Transform Your Indoors with Human Compatible™ Lighting – Robert Soler & Dave Asprey Hack LEDs : 704

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Today's guest is a really impressive guy you've probably not heard of, but he's the subject matter expert for NASA's circadian lighting system on board the International Space Station. And this is actually circadian biology in deployment, and it's really cool to be able to interview Sachin Panda at the Salk Institute, talk about circadian biology in a Petri dish. It's different when you're talking about a team of people who are in space who see a sunrise every 90 minutes. And it's also very power constrained. Like, how, how do you not have to use incandescent bulbs? How do you keep people from going nuts when they spend a year in space? So he designed the first LEDs used on the International Space Station, and he's since co-founded a NASA spinoff company that brings that technology to the general public. And the company is called BIOS for Biological Innovation and Optimization Systems. And BIOS and my company, TrueLight, have partnered to launch the first consumer bulb. And we're going to go deep on biology of lighting, why LED lighting has been your number one enemy indoors for years if you've been following my work. And I think Robert has cracked the code because his LEDs, which are custom built from the ground up, do something different than any LEDs I've seen. So power consumption and sleep and a brain that works. How'd we do it? Robert's the man. Robert Siller, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

78 patents on lighting under your name. What, what made you such a lighting fetishist?

Um, you know, so that's a great question. I think, uh, it started when I was little. I, um, I am allergic to the sun.

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It started when I was little. I, um, I am allergic to the sun. And so when I was, you know, 10, doctors couldn't figure it out, but I had these rashes all over my arms, only where it was exposed to the sun, and they couldn't figure it out. And it was probably a couple years of testing and testing blood work, trying to figure it out. And we realized that it was the sun the whole time that I had an allergic reaction to. So I think, From a young age, I had an appreciation for, you know, what light could do to us or for us, and the power that light had. So then I kind of got excited about it, pursued electrical engineering, Cal Poly, and then there are very few programs that, you know, focus on lighting, so Rensselaer Polytechnic was one of them. And so I pursued a master's degree there to really kind of dive into light as an element. So, and because that's a prominent education place, NASA seemed to want to pull from that school. So that's how I ended up at NASA doing some really cool stuff. But yeah, I'm passionate about what LED provides. It's led to a lot of patents. Really, what's most interesting about LEDs and what makes it uniquely different is that it could produce a very specific spectrum of light. So, given the material composition, you could produce a very specific spectrum of light, and you could do all sorts of things to elicit different biological effects knowing that we have all these photoreceptors that are looking for light to do different things.

Did you figure out which part of sunlight you were allergic to?

We haven't really delved into it too much. Luckily, I've grown out of it by and large, so it's not that big of a deal, but I'm guessing it's the UV spectrum.

And so, you would just get rashes or what is allergic to the sunlight? I've heard of people. I never talked to someone who actually has that.

It would be hives and it'd be all over my arms and I get nauseous. And it was just a bad day, bad day when that happened. But being a little kid, I had to go outdoors every day and I spent all my time outside. And so it was just a constant. It never like came and went. It was just always there.

So do you have like PTSD, post-traumatic sun disorder, where you got in the sun and you're just, you feel vaguely uncomfortable because you used to get a rash or are you just over that?

Oh, no. So now I try to get out as much as I possibly can. I mean, it's what's giving us the vitamin D. It's what's giving us our sky blue signals to get us up and alert. It's probably the most important thing that we have.

Okay. So you got to be like hyper-aware of light and you started sort of surgically pulling it apart and looking at what's going on. That's actually really cool. I didn't know that about you. I mean, we obviously, we've been working together for a while on launching the the TrueLight bulb that you guys are powering with your tech. And it's just going on the market and I've replaced all of the bulbs in my house with it and I'm just so happy. I'm sure my power bill will be lower, but my, my eyes are happier. But I want to go deeper around LED light itself. I was so excited. I remember Wired magazine like 20 years ago had this article about a Japanese inventor who made the first blue LED and it was called True Bru, B-R-U, because he was Japanese. They're kind of making fun of this. Do you remember that article? You might, because, um, I think I do.

I certainly remember when the blue LED was invented and it was such a, I mean, it changed everything.

It really did. And this article is all about it and it was sort of saying, this is going to lead us to have white LEDs. And I was all excited. I'm a geek and I didn't know it, but then I started really feeling crappy under compact fluorescent lights. I would get dizzy, I'd get nauseous. I would just feel like I took a Valium. Uh, and it led me down this path like you, uh, I wasn't allergic to the sun, but I would try to sit in a boardroom with the first-generation LED bulbs, you know, the ones that cost $500 and you bought them just to show you were cool. And the lighting was such low quality. I couldn't function in an executive staff meeting because I would sit there and I was like, uh, you know, drooling on myself and Really, um, really bad. And so I said, I got to start filtering. And I found out about Irlen lenses and Helen Irlen's been on the show. And I ended up launching the line of glasses to filter out all this crappy light that comes from those blue LEDs. Uh, and you started from, I think the other end, I said, well, I'm not going to have astronauts wearing glasses. Uh, you know, I'm going to have to do something to the light so that it works. What did you do to fix the, The junk light problem in LEDs.

Yeah. So, there's kind of this blue light paradox that there's some blue that's bad for us, the shorter wavelength blue, and there's the longer wavelength blue like the sky blue that's actually good for us. Yeah. So, what we did was we basically shifted it. We took out the bad blue and reapprropriate into the good blue region. Giving those sky blue signals that we need and getting rid of the bad blue in the shorter wavelengths. And it's just really kind of pinpointing that. And what we've done is, you know, we give this amplification of blue light, but it's really quite interesting because this photoreceptor, you know, there's this key photoreceptor that drives our circadian rhythms.

Inside the eye, the melanopsin sensor you're talking about.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm not sure how much the audience knows.

If you're listening and you've read my books, probably heard about these special light receptors, but let's assume that some of the audience hasn't purchased a book yet. Headstrong has a lot of the details here. But, okay, so talk about that receptor and then what blue light does to it. Yeah.

