Thaddeus Owen: Modern Humans Live Under Alien Light | DSH #1742

Summary

Digital Social Hour: Thaddeus Owen – Modern Humans Live Under Alien Light (DSH #1742)

Podcast: Digital Social Hour
Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Thaddeus Owen
Date: January 8, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Sean Kelly sits down with Thaddeus Owen, a biohacker, circadian health expert, and advocate for optimizing the indoor light environment. The conversation centers around the concept of “light poisoning,” how modern artificial lighting disrupts biology, negatively impacts sleep, alters metabolism, and stands at the root of many health problems. Thaddeus provides an in-depth critique of LEDs, blue light, EMF, and modern living while offering practical guidance for reclaiming circadian health. The episode interweaves discussions about lab-grown meat, GLP-1 shots, biohacking trends, and the profound impact of light on well-being.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem with Modern Light Environments

• Light as a Biological Force:

  • Only 1–2% of the sun’s spectrum is visible to the human eye, but all parts of the light spectrum influence biology.
    • “The visible light that we can see is like 1 to 2% of the whole spectrum of light that our body is tuned to naturally.” – Thaddeus (00:45)
  • Artificial LED lighting in studios, offices, and homes bombards people with blue light, missing the balancing effects of red and infrared.

• Why Red/Infrared Light is Important:

  • Modern lighting lacks healing red and infrared wavelengths.
  • Use of red light panels and saunas “mitigates blue light toxicity.”
    • “Once we switched everything to LED lights, we lost red and infrared from our spectrum indoors.” – Thaddeus (01:29)
  • Pro athletes use red light for recovery.

• Consequences of Blue Light Overexposure:

  • Causes free radicals, oxidative stress, disrupts melatonin production, and is linked to cancer, metabolic disorders, and poor sleep.
  • "We're a light poisoned culture." – Thaddeus (01:29)
  • "It's causing a huge problem in our society from this one wavelength of light that we get without anything else backing it up." (03:51)

2. Melatonin: Not Just a Sleep Hormone

• Master Antioxidant:

  • Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant known, cleaning up damaged cells and supporting immune function.
    • “Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant that we know about.” – Thaddeus (05:08)
  • Blue light destroys melatonin by day and, if present at night, impairs nighttime repair.

• Circadian Rhythm and Sleep Health:

  • Only darkness starts melatonin repair functions.
  • Artificial lighting and late-night device use block normal hormone cycles.
  • "When we see blue light from the phone, it's changing your circadian rhythm every single time." (06:25)

3. Strategies to Minimize Light Poisoning

• Device Management:

  • Phones, tablets, TVs emit toxic blue light and cause flicker stress.
  • "When you dim your iPhone, it flickers more, which causes stress in the brain." (07:28)

• Bedroom Tips:

  • Don’t look at your phone in the middle of the night, or use blue-light-blocking glasses.
  • Use a red LED battery-powered clock instead of a phone for time-checking (09:57).
  • Airplane mode disables EMFs and still lets you use the alarm clock (08:25).

• Blue Light Blocking Contacts and Sunglasses:

  • Most contacts and sunglasses block UV, but you need a bit of UV for healthy circadian signaling and melanin production.
  • "If you block all the UV light... your brain doesn't read how much UV there is and we can get sunburned faster." (09:29)

4. The Case Against Sunglasses and Over-Protection from Sun

• Historical Fact:

  • Sunglasses were invented for movie stars under harsh studio lighting, not for outdoor health (12:45).

• Sunlight, Food Cravings, and Weight Gain:

  • Artificially dimming sunlight with sunglasses can increase carb cravings.
  • "We start craving carbohydrates and then we put on more weight … there are all these unintended consequences." (13:27)

• Views on Sun Avoidance:

  • Critique of extreme sunlight avoidance a la Brian Johnson; nature and studies favor more sun exposure, not less (34:39, 34:45).

5. Alien Light, EMF, and Surveillance

• LED Lighting as an 'Alien Spectrum':

  • LEDs deliver an unnatural composition of light never found before in human history.
  • Discusses the ban and shortage of incandescent bulbs, and the difficulty finding authentic ones (17:32–18:22).

• LEDs and Microwave Radiation:

  • LED bulbs emit microwave radiation, needing FCC certification to avoid device interference.
    • “If you look at every LED bulb package, it will say, FCC certified... they give off microwave radiation from an LED bulb.” (19:49)

• WiFi, 5G, and Surveillance Concerns:

  • WiFi routers, like microwave ovens, emit the same 2.45 GHz radiation (21:26).
  • WiFi and LEDs can potentially be used to “map” interiors (20:28, 21:26).
  • “That microwave radiation is a light.” (22:16)
  • Shut off WiFi when sleeping to improve sleep and decrease EMF exposure (21:22).

6. Circadian Disruption: Always-On Summer

• No More “Winter”:

  • Modern life eliminates seasonal cues such as cold and darkness, creating a perpetual summer state.
  • “So the whole book is about how we have lost winter in our society.” (25:03)
  • “Winter never comes, so we never get a break from eating carbohydrates, from craving sugars, and from having the lights on.” (25:33)

• Winter Adaptation Strategies:

  • Sleep more in winter; expose yourself to cold; adopt a ketogenic diet temporarily.
  • “In 1910, men and women slept 500 hours more a year than they do today.” (27:01)
  • “Every study shows there’s no such thing as a night owl…” (27:16)

• Melatonin Supplementation vs. Natural Production:

  • Modern reliance on supplements signals a broken light environment.
  • Block blue light and prioritize darkness, especially in winter, to naturally increase melatonin (28:49).

7. Timing of Eating and Weight Gain

• Eating After Dark:
  • People who eat after dark gain more weight even on the same calories, due to circadian disruption.
  • Mouse studies show that 24/7 light exposure causes obesity, regardless of calorie intake or exercise (30:00).

