How Artificial Light and EMFs Are Rewiring Your Biology (And How to Fix It) | Thaddeus Owen

What if the biggest threat to your health isn't diet and exercise? It's the modern society your body was never designed for. Today on Everyday Ancestral, I am talking with Thaddeus Owen, a leading voice in ancestral physiology and environmental health. Thaddeus believes most of our struggles, from fatigue to poor sleep to hormone issues, come from living in an artificial world our biology can't recognize. We're going to break down what's hurting us, what actually helps and how to rebuild an environment that works with your biology instead of against it. This is about reclaiming the natural signals your body is wired for and letting them change your life. Thaddeus, thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited to dive into this topic.

James, it's exciting to be here. And I absolutely love helping people understand how to heal in this modern chaotic society.

Yeah, you've been doing this for some time now, right?

I originally started my own journey back in 2007 when I started learning about this concept of originally biohacking and then moved from the biohacking space to the more ancestral space. And my main goal back in like early 2009 was solving my own personal health problem that I had. And what I found, it was a combination of learning some of these new skills in biohacking and pairing them with ancient practices that we've had forever that largely have been forgotten or put to the wayside.

Now, that's interesting that you went from biohacking to then saying, oh, actually we need to look at ancestral lifestyles. Well, that's really what our podcast is about, but that's what I find fascinating about that is a lot of people assume, well, biohacking is very tech modern, you know, focused. So what did something happen that made you go, hey, this isn't all I should be looking at? Like, was there a catalyst that made you look back and revisit kind of ancestral lifestyle?

Yeah, absolutely, James. So, I'm most known for in the past this brand that I kind of created, which was an educational brand called Primal Hacker. So, it was this bridge between the biohacking space and primal and ancestral tools. And what I found is when I was on my own journey solving my anxiety and insomnia. I mean, I had massive insomnia for 16 years. So I looked at all the biohacking ways of solving it. And what I largely found in the biohacking space is people were chasing like the latest tech, the newest tools, the newest supplements, and then they kept chasing more. And if the first, you know, silver, gold tech, whatever it was, worked, If that tech was working, they wouldn't have to chase more tech. So I found that it wasn't all the new devices weren't necessarily solving a problem. They were putting a bandaid on symptoms that were occurring. And some of them are very effective, but they were never solving the deeper problem. So when I looked at the latest research from the National Institute of Health, it was showing that our light environment could have been the biggest factor for me having insomnia. So when I learned that there was a specific type of light at night that was really disruptive to sleep, circadian rhythm, and melatonin, which heals us while we sleep, I started doing the ancestral things. How did our ancestors live? Well, they would have gone to bed when the sun set. They would have arose or woken up shortly after sunrise because it's expensive to have fire when you're, when you're living in these ancient worlds. Whether you have candles or not, these things were hard to come by and expensive for most people, which means we never were around this ultra-processed synthetic and bright light that has lots of blue light at night. And our ancestors, the way that they lived around firelight at night or darkness was absolutely critical to help with sleep repair, hormone regulation, all of these things that people struggle with in modern society. We find that when we mimic our ancestors, we actually get, and what I experienced, got better sleep just by turning out the lights and using the right type of light at night.

What were some of the tools you immediately, like, 'cause you mentioned you had severe insomnia for so long, were there like a handful of tools that you found right away worked for you? Like, I know for myself, it was like light-blocking shades, like, you know, like making sure that there was no light coming into the bedroom that worked. Very, very well for me. But did you find some tools that you could share with our audience that they could maybe incorporate right away?

Yeah, I did. I honestly, James, I started out doing what most people do. There's 100 million people in America that take a supplement to help them sleep every single night. We only have 337 million people in the US. And so it's a third of us that are taking a sleep supplement. And that's what I started out doing. And I found that it did help me fall asleep, but I wasn't necessarily getting the deep repair and the deep sleep that I needed. And it was covering up like the problem. It wasn't solving what the problem was, which was my light environment, as you stated. So when I learned this, I created what I like to call a primal sleeping environment. And so I changed the temperature in my room. So what the first thing that I did is turn down the thermostat. from 69 degrees to 62 degrees. Might be a little cold for some people. They say you can go to like 65 degrees is kind of ideal all the way up to 68, but I like 62. So I turn the temperature down because our body goes through a natural decrease in body temperature when we start to get ready for sleep. And so that helps your body signal that it's time to go to sleep. The next thing I did is exactly what you said. I put on a pair of blue light blocking glasses at night that block all the blue light from getting to my eye. And that blue light is how our body tells us what time of day it is and whether it's light or dark. So if you can block the blue light from your eye, it tells your body that it's dark. It allows your melatonin to be released, and it allows your body to get ready for sleep. And putting on blue light blocking glasses made such a massive difference in my sleep journey that it was the main factor that solved my insomnia. And I gave a TED Talk on it three years later. Because people saw the benefit that I received after knowing me for so long and invited me to give a TED Talk on my experience.

That's amazing. And now for those that are watching, you're wearing some glasses right now, and maybe you can talk since we're on this topic now, like maybe you can talk about it because the glasses you're wearing have more of an amber tint to them. And I know from, you know, my experience and also knowing you that these are what would be Daytime glasses. So, can you just talk about the difference between the daytime color versus, and then what the nighttime color is and why they're different? Yeah.