So, in 2001, newly discovered photoreceptor, we thought we knew everything about the eye, hundreds of years of research. And then, 2001, we figure out that there's something else in the eye that goes to a different place of the brain. Well, actually, we're starting to understand it goes to all sorts of different regions of the brain, but it doesn't go to the visual cortex. So, it drives our circadian rhythms. There's different ipRGC subtypes. RGC is retinal ganglion cell. The ip means that it's intrinsically photosensitive. And, how that's different than regular retinal ganglion cells is those ones go in the optic nerve to the visual cortex. But this one, so the standard rods and cones that we have are looking for blue, green, and red. And this melanopsin photoreceptor is looking for something that's right in the middle, kind of this sky blue kind of cyan color, actually kind of like the color of our body fluid.

Like a kind of a French bluish sort of thing.

That's right.

Okay.

So, it's a very specific 490 nanometers that it's looking for. And with that signal, it's sending a lot of this daytime signal. So, that's a very prominent sky blue signal that is evident when you're outside. That sky is pumping in that signal. And electric lighting is not giving you hardly any of it. And it's really all because of how it's trying to be energy efficient. It doesn't really contribute to vision as much as driving these biological processes. So, early-day LEDs really had poor amounts of this sky blue signal going into it. So, we basically looked at this and said, guys, this is going to be a really big problem. So we created a technology that we call our Sky Blue technology that infuses it into just standard LED light bulbs.

So the, the one that, that we're launching, which is going to be the only one you can buy for consumers— most of your work is with large, large corporate headquarters and hotels and places like that. So you get a BIOS lighting system and then it just feels good everywhere in a building. But for screw-in light bulbs, the one where we're launching with you, the daytime bulb looks like a normal LED screw-in bulb, but I look at it and it doesn't make me want to punch people. And I'm serious. Like, when Helen Erland tested me, she said I was one of the 5 most sensitive people she'd ever met. She's like, no wonder you don't like LEDs and compact fluorescents. Like, I can see you wilt under them. And I don't wilt, I actually don't have any issues with this. Is it just because you took out the low blue and you left the sky blue?

Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you why you're feeling what you're feeling, but that, I mean, from a physiological standpoint, that's exactly what we did. We took out that short wavelength blue, put in the good blue that you need, and I guess the result for you is less face punching.

I've actually measured it. I punch 74% less people from the thing. I'm actually really peaceful. I don't really want to punch most people. Every now and then the urge comes up and I let it wash over me like a wave of peace. Now, the theory that I have, and I want to test this with you, and I know you're more of a lighting engineer than a biologist, but we know that it takes way more energy for the light receptors in the eyes to see the blue color. They have to resonate a lot more, they have to move more frequently. It takes more energy to, I'm going to say, digest blue light than it does say the opposite of blue, which is red, just because it's very slow wavelength. And so, I have this hypothesis that the more energy it takes to absorb the light, the harder it is for the eyes. And there's actually some good data about that out there in a study or another. So, maybe by taking out the the light that's metabolically expensive to digest, it's creating less of a load on the eyes or less of a load on the brain, which would be Helen's thing. But whatever the difference is, uh, it, during the day you use this bulb, um, the, the TrueLight bulb and, uh, you, you feel like you've been outside. And is that the same thing you did on the space station? You basically took out the bad blue and left the good blue.

Yeah, so we, well, on space station, we had kind of a couple different modes, kind of an alert mode that is basically this heightened amount of this sky blue signal.

Good blue that suppresses melatonin, but wakes you up and is good for you.

That's right, that's right. And then at night, there's kind of a nighttime mode that pulls out kind of all the blue. And then there's kind of something in the middle that's neither one or the other, but it's a basic premise that If we're going to do this, the best time to get that bright light, that bright blue light is first thing in the morning. Ideally, we want it all day long and then you want to pull it out at the end of the night. And, it's a very simple premise of we evolved around the sun coming up at the same time each day, you want to basically replicate that inside.

[Speaker:DAVE] It's really funny because, I mean, you know the TrueDark glasses story because we're partnered, But I, like, I can't do this when I'm traveling and all. So during the day, like, how do I cut out the annoying blue but leave enough blue? Which is why I've always been against blue blockers in general. Cause if you block blue all day long, you don't get the wake up.

Right. Right.

And so you get these people selling blue blockers and you're like, no, that's not how circadian stuff works. So it was, it was sort of like you want to have a snack but not eat the whole cake. Right. So you wanted enough blue and what you've done is you've basically taken most of the sugar out of the cake. So you got the good stuff, but not the bad stuff. Uh, and then, um, when, when you dim the bulb, this is for me, the reason I was literally halfway down the path of creating a bulb that would do what I wanted. And I met you guys. I'm like, this is so good. Cause you have way more experience in bulbs and you actually had to go in and get a new driver for the LEDs. You've, you know, tons of patents and all. So I said, all right, we're going to create this partnership. But then when you dim the bulb, it, it changes its color. So the dimmer it gets, the less and less blue there is in it. Why is it— why are those tied together? So the, the strength of the bulb is, is tied to the color. This is the only thing like that out there, right?

So we just, we just thought that that was kind of an intuitive way to think about it, is that as you kind of dim it down, it pulls out that sky blue first or that those blue signals first. So it, and it not only, you know, it's biologically pulling out that blue, but emotionally you kind of, you see it all change. You see the color get yellower and redder, and it really feels like more of a nighttime environment. I think that we could have done it in a way where it was the exact same color, but I think that the psychological component of kind of seeing it change and seeing it go into these, ultra-protective, almost red lights really is beneficial to set the mood, to kind of get you to wind down, but it also kind of communicates to you that, "Hey, behaviorally, I should be getting ready for bed." And, if you automate it, it's a very profound effect.

[Speaker:DAVE] It works really well. In fact, there's a patent on the sunset glasses, the TrueDark ones. Specifically around creating the biological effects of the sun going down. It's not down yet, but those are the glasses that you can wear out to a bar and you look like a rock star, but people can see your eyes. And then the ones for like really late at night, you wear those and you look like Cyclops. No one's ever going to see your eyes, but you're not going to get jet lag. Right. So what you did is you sort of packaged that up in a bulb where the sunset part of it, as you turn it down, and what I particularly like I mean, you can get Philips Hue and all sorts of color-changing bulbs, but then they're toxic blue during the day. Uh, and it's kind of a washed-out white, but then at night, um, they're full of EMF. So you get all sorts of, of, you know, either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. They're expensive. Uh, and frankly, I don't really want to screw around to just dim the bulb. So the, the, the Neutrolight bulb, you just use a dimmer switch and it automatically, as the brightness goes down, the color changes. And so no weird stuff, but what is the effect of brightness versus color on sleep?

