with ketones. And so, so it's connected to like all human flourishing is really mitochondrial flourishing. Oh, by the way, I'll just I'll just mention one of one of the people on our board of directors is a former astronaut and he's a a Stanford doctor, former astronaut who studies radiation. Okay, we've got a we've got a whole we've got a whole like idea of what's going to be needed for people going to Mars and people going to to the moon. It's going to we're going to need mitochondrial supplements for them because that radiation damages mitochondria. Yeah. I once asked the president of SpaceX, I'm like, "Well, you guys have hardened all the electronics going to space. What have you done to harden astronauts?" Yeah. And she said, "No one's ever asked me that in 17 years." I'm like, "Well, you know, there are people thinking about that. You're one of them. Obviously, and so I want to harden myself just for life on planet Earth, you know, then I'll just live longer. But if I end up going to Mars, hey, I want to be hardened for that, too. That's right. I mean, the bottom line is I don't think the human body is quite up to the job as it is. We're too fragile and we need to not be so fragile really. We need to be we always say more durable, more resistant to radiation, cancer, and infections, you know, and like I don't think that we're going to be super beings. I think, you know, I think when you're 25, that's about as you're about as strong as you're ever going to get, but certainly we can be more resistant as we get older. And that's what I'm aiming for.

Do you think we'll ever get to the point where we can add a USB charging port for ourselves? I mean, they're running on electricity. Why not, right? Well, this is the next thing. This is the next closest thing. But, you know, one of the things that people don't realize, like people talk about, you know, when as you get older, and you know, I'm I'm mature, right? Like I So, I I'm old enough that I know what's going on, right? Got some wisdom in there. I got some wisdom in there, unfortunately. And um one of the things people always complain about is as you get older, it's harder and harder to keep off the fat, right? you like men get this tummy fat, women get the thighs. And from from for any mitochondrial person, it's like, oh, well, that's obvious because you're eating the same amount and your body is supplying all those nutrients in the bloodstream. But the last mile of energy conversion is the mitochondria. It's like it's like if the if the cell can't get those nutrients through the mitochondria, it can't take them in. And so what happens? There's not enough mitochondria to process all that fuel that you had when you were 30. Now you're 60. You don't have the same number of mitochondria. You don't have enough furnaces to burn all the fuel. And so what happens? It all gets sent off to a dump pile, you know, which is white fat. And your body is like, "Oh, I'll keep it for later." And of course, there never is later because you always, you know, we're Yeah. I was like, so I think if we can improve the mitochondria, if nothing else, maybe we'll all just be a little slimmer. You know, it appears that that's possible because I was the, you know, the the computer hacker from Jurassic Park 1. I was 300 lb when I was in Silicon Valley and I'm 52 and I'm not on right. Yeah. Good for you. And and I I don't limit my calories at all. Right? Because I've literally done everything that I can think of and some that I think are going to work, but I'm not sure yet to make my mitochondria really good at processing air and food. Right? I think by popularizing this as the next step beyond stem cells and exoomes, uh, and as a major part of longevity, as important as NAD even, um, this this is this is where it's at. And I I have a couple questions so I understand this. So I was blown away in 2001 there was a book called the daughters of Eve or the seven daughters of Eve. Oh yeah, right. U my grandmother who was a nuclear engineer actually uh sent it to me and she was so fascinated by this and saying, "Oh, there's seven kinds of mitochondrial DNA." That's true just of Europe, right? Because we didn't have data back then for um other cultures. But so there's what 30 or 40 different 26. 26. 26. Okay. One one per letter. So it's A through Z. A through Z. Okay. Cool. Yeah. What would happen um if say someone has you one of those seven European hapllet types and they get some other hletype infused are these mitochondria going to form a new network become friends are they going to go to war has anyone ever experimented with this we don't know yet and that's do it in mouse and tell me what happens I got to know we've not we've done there have been studies like someone took mouse egg cells and they took out half the mitochondria and they put in a completely different type and The mice lived, but they weren't it wasn't great. Okay, they didn't they weren't they were runy, okay? They didn't do well. On the other hand, there have been I mean, we've injected mice with vast qu we're up to the point where in our animal injections, we're up to doing now 1% of the animals mitochondria per injection. Okay, that's how far we've gotten. And it's getting to the limit of what the animals can handle. And so, but we wanted to know how much we could do. So, you know, in a human being, that's like an unbelievable amount of mitochondria. Okay, that's 1% of your body weight uh per injection. And and we I think this would be something where you do like these. You would do these every few weeks over the course of a year or maybe once a month or whatever and you slowly build your stock back up. But the reason I want to use your mitochondria is because we don't know yet what happens if we use someone else's and it's just another variable we don't want to deal with. Maybe I totally respect that. Yeah. Maybe there's a type maybe there's a typeo mitochondria. See, maybe after we go through all this, we'll find out that, you know, type L mitochondria actually work fine for everybody and then we could just massproduce those. Okay. We just That's going to take research. It is going to take research and I'm so happy you're doing it.

