John Payne: Autism solutions for a better tomorrow

Welcome to Why Not Me? embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Hosted by Tony Meehator. Broadcasting from the heart of Music City USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests share their raw, powerful stories. Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears. These real life journeys inspire, connect and remind you that you're never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Tune in, be inspired and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi I'm Tony Meehator. Welcome to Why Not Me? embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Joining us today is John Payne, the visionary founder of Pure Life Genetics, which is a leader in genetic health solutions. With a passion for advancing personalized wellness, he spearheads innovative testing and tailored health insights to empower individuals toward optimal well-being. He along with his team of global researchers and doctors developed the Technon protocol. It was developed to help those within the autistic community. He's here to share his journey of how it all started to building a global product that helps people worldwide. So before we dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. Let's start this with a brief overview of what you do. Well, I'm a researcher. I've spent the last 50 years researching primarily metabolic health diseases. Now, having said that, that means type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's. But all my research was based on those specific diseases. Okay. So what happened to lead to the path of autism? I was speaking in New York at the C3 US Air Healthcare Summit, like 2014 or 15. A couple of people came out of the audience to talk to me afterwards and come to find out they were researchers at the University of Wisconsin. And they said, we're very interested in your work in metabolic health because we are trying to develop a test for autism. Now, I knew what autism was, but I didn't really know much about it. What they said was that they had come to the conclusion that autism was a metabolic disorder, not a neurological disease, which science now knows that's a fact. It's not exclusively metabolic, but it's primarily metabolic. And they asked me if I would work with them on some of the research. They were trying to develop a test. You know, autism can't be diagnosed right now till a child's really five or six years old. The only thing they can use is the car scoring method, which is very subjective, highly inaccurate. From what I understand, it's only about 60% accurate. A lot of people get misdiagnosed having it, but they don't have it, not having it, and they do have it and so on. So they're trying to develop a blood test that they could use at a very young age. Okay. That's very interesting. What happened from there? I said, let me do a little bit of research on autism. And you know, if it looks like something I believe I can help with, then yes, I'd be willing to contribute what I can. Well, I came to the conclusion that they were right. I worked with them for a few months to see what we could do and if they could develop a blood test, which they have not been able to do yet. In doing that, you know, I'm old. I had come to the conclusion in my research, no matter what I did for diabetes, unless I discovered something where you just take one pill and you're cured and that's it, go away. You're not going to get most diabetics to change because it kills you silently. You know, you don't have a lot of symptoms for a long time. People don't take it really seriously until it's too late. I realized that unless I did something like that, I'm not going to make a really an impact because only 2% of the people will make the change to really correct their diabetes. 90% won't. They'll do it for two, three weeks, but that's it. You know, maybe a month. And then they go back to doing what made them a diabetic in the first place. Yes. Unfortunately, that is very true. So what was your next move from there? What I decided was before my time comes, I wanted to give something back. And I realized in my area of research, I probably wasn't going to be able to do that because we certainly weren't close to developing a magic bullet that all you had to do is take one pill and you're cured. I was talking to one of my other friends that was in Milwaukee and one of his friends referred a lady who owns a autism treatment clinic in California. She called me and she asked me if I would come out and speak to some of the parents. I didn't know much about autism at this point in time, other than it was growing exponentially. I went out to speak to the parents because what she told me was that most autism parents have given up. They don't believe anything anybody says. They've tried everything. The only thing they'll do is what's called ABA therapy, which is behavioral therapy. It's very expensive, incredibly time consuming, like four or five times a week. And we were actually finding out now that in some cases it's actually harmful, but it takes a long time before you're ever going to get any results. So she asked me if I'd come out and speak with them and try to, you know, give some hope. And I did it just because I wanted to learn more. Yeah, that's really good. When you meet people like that, you can learn so much more. So what did you find out with your trip and talking with these people? She called me the day I was supposed to be there and asked me if I'd come in early because one of the parents wanted to talk to me when the other parents weren't around. One