Well, so if you, um, I mean, we really want to tie those two together. So the whole premise is brighter days, darker nights. If you, um, I know you guys advocate for red light, but if you had red light and you made it really, really bright, it still sends some, some signals that, uh, that it's daytime because You have these ipRGCs that contain melanopsin, but then they're also still connected to the rods and cones. So, there's still something going through. So, it's not immune. So, you really do kind of want to bring that light level down with the spectrum together. So, brighter days, darker nights, and we kind of basically decided to tie those two things together to pull it all out holistically.

I think it's brilliant, which is why We're the, the only people with your bulb out there. Um, and why we're collaborating because the other two things, this is a very recent study from Satchin Panda's lab, uh, who is one of my favorite circadian biologists. Uh, he talked about there's three things and we didn't know this, um, back when you guys founded BIOS, back when I started, uh, TrueDark, but we did know that at least the color of the light mattered. And since then, they've found 3 different kinds of melanopsin receptors. There's some that look at color, which are the predominantly important ones, and blocking just blue isn't enough. So your bulb dims the right colors. The next thing though was brightness, right? Where, like you said, even red light, which is generally a good thing, it will wake you up if it's, you know, a spotlight in your eyes. And we make some little like dim red reading lights instead of a red spotlight. And then the third one was the angle of the light, right? So if you can get all those things down and you have dimming light bulbs that change their colors and get dimmer at the same time, I think it's awesome. Because if you have home automation and you're into all that stuff, whatever dimming system you have, well, these bulbs work with it like any other one, but the bulbs themselves don't need all the Wi-Fi and all that crap on them. So it works very naturally. Right.

That, and that's a really important part. I don't think that, um, EMF is an important thing to try to get rid of in your house, but I just think from a control system, it's too complicated. I'm an engineer, so I think about those things as you're putting radios around metal and it's hard to get those signals out. I know that's a different message, but it's an engineer's perspective is that does it really need to be that complicated in order to really just create this day-night cycle? Simulation.

You know, it's kind of funny. I wouldn't be that opposed to bulbs that had a little Wi-Fi receiver in them. But the way, the way people do these wireless control systems now is they're sending data all the time for no apparent reason, which both uses power. And there's some data that says you probably don't want to bathe in EMF. There's also data that says some EMF is just worth it. I like my cell phone a lot. And so it's a harm minimization thing. Uh, right. And you know, some people say, you know, no EMF is, is ever going to be acceptable. Like, I don't think that's the case because we have a sun. Uh, and there are, you know, others who are saying it's just, as long as you're not inside your microwave, you're not fine. I think the truth is in the middle somewhere. So sure, you know, but why gum up the works?

Like, it's, it's horrible.

Think about 500 wireless radios. If you have You know, 500 little devices around your house. Someone has to make all those, like chips have to be manufactured. We have to use huge amounts of water to make those chips so you can dim your lights instead of flicking a switch. Like how stupid are you? I'm sorry. Not how stupid are you, but you're preaching to the choir on this one.

Yeah. I completely agree.

Do you have an internet-connected toaster?

I do not. What?

Robert? But it's the same kind of thing. I am, I am, I am admitting that I'm old fashioned, but I, I like a good old-fashioned binary light switch or one little dimmer at the bottom, which is what my entire house has now. Um, thanks to our partnership, because there were a few light switches that I didn't use that often that didn't have dimmers. Uh, so now I was like, all right, dimmers everywhere. Because now literally, instead of having to go through and turn on red lamps, which is what I was doing before, uh, I'm just like, hey, let's just dim. And I would dim the lights and then after the sun went down, I'd turn on red. Now I just dim everything and it's like this. Gentle, almost like candles have lit everything. Um, and I didn't have to change anything, which I don't know, it was, it was liberating. Maybe I'm just a dork. Um, what do you hear from people when, when they, they go into a well-lit circadian compliant environment you've designed? Like, do people walk in and go, whoa, or they're just entirely oblivious. They just feel better or maybe nothing.

You know, it's a, it's a great, uh, the best compliment, um, from a lighting perspective is that they say nothing. 'Cause as you know, it's only a problem when you hate it. So, as long as it's not harsh or glary, I mean, it feels like what it should feel like when you're outside and no one's going, "Whoa," it just feels right. And when it feels right, that's the way it should be. It's only when it feels wrong that you kind of go, "There's something not right with the lighting that's going on here." [Speaker:DAVE] In big box stores, they put in incredibly intense, over-illuminated, very high in the low-frequency blue lighting.

And you go in there and you feel stunned and you just put shit in your shopping cart, stuff you don't even need. I honestly think that your, your decision-making is depleted when you're in environments like that. And they've done studies. You actually buy more. That's the reason those stores are lit that way. And you go in there at 7 o'clock at night and it's like you're in Tron land. It's to make you buy. Interesting. So Okay, if you were going to design a lighting system to just trash people the most, like the lighting system for people you didn't like, what would you do to it?

Well, there's a lot of interesting things of what lighting does to trick people. There's a really cool study, I think it was in London, where they made the lights pink because they were upset with teenagers loitering in the space and the pink made their acne glow, and so they looked really unattractive in that light. So, they wouldn't hang out there.

Especially in Instagram land, that's funny. Okay.

Yeah. I think that there was some really cool studies that people putting blue light in bathrooms so that people can go in there, in public bathrooms, so people can go in there and see their veins so they couldn't do drugs in those bathrooms. So, there are things that I've seen from a lighting standpoint that I don't know that it's tricking people, but it's kind of playing the game so that you're avoiding the wrong kind of public.

The first time I saw a light like that was when I got my marriage license in Stockholm with my wife. Well, now wife. She wasn't my wife then. And I went into the bathroom at like City Hall or whatever, and it had this bizarre greenish-bluish light, and I'm pretty sure I peed on the toilet because It was, it was so intense. I didn't want to open my eyes. It was the most horrible color ever. And I came out like, something's wrong in there. And Lana laughed and she said, that's what people won't use needles in there. And, you know, Stockholm is very progressive on stuff like that. And I had never considered that, um, like going to use a needle at city hall. In fact, that seems like a dumb place to do it, but, um, okay. So we have, um, the pink light for acne. We have the blue-green light for not seeing your veins. I've read something about pink because pink light, if you use it for long periods of time, apparently makes people go nuts. Is that anything you've heard about?