So, we're talking about this, in my opinion, chaotic modern society. It's very chaotic to our physiology and our biology. Our biology is designed to work with the light and dark cycles on Earth. And, Light, specifically sunlight, is a nutrient. And when we come indoors, we are not mimicking natural sunlight indoors. There's no infrared in our modern lighting. There's no ultraviolet in our modern light. There's a very altered alien spectrum that we're living under. And if we think of vitamin C and calcium and how critical those are as nutrients, that if we're deficient, we call it malnutrition. So, Dr. Ott created this term called malillumination, that when we come indoors under an alien light spectrum, we change our physiology for the worse because we're missing nutrient spectrums from sunlight when we come indoors. And the problem is, number one, that those spectrums help our physiology stay optimally healthy. They give us energy, they produce vitamin D in the skin, And altered spectrum indoors not only is missing those things that provide the benefit, but it's providing too much of a specific type of light. It's providing too much blue light, whether you're in front of a window, a screen, which all of us are these days, your phone, or just under artificial lighting in an office. So that lighting can cause free radical damage to our eyes because of all the blue light. without the mitigating factors of red and infrared light to clean up those free radicals. So, in my world, I like to wear glasses that protect my eyes during the day when I'm on a device. And those glasses have typically a yellow lens. So, you said amber, the glasses can be like an amber or a yellowish, and that tint blocks some of the blue light in the highest intensity from harming my eyes. While still letting in some blue light to tell my body that it's daytime. At night, I would wear an orange pair of glasses or red. So at night, there's 2 lens colors that people wear, either an orange or a red, and they really do the same thing. These nighttime glasses, when you put them on after sunset, block 100% of the blue light from reaching our eyes. And after sunset, our ancestors never would have experienced blue light to the point that our biology is designed to read no blue light as darkness and then create a whole host of physiology to occur, release melatonin, repair and rejuvenate the body, you know, do all of these things, increase the resistance to all sorts of things in the body that we want. So, like, if we want to be able to utilize sugar better, this nighttime release of melatonin does that. But most of us are not blocking the blue light from hitting our eyes, which means we're getting blasted with blue light after dark. It increases our cortisol, which is our stress hormone. It makes us crave more sugar and therefore gain more weight because our body assumes it's the long days of summer and we're preparing for a winter that never arrives.

That's so interesting. So it's like that light, that, that summer, that winter light, It really is different and it's communicating different things. So basically it's the seasons, the light of the seasons are communicating different things to our bodies.

Did you know that most mammals, in fact, maybe almost all mammals, they do not have babies or become pregnant in the winter? That is all based on light signals through their eye. And in fact, the theory based on anthropological data is that men and women did not get pregnant Or have babies during the winter either. They were, they were created. Our biology was created in this way, James, that by reading the outdoor light cycles, again, we now live an indoor existence. 95% of our time is spent indoors. So we're missing all these natural signals. And throughout all of history, nature signaled even men and women that winter was coming. There'd be less water, less food, and it would be really cold. We would be moving around less to conserve energy. And some people think we even might've semi-hibernated. So that light tells men and women not to be producing offspring in the winter, just like other animals aren't able to do that.

That is so fascinating. I mean, we kind of do experience that internally, right? Because there's, I know, like when I used to live in LA, it was very evident in Southern California because there aren't a lot of seasons, right? But during the winter, I would eternally feel more kind of homebound. Like I would kind of feel more introverted. I would feel slightly sad, depressed, right? Like I was experiencing internally an emotional state, but externally it was in opposition really. Yeah.

I mean, so the thing, if you think about how we live our lives in summer versus winter, especially where I live in a northern climate, We come indoors in the winter. Not that this, the statistic of 90 to 95% of our time indoors doesn't include the summer, but for the most part, if you think about your summertime, we're outdoors more. We're under nature's light. We get full spectrum light. We're getting these nutrients from the light. And in the winter, in some areas it tends to be rainy season and other areas it's freezing cold and we spend almost 100% of our time indoors. And What that does is indoors, that blue light that we surround ourselves with. So, all modern LEDs are based on a blue light driver with huge spikes of blue light and completely absent of ultraviolet and infrared and all these other healing frequencies and wavelengths of light. So, we come in and that blue light saps our energy, it increases our stress, and it increases our craving for sugars. Whereas, if we were outdoors, even in the winter, We're getting brighter light. So indoors in the winter, in a modern home, it's about a measurement of light intensity is about 5,000 lux is what we're experiencing for brightness. Meanwhile, outdoors, it's about 100,000 lux. That brightness alone can help increase energy, decrease cravings, and just give you more motivation to do something physical. So as we come in, there's an actual medical term for coming indoors in the winter and experiencing this shift in your physiology and even your psychology. And it's called seasonal affectiveness disorder, SAD. It's like sad is the acronym.

Appropriate.

And that's kind of how most people feel, right? They get a little bit sad and depressed in the winter. And I have 2 counterarguments around seasonal affectiveness disorder. People always ask, how do I change that and get rid of it? And so there's a way to do it. It's like, in my opinion, you bring back the missing frequencies and the missing brightness, and you can absolutely Overcome SAD. I've done it myself. I've seen everyone that we give this protocol to do it. But the counterargument is maybe in the winter we should come inside. We should be more connecting more with our spiritual side. We should rest and rejuvenate more. We should sleep more in winter and recover from all the things we did staying up all hours of the night in the summer. So there, there may be a reason that our body goes through this psychological shift, and it might be necessary to kind of tune into that once in a while.

Hmm. Do you have any suggestions on how people could tune into it?

Number one, we see the research shows, so this is where I love to pair these ancestral practices with modern research. So our ancestors would have slept 500 hours more per year than we do in our modern society.

Wow.