thing I've since learned is that a lot of parents, they've not only given up, but they're in denial and they don't want other people to know about it. So I said, yeah, no problem. I'll just come a couple hours early and we can talk with her. So I got there and they had this gigantic room because it's a treatment facility for special needs kids, primarily autism. They had three chairs set up in the middle for the mother, myself and for the owner of the facility and therapist. I get set down with Sherry and this mother comes walking in with her son. The son looked to me like he was about seven years old. Looked like he weighed about 75 pounds, something like that. I learned later he was 13 and all he would eat was french fries. He wouldn't eat anything else. So you can imagine what a nutritional level was. Yes, that's not good at all. So we sit down and this young boy, he got up, he started making a sound and I apologize for this. The only thing I can relate it to is kind of like a small barking sound. I've since learned that many autistic children do this, but I wasn't familiar with it at the time and he started jumping and bouncing around the room and what he would do is they had these large waste baskets, but they're very, very large so no kid could get hurt or whatever. And he'd go and he'd bounce up to them, making this noise. He'd jump in them and knock them over. He'd spill everything out that was in them and then go to the next one. And the mother says, his name was Ethan. The mother says, Ethan, will you please come down and sit down so I can speak with this gentleman for a few minutes? Ignored her completely. So that went on, he wouldn't even answer. So then the owner of the center who knew him quite well because he was there frequently said, Ethan, please come down and sit down with us so your mother and I can talk with this man. He ignored her too. Me and my innate intelligence thought, well, if I say something, maybe with a stronger voice, deeper voice, maybe he'll listen a little bit. So I said, Ethan, will you please come and sit down so I can speak with your mother? He ignored me completely also. So what was the next step? Did you try anything different? So I got up and I walked over to him, Tony, I really can't tell you why this came out of my mouth. I really can't tell you. But I said, Ethan, please, will you be quiet so I can speak with your mother? He just completely ignored me. And the next thing I said, Ethan, please, please, he just looked up at me just for a second and said, no, look back down really quickly. What I said then had to be because I didn't plan it, but it had to be because of the jewelry the mother was wearing and how they spoke, the words she used. So I assumed they were very religious. Just out of the blue, I said, Ethan, what would you say to me if I asked you that and I was Jesus? And this kid stopped dead still in his tracks, totally silent, and he looks up at me like this and then back down real quickly. And in this really tiny, quiet voice, he goes, why me? It shook me. It just really shook me. I reached and I put my hand on the shoulder and said, Ethan, I'm going to help you. Wow, that's a great story. So what were you thinking and what was your plan from that point? Did I know for sure how I was going to be helping at that point in time? Not really. He looked up at me again really quickly and then back down and he put his hand, you know, when you wear suit pants, they tend to be a little baggy around where your pockets are. And he put his thumb and forefinger in my pocket corner and he just stood there. So I thought, well, I'll just walk backwards. So I walked backwards and I sat down. He walked back with me. He sat down beside me, but hanging onto my suit pocket. We had our talk and then when the rest of the people came, they had him set up in these rows with chairs and then I had one smaller table at front with one of these office roller chairs. So I said, Ethan, I've got to go up to the front to speak. He just followed right with me, still anchored to me. So I sat down in the chair and he curled around my chair. I mean, literally curls for an hour while I was speaking. I was afraid to move because I'd run over his finger, you know, something because his roller chair, he never moved. He just stayed there. So if he was there for about an hour, hour and a half, what happened when you finished? When I was done, there were four or five parents that also wanted to talk to me without asking the question out loud in front of everybody. I got up and said, yes, carefully said, Ethan, I got to go to the back. He stayed right with me. I answered the questions and so on. And then when it was time to go, the father came to Ethan and said, Ethan, you know, it's time to go out and get in the truck. We need to go home. Ethan didn't budge. He just stayed anchored to me. And honestly, I didn't know what to do. Honestly, after several minutes, I thought, well, maybe if I walk out where the family is there in the truck, you know, he'll get in and go. So I walked out, dude by the truck and the father says, Ethan, get in the truck. Time to go home. Ethan doesn't get in the truck. So I looked down at him. I said, Ethan, please get in the truck as your father says and go with your family. So after all that, was you finally able to get him to get into the truck? This young man looks up at me. Just a brief look. He just looks up at me and he looked straight down and in the tiniest, tiniest, quietest voice, he goes, don't forget about me. And then he got in the truck and they went home. What that taught me in that minute