You know, so we do— BIOS, who is Biologically Optimized, really also does agriculture, horticulture lighting. And so, early-day horticulture lighting was pink. Plants are green, which means they reflect green, which means that they absorb the red and the blue. So, you could put them in purple lights and they look black. You have no idea how they are, but you're bathed in this pink light. I'll tell you, it's weird being in that environment. And, the weirdest part I would say is that you are in there and that your eyes are trying to make sense of what's going on. And then, you leave that space and then everything's green. Because your eyes have like tried to comp— try to white balance that pink light. And, um, and then you leave that environment and everything all of a sudden is green. It's like Emerald City. So it's, uh, so I wouldn't be surprised if pink light would make you mad. Um, okay.

I, uh, uh, I, I believe that. And I'm trying to find the study and I'm not finding it right now. It's an old one, probably from Russia or somewhere, but they would They would use only pink light in cells or something, and it would cause bad things to happen. What about flicker? This is something that I could see flicker that other people apparently couldn't see, and it would just drive me crazy.

Oh yeah.

Oh, and why could— okay, do you know why some people can see flicker and some people can't?

There are certainly people, and I know one that I could think of who is just a— she's better than a meter. At detecting flicker. There are some people who are insanely sensitive to it. And, a lot of these light bulbs, especially if you go to Home Depot, the cheap ones out there, I mean, it's 100% flicker. It's going at 120 Hz and it's just going all the time. And so, the low end of flicker is a stroboscopic effect. You're doing laundry or something and you feel like your hands are like missing half the time. Yeah, because it's just kind of going black, and that's when you pick it up. And there's other times it's like, oh, you just like— you see everything flickering. Um, what we've— all I know is that it's mostly in the periphery, is that you'll— you look at the light and it's not flickering, but you look away and then you see it flicker. Because, right, it's kind of the stuff that's in the, the periphery is really good at picking it up. But But we see that flicker is associated with migraine headaches, fatigue. It's just really not a good thing to have a flickery light source. So, I think that— I know the lighting industry is very keen on trying to get regulations put on flicker to kind of get rid of the junk light, not just in spectrum but in a flicker standpoint as well. That's a really good point.

Now, if you have an incandescent bulb or a halogen bulb, uh, you don't see a lot of flicker because the bulb glows. So if the light is literally turning on and off in North America 60 times a second, which is the way the power system cycles, or 50 times a second in Europe, uh, it goes on, off, on, off. But all you see is a little tiny, like, kind of wave-like variance because even when the light's off, it's going to glow for more than 1/60th of a second. So it looks like— and it, if on a graph, it's mostly a straight line. Uh, but then with an LED, but if the light turns off 60 times a second, how does the LED handle that? I mean, the original ones would turn on and off 60 times a second, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a, so incandescent was an analog system, which means that it, I mean, it's just a heater. So, so it would weigh a little bit when it went to zero on the 60 times a second, it would just get a little bit dimmer because it got a little bit cooler. On the LEDs, they're digital devices, so they turn all the way off. And what that means, that's really important from a detection standpoint because everything goes black for a fraction of a second, you know, 60 times a second or 50 times a second. So it's very noticeable to our eyes that something has changed. What happened with incandescent, it was very, very minimal and it wasn't a complete darkness. So these digital systems have the ability to go do something that we've never seen before.

Okay. I, uh, I'm concerned about that, that 60 Hertz flicker rate, cause that stuff just, just really, I don't think it's good for anyone. And the fact that your brain knows, or your body knows that it's going light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. Like dark. And, uh, your brain is telling you, oh no, don't worry. Don't worry.

Don't worry.

It's, it's kind of using energy to smooth that out, but you mentioned 120 Hz. So how is it that an LED can blink 120 times a second, which can be much less stressful on the brain? What are you doing electronically in order to allow 60 Hz to turn into 120 Hz?

Oh, so, um, all it is is the AC wave, it goes up and then down. So that's 60 Hz. So in an LED, we rectify the signal so it goes up, and then that downward gets flipped over. So you get up, up. So the off goes twice. So basically, when you rectify it, you're getting 120 Hz is the time that it goes off, off, off, off.

Now, So if you're able to basically double it, but the 120 Hz you said is not really good either. You said like the big box store lighting is like that. So I've— there are 240 Hz lights. So these are turning on and off 240 times a second. And the briefer the period of darkness, the less biologically disruptive it is. How do you get to 240?

Well, so most of them actually, if you, if you have enough capacitance and you have a true driver, that's going to go on those things. A lot of that gets smoothed out. And so, usually, the better quality stuff will kind of be switching at 1,000 Hz or even faster than that. So, it's really not perceivable by our biology. And, it's really just conditioning that power, that AC power that's coming in and turning into something that is going to go a lot faster, that's going to smooth out that signal and do something with it to get to 1,000 Hz and above. So like 50 Hz, almost everyone could see it. As you get to 120 Hz, then there's the select people who could see it like you. Once you get to above 500 Hz, then it gets into the realm that nobody could see that. So that's where it gets to the threshold of We feel pretty confident that, that there's not a whole lot going on biologically.

I like to think there's, there's supertasters, uh, who are able to taste things other people can't taste. And then we also know there's people who can see more colors, uh, than other people, the normal 16.7 million people's 16.7 million colors people can see. It turns out there's people who can do more. Uh, and I feel like that flicker rate, there's probably people who are supertasters for light who are just more able to perceive things. And I don't know if those are actual superpowers or not. They're outliers of human capabilities, but whether— well, if it's irritating, maybe it's a weakness, but the ability to perceive more of the world to me is a strength. So I don't know what's going on there, but you're saying above 500. I would say most people can't see it, but I do know people who work specifically with flicker rates for lasers and things like that who can very reliably tell the difference between a 500-hertz laser flicker and a 1,000-hertz laser flicker just by putting over their hands. But this is 10 years of working with that kind of stuff. So, there's some kind of weird cellular, even light reception in the hands, but I'm going to consider those people just weird as a compliment. But for everyone listening, even for those set of 4 people I can think of, they're going to walk into a place with 500-hertz or 1,000-hertz lighting and be like, I'm okay with this as long as it's not that weird blue color. So the new True Light bulbs that we've put together, what's the flicker rate on those?

Uh, 1000 Hz.