Do you find that the mice who are receiving these high doses of their own mitochondria are living longer? Like what do you see? They are living longer. But again, I don't like I don't really trust mouse life extension because anything you do with a mouse will make it live longer. So, no, it's true. There's like a thousand different things you could do with a mouse that'll make it live 25%. I just take it out and give it and pet it once in a while. It's going to live longer. Okay. Mice, they're so variable. And so I don't we just don't put we don't hang our hat on that. We're looking at can we make them stronger and better cognition and and improve their immune system because those are real things that are right in front of us. Okay. And they're they're measurable and uh I always laugh when you see these these studies to your point about mice um especially from the pharmaceutical industry they're saying well you know we controlled for all variables and and you go oh was it a man or a woman who fed the mouse? Yeah, exactly. Right. It turns a massive change in cortisol response because mice know that men kill them and women run away. So, they're not afraid of women. And like that's a big variable, guys. But they don't even know, right? And and is it the nice technician who likes the mice or is it the technician that doesn't give a crap? The mice know that. All right. They they totally know. They can bond and they're very emotional. Mice are very emotional little guys. Are they Do they have you know, do they have a piece of fluff to make a nest out of? Do they have a wheel? Do they have friends? I mean, they're in solitary confinement really. So, I mean, yeah, I I uh they they made this they made it now where, you know, the FDA is no longer requiring all these animal studies, and I'm I believe I'm a believer in that. I don't think animal studies really are very good. So, they're better than nothing. But now that we can fully uh create a virtual cell uh for the first time thanks to AI and we can run experiments on that in a way that's pretty accurate. Uh I think it does save a lot of of messiness. And frankly I have no problem with eating animals that are treated ethically. But I'd rather not have them suffer in labs unless it's the only way forward in which case I'm willing to do that.

Well, and also mitochondria are so different in human beings compared to animals that we actually went through this whole process a year ago and we talked to our 85year-old volunteers and they're like, "Yeah, there's no point. Just just let's just try it." You know, they they finally the decision was by the group that going trying to do this in animals just wasn't worth it. And we just do it in human beings. Start slow. do it very very slowly, you know, be very very careful and and do lots of and that's what our human trials are going to be is just slow increases in dose. Good for you. That is the future. And this idea that a a government regulator says whether a human um is allowed to take certain risks when they're at the end of their life or they have a life they're sorry that's not a government decision. That's that's a me decision. Uh, and so for someone to who's in 85 saying, you know, I'd like to learn something before I go and who knows maybe I'll get some benefits like I respect that greatly. Like I think that's and again there's children there's children who have these diseases and so a lot of my old folk are like hey let me be the guinea pig. I mean they they consider that to be absolutely an honorable thing to do and in fact they're they're just they're just dying to do it because they want to do something to help kids right and so look at that. See, that's the innate goodness in humans. And um after I send you the the book, I actually make the case that kindness is wired into our mitochondria. Yeah. Um but only under certain conditions. And I I think a lot of our human emotions are actually driven by a mitochondria network. That is speculative. It just makes sense.

Well, and the other thing I just want to mention, it's funny because getting back to the very beginning of our conversation, I said there was all this new research coming out. One of the things I didn't mention was that, you know, the textbook version of mitochondria is that they just sit in the cell and the cell just remakes them whenever they want. They're kind of stable, right? What we found out is that's not true at all. Mitochondria are completely, you know, they they move everywhere in the body. They're flowing between cells. Cells are loaning them, okay, and then being having them be returned. Stem cells are mitochondrial loaners, okay? They they have pictures of stem cells where there's a cell it builds a little nano tube to the other cell and you see that you actually see the mitochondria marching down this tube. It's really cool, right? The body is those tissues. They're all about keeping everybody healthy because if the cell next to you is dying, that's bad for you. And so you're going to loan your mitochondria to them to give them a jump start, okay? If they've been damaged. So it is about kindness, okay? And even at a biochemical level, our our cells are taking care of each other. Uh because they're a society, right? It's like a it's like a beehive, you know, the beehive is the same kind of thing. Bees are these, you know, they have to take care of each other to keep the hive going.