And we could argue, you know, industrial diseases really occurred as we electrified our homes and brought in the electric light bulb and did some of these other things. So when we sleep more in winter, one of those things that your body, like when people have SAD, seasonal affectiveness disorder, they say, I feel tired, lethargic. I feel a little depressed. So maybe you should sleep more in the winter. Like tune into that. It's darker, longer in the winter if you live above the equator. So we have way more hours of darkness and it is literally okay to allow yourself to get some more sleep in the winter. This whole 8 hours of sleep a night, I think is BS. I do not think we need 8 hours of sleep a night. In fact, I think my personal opinion and my experience is that we could probably get 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night in the summer, as long as in the winter we're getting 8 to 12 hours of sleep a night.

Interesting. So it's like cumulative opposed to just looking at it day by day.

We are so disconnected from our cycles of nature living in our society because the lights are always on. The food is always plentiful. We can get sugar and carbs at all times of the year in every region. So we're really disentangled from the natural environment. And when we tune back into that natural environment, living seasonally, I think we can be optimally healthy without bringing in a bunch of outside things to try to fix that.

I love how you're bringing up diet though. So we're talking about light, we're talking about ancestral practices. But in a way, you're, you're talking about diet really seasonally. Your focus is like, if you're in a certain season, you're going to be wanting— you probably should be more mindful about what you're eating during that season. And I've heard that talked about regarding light as well, like the, the light, for example, of a banana that a banana has absorbed If you eat that in a region that is very different from where it's grown, and also that is completely out of season with a banana growth, that in a sense you could be disrupting, you know, some internal energy or maybe, I don't know, I don't really know how else to word it, but you, that there's a disruption happening when you're introducing foods that are not only not seasonal, but also out of your region. Do you know anything about that?

I do. And this is kind of a fascinating topic and it gets into a little bit of quantum physics, which I won't go into, but I'll break it down really simply. All food that we eat is frozen light. So if you think about the fact that our bodies run off of light and people might question, well, don't they run off protein, fats, and carbs or calories? But if you, if you understand what the body does with a protein, fat, or carb, or a calorie, whatever happens to be, it breaks that down into the electron transport chain of the mitochondria to produce energy. So at the end of the day, we eat food to produce energy. And the mitochondria can't use a protein, fat, or a carb. It can use an electron only, just an electron. So we have to break down all our food to electrons, which means frozen light. So when you eat a food that's made up of frozen light, a banana grows in a tropical region near the equator. It has high ultraviolet in the sun at that time. The banana tree soaks in by photosynthesis that light and creates carbohydrates from the light, right? So it's frozen light that's going into that banana. When your body eats that banana, it decodes the light through the mitochondria. It reads the spin on the electron to determine the light frequencies that are coming off and it will give specific frequencies of light to your cells. And those frequencies of light, just like blue light can tell us that it's daytime. And at night, when we see blue light, this is well documented in thousands of studies that are published on PubMed, on National Institute of Health, that when we see blue light at night, it causes a change in our body. It destroys melatonin, it increases stress, and it stops some of the repair we do at night from the melatonin. So that's a signal literally just from light making physical changes to the body. Well, so when we eat food, that's frozen light, and we get a signal from the electron that there's tons of ultraviolet in the air, there's lots of carbohydrates available, but then we go outside and it's snowy and it's freezing cold and there's definitely no carbohydrates growing. It's called a circadian mismatch. Your body is reading one thing outdoors and another thing from the food. And it can cause some metabolic chaos in the body because of that mismatch. So there's this theory that if you're eating high-sugar tropical foods in a northern environment in the winter, when your mitochondria is trying to go into winter mode, it's trying to open ancient pathways to keep you warm in the winter, but the food you're eating is a mismatch and it's not allowing the mitochondria to do what it wants. It can cause some, some chaos in the body, and that's when people get more seasonal affectiveness disorder, but also start to gain more weight because the body thinks, wow, maybe it's not winter. We need to save up more fat for winter.

Oh my gosh. This is blowing my mind. 'Cause it's like, I, I've studied diets, studied food, but I've never really thought of it from a light perspective until I had this one conversation like a year ago about it. So you're just expanding on this thought. So Without going into diet necessarily, because that's, you know, we, we could go, you know, that's, that's kind of its own rabbit hole to a degree. What should people be focusing on from a seasonality? Because even that feels thrown off because we're technically— most foods are shipped in, freighted in all over the place. Like, so I don't even know if people really understand seasonality at this point.

Seasonality when you buy your food from a grocery store is not something that comes to the forefront of your mind.

Yeah, it's very confusing.

You really don't see season— I mean, okay, in the fall you go to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, right? And you're going to see some squash. And that might be the extent of how we view seasonality as Americans.

Yeah, pomegranates maybe.

Exactly. And those of us in the northern Midwest, we don't even know when pomegranate season actually is. So it's very hard to know seasonality from going to your local grocery store. I encourage everybody to do one thing that is simple, but it's not easy to do. The simplicity is eat locally as much as possible. And what does that mean? So in the area where I live, it's snowing. There's half a foot of snow on the ground. So the things that are available to me right now locally would be things like meat, milk, eggs, cheeses, and then things that might have been stored from the fall harvest still. So we still have squash. So I have a garden and I have squash in my garden and it's still good. So I'll still be eating that at this point in time. But things like bananas and grapes and all these tropical foods, those are not available here. And so what do you do? Because if I go to the grocery store and I buy meat, milk, or eggs or whatever it is that would be available, quote unquote, available in my area, I'm probably getting them from California or Chile or Mexico or somewhere else. So I tell people, one of the things that I've been able to do is connect with my local farmers. So A, local farmers are very excited to sell to people in their local region. They love selling locally. They make more money from it. And that helps them continue on as a small farm. And there's a place that we use, it's called FarmMatch. I think farmmatch.com is probably national, right? And so I know a lot of local farmers, but I also went onto FarmMatch and it just happened that my local farmer is on FarmMatch. So what we do is there's 1,500 families in the Twin Cities that order from this farmer and we place an order online and we place an order for eggs, milk, meat, cheese, all these things. And he delivers it to 100 different drop sites, and it's all from local farmers. He sources it from Amish farmers, from local organic farmers, from grass-fed farmers, and all of that comes from within a 200-mile region. And literally, I've lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, here in Wisconsin, and I've never not found a local farmer where I could order things fresh, either from the farmer's market Or from somebody who's offering those things from their farm.