1000 Hz. Okay. So it's basically compared to the first generation LEDs. It's, I don't feel stressed when I look at them and I have for every other bulb, including the so-called, you know, natural spectrum bulbs. They don't look natural spectrum. And you look at the graph of the light and like, how can you call it natural spectrum? But I, I'm truly impressed with what we've got. Okay, so flicker mattered and we talked about that. So people understand that's what's going on. What happens to people who are under the bad color of blue and flicker by the end of the day? What, what do their brains do? What do their bodies do biologically?

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Yeah, I don't, I can't tell you exactly biologically. I don't think that too many people have studied the effects of this, but I could tell you those who've experienced it that it it feels like excess fatigue from being in that environment for too long. They come home and they're just wrecked for the day. They don't feel right. What it is, I couldn't tell you. I don't have enough letters on the back of my name to tell you what that is. But I could tell you that for those who feel it and those who know that it's there. Um, it is, it is real and it's very, uh, very strong. And if they could do anything about it, they would absolutely do this, make a change.

Uh, that was what it was kind of desperation that led me to really jump in on this. I mentioned the boardroom stuff. Uh, one of the weirdest times, uh, in my life was I was, I had finally gotten to work at a venture capital firm. This is something I wanted to do since I was 12. I don't know what kind of 12-year-old— I read it in a magazine like Entrepreneur Inc. or something. I don't know why I read those when I was 12. I was just like, entrepreneurship sounds like fun. I want to go make stuff. And so I finally— I want to help entrepreneurs. I'll be a VC. And I didn't understand that that's not really what VCs do. They kind of like— their job is to mechanistically take what they can. But I'm sitting because I'm, you know, an entrepreneur in residence at Sand Hill Road, you know, the most famous. I'm like, I'm a big deal. And I got a Mac for the first time. And Max had the bright white background, like super glowy, 10 times more than everyone else. And I'm sitting in an indoor room with no light because I'm, you know, bottom of the rung. And there's these horrible compact fluorescent LEDs, whatever. And by the time just lunch rolled around, I, I couldn't function. I'd just go outside and my eyes were like twitching and I would just kind of sit there and stare, just, oh, sunlight. And I'd go back in and it was like this oppressive thing. And then I'd start my bright white Mac and I would just get It's so tweaked, which had— I don't know what the flicker rate was in the first-generation Mac super bright screens, but it wasn't great. And I felt disabled by the end of the day. I mean, it was horrifying.

As you say that, I think that what we're starting to understand is specifically about this melanopsin receptor, these ipRGCs, is that there's the receptors that are looking for things, as you mentioned before, angle, intensity, color, or spectrum. But, you know, that's what we know what's going on in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. But, these receptors or these ipRGCs, they project to all sorts of different places in the brain and they drive things like mood. So, the happy feelings that you get, we're working with the National Institute of Health on trying to figure out what the right quantity of these sky blue signals are to give you that proper spectrum for just overall mental health on a day-to-day basis. It's really important for not just like sleep and wake and energy, but everything that we do. We're supposed to be outside. We're supposed to be getting that sky blue signal. All day long and then when it's not there, that's time to sleep. So, when you're modulating that throughout the day, it's not the best way to live your life. And, I think that we see higher— you see that downturn and you replace it with things like food, you replace it with things that try to make you happy to replace that. So, So, it's really quite interesting how important light is into not just our sleep and wake, but how we just feel on a day-to-day basis.

It reminds me of a guy who reached out on social and he said, "Dave, I'm a biohacker like you. I've got my continuous glucose monitor on the back of my arm and every day I eat the same thing." You can tell these are my people, software developer, engineering types, your and my kind of smart person, honestly. I mean, you're an engineer and we just, we look at life effectively. And he was single and he'd say, so on weekends I have perfectly good blood sugar regulation and I eat exactly the same. And every day at work, by the end of the day, I'm getting hypoglycemia. Like my blood sugar is getting unstable. And then I come home and I'm having a very different response. And he said, so it's been a mystery. Like, why, what's different? Is it just that stress of work? And then he tried, the, the Day Timer glasses, the, the ones that filter out the nasty blue, but not all blue, the, the ones from TrueDark. And it's like, Dave, my blood sugar got fixed. Like, now I feel the same on weekends when I go home. I have so much more energy. My, my metabolic regulation, uh, feels like it's changed. And I've noticed the same thing. My blood sugar is less stable under blue light. And the circadian, you know, you get a bad night's sleep, your blood sugar regulation is off by 40%. So I think there's a lot more metabolically going on. This is more like Satchin Panda's side of things about what's going on, but it's, it matters. And I'm, I'm worried right now because so many people, including you and me, are pretty much stuck at home for a while. And there's a lot of people, maybe you have a window, but it may not be open or sun-facing or whatever else. Uh, and I feel like our junk light is now a much bigger clear and presence antinutrient than, than it was before. Um, yeah, if you were at home and you had junk light and you didn't have access to the new TrueLight bulb that we've made through our partnership, what would you do to stay healthy from a lighting perspective? You're not allowed to buy anything. You got to make do with whatever crap your landlord put in your lights and your windows. Tell me your strategy.

Oh, well, yeah, so you would, uh, you would definitely want to face all chairs towards those windows that you have, try to get as much of that that sky blue signal that you can. I mean, what I've been doing is I've been holding all my meetings outside. I hang out on either my balcony, outside on my back porch, front porch, wherever I could go to get as much of that signal that I can, just because it's what we're supposed to be getting. So, if you could spend as much time outdoors as you possibly can, I know there's some parts of the country that can't do that because it's colder or rainy out. But that would be the best strategy that you can during the daytime. And at night, try to use as little light as you possibly can. The TV signal is not too bad, but that would be what I would do. I think incandescent light bulbs are a great way to do it if that's what you had, couldn't buy anything. Obviously, you can't really buy incandescents right now.

Um, but you can still buy halogens, which, which work. Um, so I guess if you did buy something really cheap, you could buy one halogen light and a dimmer lamp or something. But if you're going to do that, you could just go to TrueLight and buy one of our new bulbs, which would be amazing, and use that one by your bed, if I could say so.