Is a single mitochondria sentient? I will not speculate on that. you anyway because I already have too many I already have too many speculative things out there. Let's put it this way. You have a million dollars and you have to bet on one or the other and the proceeds go to charity. Which one would you bet? I would depend on your definition of sentient. Okay. I just did you see me just dodge. I just dodged. I absolutely But now the charity didn't get the $2 million that was coming their way. But I know I didn't I know. I I didn't get the money. What can I say? Um, it's uh it's a fair question and I think AI is making us really ask questions about what sentience really is and what consciousness is and all and um I am on the side of until proven otherwise that that it's very likely that they that an individual one is and as a distributed network they sure look like they are right and you know distributed systems multisellular systems can exhibit really complex behaviors but and if you said does part of our does part of our intelligence and our consciousness reside in the mitochondria. I'd say yeah, hell yeah. Because you know the mitochondria and the neurons are I mean we're our our thoughts are mitochondrial. Okay, because we're our brain is a bunch of energy gradients being maintained by those mitochondria and they're going I mean you know the brain is the biggest user of energy in the whole body. It's got tremendous energy needs and there's all these specialized components that that the mitochondria are very special um in the brain. So, and and as you said, these things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's that come on, you know, when the mitochondrial when the mitochondria get prematurely aged, you know, you start getting these mental diseases. So um and by the way there's a whole bunch of work going into looking at mental illnesses in relation to mitochondria. You probably know you know about Chris Palmer right Dr. Chris Palmer and you know autism and schizophrenia and depression and are they related to mitochondrial weakness? There's some pretty strong evidence that mitochondria and autism are are tightly linked. I have Asperger syndrome that runs in my family. And I say had because I don't meet the diagnostic criteria anymore. And is you're you're on you're doing a keto diet, right? You're on a not always. I I popularize the keto diet, but I I make sure there's ketones present most of the time, but I eat carbs frequently, but um not excessively. Um, but for a few years there, I didn't. And what I um what I came to understand from talking with a lot of mitochondrial researchers and autism researchers is that a characteristic of autism is that mitochondrial energy production is artificially low. And so when you have that in a kid that means that their brain is trying to make sense of a lot of signal processing without enough power. So it it develops low power algorithms in the brain. Right. Yeah. That's good. And then you you're such a techie, you know. It's super. Does it show? Yeah. All right. And so, but if you think about then, okay, let's reboot the mitochondria with maybe your technology, right? Or anything else that gets mitochondria working better. And now all of a sudden, you have a brain that's good at low power things, but now it has adequate power. So, it's a more efficient brain. And then you have to fix all the signal processing that the brain never learned. And for me, that was like a 10-year journey of reprogramming my eyes and my ears and my tongue and all sorts of weird crap. But the idea that if we can get these kids even when they're in the womb or when they're very young and just get their mitochondria healthy, we should see a massive reduction in autism and some of the other childhood things like ADHD and all those they it just seems universal. You improve mitochondria with known things that in just in the short term improve mitochondrial function, symptoms go down for almost all of that stuff. Right.

Well, and that's the thing, and of course, I just want to mention, we also

Don't know if those kids have mitochondrial dysfunction from birth. I mean, there are low-level mitochondrial mutations that are floating through the human gene pool that we don't know about because we're not testing. That's why I said earlier, I think we should do nationwide population-level tests of mitochondrial mitochondrial DNA to see what the mutation load is out there in the gene pool that we don't know about. We're only tracking the ones that get up to the big enough level that people die. When people, when kids start dying, then they look to see if they have mitochondrial mutations. Well, what about the kids that are just not prospering very well that might have a lesser, a lesser level of mutations and nobody bothers to look?