was these kids know. We wonder why they're so stressed out, why they have such an anxiety and so on. They know. Yeah. They know that something's wrong and nobody seems to be able to help them. I walked back into that building with one commitment that I was going to change my focus and my entire company's resources focus to nothing but helping autistic children because there's so many of them with so few answers. And they're misled entirely by big pharma because big pharma spent billions of dollars looking for a drug and there's not one treatment on the market today that helps an autistic kid. It's my understanding that you came up with something that's more food related. Yeah. In my research and my company's research, I can't take credit for all of it. What we really came to the conclusion was that autism is primarily a metabolic disorder, not a neurological disease. And we know for a fact, science knows for a fact that you can effectively address neurological disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety and stress and depression by treating the gut. What we did is we focused on providing a formula that would address as many of the microbiome disorders that would affect the type of symptoms that most autistic children. I mean, they vary all across the board. Some of them are non-verbal, some of them yell and scream most of the time. They all have a messed up gut. They either have constipation severely or they have diarrhea severely or they bounce back and forth between the two, but they all have a distressed gut. So we focused on developing a nutrient dense, primarily plant-based formula to treat their gut. We created a formula to start with and did our testing. And we did help them, but not as much as what we were looking for. So we kept looking and looking. And one of our chief scientists actually is the name of Dr. Aftab Ahmed and he's from the Middle East. And he said, John, you know, we have fairly good success by utilizing camel milk to treat the autistic children because they don't have access to anything else and where he's from in northern Pakistan. So I started researching camel milk and what in it could benefit somebody with a distressed gut with neurological symptoms attached to it. That's very interesting. So what did you find moving forward with the ingredients that you could use with camel milk? What we found was that the colostrum in a specific type of camel milk is virtually bio-identical to the colostrum and a new mother's nursing milk, which is the greatest nutrition, you know, that exists in the world today. Everybody who's a nutrition, including myself, has tried to develop a formula that mimics a mother's new nursing milk. We've all failed, me included. So what we found is this one type of colostrum, we could take an extract out of it, okay, boost the effects by adding a patented and clinically proven delivery agent so they absorb much more of it, mix it in with the plant-based formula. We got amazing results. We've got amazing results. Okay, that sounds really good. Can you expand on the results that you received? Okay, well, by properly addressing the gut brain axis, which is this is what we do, and improving metabolic gut health. Essentially, what happened is we were able to improve cognition, social communication. We can take completely non-verbal autistic children and adults, because there's a tremendous number of adults also that are autistic or past the age of 15. If they're non-verbal, somewhere between six months and 13 months, they'll become verbal, okay? We improve social communication, absolute reduced aggravated behavior. As a matter of fact, somewhere between three and 12 weeks, typically, typically, I don't want to overstate this, but I mean, in 98% of the cases, three things will show up in an autistic person if they start on art, called Tecnawn. Tecnawn is an ancient Greek word which stands for young child of God. We named it that for two reasons. One, we can trademark it, which is hard to find the name you can trademark anymore. And two, it just felt right to me in our research when we found that. But there's three things where you'll know it's going to work. This will happen almost every time, somewhere between one and three weeks. And that is, you'll see a significant improvement in calmness. You'll see a significant improvement in digestion, meaning if they had diarrhea, it'll start to go away. If they're constipated time, they'll start to have regular bowel movements. And almost all autistic children have difficulty sleeping. They don't go to sleep until really early in the morning, whatever. Virtually all of them will start sleeping at a much earlier hour. They'll start getting real rest. Those three things, once you see those three things, you know you're going to have success with time. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, some people will look at this and say that it appears like it's a cure. And as most of us know, there is no cure. So how do you address that? I want to be clear. Tecnawn does not cure it. What it does is it helps you manage the symptoms to where your child can live a functionally normal life. Look, autism as it is today, untreated, it's a life sentence for the child. It's a life sentence for the parents, the family. So anything you can do to help them manage those symptoms is really important. Now, it increases their GABA, which improves their neurotransmission, lowers systemic inflammation, and it decreases oxidative stress. But it improves the gut microbiome at such a significant level that that's what's impacting the neurological symptoms that children and adults are having. Okay, so how does it work? Is it a drink? Is it a pill? Is it a food? What is the way that they consume this? Okay, it's in a powdered form. They're in small sachets that are individual servings, and you mix it with water and you drink it. You drink it twice a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We like to have them about 12 hours apart because our body uses or evacuates the majority of our vitamins and minerals every 12 to 16 hours. So you need to replace, especially at night when they're sleeping, you need it to keep replenishing those. So it's a drink. We do it a drink because we want it to go down through the saliva glands. Your gut is so messed up that when the active nutrients hit the acid in the gut, we get it so they drink and it goes down through the saliva glands and gets into the bloodstream before it hits that acid. Okay, that makes sense. Now is this for everyone or is it just for those that are autistic? It was developed for autistic people, but we have many, many people who have gut disorders because our diet's so bad. I mean, let's be honest. Everybody's got a gut problem out there now because our diet is so horrendous. We have many, many people who take it just for their gut health, but it was developed and all our focus has been on autism. Perfect. Now, let's roll back to Ethan. Did you bring this to him? Did he use it and did it help? He was the very first one we put on. There were two children that I said, when we're done with this, and it took us about four more months before we actually had it where I was willing to introduce it into the market. We went back to Ethan and a young man named Hunter, who was three and a half years old at the time. It absolutely helped. Ethan now is attending junior college. He has his driver's license, okay, and he has a girlfriend. None of those were possible before. That's really good. It's always nice to start off with a success story. I'd like to share if you have time. I'd like to share Hunter's story also if it's possible. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear it. I'm sure the listeners would too. Okay. Hunter was three and a half years old. I had a neighbor when I was developing this whose prime focus was on rescuing abused animals, primarily dogs, and she worked closely with a lady in Cooper City, Florida. In talking, I found out that she found out that this grandmother had a grandson that was severely autistic. She told them about our stuff, and I have an office in South Florida, and she asked me if I'd go in and visit them while I was down there. They live in a place where very rough neighborhood, where there's not even a number on the house street, so I couldn't find the house. I parked quite a ways away and just walked until I could find what they described to me. Anyway, I go in and I meet Hunter. He's very violent, tearing out his own hair, attacking everybody, yelling and screaming. The only way they could get, and I hate to even say this, but the only way that they could get through the day with him is by sedating. It just broke my heart. I told the mother, it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to afford to pay for this stuff. What I told them was, no man can walk away and not want to help. So I told them, look, I'll provide it for you if you promise me you'll commit to it. Autistic people are very taste-tastic or sensitive. Yes, some are for sure. So you never know if they're going to drink it. Parents have to be creative to get away, to get them to consume it. Yeah, that's right. So did she find a way to make it happen? What she did is she found that if she would put it in his voice or in, she could put it in the corner of his mouth and shoot it in and drink it. To drink it out of the shaker, no way. Okay. So as long as he got it in himself, twice a day, and she invited me back, I'm going to say about six months later. Now, we've been supplying him product because he had to take it on a continuous basis. She invited me back. Again, I had trouble finding the house because my memory wasn't good enough to remember exactly where it was at. So I parked, seemed like a long ways away. And I walked in, Hunter greeted me at the door. He was nonverbal other than screaming. He greeted me at the door with a nice smile on his face. And the mother and the grandmother sat me down and said, this is a techno. You know, we're so grateful for what you've been able to do. They said he was sleeping at night. He was eating a wide variety of food. It wasn't difficult with what he would eat anymore. He was talking, saying words and so on. So I spent my time in answering their questions and talking with them when it was time for me to leave. And Hunter stands up and he said, will you show me your car? This is a kid that didn't talk at all other than screaming and yelling. I said, sure. So we go outside and he takes my hand. And he's tiny little, like four by now, tiny, tiny little boy. And he reaches up and he takes my hand and he said, what color is your car? To be honest with you, I didn't know because I hadn't thought about it. But I looked down the street and I could see that it was white. I said, it's white. And he says, oh, my grandmother's is blue. We walked down the street and he's holding my hand. Now he's only met me once before, but he's holding my hand. We get in and we get up to the car. I open the door and he says, can I drive it? Can I sit in the seat? You know, not really drive it, drive it, but you know, sit in the seat and move the steering wheel. I said, sure. I opened the door. He hops up in