Yeah, actually, um, you know, it's, uh, it's funny. So, um, I, I just had a baby He's sleeping right next to our bed and my wife's like, "All right, Robert, you got to set me up with some sort of lighting scheme for the baby so that I could see, keep an eye on him, but I want to keep an eye on him. I don't want him to wake up. I don't want to wake myself up." And so, we use the TrueLight light bulb, dimmed it all the way down. Got the— pulled out all the sky blue so it was enough to see. And I have these— I took some pictures I'll have to share with you of the light bulb, actually a bare light bulb on a cord, kind of under his— where he was sleeping. So it just had enough of this kind of orange amber light kind of parading around so you could see some reflected light. It wasn't too bright for him. It was enough light that my wife could see. See him, make sure he's okay, feed him in the middle of the night, didn't disturb our sleep. And that's actually a really— it's a really cool solution to be able to have that control because most solutions out there, they're just on or off. And so, to have that control, have the ability to pull out the blue spectrum, that was a solid win. And it's not just for babies. Everyone else needs it to sleep too.

It works. And you would still turn off the, uh, the, the lights when you're not in the room though, right? You wouldn't want the— even a dim light on for the baby, correct? Yeah, correct. That's what we did. Our babies have always been in, uh, in a completely black room when they're sleeping so that they sleep better and mom sleeps better too. And, um, we make a little, a little TrueLight, little handheld flashlight thing that has only the right red spectrum, and it's like a real dim kind of nightlighty thing that is motion activated. So you can have that on Uh, and then only if you move around, you get this little bit enough to like nurse, but not enough to wake anyone up. And, and this is how dorky I am. So I'm like looking, okay, what's the cheapest thing you could do if you like, okay, like I'm on a budget. I'm one of the 26 million people who just nearly doesn't have a job. Um, so on my phone light, I'm going to hold my phone up. I don't know if my camera will pick that up. It's red. And so what I did is we make these little dots to cover LEDs. It's one of the TrueDark things. I don't even know if we still have them on the site, but it's these little colored red dots. So I put a little red sticker. So if you take a picture with a flash, I don't look good. Who uses flash anyway? You always look bad on a flash. So I did that and I kind of sneak around at night. Um, so I guess, uh, in hotel rooms, I will, I'll put a towel around an LED light, as long as it's not one that gets hot, cause you don't want to start a fire. That's really a bad thing. Um, but like I sneak around. So what you would do is you're saying in, in the morning, during the day, as much windows as you can at night, you turn everything off. What about TV brightness? How important is it to turn that down?

Yeah, actually, the evidence shows that TVs aren't that bad because they're usually so far away. In fact, the tablets and cell phones, because they're so much closer to your face, are a lot worse than a television. So between the two, a TV is a much bigger, better win than a tablet or a cell phone to watch, or laptop to watch your TV. Or watch whatever you're going to watch at the end of the day just because those things are so close and it's so much dedicated light directly on your face where the TV is going to put less. It's an I squared R thing.

Okay. So, basically putting your TV away, I still think it does matter at least some of the new TVs. I'm sitting in front of a TV that's my backdrop. I don't know if you— if you're on the Dave Asprey YouTube page, you'll see this cool background that's all digital and neat. But what, uh, um, what I found is at night, if I have that thing on, it like lights up the whole room, but it may be because it's a LED backlight or whatever. So I do tend to dim those. The other thing, and you probably know about this, but this is more for, for listeners. Um, I'm going to show my phone right now. Um, and, uh, what I'm doing now is I'm, I just on normal brightness, it's on full brightness. And if I triple-click the power button, little thing comes up that says color filters. And I checked the color filters box and now my phone is bright red as the background. And then I click it again and I click the reduce white point. And now the phone has a dim backlight and it's red. And I can look at that in bed at midnight without messing with my circadian rhythm. And if I look at it under normal light, I can't see enough to undo it, which is a problem. Uh, but I might be extreme, but I'm with you in that I feel the difference from my phone. So, so as a lighting engineer, you would tell people in the space station, dim your phones.

Yes. I would tell the people in the space station, I tell everyone to, to dim their phones, use the filters. Apple has Night Shift. It's not the best. There's f.lux or flux, f.lux, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, Michael Herf is a, is a good friend of mine. So he, he tells me that it's Flux, not F. Oh, okay.

I'm going to believe you. I always say F. Or F.lux so I can tell people what to do. So he says it's Flux.

All right.

So I've never talked to him, but, um, for 15 years I've used that free software to make my phone. Uh, I even donated once, uh, to say thanks, uh, to, to not to make my phone, but to make my computer dim. In fact, I'm using it right now on my computer.

Yeah, yeah. When I give a presentation on circadian rhythms, which I do a lot of, it's always the best when I do it around dinnertime and the sun goes down and my whole presentation changes to a warmer color and people go, "Whoa, what's happening?" Oh yeah, it's, you know—

Free software, okay, called Flux. Justgetflux.com, no financial affiliation, just cool stuff that's been out there for a long time.

Yeah, and they're free. They accept donations, but it's It's cool software and it's free and it works like a champ. And it automatically goes, so you set in some points about what your bedtime is, wake time is, and when it gets closer, it actually goes redder to pull out more of that blue out of there. So, it does some things at sunset, but then it pulls out even more blue as it gets closer to your bedtime. So, it's really actively trying to pull out that blue light.

So, if you wanted to spend no money You could get a, you get flux, you turn off all the lights in your house at night and just run your TV with, with your computer powering it with flux. And you'd get kind of sort of close, but probably still too much blue. And if you did the TrueLight bulb, you would be, uh, even better off, but, but that's, you know, spending money. So I want, I want to really just encourage people, look, you want to be highly resilient right now. Your circadian rhythm is the thing. Uh, which is, uh, uh, which is going to affect survival, to be perfectly honest, of any sort of, uh, assault or insult that the body can, can go under. If, oh, I got a good night's sleep, I can handle more. I got a bad night's sleep. I can't handle more. Okay.

That's right.

What are the other things you worry about for astronauts specifically when you're designing lighting? I'm, I'm still just like, this is the worst environment ever for circadian. So you're like the, the, the Navy SEAL of lighting engineers.

Yeah, you know, well, this isn't biologically important, but one of the things, I mean, we did stuff for, you know, rapid decompression. If, so if basically there's a hole sprung on space station and all the pressure drops, the last thing you want is your lighting to fail on you, right? So we had to make sure that it was all designed so that if anything like that, a rapid change in pressure happened, the lighting wouldn't, uh, wouldn't be affected.