8. Systemic Resistance and Censorship

• Studies and Mainstream Science:
  • Light’s role as a biological regulator is universally accepted by Nobel laureates, but nutrition/exercise research ignores it (34:07).
  • “If light can act as a drug, then it invalidates all of their studies.” (32:15)
  • Social media platforms censor information on sunlight’s health benefits (33:20).

9. Quick Fixes vs. Foundational Health

• Critique of Modern Biohacking Trends:
  • Trend towards quick fixes, magic supplements, and injectables (GLP-1 shots, peptides, etc.) ignores foundational biological needs.
  • “If any of them did what they claim, you wouldn’t have to chase the next one.” (38:38)
  • Thaddeus recommends prioritizing natural behaviors before advanced interventions (38:13–38:31).

10. Personal Journey & Advocacy

• Thaddeus’s Story:

  • Suffered insomnia and anxiety for decades working in pharmaceutical labs.
  • Fixed these issues primarily by changing his light environment (47:16).
  • “When I started addressing my light environment, things got massively better for me … For me, the most powerful tool was light.” (47:26)

• Analogy:

  • “If somebody’s hitting you in the hand with a hammer and you’re taking Tylenol to get rid of the pain, maybe you should think about the environment of the hammer.” (48:39)

11. Practical Recommendations

• Light Bulb Swaps:

  • Use amber, red, or blue-light-free bulbs at night; seek bulbs that mimic firelight (50:08).
  • “If people literally just swapped out their light bulbs for healthier light bulbs, like, that could be a massive change for almost everybody in our country.” (50:48)

• Bedroom Environment:

  • Dark, cold, no-EMF; blackout curtains, minimize light before bed (29:30).

• Behavioral Tweaks:

  • Get sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up (10:49).
  • Do not use sunglasses or contacts that block UV for early-morning sun.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We're a light poisoned culture. I invented this term ‘weapons of mass illumination.’” – Thaddeus (01:29)
• “Melatonin is what helps us sleep … and it's the master antioxidant.” (04:25)
• "The iPhones use pulse wave modulation. When you dim your iPhone, it flickers more, which causes stress in the brain..." (07:28)
• “Sunglasses … were invented for movie stars under studio lighting ... not for outdoors.” (12:45)
• “The more sun you have, the less you die from all causes. Like, all causes.” (34:45)
• “If you look at every LED bulb package, it will say FCC certified… because they give off microwave radiation.” (19:49)
• “I've had massive insomnia for 16 years … When I started addressing my light environment, things got massively better ... For me, the most powerful tool was light.” (47:16–47:26)
• “You just want blue light free light bulbs...if people literally just swapped out their light bulbs...that could be a massive change.” (50:13–50:48)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:29] – Defining “light poisoning” and weapons of mass illumination
• [03:02] – Blue light’s effect on skin and melasma
• [05:08] – Melatonin as a potent antioxidant
• [07:28] – Pulse wave modulation and phone flicker
• [09:57] – Red LED clocks and EMF-free recommendations
• [12:45] – Sunglasses: Origin and consequences
• [19:49] – LED bulbs and microwave radiation, FCC certification
• [21:26] – WiFi as a light source, microwave equivalency
• [25:03] – Loss of winter, perpetual summer, circadian mismatch
• [27:01] – Historical sleep data and circadian rhythm
• [30:00] – Mouse study: light exposure and weight gain
• [34:39] – Critique of Brian Johnson’s sunlight avoidance
• [38:38] – Critiquing the “magic supplement” mentality
• [47:16] – Thaddeus’s personal journey, insomnia and anxiety
• [50:08] – Practical lighting swaps and firelight mimicry

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Guest & Resources

• Thaddeus Owen
  • Podcast: Primal Hacker Podcast, returning for Season 3 (51:08)
  • Book: The Ketogenic Hibernation Diet
  • Company: DreamWalkers AI (circadian wellness for women)
  • Find more: YouTube: Primal Hacker | DreamWalkers AI

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Conclusion

This episode delivers an urgent and evidence-backed message: the light you are exposed to every day is a powerful determinant of your health. From “weapons of mass illumination” to the wisdom of respecting natural light cycles, Thaddeus Owen lays out the case for a lighting revolution—one accessible through simple, actionable changes. Whether you’re a biohacker or just seeking better sleep and energy, understanding and optimizing your light environment may be among the most potent interventions you can make.

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Quote to Remember:
"If people literally just swapped out their light bulbs for healthier light bulbs, that could be a massive change for almost everybody." – Thaddeus Owen (50:48)

Transcript

[Sean]

So a lot of the benefit is we're missing these frequencies. So we're getting this like hammer of blue light hitting us all day long. And that causes free radical in the body. And free radicals are fine, like they're a signal. There's blue light in the sky, but then there's red and infrared to mitigate that. And inside we never get that mitigation. So getting under a red light panel or a red light sauna or infrared sauna, you're mitigating like all that blue light toxicity that we're exposed to all day long.

[Podcast Host]

Foreign. Okay, guys, got Thaddeus here in Las Vegas. There's a lot of light going around, so hopefully you'll be all right, man.

[Sean]

We'll make it through.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I know you talk about light. I saw you on Alex Clark show and you were talking about the different types of light. I thought it was really interesting.

[Sean]

Yeah. So there's so many types of light and we only know a small percentage, right? So like the visible light that we can see is like 1 to 2% of the whole spectrum of light that our body is tuned to naturally. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

So we only know 1 to 2% of light.

[Sean]

That's the only amount of visible light that comes from the sun. And even the visible light, red, yellow, green, blue, all of those colors have an effect on our biology. And all of the colors we can't see have an effect on our biology. So ultraviolet can't see it. Infrared. But we know they have an impact, right? Because ultraviolet can cause us to get a tan or a sunburn. Totally invisible. And there's spectrums way beyond those that we probably don't even know about because we can't measure them yet.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't realize how quite powerful light was until I got a red light sauna.