and you can only see, you know, this height, this steering wheel. And he's doing this and everything. And I just happened to look over my shoulder because I'd heard a sound and the mother is just crying her eyes out on the sidewalk on the other side. So you know, I let him play, do what he wanted. I said, Hunter, you know, it's time for me to go. Would like to say goodbye. So he gets out and he reaches up and he shakes my hand and he says, can I see you again? And I said, sure. And he just smiles and turns away and runs over to his mom. Wow. That's a great story. I also understand that you do a lot over in the Middle East. Can you tell us a little bit about that? You can go on Instagram and look at Dolina Store. We did our first major test in the United Arab Emirates because the Middle East has the worst incidents of autism in the world. The top five countries in the world for prevalence of autism are five GCC countries with Qatar being the worst than UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain. So we have a called Hope Medical. It's a wonderful facility. Parents started this facility because they have a six year old daughter with cerebral policy and they started this to help all of them, but they have so many autistic children that they people were bringing them in. Can you help us? Can you help us? So we started working with them and we've had phenomenal results. You can go on. I think it's called the Lena Store. I'm not very social media savvy, so forgive me for this, but it's on Instagram. And if you follow that, you'll see many, many, many cases of success and podcasts where we talk about that and outworks and et cetera. In fact, we've been so successful, Tony, I have to say this. We've been selected as the protocol of choice for developmental disorders by the American Mission Hospital in Bahrain. It's a new $100 million hospital that just opened a year ago. As a matter of fact, they named the Autism and Developmental Disorder Center in this new hospital after me because of the success we'd had. Wow, that's great. Congratulations on that for sure. Eddie Rabie, who I have to admit is traditionally very difficult to work with to get anything approved in there, especially if it's not Saudi made, et cetera, et cetera. After they did, you know, eight months worth of testing, they liked what we were doing so well. They gave us what's called Fast Track and the Ministry of Health has told us we'll have our registration approval in the middle of September. So six weeks as opposed to two years. That's awesome. Something to be proud of. Yeah. It's very gratifying for somebody that's as old as I am to actually be able to help these young children and adults. There's so many adults that we forget about that have autism. But the thing I would say is it works quick enough that you know you're going to have success with your child. You know, one to three weeks is not a very long time. No, not a long time at all. If you can see that kind of results in a short time, I can only imagine the results that you could get over the long haul. I should say this. The older the person is, the longer it takes. If they're three to nine, we get outstanding success very quickly. If they're nine to 15, it takes, you know, what takes one to three months in a younger child, you know, takes three to six months and sometimes longer because every child's different. If they're over 15 and up in their 20s, 30s, our oldest patient is 45. It can take as much as 13 months if they're nonverbal. That's the longest we've gone to where they started saying words and talking and sentences and so on. Like everything else. They work the same on everybody. Some people take a little longer. Some people get outstanding results very quickly. Some people, they'll get some other symptom that will come in that hadn't been showing up before, but usually it's from an additional stimulant. They're changing in ways and there's some additional stimulation that's causing change in what the behavior, but it all evens out over a period of time. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now, do you have a website that people can go to find out more about you? Yes. www.purelifegenetics.com. Look for Tecna. I do want to alert people because of the FDA and their 600 million regulations against anything that's not a drug or a pharmaceutical. We can only say a limited amount of things, you know, on the website because they prohibit it. If you really want information, you can call and ask or, you know, go on Instagram, look under Dolina Store and you'll get a broad spectrum of information or you can call us and ask us. Yes, like buying supplements online, they're not FDA approved and it's very difficult to say anything. They really don't like you saying anything. You know, you can't even use the word autism. So you know, I mean, you got to just try to address what people want to hear or need to hear without stepping over the line with the FDA. Any other countries that we don't have those restrictions. Yeah, that's right. I completely understand. Well, this has been great, great conversation, great information. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Well, thank you for having me. Anytime we can get the message out and try to help some of these families. I'm all in. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone who has a story to share, tell them to contact us at why not me dot world. One last thing, spread the word about why not me. Our conversations are inspiring guests. The show you are not alone in this world. 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