What's the best color frequency for rapid decompression hypoxia?

Um, there's, uh, well, you know, actually hypoxia is a very interesting thing because your whole color vision changes. Um, that's one of the things we, we tested some of our hardware.

Holy crap. We have to talk about that. I'm so excited. Okay. Well, let's, let's just talk about that. All right.

Well, the only other thing is the only other thing that you had to design for was the fact that these astronauts are basically pushing themselves propel itself off of everything and up is down and all that stuff. So, it has to be able to stand an astronaut basically pushing off your light and basically propelling themselves off that light.

Oh, so they had to be really rugged and pressure capable. So, the physical demands of the lighting case and the chips themselves. Okay, that's kind of cool. I never even would have considered those.

It's like a tank.

And, the ones we're doing are just normal bulbs, so people shouldn't be jumping up and down on them, I don't think.

Yes. Don't, don't do that.

We won't. Um, all right. Hypoxic, hypoxic or hypoxia, hypoxic brains and color perception. What do you know about that? Cause I want to share some, some stuff I've never written about. In fact, I'm writing about it right now, but it's not on the blog yet. Uh, so, um, what do you know?

The only thing that I know, um, is what I experienced, which is, um, uh, we, we tested some hardware, uh, with NASA in, in what's called the Vomit Comet, which is the, um, the parabolic flight. So, you get 20 seconds of zero G, 20 seconds of 2 G, and you get stuff in the middle. And so, they train you before you do this to understand what hypoxia feels like, what the experience is. And so, they give you a color wheel to look at and then they kind of reduce the partial pressure of oxygen. And what happens is your your receptors, your cones are getting depleted of oxygen, and so they're changing their sensitivity. And so, the colors just kind of shift. I didn't pay much attention to it, but if you're in a hypoxic state, colors just go weird. And blue is not exactly blue anymore, but it gets shifted to a slightly more greenish color. Okay.

Um, I didn't know about that specific shift. Um, here's some interesting stuff. If you don't mind me sort of like rambling for a minute here, I just want to get your take on it. And you may just be like, I didn't hear that, but that's fine. Cause I think it's valuable for listeners, but like, tell, tell me what you know. I think something good will come from this, uh, this thing. Okay. I've had toxic mold, uh, exposure and poisoning, uh, from aflatoxin, which by the way is a major issue on the space station. And especially if we're going to other planets, we have to kind of control biofilms. That's a different one of my companies is working on that. Um, but it's a, it's a major thing. And one of the ways when I had this mold poisoning, I got to be 300 pounds. It damages your mitochondria. And one of the, the interesting ways of diagnosing whether someone has toxic mold exposure or sometimes Lyme disease, which is usually toxic mold, they just think it's Lyme, but you look at their visual contrast sensitivity and you are unable to see subtle differences in shades of gray. And I used to have this problem where, um, when my, my vision was the most sensitive, I, I would fail a test. Like you would be able to say, oh, that gray is different from that gray. And I look at them, they're the same damn gray. Like, or I just don't see any gray at all there.

Interesting.

Um, and so one of the things that happens then is pseudo-hypoxia. And this is what happens when your mitochondria basically get poisoned and they act like they're hypoxic because they can't use, just like you can get, um, sugar backed up in your blood, high blood sugar, because you can't use the sugar going in. Well, if a different pathway is blocked by toxin, you can't use the oxygen going in, right? So you can have high blood sugar and I don't wanna say high blood oxygen, but basically your cells act a little bit hypoxic, especially in the brain. And that's why you get the painful— like I used to have this horrible back pain all the time and joints and all this stuff, these pressure points that anyone with chronic fatigue syndrome knows about, these diagnosable areas of tenderness that are pseudo-hypoxic points. So why am I talking about hypoxia so much? Because COVID damages hemoglobin, which causes system-wide hypoxia. And I will bet you, and I've not written about this yet, but I will bet you 100%, not only are people having problems with losing their sense of smell and taste, they're also having visual disturbances that they just don't notice because no one's paying attention to it yet. And I will bet you can tell someone who is getting hypoxic and should go to the hospital. I just did a video on my YouTube channel around just a $30 pulse oximeter will tell you, oh, you're at 92. Like if you're below 90, you're actually really need to go to the hospital probably because you can't carry oxygen, even if you don't feel like you're out of breath. But I think just, oh, like my vision just changed. That's going to tell you about the same time that a change in smell or taste is okay. That's enough of my scientific A leads to B leads to C. What could we do with light and visual contrast and all this other hypoxic stuff? What does your engineering brain tell me?

Oh my gosh, that— so, um, so what, what I think is most interesting is though, I don't know what you did on that pulse oximeter, um, but it is actually like a far red that it's measuring. And what's, what's interesting is, um, uh, our, our lighting that we've, uh, created actually meets the cyanosis observation index. Which means that you get a higher contrast of that bluish— if you are cyanosed, basically your extremities will be bluish-colored. It's a lack of oxygen that causes that. Well, it's not actually blue, it's a lack of red that causes that. So, one of the things that we don't talk about, we talk about the sky blue that's important, but this far red actually could change the contrast of those reds so that you could see visibly that your lips might look a little bluer, your earlobes or your fingertips might look a little bluer. So, there's something that's really interesting based on what you said that could be interesting for detection. Maybe you wouldn't detect it yourself, but maybe your wife would go, "Hey, something's not right with you." And, this lighting is very good at kind of illuminating those issues.

[Speaker:BEN] So, is the color rendering of the new TrueLight BIOS bulb, is it Uh, is it like as good as sunlight or is it what you'd find in a museum? I actually, I should have known this already, cuz you know, we're launching it, but I never asked about that for color rendering.

Yeah. I mean, it's something that we threw, uh, we threw in there because we thought the far red is, um, the reason why it, why it works is cuz it penetrates the skin deeper. Um, and it actually, you know, there's another photoreceptor in the mitochondria called cytochrome c oxidase. That when it gets illuminated, it produces more ATP density.

That's the same far-red that we put in the therapeutic side of the TrueLight, like the squares, the energy squares, those things, because of its effect on that. And as a matter of fact, COVID is messing with cytochrome c oxidase, we think, according to some of the things there, probably through its effect on hemoglobin. So, stimulating or repairing that seems to be important. And so, they're actually getting not really a therapeutic dose, but they're at least getting the right frequency that would be in natural sun, that far red, not far infrared, but far red that is in sunlight. So, that's there, but it's not in normal LED bulbs at all, right?