[Sean]

So red light is one of the, like, we're here under these crazy studio lights, right? And so I like to say that we're a light poisoned culture. We're actually, I, I, as far as I know, I invented this term called weapons of mass illumination because all these lights that we are under all the time, like, you can't technically opt out of these lights other than like putting on these crazy blue light blocking glasses, right? But what we're missing under these lights, once we switched everything to red and infrared. I'm sorry, Once we switched everything to LED lights, we lost red and infrared from our spectrum indoors. And we don't have any ultraviolet indoors. So like, why do red light saunas and why do red and infrared light panels have Such a benefit to where, like, everybody in the NBA is using them. Every trainer in the NFL wants their players using red light panels as well. Because we're missing those frequencies. They have a huge impact on our body. And what they do is they mitigate all this blue light that we're under all day long. And so a lot of the benefit is we're missing these frequencies. So we're getting this, like, hammer of blue light hitting us all day long. And that causes free radicals in the body. And free radicals are fine. Like they're a signal. They're. There's blue light in the sky, but then there's red and infrared to mitigate that. And inside, we never get that mitigation. So getting under a red light panel or a red light sauna or infrared sauna, you're mitigating, like, all that blue light toxicity that we're exposed to all day long.

[Podcast Host]

That makes so much sense why I feel it noticeably, because I'm under these lights six hours a day, two, three days a week. And then when I get home and hit the red lights on, I feel incredible.

[Sean]

I mean, these lights are pretty powerful blue light spectrum. So if you had a spectrometer and you measure, like, this huge spike of blue light causing, like, some people now are using, they call it sunscreen, but it's actually blue light screen. So they make like a cosmetic or a sunscreen product just for blue light. Because what they're showing is the blue light alone can cause something called melasma, which is like a color change in the skin, a pigmentation of the skin caused not from sun damage, but from so much blue light that we're around.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

So, like, the. The best thing you could do, like an environment like this is add infrared. Cause it's invisible. So, like, infrared's totally missing from these lights, but it's invisible. So it's not gonna mess with your studio lighting at all. And it's going to be part of the mitigation of all this blue light that you're on.

[Podcast Host]

That is crazy. So if you're under the wrong lights all day, it could really be damaging to the body.

[Sean]

I mean, you hear people like Dr. Tom Cowan, and they're like, all these people are getting cancer and they're getting sick. And most people are like, how can we fix it with pills? But the first question that you ask is, if you had an aquarium and the fish get sick, it's like, who put poison in the water? Well, if we're light poisoned from all this blue light, like, yes, it's causing a huge problem in our society from this one wavelength of light that we get without anything else backing it up. So outdoors in nature, our biology is tuned to light. So all the colors of light are red through different aspects of our biology. So like blue light and even ultraviolet light are read through our eye. Outdoors, our body can read how much blue light there is. And then when it sees the blue light, it destroys melatonin in the body. And melatonin is what helps us sleep and get the benefits of sleep. So at night, when we're sleeping, this melatonin is a conductor of 10 additional hormones in the body, and it's the master antioxidant. So if you think about, like, we're exposed to fluoride and we're exposed to EMF and we're exposed to all sorts of poisons from glyphosate. Like, what's cleaning those up? It's antioxidants like melatonin, which is the most potent antioxidant known to man. And we're destroying it under all these blue lights.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. I didn't know melatonin was an antioxidant.

[Sean]

It is. It is an anti cancer. It cleans up damaged cells, so it allows us to repair and rejuvenate when we sleep. And it is literally the most potent antioxidant that we know about.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy. Wow.

[Sean]

It's huge.

[Podcast Host]

We're also on our phone eight hours a day on average, so that's probably not helping.

[Sean]

The phone between, as you're well aware, the electromagnetic frequency from the microwave radiation, but also the phones have a lot of flicker from the LED diodes. So what people have realized is we have swapped out traditional lighting, which would have been firelight and then halogen and incandescent somewhat, but not exactly mimic, a little bit more like firelight. These LEDs are a completely alien spectrum. So I, I call it like als, which I know is probably like an acronym for a disease, but alien light spectrum. So all day long we're under this alien light spectrum where we get these different spikes of light that the body is not used to seeing and being under all day long. And because our body is literally tuned to the sun, so we know about circadian rhythm. So I know you've heard of, like, how important circadian rhythm is. And it's really just like a 24 hour cycle that the body goes through. It's built into our biology and it sets what we're hungry for, the foods we crave, whether we gain weight and whether we get good sleep or not. And that is set by light and dark, specifically by blue light and darkness. So when we see blue light, like from the phone, which is an LED device, so are all your devices at home, whether it's your television, your tablets, the overhead lights, all those are LED lights. They all have a ridiculously high amount of blue light. And that is changing, changing your circadian rhythm every single time you see it. Darkness is the only thing that starts the repair. So when we see morning sunlight, we start our circadian rhythm for the day and we set our melatonin clock to give us that master antioxidant at night. And when we see darkness, we start the repair function of melatonin. But because our culture, I call the weapons of mass illumination, we never turn out the lights. It is always light. Whether you've got LED chargers, whether it's past sunset and you want to have the television on or you want to cook dinner at, know, 9 o' clock at night, we can all do that nowadays. And that's stopping that darkness cycle from completing our circadian rhythm to the point where we do the repair and rejuvenation.

[Podcast Host]

Jeez, light poisoning. I'm. I'm going to start using that term.

[Sean]

It's legit. Like, especially these phones, right? Because we, we not only keep them on us 24 7, but we sleep with them too. And so, like, first thing you do in the morning, or even if it's two in the morning and you can't sleep, you turn that phone on. And I mean, like, even the new iPhone, it's just, it is blasting you with so much blue light. And then people think like, oh, I can dim the brightness. You're not changing the spectrum on your phone. It's still a ton of blue light, even though you dim it. And the iPhones used pulse wave modulation. It's just basically means like when you dim your iPhone, it flickers more, which causes stress in the brain, which then makes it so you can't sleep as well anyway.