FarmMatch is great. That's Max Kane's company. I've known Max for a long time and it's a fantastic resource. So I highly recommend that as well. Okay. This is fantastic. You're giving gold to everyone participating in this. I know EMFs though are also something you're very educated about. So let's talk about that. 'Cause I think it's interesting, particularly if we think about biohacking, right? We talk about all these tech-forward devices. They're all emitting EMFs to a degree. Right. And so—

Nearly all of them.

Yeah, nearly all of them. And so I think it's very interesting that I find this, this is one of the issues I find with many health modalities is that everyone's just looking at it from their own lens, like from a very narrow lens of like, well, I'm only going to focus on lead or I'm only going to focus on Microplastics. It's like, but when you look at all of it together, it's pretty hard to find one thing that fits everything, you know, that checks off all the boxes. It's just really challenging. It's kind of why I like organ meats because I feel like when you measure organ meats, it checks off all the boxes, you know, and it's coming from nature. So, so what do we need to know about EMFs and start really simply in terms of like, There might be someone out there that doesn't even understand what they are.

Number one, EMFs can absolutely change and harm our biology. And EMF just stands for electromagnetic frequencies. Electromagnetic frequencies are both natural and man-made. So, think of a natural electromagnetic frequency like some people know the Schumann resonance. So, when we stand barefoot on the ground, we call it grounding. We're actually tuning into the Schumann resonance, which, which is literally just 5 million lightning strikes every, I think it's like every 5 minutes or every hour. It's something like this, hit the Earth. And that causes a resonance of energy along the whole Earth that averages out at 7.833 hertz, which is the same as alpha waves in the brain, interestingly. So that's a Schumann resonance, or it's called the grounding frequency of Earth. There's also like infrared and ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light produces vitamin D in our skin, which has massive benefits far and above any vitamin D you could take from a pill. Those are natural electromagnetic frequencies that our body utilizes and are necessary for our health and life. There are unnatural electromagnetic frequencies. So number one, when most people think of EMFs, they think of microwave radiation. Microwave radiation today passes through our body at a rate of 1 quintillion times more than 1950. That's a 1 with 18 zeros after it. Every second, that much additional microwave radiation is passing through us than in 1950, which is a massive amount. And most people will say, well, so what? This is your Wi-Fi, your cellular data, your Bluetooth. And We use it everywhere. You can't escape it. There's cell phone towers everywhere. Everybody has a Wi-Fi router. And like, it was, it wouldn't be unsafe or we wouldn't be using it. Now, the fact of the matter is that microwave radiation that's at 1 quintillion times more hits of your body per second than in 1950 has been well studied on whether it has a biological effect or not by our own US government, including the Army, the Navy, the Air Force. the National Institute of Health, the EPA, and others, including big research universities. There are in fact 5,500 peer-reviewed published studies showing a biological effect from microwave radiation on our bodies. So when we hear EMF, we're talking about microwave radiation from your cell phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. We're also talking about electric fields that come off of all of our electric devices, from your electric that runs through your walls, and magnetic fields. And magnetic fields, if you live under those like huge high-tension power lines. Back in the '70s, um, Dr. Robert O. Becker from Syracuse University did the pivotal study showing that people living under those lines had higher rates of leukemia. And now it's like a known factor.

Wow.

And in fact, the World Health Organization has listed Microwave radiation as a possible human carcinogen. It's the same level of asbestos and benzene. So you can literally go to IARC, International Agency for the Research on Cancer, which is under the World Health Organization, and look up microwave radiation and they show that they have concerns that it's a carcinogen.

Now, but when we talk about microwave radiation, and I have to admit, I am at this point pretty confused on it because I, I remember when microwaves in the '80s came out, and I remember basically through the '90s, all the way through the early 2000s, it was like bad, bad, bad. Don't have a microwave, don't use it. And then as of late, around 2020-ish, I started hearing, well, no, no, the tech that's involved with microwaves is a lot safer. It's a different type of wave and yada, yada. So can you just like, can you kind of explain that or help clarify that? Because I'm at this point, I'm pretty confused.