Correct. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. It's something that we— it takes a very sophisticated audience to start getting into mitochondria. The circadian story is important, but we actually think that the ATP has an intracellular signaling that basically is almost like a double tap of the fact that it's daytime because as you mentioned, you're getting in sunlight to try to amplify that in the built environment.

That is esoteric knowledge. I mean, I really have a lot of respect for the engineering abilities and just the level of rigor for what you're doing. There are actually studies now, well, scientific papers proposing that ATP is a signaling molecule, extracellular ATP outside the cells. And anyone who's listened to a few of the shows knows that I'm a big mitochondria geek. My, my big science book was on that. And my secret recipe for being more bulletproof is just have more ATP, have it outside the cells, have it inside the cells, be better at making it. And if you do that, you'll have enough energy and willpower to do whatever you want to do and probably fight off viruses and stuff. So, uh, but the fact that you're recognizing, okay, the light on your skin from your LED lights may create more ATP through cytochrome c oxidase, and honestly probably does sunlight does. Right. And we don't know what percentage of red from sun, but we know that other bulbs are completely deficient in this stuff. And the TrueLight BIOS bulb is more natural spectrum than you're going to get other anywhere else like that. And then if it is a signal molecule, we don't know how much of it would be necessary to cause an upregulation elsewhere. But people feel really good when they use red light therapy. I have for almost 20 years now. So, um, I actually didn't realize that you guys had put it in for that reason, which is killer. Like, like, I mean, you guys have to understand, um, I've been dreaming about building a proper LED bulb and it's a massive engineering effort. And so I've been thinking about this for TrueLight, I'm gonna have to go, like, you know, raise funding and do something, you know, really magic and find a lighting engineer who really understands all this stuff. And I was getting ready to launch our kind of our first, you know, this is 20% of what I want to do, but it was, you know, just not there. And then in walks Robert and the team from BIOS. I'm like, wait a minute, they've already done it. So we formed our partnership and now, The first ever bulb you can buy that actually meets my standards for indoor lighting without having to wear the protective TrueDark glasses. It's here. It's going to— it's on. I think we're doing it on TrueDark.com. Whatever. TrueLight is the company who makes it or who's selling it. And you guys are the ones who have the tech. And do you see like in 1 year or 3 years or 5 years, how long is it going to be until like no one wants to go to work at a company that doesn't have a BIOS lighting system?

Yeah, I think that, well, they say that people should change out their lighting around every 7 years from like a commercial standpoint. From a residential standpoint, a consumer standpoint, you could do it today. So I'd like to think that in 3 years from now, people, just as people have switched from incandescent to LED pretty quickly within When did they become reasonable in price? Maybe like 4 or 5 years ago. Yeah, um, yeah, I think that, you know, they did it for the energy efficiency. Now as people start understanding the, um, the messaging for, um, um, for biology and how it's important for, for your health and well-being, um, we'd like to think that in the next 3 to 4 years it'll be a next transition to kind of what's next. I think that it's the next evolution.

All right, what did I not ask you? Like, you're a lighting engineer, I'm a pretty geeky guy, our audience, we can handle it. Like, what's the most annoying lighting thing or the best lighting thing or I don't know, what would I not know?

We're looking at some interesting things about what's called color constancy, which is why you might buy a daylight bulb from Home Depot, which with all that junk blue light, And it feels so wrong. And it might be just the junk blue, but it also might be about the way that we perceive like a homogenous space of all that one color. When you go outside, you have all those different gradients of light. And so we've actually been experimenting with like the blue sky component as a background to your lighting to make it feel more natural. To try to create these kind of layers of light. So, I think that the perception of light is kind of the next frontier of things that we could start playing with that I think is probably the coolest thing.

I've been dreaming about doing exactly that in the Bulletproof Coffee Shop and in Upgrade Labs for a long time. And so, we've got a roadmap together of some other stuff we're going to come out with for all the consumer-level stuff where you want to do office, in your apartment, in your home, you can do it. And it's, it's going to be, I think, a big part of how TrueLight helps to solve the junk light problem. And you guys are the engineering company, and you're going to solve this problem for probably like 20 times more people because you're going to do it, I believe, in every office building globally. And I mean, you've done the work, you have the patents and all that stuff. I, I truly see, and this is not a 5-year vision, this is a 20-year vision, but I truly see people who say, oh, I could buy the junk LEDs, but I don't like it. And like, I have to work here and I'm the guy who makes the decision. And it would be kind of douchey to be like, I put BIOS lighting in my office. And then I bought, you know, the 20 cents cheaper or whatever it is, lighting for everyone else. Um, I don't think that that's going to pencil, uh, because they'll realize I didn't make as much money when I did that. So. We are going to see, um, we're going to see quality light, uh, in, in all but the very, very worst workplaces. So a sign of, of quality in the future is not, oh, you know, Google made me lunch. It's that Google lit my office properly and bought me lunch. So this is the new perk.

That's the world I want to live in.

Uh, me too. I'd like to walk around without wearing my, my TrueDark glasses when I'm indoors most of the time, because I don't need to, like, wouldn't that be amazing? All right, I'm feeling hopeful. And if you're sitting at home and you're not feeling hopeful because, oh my God, there's a pandemic and all that sort of stuff, hey, maybe getting a little bit more sunlight through your windows is a good idea. Maybe getting some more darkness before sleep is a good idea. And strangely enough, that can make you feel more hopeful. Thanks, Robert. Thanks for your work. Thanks for lighting up our astronauts and just caring deeply about the anatomy of light because it's it's a beautiful thing.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

If you'd like to learn more, you can head on over to truedark.com. The bulbs will be prominent there on the front of the page when this comes out. And if you want to know more about BIOS Lighting, the engineering firm, you want to put it in your building or hotel, whatever, even your house, go to Robert. What's the URL? BIOS—

BIOSLighting.com.

BIOSLighting.com. Man, I am so stoked on this bulb. It's one of the things that's like as big as mold-free coffee. It matters at that level. To me personally. So I'm really hopeful that this changes a lot of people's sleep and days. So we shall have you back on the show probably another 6 months. We'll let people digest the new lighting, see how it changes. And I know we've got some new stuff coming out after that. So thank you.

Awesome. Great. Thanks, Dave.

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