[Podcast Host]

Wow, that's crazy. Get this thing out of your bedroom, guys.

[Sean]

You know what? Even if you keep your phone in your bedroom, you can do that, but don't look at your phone as the first thing you do. So, like, put it on airplane mode. And then it can still be your alarm clock. It will still work. People kind of freak out. They're like, if I put my phone in airplane mode, it can't work as an alarm. It totally works as an alarm in airplane mode. It doesn't do anything as long as.

[Podcast Host]

You have WI fi, right?

[Sean]

You don't need it? No. Oh, you don't even, don't even need that. You don't need. You don't need Bluetooth, you don't need WI Fi, and you do not need your cell service on whatsoever. Your alarm on your phone will still work. You won't get a phone call, but your alarm to wake you up still works fine. And the other thing I always tell people is either keep a pair of blue light blocking glasses next to your bed when you actually look at your phone, because as soon as you blast yourself with blue light at 2 in the morning, that's gonna wake you up and it can stop your melatonin production for up to four more hours, which might be as much as you're gonna sleep.

[Podcast Host]

That's nuts.

[Sean]

So either put on a pair of blue light blocking glasses and look at your phone or just get like a battery powered red LED clock that you can put in your bedroom because the red is not going to stop your melatonin. It's battery powered. So there's no EMF from the electricity, no magnetic field from the electric field, from the electricity going into it. And then you don't have to turn your phone on to see what time it is.

[Podcast Host]

I just went to the eye doctor. They actually make contacts that block blue light now too.

[Sean]

Really?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

What about ultraviolet light in the contacts?

[Podcast Host]

I'll find out. I'm not sure.

[Sean]

So the one thing that I always encourage people to check with their contacts is finding, find out if they block ultraviolet light, because most contacts by default. And as far as I'm aware, there's two brands that I don't know the name of of contacts that don't block ultraviolet light. So when we go outside, we need ultraviolet light because our body reads the time of the day, the time of the year, and how much UV is in the sun to know how much melanin to make on our skin to protect ourselves. So when you block all the UV light, like with glasses, contacts, or sunglasses, your brain doesn't read how much UV there is and we can get sunburned faster. But also reading the time of the year helps us determine, like when should we be gaining or losing weight, when should we be fertile? So we have a lot of people with infertility issues. A lot of that is from covering themselves up from the sunlight and only operating in an alien spectrum where we spend 95% of our time indoors and 5% of our time, oddly enough, is driving time, and that's counted as outdoor time. Which I would argue most people are not keeping their windows and sunroof.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I wouldn't consider that outdoor time at all.

[Sean]

No. So if you can look at your contacts and find a contact maker that can put the blue light coating in, but if they cannot put a UV coating in.

[Podcast Host]

Not put it in.

[Sean]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Sean]

It's really important to get ultraviolet light and dawn so like sunrise sunlight in our eyes because it sets a melatonin clock for 16 hours later. So if you want to produce melatonin at night when you go to sleep, the first thing you want to do when you get up is not grab your phone and look at it, but to get outside and see the Natural sunlight within 30 minutes of dawn would be ideal. But if you get up at noon because you slept really late, then getting outside first thing sets that melatonin clock for 16 hours later, which means it could be 4 in the morning before your body starts to release melatonin based on when you get outside. And if you've got contacts, glasses, or sunglasses on, you don't read the signals the same way and the clocks get totally confused.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I don't think I'll ever wear sunglasses again.

[Sean]

Sunglasses, you know. So this is really interesting. I learned this recently.

[Podcast Host]

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[Sean]

Sunglasses were invented in the 1920s.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

They were invented for movie stars under studio lighting like these lights. So the lighting for movie stars was so bright and there were no such thing as sunglasses. So their eyes were used to native sunlight. And when they Came indoors, they were used to dim light or firelight, and these studio lights were so bright they started wearing sunglasses. So this really smart guy, his name was Sam Foster, he's like, if everyone wants to look like a movie star, I'm going to make sunglasses for everybody. So sunglasses were never invented for health or even for outdoors. They were invented for movie stars indoors and then for all the normal people to look like movie stars.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. I never knew that they were totally. So it's purely an aesthetic thing, for sure.

[Sean]

Now, that's not to say, like, if you're skiing and you're on snow all day long or you're on the water all day that you might need to protect your eyes from some uv. I wouldn't wear them all the time on the water, but that might be the only time I would say, like, you might want to wear sunglasses to protect your eyes. But otherwise, like, we talk about, you know, Bill Gates and all these. And Harvard University have these plans to dim the sun and like, oh, my gosh, that might be really bad if we dim the sun. Like, what happens to the plants and the animals and the humans if we dim sunlight? It can't be good. Well, that's what we're doing when we put sunglasses on is we're dimming the sunlight that's coming into our own body. And when we see so much dim light, what happens is we start craving carbohydrates and then we put on more weight. So there's all these unintended consequences that's happening when people put on sunglasses, when in fact, their eyes are sensitive to the sun because they're indoors for 95% of the time. And when they're outdoors, they're wearing sunglasses.

[Podcast Host]

Why is it whenever I see Bill Gates name lately, it's something with a weird health thing. Like, I didn't even know he was doing that, but it's just like, why now he's trying to make vegan meat or whatever too.

[Sean]

Yeah, Lab grown meat.

[Podcast Host]

Butter. Vegan butter.

[Sean]

I see all these legal notices come through my desk, and I do a lot with corporate law and my main job, and I see a ton of stuff on lab grown meat where it's being approved and not approved and the names they're allowed to use. And in some cases, they can call it, like, cultured chicken. So you think, like, that sounds really good, but cultured chicken means it was grown in a lab.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And so trying to figure out, like, what do we name some of these alternative meats is really important because somebody that doesn't want to eat lab grown meat. Might just go to the store and grab something that has the word chicken on it. And it's not even real meat.

[Podcast Host]

How are they making those meats though?