Okay. So, yeah. And it runs in families. It can run in families for dozens of generations. It could be passed down from 500 years ago and no one would know it. And we always blame the nuclear DNA, but it may be the mitochondrial DNA, or it may be the interaction of the two. So it skips a generation here because that. And now we can get the data. How many companies or how hard is it to do a mitochondrial DNA test? It's almost impossible. I mean, yeah, I haven't seen it commercially available. No, it's not commercially available at all. You have to go, like, to get one. Even if you have a child that's dying, you have to almost pull your teeth out to get the mitochondrian analysis. And it's very hard to do. And there's like maybe two people, three people in the United States who can do it.

Well, and you know, no, it's so new and there's I just want to say again, there's no funding going into this. Even Tom, you know, you've got to start 23andMe. No, no, no. We, we want to, we actually have a thing called Mito Clock and we're thinking about spinning it off as a separate company. I'm not here to promote, but I mean, we're, we're, I'd love to turn that into a separate company, or maybe this guy with this Micreen thing, maybe he'll do something that'll that'll give us the same information, right? So, we need to all come together and come up with a really good, mass-producible mitochondrial, uh, tool test, and we need to start using it.

This is music to my ears, and knowing that a three-time successful tech entrepreneur is working on this, uh, gives me hope because you learn something after a couple of companies, growing them, just how to make stuff happen in large networks of humans. Like, it's hard to be a CEO in a, in a new field. So, you're taking all that wisdom you accumulated and putting it towards, uh, what I would consider to be one of the most important longevity, um, projects underway right now.

Well, I can tell you that if I just wanted to have a successful business and make money, I'd just do software. Software is a hell of a lot easier. So much easier. Biotech is hard. And, you know, it's, it's also been lately, it's just been really hard because it's just getting nailed from all directions.

So, is this something you're going to be able to do in the United States, or are you going to have to go to somewhere like Abu Dhabi or Costa Rica where the laws are a little bit more flexible on this kind of stuff? Abu Dhabi is, they're making a big play for this kind of stuff. Um, we need to do, we have to do it in the United States because we have a lead right now and we can't lose that lead. I just, I mean, I'm just saying, you know, we need to stay in the game. And, um, they are now talking about reducing the FDA, uh, of course, the FDA lag time has been horrible, and especially for biologics, and the FDA has no conception of how to manage aging, as you already know. They don't know what to do about aging, and they're, they're struggling trying to figure it out. So hopefully, they're going to reduce the overhead also, at the same time.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but individual states, they're, I mean, Montana just passed a law that is breakthrough, the Montana Right to Try law, right? I mean, I, uh, I think I, I know the guy who was, uh, the funding behind that campaign. Uh, and yeah, so maybe the states will just reclaim some of their rights and they'll just, they'll just say, "No, we're going to just," and doctors can make their own decisions. Is the FDA should be, a lot of people say the FDA should focus on small molecule drugs and let the biologics be mand, be regulated by the traditional, you know, state boards and state organizations. And also, there's this question of what happens when you have individualized genetic treatments, like you're, you're building a, a genetic treatment for one person, you're going to go to the FDA with that? Makes no sense at all. Are they going to? So, um, we're, it's one way or another, we have to figure out how to make this work in the United States. And so right now, I think between Montana and Florida and Utah and some of these other states, I think we'll probably be able to do it here. I certainly hope so, because there's no reason we should be moving that offshore.

No, it's just that it's so slow and expensive, mostly because of overregulation. Um, and, you know, there's all sorts of stuff we could talk about the regulatory capture and all, but working on that whole, yeah, we don't need to get into that. It's just what it is, a situation. And so, um, I've seen even when I worked with, um, one of the fact, it was the first, um, at-home cardiac monitor to replace a Holter monitor. Oh, nice. They ended up having to, this was back, it was a Mayfield Bax company back in like 2001, and, um, they, uh, they ended up doing all of their trials in India and then coming back because it was another hundred million to do it here. So I feel like the US is becoming a little bit more open and a little bit more, um, focused on like, this is a national kind of economic survival thing.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you look at the level of chronic disease, it's going to swamp us. In fact, it is already swamping us. So, we have to deal with chronic disease. And of course, that's a big initiative already. They're talking about it. But mitochondrial treatments are one really big, you know, thing in our toolkit to deal with chronic disease. So, if we don't move, anyway, this is my, this is a CEO. This is my claim that mitochondrial transplantation is a big thing, and we need to attack it aggressively, right? Um, as a national initiative.