So what a microwave ultimately does to your food is different than different and the same as what it's going to do to your body. So let's just take a microwave oven, for example. Number one, the microwave oven is supposed to be sealed so that the microwaves cannot escape. And if the microwaves are just agitating the molecules of the food, There's some debate whether they're decreasing the energetic content or the vitamin mineral content of that food, but ultimately they're shaking the molecules and heating the food up. And also throw a piece of steak in the microwave and it'll dehydrate the steak. So it's using water to vibrate the frequency that water vibrates at to use the water to heat the food up. And then the water evaporates off leaving your food drier, but hot. Now I've tested with microwave Meters. So we have these meters that can test microwaves in the air because they're invisible. I've tested every microwave and I don't have a microwave, but everyone's home that's had a microwave, every single one of them to a T has leaked microwave radiation from the microwave into the home as far away as 45 feet. And I have a video on YouTube showing me testing somebody's microwave closed. Their microwave is closed. I have the microwave meter and I start backing up to see where the level would drop. We had to open their front door and I had to keep going into the street before the levels dropped. And most people are standing in front of the microwave. Now, is that technology safer? It is not any different. I— the, the technology that drives the microwave frequency to heat your food is still the same. It's just they're supposed to be sealing it better, which I disagree because I've not found a well-sealed microwave. And here's the kicker. Your Wi-Fi router that most people keep under their bed or under their desk at work emits the exact same microwave frequency as a microwave oven. End of story. Look on your microwave, open it up if you still have one, and it will tell you by law the frequency that it runs at, 2.45 gigahertz.

That's what you're—

Go look at your router and turn over your router. Yes, it's 2.45. Oh, now it's less intense from your router than the microwave oven, but it is on 24/7 passing through your body and dehydrating your cells and doing all sorts of other things.

Oh my gosh, that is— I mean, what do we do though? It's like, sure, you can have a timer on your Your Wi-Fi, you can, um, you can have it at least go off at night. So when you're sleeping, that's, that's, you know, at least, uh, a little bit better. Um, but technically you're, you're getting everyone else's router.

Yes.

Because all the houses are so close, particularly if you're in an apartment, you share a wall, like, like anyone can have their phone on, be looking for wireless in 20 different Wi-Fi routers show up. So clearly, if your phone's picking it up, so is your body.

The, the benefit though to this microwave radiation is that it drops off very quickly with distance. So your neighbor's Wi-Fi router is way less harmful to your body than your own. Even if you're picking it up, even if it's going through your body, the distance that you have from that Wi-Fi router makes a massive change in the amount that it affects your body. So you might be able to see a lot of neighbors' Wi-Fi routers, but unless you're in an apartment where their Wi-Fi router is against the wall that you lay your head against when you sleep, that being an issue, your neighbors' Wi-Fi routers aren't such a big deal when we measure the intensity of them hitting the body.

Okay. So putting a timer on your own router, having it shut off at bedtime and turning back on, You know, in the morning, that is a good step then.

If you have any capability to turn your Wi-Fi router off at night, I think that's literally one of the biggest bangs for the buck on reducing microwave radiation other than putting your phone in your pocket while it's turned on. Those 2 steps of not keeping your phone in your pocket while it's turned on, literally just putting it in a purse or a backpack or on the table in front of you because of the distance makes a huge difference in how much exposure you get. But turning off your Wi-Fi at night, like literally you can, you can just buy a Christmas tree timer for like $10 off Amazon and set it to go off at 10:00 PM every night and back on at 6:00 AM every morning. Or I, I have this viral video back in like 2015 where I took a remote control and I turned my Wi-Fi router off with a remote control. So I just plugged the Wi-Fi router into this little device that went into the socket. And then I had a remote that sat on my nightstand and I turned the Wi-Fi on when I woke up and off when I went to bed from this little remote control. It makes it super easy and it drastically reduces your exposure to Wi-Fi just doing that thing alone. Now, personally, I don't have Wi-Fi at my home. I work for a large corporation as an executive. I'm online and in meetings on like Zoom calls all day long. I have never had Wi-Fi on in my home. And I run a business and I'm an executive. And so you can, if you're serious enough about it, get away with no Wi-Fi on in your house whatsoever.

And that's through why you have to be, have a wired—

You would be wired to a landline. And most people are like, well, what's a landline? Well, guess what? Where do you think your cell phone calls go to? They're not going to a satellite. They're not going from satellite to satellite to someone else's cell phone. Every one of your cell phone calls. goes through underground wiring, including under the ocean to Europe or Asia, because wired is faster than wireless. And so every phone call you make with your cell phone goes to the closest tower to you through the air. From that tower, it is wired all the way to the closest tower to somebody else, not through satellites in the air because they're not fast. Wired is always faster. So to me, using a landline at home It's a hard-connected line that goes into my laptop or even my phone or my tablet. And, my internet is more stable, it's faster, and it's free of electromagnetic frequencies.

Yeah. I mean, and technically, everyone already is wired. You're just using a wireless router. If you just plugged into your router and didn't have a wireless one, then that is what it is.

So, I have a wireless router. It's a Wi-Fi router, right? I use Comcast or Xfinity, whatever it's called now that everybody uses. They bring it wired into my home, not wireless, right? And so then what I do is I put a landline into the back of my Wi-Fi router, but then I go onto my laptop and I disable the Wi-Fi portion of the Wi-Fi router. It's super simple to look up on YouTube. It takes like literally 10 seconds to do.

Yeah. Wow. So how, like, there's all this talk then about 4G, 5G, 6G eventually, right? So it's like, What is that then?