[Sean]

They're grown from cell lines. So they culture cell lines from some sort of either animal or stem cell and then they have a method to grow from those original cell lines, other compounds. So like, if you've ever heard of people in the vaccine space. Right. That they use these immortal genes, they're like these cancer genes from one lady that they grow something that goes into the vaccine from those cancer genes from one lady originally.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Sean]

They don't use the human genes or the human cells themselves, but they use those cells to produce a protein that goes into a vaccine. We can do the same thing. Not we, someone else can do the same thing with other animal cells where they can culture those cells to grow specific proteins that you can then blow up into actual meats that are probably made from something like bacterias and yeasts, but they use the right proteins to taste like a chicken or a beef.

[Podcast Host]

Have you tried it?

[Sean]

I have not. Nor will I in the future.

[Podcast Host]

Sounds sketchy to me. I don't know.

[Sean]

You know, like with all that new stuff, it's like, do you want to be the first person to experiment?

[Podcast Host]

No, I'm not getting neuralink on myself.

[Sean]

Oh my gosh. Right. Yet no long term studies yet.

[Podcast Host]

No long term studies. Maybe in 30 years.

[Sean]

Yeah. I mean, when people have gone through enough time that you're like, okay, are these things safe? What are the long term consequences? I mean, it's just like LED lights. Like, are the LED lights all around us a science experiment? Essentially, because we've never lived under such an alien spectrum.

[Podcast Host]

We don't know the long term effects yet.

[Sean]

We don't know for all of human history, what have we seen at night? Firelight and moonlight or darkness. Nothing else. There's nothing that we've seen until the incandescent when we electrified the light bulb back in the early 1900s. And then by 1950, we had electrified and lit up almost everybody's home in the U.S. so only since about 1950, 1960, have we even had indoor lighting from electric light bulbs. And now we changed every one of those electric light bulbs when we banned incandescents to LEDs with these completely alien spectrums that were never intended to heal us. They are not intended to be healthy. They are intended to allow us to work longer into the night so factory owners could run three shifts so they were intended for us to see, so we could do a task. Never intended to help us with health. And in fact, they are destroying our health the more that we're under them.

[Podcast Host]

So you can't buy into incandescent anymore.

[Sean]

So they were banned for a short time based on the US Federal government, and now there is no longer a ban on incandescent, but they are almost impossible to buy. So we were at a conference in Salt Lake City last week, and I had a gentleman come up to our booth, and he said, where do I get incandescents? Because he claimed that he would go to every garage sale ever and just buy every incandescent he could see because there's nowhere to buy them now. Wow. So they might not even be illegal anymore, but you cannot find them.

[Podcast Host]

So the manufacturers stop making them.

[Sean]

They stopped making them. As far as I can tell, they don't make them in the US So if you can find a source overseas where you can find incandescents, they're still available, but it is not easy to get your hands on them.

[Podcast Host]

Go on Alibaba when I get home.

[Sean]

Exactly. So they'll make them for you for sure. You have to be careful when you go on Alibaba or even AliExpress. Right?

[Podcast Host]

A lot of scams.

[Sean]

Yeah, there's a lot of scams, and they'll say Edison incandescent bulbs, but they'll be led, so you really have to look to make sure you're actually getting a real incandescent. And another story that someone told me is they went into these catacombs under New York City where they keep, like, really wealthy people's remains. For hundreds of years. They've kept them in these underground crypts, and they're using an edison bulb from 100 years ago to light these crypts. And it has never gone out. It's the same bulb. So we think, like, Edison bulbs don't last very long, but that's because the ones we typically buy at the store are made to not last very long. And same with the LEDs. But even an Edison bulb can be low energy, like an LED, and last for 100 years.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Sean]

So according to what's under New York City in the catacombs, it is possible to run an Edison bulb almost forever.

[Podcast Host]

That is nuts.

[Sean]

It's amazing because there's all this technology out there that we could be using that's not as altered a spectrum. It almost makes you wonder, like, why are we using these LEDs that are such an alien spectrum? And why did we put Them in. I mean, everywhere, every day. Yes.

[Podcast Host]

They only last, like, three months over. Then you got to replace them.

[Sean]

Exactly. And it's over the whole world. Like, it doesn't matter if you're in Europe, if you're in the airplane, if you're at home, if you're at the gym. It's all the same bulbs now. And another thing that people don't know about those bulbs that I think is fascinating. I don't know if other people do, but they emit microwave radiation.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Sean]

So it's like, since when does LED bulb emit microwave radiation? But if you look at every LED bulb package, it will say, fcc certified. That's the Federal Communications Commission. Why do they have to be certified to meet FCC standards? Because they give off microwave radiation from an LED bulb, and it could interfere with pacemakers that are installed in the body.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Sean]

Most people have no idea that when they put these LEDs everywhere in their home, if they're sensitive to EMF, that they're creating more EMF from the bulbs themselves.

[Podcast Host]

That is nuts. I literally got rid of my microwave a couple years ago. I didn't even think about light bulbs emitting microwaves.

[Sean]

Yeah. Most people have never heard of that, but you can look it up. And each bulb has to be certified to not emit a certain microwave frequency that interferes with things like pacemakers. So it's totally something that people are unaware of. And I think, like, you put these LED bulbs right by your head and by your night light, Right. And they're just emitting sometimes this microwave energy that you need to at least be aware of that. The other thing that I've been told with the LED bulbs is it's really easy to embed, like cameras, but also use the microwave frequency for communications. So if you know the frequencies that are being emitted by LEDs, you can utilize those, like the WI FI router in your house to visualize what's inside of your home. So if you've ever seen, like, renderings of somebody's WI FI router showing them what the inside of a home looks like just from the WI FI router itself, that is something that's possible. So I always at least tell people, if you have a WI FI router and you use WI fi turn it.

[Podcast Host]

Off when you go to sleep, that is nuts. You can know what someone's house looks.