And you, you could be biased because you're running a company, and you're not biased because you chose to run this company, and you didn't have to do anything because you could have retired, right? I could have started another easy software company, you know, and just, yeah. And just, yeah. Done what I'd already do. Yeah. But, I mean, anyway, I'm not complaining. This is, you know, it's not often at this point in one's career that you get a whole another exciting, you know, thing like this. It's very rare, actually. So, what a gift. I'm the luckiest guy on the planet. I really am.

So, that is it's so profound, and I'm, I'm really happy to get to to chat with you about this, and this is planting a seed. You know, millions of people listen to the show, and a lot of the innovations that have come out in the longevity field, this is a very early source of info and interest, and I, I know there's a lot of investors who listen to the show, and I hope that just by shining a light on what you're doing, um, that it helps to move it forward. There probably some researchers who may reach out, you know, there's, there's just a whole community just eager to support the kind of work you're doing.

I want to know, you've got some wisdom, as you said earlier. So, what does your longevity practice look like? I mean, are you doing little lines of mitochondria at parties? How does this work? I've got my secret stash, and I'm like, I'm like, I've got tracks up my arm. And well, you know, people always say, you know, Tom, are you going to use this on yourself? And I'm like, of course I'm going to use it on myself. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm patient zero. Okay. Uh, you know, I have, I have my own little problems that I've accumulated over the years, just like everybody. I'm in my mid-60s, and I intend to fix them, and I, yeah, I, I want to keep going.

You know, it's funny because one of our, one of our, our kind of our number one volunteer is a guy named John Kramer. And I know he's okay with me saying his name. He's 90 years old. He's a former physics professor at, at, uh, University of Washington. He's written books on quantum physics. He's like worked at EP, at, at the big physics facility. He's like this. And he's written three science fiction books. Okay. Just this incredible guy. And he's a biohacker. He follows, you know, I think he's, he, he watches your, your show. He's our, he's our main volunteer because he's n, uh, yeah. Right. He's 90 years old, and, uh, you know, we're like, "Okay, we're going to be, we're going to be the first two." So, you know, I've got 90-year-olds, I've got 85-year-olds, I've got doctors, I've got scientists, I've got VCs. I've got a lot of people who are kind of quietly volunteering to be, you know, the first, because everybody, yeah, yeah. You're in. You're, if you want to try it, you're, you're, you're in.

Uh, we're not, as I said, it really isn't, I don't think this is going to do much for people under 55 or 60 years old. It's just your mitochondria are, they're still in pretty good shape. Um, so what we're saying is people over 55 or who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or some other, other chronic disease, um, ALS is a problem, but, you know, and there any strong autoimmunity ought to improve with this, I would, I would imagine. I don't know. I, I'm completely, I don't know about autoimmunity. We don't want to try to mess with cancer yet. I think there's a lot of people who think that cancer is going to be helped a lot. I, I would bet a lot of money on that, knowing what I know about, um, the Krebs cycle and all. And I know cancer treatment is just fraught with risk and all. I wouldn't, I wouldn't make any claims about that until you have a lot of data. That's a toughy. But, you know, T-cells, like killer T-cells, if we can boost, I know how to boost the mitochondria and T-cells. We can do it anytime. It's easy. And so, like, if we can boost the performance of the T-cells and the killer cells in your body, then of course that's a cancer, uh, that could be potentially a cancer thing.

You just inspired me. Um, if you'd be up for it, ask, uh, John Kramer if he wants to come on the show. A physicist, science fiction author, and biohacker who's 90. I have something to learn from him. So, that's right. We have, we have some great people in our group. It's just, we have a lot of ringers.

Well, Tom, right? I deeply appreciate that you chose to do this, and just, I can sense your excitement about it. Like, this is the coolest stuff I can think of to work with, and you're right at ground zero of something that I am predicting, and I'm pretty good at predicting, this is going to be really, really big.

Yeah, I hope so. And, um, you know, I, uh, I'd be more than happy to see it get big, and, you know, that would, that would be a big, uh, that would be a big win for the world.

So, your website is Mitrix, M-I-T-R-I-X dot bio, bio. And yes, and anybody wants to just go to our contact page. So, we, we get, we get inquiries all the time. And, uh, just remember, we're a tiny company. So if it takes a while to get back, just be patient.

That's reasonable. I, I imagine you're going to get some very interesting contacts after this interview. And, uh, hope so. Hope so. I am, uh, I'm even more hopeful than I was at the start of the interview. So, thank you.

Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.