So the G stands for generation. So 1G is first generation of wireless technology and you could call people on a car phone that was huge, as big as a brick, right? And then 2G was the second generation of cellular technology. They had talk and a little bit of text. And then 3G, we had talk, text, and some data, but it was really slow. And as we go up in generations, The only difference we're doing in the generational increase is changing the wavelength at which we send the data through the air wirelessly, right? So we're sending data through the air in little packets of energy that has to be decoded and read by your phone. So this energy passes through your body and then it comes to your phone and it renders a photo or a video or whatever it is, a YouTube channel. So when we go up in signal intensity, we start to increase the wavelength at which we send data packets, which means we can send more data at once and we can send that data faster. So when we get to 5G, we're getting into this, they call it millimeter wave technology because the wavelength, the trough between each trough of the wave that's being sent with data attached to it, is now millimeters versus smaller, like nanometers. So when we get to these bigger wavelengths, they have to be pushed through the air with more data using more power. And so 5G and 6G are going to be sending more power through your body, through the air, to the point where you can start to capture this data and run a light bulb, let's say, off of all the energy running through the air, wirelessly because this light bulb is just picking up so much energy from the air. All of that information with more energy is passing through our bodies like millions of times a day. And so there will, in my opinion, there will be more of a biological effect as we move up in those bandwidths with more data pushed on more channels through the air with more power and more people having devices. So like everyone's got a phone in their pocket. Now everybody's got a Wi-Fi router in their home. Now everybody's adding Alexa or whatever it is to their home. Now everybody's adding Nest. Now everyone's adding repeaters into their home to extend the Wi-Fi range. And now everybody's adding these Verizon repeaters on their roofs to allow the 5G mesh network to move through windows into your home because 5G doesn't— 5G and 6G don't pass through walls. 4G does. So 5G, because it can't go through a wall, it's got to go through a visible window to get to your phone or your technology. which requires people to add more technology to their homes to take that signal and pass it along the network to keep that data flowing.

This is incredible. So the person, 'cause I have definitely heard reports of people saying like, oh, they live on farms, you know, out very rural areas. And then they're like, yeah, my town just got 5G and I've immediately noticed how it's interacting with my body. So, are these people crazy or is it, you know, is, are, are some people more sensitive to it than others?

Everybody is sensitive to it because we have the same biology. However, there are some people that are more sensitive. And, and what really what Robert O. Becker from Syracuse University found, and he wrote a couple books, Cross Currents and The Body Electric, and they kind of described the effects of, of this electromagnetic frequency, not just from microwaves, but from the big power lines originally. That was where he did his research on. Until they started having the cell phone technology that came out in the '50s. And really in the '70s, they started perfecting the technology, but we didn't have all the repeaters to send it across the world. So what he showed is that this wireless electromagnetic frequency causes stress in the body. And so you and I might react to stress differently. You might be more susceptible to, let's just say, something going wrong with your eyes. And I might be more susceptible to something going wrong with sleep. And so people say like, hey, 5G is turned on, but it's not like everybody's getting leukemia. It's like there's a lot, a lot of stuff happening, but it's all different things happening to different people. And that's because it's just increasing the stress your body has to deal with because it's flooding your cells with calcium. These electromagnetic frequencies can work on the calcium channels of the body where they flood calcium into the cells, and it takes a lot of antioxidants to clean that up, and it floods it to such an effect that our antioxidants can't keep up. And so eventually that can lead to DNA damage and stress on the body, and that can lead to a whole host of problems for people. And so yes, people are affected. Again, there's 5,500 peer-reviewed published studies showing a biological effect, and a lot of those studies were done by our own military because they use radar and LiDAR and sonar, and they found that people using like the sonar and the radar were having all these problems. So they started researching and testing why they were receiving these problems from wireless, wireless sources. And so those papers are still available and they're public and you can, you can see them. But the 5G, when they add it, some people are very sensitive to that because they have more stress and it pushes them over the edge. And some people just don't have as much of a reaction.

Isn't it a form of warfare as well? I mean, I, I'm pretty sure some very, um, modern weapons are being designed with these different waves or different sounds to elicit illness or sickness, you know, some kind of physical reaction in people.

This is called quiet weapons for silent wars. And it's very real. Now, one thing that I want to leave people with though before we move on or say anything else is like there can be a lot of fear around electromagnetic frequencies like microwaves because You cannot consent to, to, to remove yourself from their frequency. They're everywhere. You are walking through downtown, you go to an office, you go to a grocery store, you're getting bombarded by 5G signals all the time. It's now in people's cars, right? So the cars have radar and sonar and LiDAR and 5G coming out the sides, the front, and the back. So just driving past a car, you're going to get blasted.

And even if you eat out too, right? A lot of times restaurants, whether you know it or not, they're reheating your food in a microwave before they serve it. I mean, so Like, so there's what's in the air, but there's also just the modern life practices that may not be in alignment with, you know, what your, your modern or your practices are.

Just walking into a grocery store through the automatic doors, they used to use radio frequency with infrared. So it'd be an infrared light and it would, you would cross the infrared light barrier, it would automatically open the door to Target, right? But now every grocery store, Target everywhere around the country uses 5G signals to hit you in the head. to open the door wirelessly. Why they chose that signal, I don't know. So, so people start to get freaked out and they're like, I can't go to the store because I feel super weird when I walk in. Well, you just got blasted in the head with a 5G signal when you walked in the automatic door opener. However, there was one article somebody sent to me when I had the Primal Hacker channel, and they're like, listen, like, here's a military article, I want you to read it. And it said that microwave radiation is like one of the best ways to manipulate human biology because it's optimally suited to messing with us. However, there is a way for you to overcome microwave radiation mentally, like using your own mind. And so the article went on to say that even though you could use 5th generation warfare to use silent weapons like microwaves to harm people, if people know that it's going on, They can use their own mind to change their physiology against the microwave energy to make it beneficial to them, or at least non-harmful. And so how do you do that? What are the practices? I don't know, but I know that it's possible. And I think if you keep that in mind and you think, okay, if I can turn my Wi-Fi router off at night, or, you know, not have my cell phone in my pocket turned on, I'll turn it on and set it down on the table when it downloads messages, like that's helping. And then program your mind to say like, I'm going to be like impenetrable to these 5G forces. And if they do come into my energy field, I'm going to turn them into things that heal me. Like, I honestly think that that can work.