[Sean]

Like just from the light that is from the. Because the WI fi is a microwave radiation signal, which most people don't know this. It's the same signal as your Microwave. So if you open up your microwave oven somewhere inside your door, or maybe on the back your microwave, but often it's inside the door, there's a sticker, and it tells you the frequency your microwave runs at. It's 2.45 gigahertz. And that's just the pulse wave frequency that those microwaves come out at. If you look on the back of your WI fi router, it also states 2.45 GHz. It's the exact same as your microwave oven. And so it's the same frequency, it's just lower intensity. So it's kind of like when you dehydrate something in your microwave. If you cook a steak in your microwave and it gets dehydrated, this is a famous quote from like, Dr. Jack Cruz. You're basically dehydrating your cells all day long with a WI fi router. And that that microwave radiation is a light. So as we talked about full spectrum sunlight, there are microwaves that come off the sun. It's just that those microwaves in the frequency that our cell phones and our WI fi run at, they never reach the earth. So in your home, when you put in that WI fi, it is a light. And that light, if somebody taps it appropriately, can be utilized to visualize what's in the rooms of your home. Which is insane to me. Like, people can spy on you not only from, from the camera on your phone or the Alexa that you install, but also just your WI fi.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I was going to say that's definitely being weaponized. I bet.

[Sean]

I can only imagine it will come out later because it's just like the cell phones when now it seems like everybody knows you should cover your cell phone camera because anybody can utilize that camera without you knowing that it's on. And then they can download that data into an app that's active once you reconnect to the Internet. And now I think what will come out later is a lot of these WI FI routers are being used to map people's homes for whatever reason. Maybe it's a good reason, maybe it's not. But if you don't want that happening, maybe like, shut your WI FI router off when you sleep. And you'll probably sleep better anyway.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you probably will. Between the WiFi and the 5G towers next to your house and the light.

[Sean]

Pollution, and hopefully you're not living next to a 5G tower. But the good thing about 5G is it, it doesn't penetrate most homes. It can move through glass, but if it's true 5G, which I would say most of the 5G towers that are installed today are not using true 5G.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Sean]

They're using 4G LTE advanced, which can move through your home and it goes through walls. But 5G is such an incredibly strong directed beam of energy that the way that it, it runs, it doesn't pass through solid walls, it'll pass through windows. And if you have a device like your cell phone that you're calling for 5G to come to your cell phone through a window, it'll go to your cell phone and then it can go throughout your house to other devices.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

But it won't just pass through like a normal wall.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, so it's not as strong as 4G.

[Sean]

It is more powerful in terms of the energy that that passes through you when it goes through your body. But because of the wavelength, it's not able to penetrate walls as easily as 4. So 4G is a lower energy EMF, a lower energy microwave, but it can pass through walls and it's always on. 5G is not always on. So true 5G is only turned on when your phone calls for it to be pulled pulsed towards your phone. 4G LTE is always on and it passes through walls. So I would say like, even though 4G is not as intense as 5G, it might be more dangerous because A, it's always on and B, it's passing through all the walls of your house all the time.

[Podcast Host]

That is interesting. When did you come out with the book? Was it recently?

[Sean]

So this book is a kind of like a rewrite of what I made earlier. So earlier I wrote the first version of the book, so maybe three years ago. And so this version just came out, the beginning of this year.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Sean]

And it's basically the ketogenic hibernation diet. So the whole book is about how we have lost winter in our society. So not only do we not turn out the lights, right, we keep the lights on 24 7. Especially here in Vegas. Yeah, but in your home, when the sun sets, it could be 4:30. In Wisconsin, where I live, when the sun sets, we're not going to bed at 4:30. So in the winter when the sun sets early and we turn all the lights on, we start having a circadian mismatch which causes problems in the body. In addition, we live at room temperature all year round. All year round it's like 72 degrees. So your car, your home, the gym, work, wherever you are is 72. And if we're 95% of our time now indoors, we never experience a temperature fluctuation in our body, which means our body constantly thinks that it's summer. And by turning lights on after sunset, we think it's the long days towards the end of summer. And we should be storing fat and craving sugar for a coming winter. But winter never comes, so we never get a break from eating carbohydrates, from craving sugars, and from having the lights on. And that can cause a lot of chaos in the body. So my whole book is written about people that live in a northern climate. How can we actually allow winter to. To come in to our bodies? By getting cold once in a while. By eating a ketogenic diet. Not all the time, but just for a short time in the winter, when carbohydrates wouldn't normally be available, and by sleeping more in the winter than you would in the summer. And the theory is that you can reverse a lot of things that you've done to yourself during the summertime.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Sean]

Including eating a ton of sugars that can lead to pre diabetes. If you're getting cold and you're not eating a bunch of carbohydrates and you're sleeping more, maybe you can reverse all those things. Things in the winter.

[Podcast Host]

You're supposed to sleep more in the winter, though.

[Sean]

I honestly think that if you look at all of our history, so in 1910, men and women slept 500 hours more a year than they do today.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And that's because we have lights on all the time. And so those lights cause our cortisol to be higher. Anytime we turn on light with this huge spike of blue, we're increasing cortisol and destroying melatonin, so we get more stressed, so we're not as tired, so we stay up longer. And then we feel like we're a night owl and we need to do more work. But in fact, like every study shows, there's no such thing as a night owl for a man or a woman, for an owl, a rat or a mouse. They do have nocturnal biology. We don't. So anytime we act as if we're night owls and stay up long into the night, there's a cost to our biology. And in winter, it gets darker earlier, especially if you live solid somewhat north of the equator. And likely our ancestors, as we've seen with the study on how many hours they slept in 1910, we would sleep more in the winter because it's just darker for longer. And if we sleep more in winter, we're producing more melatonin. And more. Melatonin is the master anti antioxidant, and I call it the master anti cancer hormone as well, because it's cleaning up damaged cells while we sleep. So should we sleep more in winter? Absolutely. Does it, you know, does it make it easy in a modern society to sleep more in winter? Probably not, but you can do it. I mean, we sleep on average six to seven hours in the summer, and at least my wife and I do. And in the winter, we sleep between 8 to 12 hours a night.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Sean]

There's a way to do it.

[Podcast Host]

12 hours. That's impressive.

[Sean]

So there's a book called lights out by T.S. wiley, and she studied this impact of artificial light at night on men and women and how much you crave sugar and carbs. And her contention is that you should sleep as much as possible in the winter without getting fired or divorced. So if you can sleep as much as you can without doing those two things, that's what you're supposed to do in the winter.

[Podcast Host]

12 is impressive. You got to be taking melatonin, Right?

[Sean]

I know. So here's the thing. So melatonin is a billion dollar industry, right? And the reason it's a billion dollar industry is because we've totally messed up our light environment. So you can produce your own melatonin if you're not exposed to so much blue light after dark. And after dark in the winter is a much longer period of time, which means you can produce way more melatonin in the winter, naturally. So you're. If you do this naturally by blocking the blue light at night, or at least having darkness before you go to sleep for at least two hours before you go to bed. But ideally, for as long as it's dark out, you will produce way more melatonin, which I'll let you sleep a lot longer.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. I need to get those blackout curtains for my bedroom.

[Sean]

Blackout curtains are key. Having a primal sleeping environment, so cold, dark, and no emf like those are the main criteria if you want to get better sleep. And then making sure that you're not exposed to too much light before sleep, because that's going to increase your stress and destroy the melatonin, which repairs you when you sleep.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And you're not supposed to eat right before. Right.

[Sean]

There's been quite a large number of studies that show that people that eat after dark, not even right before bed, but people that eat after dark, gain significantly more weight than people that only eat during the light hours of the day. So, a, you don't want to be Shoving a bunch of energy and calories into your cells. When they're trying to sleep, they're trying to use the energy to rejuvenate and repair while you sleep. And if you just ate a big meal now, they have to totally change what it is that they're doing, and you lose all that time to rejuvenate and repair. There's actually a study recently, I think it was in 2014, that had two different sets of mice, and one set of mice had a certain amount of food. So they tracked the calories they ate and a certain amount of exercise. They tracked how many calories they expended. The second set of mice, same thing. They fed them the exact number of calories as the first set and had them exercise the exact same amount. So same calories in, same calories out. One set of mice was exposed to 24 hours a day of light, and one set of mice had 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. The mice that had 24 hours a day of light were obese, and the mice that had 12 hours a day of darkness were normal weight. Really the only difference was the light, not how much they ate and not how much they exercised.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Sean]

So light is a drug. And the amount of light that you get in your body of the wrong type can absolutely dictate how much weight you gain, what food you crave, and what weight your body wants to keep.

[Podcast Host]

It's starting to add up for me. I used to always think it was the food system, but when you see photos of people on the beach in the 60s, 70s, no one was overweight.

[Sean]

There's a lot of factors. Right. So like light. Back then, they didn't have any LEDs. Right. They get. Got more sleep than we did, so they had more melatonin around. They were mostly. I don't know how they ate their meals, but most people had family dinners and did things together, together during the light hours and did sleep a lot more when it was dark. The food system was better back then because, like, I mean, in 1950, you didn't have to have organic because everything was organic. They just didn't use the same pesticides and herbicides that they do now because they didn't exist. So there are a lot of things that are against us now from our air, our water, our food supply, and our lighting. I mean, you got to really take care of yourself a little bit differently now than you had to in the past.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. I'm sure your work censored all over the place.

[Sean]

So one of the Things that I find odd is a place where I'm censored that I shouldn't be is in the community that researches food and exercise.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Sean]

So, like these food and exercise scientists and researchers, they don't want to look at light because if light can act as a drug, then it invalidates all of their studies.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

On diet and exercise, they don't factor it in. They don't factor it in. Which means if you're not factoring in light. And we know that it acts as a drug because the. The Johns Hopkins study on those mice proved that it acts as a drug and it can cause you to become obese from the light. What light environment are their test animals under when they're testing food and exercise? So not only there we were recording a podcast back in late 2020, and Facebook totally just like, shut off the sound.

[Podcast Host]

That was peak censorship too.

[Sean]

It's 2020 was. I had no idea it said it actually, Facebook said that we were playing music that was copyrighted, but we were just having a conversation like this. No music turned on. So it's been interesting.

[Podcast Host]

That was a rough year, man. You brought up vaccines, you brought up anything controversial in the health industry, you were getting censored.

[Sean]

Totally. And it's been hard for us to recover. Even to this day. Some of our stuff is still shadow banned to where they don't show it to as many people.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And I think if you're telling people about natural things, things like even on YouTube, you're not allowed to talk about sunlight being able to heal anything.

[Podcast Host]

No way.

[Sean]

You can't say that on YouTube. They will either bury or ban your video. And we've had banned videos on YouTube for things that were totally natural. And they just. I don't. I don't know why either. They think that there's not enough data. But there have been numerous studies, including, like in Sweden, the Karolinska Institute, super famous Swedish institute, Oxford University, and I think it was Loma Linda University in the US have all done studies that show that people that are outside the most live the longest. And that's sunlight healing people, essentially. But you can't say that on YouTube.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you could say nature's healing, but once you mentioned sunlight for some reason.

[Sean]

Yeah. And there's studies that prove it. So I'm not quite certain why that policy came about on YouTube, but sunlight is legit and our body is uses it because in 2017, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to three scientists who they say discovered, although it's been known for decades that the circadian rhythm based on light has everything to do with our health. That was the Nobel Prize in medicine. It's not like information that's like conspiracy whatsoever.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting. What do you think of Brian Johnson's sunlight strategy?