I'm all for it, man. And any mind over matter, you know, anything that we can do to protect ourselves. What do you think about all these? Whenever we go to events, I always see like, you know, necklaces, charms, some something stickers you put on your phone. Like, what do you think about all those kind of EMF blocking devices?

Uh, number, I have 2 things. The first one is that you cannot physically measure whether they're doing anything. So I love to take a device, like I can take a device that's run through physics and you can measure invisible microwaves. It tells you how many are there, what wavelength they're running at, what frequency they're running at, and like how powerful they are in any given space. And then I can block that signal. So metal blocks all microwave frequencies. So people wear like silver shirts and silver pants or silver underwear or the tinfoil hat, right? Well, the tinfoil and aluminum foil, it does block microwave frequency. So I can put a piece of tinfoil or silver in between the microwave source and my microwave meter, and it will drop to zero. I can show that I'm blocking the microwaves and I'm not experiencing any on my body because I can show it with a meter. When I put a sticker on my body or on my phone, or I wear a pendant, the microwave meter still shows that I'm getting hit with the exact same amount, frequency, and wavelength of microwaves. Nothing has changed. So these companies claim that they're using frequencies that are not measurable. And then I would argue like, well, then how did they build it if nobody can measure that they're able to change?

Yeah, right.

So my personal opinion, is that I don't like to say this, but like none of that can be proven to work with the devices we have today because they're using quote unquote scalar frequencies that nobody can measure that they're working, or they're saying I'm changing the microwave to be harmonized to your body. If you changed a microwave to harmonize with your body, it's a different frequency and your cell phone antenna would not be able to use it. Your antenna can use very narrow wavelengths of microwave energy to receive a text or a call. And if your harmonizer is changing the energy to something beneficial, your cell phone would not pick up the text, the call, the video, any of that. So to me, I disbelieve some of those things. However, some of those companies have really good studies showing like, well, when we test the blood, we show less stress. When we test the blood, blood. We show all this beneficial thing that your physiology is changing to the good when you use some of these products. So I'm skeptical but optimistic that some of them might be working. So whenever people ask me, what should I do? Is the sticker helping? I say, if your mind is wrapped around the fact that the sticker is working, there's this thing called the placebo effect, and your mind is more powerful than anything out there. So it probably is working. Keep going. But if you were to block the microwaves, great. I think you should do that is if you can block them or get more distance, do it and use the pendant. And if I can get really good studies that are third-party validated that show certain devices or technologies are absolutely harmonizing and making you healthier, awesome. Like, I'd love to see them. I'd love to promote something like that.

I love that you're so discerning, you know what I mean? Like that you're not just, because sometimes what you see in these, You know, in the health field is you see someone who just gets on a certain bandwagon and they're like, oh, love and light to everything. You know what I mean? Like they're just so, they're all in and they're not as discerning because they're just like, well, as long as it's natural, it's good. You know, you know, they kind of fall into that certain category. So I really appreciate that you're discerning. You're like, look, I want to, I'm combining, you know, ancestral principles with modern devices or techniques of measurement. And I just want to see that there's something happening. But you're also kind of leaving room for like placebo effect, or just if you believe it, then that sometimes is enough. So I really appreciate that. I'm sure people listening to this are feeling overwhelmed and it's okay, first of all. Like, I think it's— we live— I think modern society is overwhelming and part of like reclaiming our power in it is to just admit it. Yes. We were promised tech was going to make things easier and it's actually made things more overwhelming and in my judgment, harder. So what are the top 2 ancestral habits you'd prescribe that give the most bang for the buck in today's modern world?

Number one, and I'm going to say this on every podcast till the day I die, and it's everybody has access to it. Everybody can do it and it's 100% free. Get outside at dawn. It might be inconvenient, but cancer and obesity are very inconvenient as well. And getting outside at dawn is one of the most impactful things that almost all of our ancestors would've done every day. And that my wife and I have committed to doing every day for the rest of our lives. And we have missed exactly zero sunrises since we made that commitment 8 years ago. I honestly think it's one of the best biohacks ancestral techniques and health things that anybody can do at any time. And it is totally free.

So sunrise versus sunset?

Yes. Sunrise and sunset are both extremely beneficial and both different. They have a different impact on the body. Remember, light is a nutrient and the frequencies that are coming from the sun at sunrise are not the same frequencies that come at sunset. And honestly, the biggest, you, you ask for the biggest bang for your buck and it's sunrise. Sunset, absolutely magical as well, but sunrise is biggest bang for your buck. And number 2, just because it made one of the biggest changes in my own life. Like, I had anxiety to the point where I couldn't get out of my pharmaceutical job putting toxins into children's products because I was so nervous and anxious to do an interview or give a public presentation. And that was largely driven from the fact that I wasn't sleeping very well at night. So when I put on a pair of blue light blocking glasses, like honestly, you can get a pair for like $15 off Amazon to try it out and see if it works for you. It made a huge difference in my life, literally just blocking the blue light at night because it allowed my body to rejuvenate, heal, repair. And it gave me the space to do the inner emotional work that I had to do to cure my anxiety.

That's fantastic. What about, and maybe these are the same, and if they are, just tell me, but, but is there something like, is there, is there one thing that listeners could do that bring their biology back online? Or is it this, or would it be the same answer?

When you get out at sunrise without glasses, sunglasses, or contacts, It is absolutely a magical way to bring your biology back online because we are tuned to natural sunlight frequencies. Our biology expects it. In fact, it demands it. And almost all of us are ignoring that to our detriment. There's a really good book, James, written by Omrom Ivanov. He's a Christian mystic who only taught with verbal teachings. He never wrote anything down, but People wrote his lectures down and published 36 books or more based on his lectures. And one of them was called Sunlight Is a Nutrient and Sunlight Is a Spirit, something like this. I'll have to find the book here. But if you look up Amram Ivanov, he wrote an entire— well, somebody wrote an entire book on his lecture about how sunlight Brings your biology back online and it gives you all this programming during that time of the morning that's going to treat you well for the rest of the entire day. It tells you what time of year it is, what time of day it is, and it really does fine-tune your biology. So number one, I would say that. And then number two, if you want like another really good thing that anybody can do and is also free, it's just like in our society, like We are getting 500 hours a year less sleep than our ancestors. And if you literally could do 2 things, eat some food that's local to you. I love to tell people to forage because that food has the information and the nutrition of your local environment, and it's not been cultivated on a farm. And so it's, it's ancient, it's natural, and it's wild. And if you can do that and pair it with more sleep, You know, those things— morning sunlight, foraging even one food from your local environment like dandelion greens, anyone can manage that, and getting more sleep— like, honestly, that alone will start to, to bring the Rubik's Cube messiness of your biology back into sync.

Thaddeus, this has been an incredible conversation. I, I mean, I could literally— we're just gonna have to do another one, you know, eventually, because I could talk We didn't even cover, you know, hot and cold. There's so much more we could talk about. So we'll just have to bring you back.

Happy to.

I, you know, I usually ask this question as my last question, but I think you just answered it, which is if you could wave a magic wand and bring back one ancestral practice, what would it be? And it sounds like it would be, you know, going out at sunrise, basically, right?

I would love everybody to get out at sunrise and experience the magic of that. The other thing I would take away would be these weaponized headlights from all the cars. I cannot stand driving at night with the brightness of those headlights. And the American Medical Association even put out a warning letter that these are too bright for human health. Like, take those away and add back sunrise for everybody. It— this is what it used to be, James. Before we had all these clocks that kept time the same for everybody, 6:00 AM was whenever the sun rose, which means everybody had opportunity now, unless you work third shift, but everybody had opportunity to get out at sunrise because the day didn't start till the sun rose. So everyone got to experience that.

Yeah, that's powerful. I, you know, it makes me think about the fact that we have so much light pollution, you know, at night. And I have been asked a similar question before, in my opinion of it. And I usually share, like, I wish that we had no lights on at night because I believe that one of our biggest existential issues in modern life is that we can't see the stars. And seeing the Milky Way, seeing the stars above, I think humbles us and reminds us that we are yet just one piece of a very big, much bigger, um, universe. And, um, and I really think so much would be solved if we just were, were, had a visual cue of, of not only our place on this beautiful planet, you know, and just feel, you know, more gratitude towards that, but also just the bigger, that we're, we're a small part of the bigger whole, of a beautiful bigger whole. Um, So I don't know, I felt inclined to share that because this has been a conversation about light.

Well said.

And I, and I, so I guess in my, I'll just share my answer as well. And I rarely do this. I hope you'll apologize for me taking the light for a second, but like, uh, I really do wish people got out and camped more, like, and got to see the stars as they are without all the light pollution.

It would be a massive change to turn the lights out at night. And we would also have to sit with ourselves and those around us rather than be distracted from anything going on internally or around us. I think it would make a huge, huge change.

Yeah, I did too. Well, you've really, I mean, you and I only met a few months ago, but you have already changed me and I just really, I really appreciate And I already really appreciate our connection. I feel like it's very special and, um, and I just feel like you are very special. So I'm just very grateful for what you're doing in the world, how you're showing up. And I just honor you for everything you've done and everything you're going to do. How can people connect with you? I know you humbly mentioned people could go on Amazon and buy these glasses, but you do have, you do sell glasses. So please share how people can get your glasses and support you and your family.

Yeah, we do make some of the best-looking glasses on the market and they're tested with spectrometers to make sure they're blocking all the right types of light. You can find them on dreamwalkers.ai and you can find us on Instagram @dreamwalkersai or on YouTube @primalhacker.

Excellent. And thank you so much, Thaddeus. And like I said, we'll have you on again because there's so much more to talk about. You are an abundance of information. And like I said, I love how you position this, that you're, you're, you're, you're concerned, you know, you're discerning around this information that you're looking for grounding within it. And I just so respect people when they, when they are curious. They're not always just like jumping onto the other side because it represents something that they're, that they're discerning and they are still curious and asking questions. even when it might fit their theme or something like that. So I really appreciate you for that.

I appreciate that. There's a lot of influencers that get a lot of views by being very polarizing, and then they stick with it because they're going to lose views if they reel themselves back and start to think more discerningly or critically. They will lose some viewers, and so they just ride that train. And I will be as discerning as possible and share those thoughts, even to the detriment of not being as As viral on social media.

Well, it just gives you more integrity. So I appreciate that. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you all for joining us. This has been a fantastic interview, but also just topic. And I hope you've gotten a lot of value out of it. I know I have. Y'all, we got to stay curious. We got to keep asking the questions. And I think Thaddeus gave some really great examples of things you can do to counteract These, these light emissions, the, these modern lifestyle conveniences that may be hurting our ancestral body. So I hope you're not feeling too overwhelmed, but that you feel empowered to keep asking questions, to, to get out when the sun rises and to turn off as much light as you can at night and get some rest. We deserve it. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, Share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.