[Sean]

I think I would not be following Brian Johnson sunlight strategy. So that dude is afraid of the sun.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

And. And every study that's been done shows that the more sun you have, the less you die from all causes. Like all causes. So if those studies are showing that, I'm not quite certain why he's so afraid of the sun. It seems like you'd want more sun. And even if you're not getting direct sunlight, just being outdoors in the shade gives you an intense benefit from the sun, even without being directly in it. So his strategy of covering up, he's. He uses chemicals to cover up. I think you should always cover up with clothes, not chemicals if you're going to cover up. Right. But I mean, he's using umbrellas, he's doing all sorts of things to never get in the sun. And I just think that's not a very well thought out strategy.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, he uses sunscreen. Granted it is mineral based, which is probably the one to use if you're going to use it. Right. But I'm not a fan of most sunscreens.

[Sean]

I mean, you're again, you're covering up with chemicals, not clothing. You can cover up with clothing just fine and it blocks the sun. Same with a hat if you want to do that, versus chemicals. And just like what we were putting in our water, like these PFAS chemicals per fluoro, alcohol substances. Right. We put PFAS in the water and for 30 years they were fine, like nobody cared. We were all drinking it and now it's a toxin and it's a known toxin and they had to remove it from all the water. So same with sunscreen. You're putting these chemicals on your body that today they don't know if they're safe or not. They think they are, but tomorrow they might find a chemical in there and say, oh, all that stuff you put on your body forever, it's not so safe. So my first thing is, yes, if you're going to use something to block the sun, clothing first before chemicals and then the mineral based sunscreens make a huge deal of sense versus chemical based sunscreens.

[Podcast Host]

What do you think of the GLP1 shots? A lot of people are taking those now. Right.

[Sean]

So people are microdosing them. People are full on taking the GLP1 shot. And essentially there's a couple things that I'm seeing. One is like you're now a laboratory experiment because there's no long term studies on what happens when you stop taking it. And it seems like people that stop taking it have a lot of issues. And so are you now on this drug forever and what are the long term consequences of being on this forever? I just don't really think we know. What we do know is that people that use the GLP1 shots, they're losing weight, but 35% of the weight they lose is muscle mass. And so people that are probably, this may not be true for everybody, but people that are probably not moving their body and working out enough already are now losing more muscle mass. That's not a good combination for the future. So to me, I think there's a lot of unknowns in the biohacking community. People are microdosing GLP1 and they say it's like a neuro benefit. So a benefit to your brain? Yeah, honestly, like you could probably take creatine or you could get out in the sun in the sunlight. So between sunlight and creatine or just like physical activity, I, and I honestly think creatine gives you all the same benefits that probably GLP1 does. And it's way safer and way more and cheaper. Way cheaper. You don't have to inject yourself. You just pour some in your water or your coffee and it's, it's well studied. People have been using creatine for decades.

[Podcast Host]

That was my whole thing with the peptide stuff. Why am I going to put a needle in myself when there's been healthy people throughout history that have never done that?

[Sean]

All of those peptides that you can inject yourself with, your body can make inherently. So if you're getting all the right things that your body needs, you can make all those peptides yourself. We're often doing things to overcome, like modern society, because our modern society causes chaos in our body, because we set it up not to help our health, we set it up for convenience.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Sean]

And the more convenience we have then the more heroics we have to go to, to put these foreign things into our body. But if we went back to nature, sunlight, simple things like creatine, the right type of water, eating right, like not overeating, getting enough sleep, you can make all of those things and then you don't need to inject yourself with anything.

[Podcast Host]

Everyone wants a quick fix, right?

[Sean]

I mean everyone wants a silver bullet. And that's, that's what I saw So I. I've been in the biohacking space since 2009.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And I trained with Dave Asprey back in 2015 in the first class of bulletproof coaches. And so I've been studying this stuff for a long time. And in that community, there's all these silver bullets, and people, like, keep chasing after the next supplement, the next drug, the next tech. And if any of them did what they claim, you wouldn't have to chase the next one. But all of them, I truly think, can be more beneficial if you first do the free, natural things that your body needs. And then if you still need more, those things are way more powerful.

[Podcast Host]

Agreed. Yeah. There's always some magic supplement, right? Shilajit or Tongkat Ali or something, for sure.

[Sean]

I mean, like, you go to the Himalayas, right, and you scrape some mold off of a rock and you make the shilajit, and it's super sticky and tari. But, like, did our ancestors have to, like, find. Find an imported mold off of a Himalayan rock, right, to be healthy? They didn't. So, like, why do we need that? Like, I can tell, like, right. Fulvic minerals are probably super beneficial, but if you just ate, like, natural fruit that already took hard minerals from the ground, inorganic minerals and made them bioavailable, could you just eat, like, a pear from your backyard?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sean]

Maybe that's healthier than Sheilajit from Nepal.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure the biohacking space has changed a lot since you first got into it in 09.

[Sean]

Huge. I mean, there were almost no people that have heard of it back then. No one had heard of light, no one had heard of biohacking. Ketogenic diet was, like, super fringe and dangerous. I mean, my mom worked in the medical field, and all the doctors were like, you can't eat ketogenic. It's going to kill you.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And, like, 10 years later, all the doctors are eating a ketogenic diet and saying it's, like, the best thing ever.

[Podcast Host]

I remember, like, when I was a kid, like, fasting was, like, scary. You know what I mean? I was, like, scared to fast. Yeah.

[Sean]

I mean, they tell you, like, you have to eat, right? You have to eat three meals a day and don't ever be hungry, because that's going to be really bad for you and you might die.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

And it feels like you're going to die if you have. If you're used to eating meals all the time, and then suddenly you don't. And so the benefits of, like, literally just not eating for a Short period of time. And to this day, like we went from people being afraid of fasting, like all of us, the way we grew up to now people are dry fasting for like five to seven days. That's no water, no food.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Sean]

It's insane. Like you wouldn't have thought people could have gone. They always say, like, you can only go three days without water. These guys are dry fasting for seven days. That's nuts. Like how, how is that possible? From what we were told. We were told you would be dead.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

And so I think we're learning way more about the human body, how resilient it is, but also that we need to experience extremes. Whether it's, we need to be cold once in a while, we need to allow ourselves to be hot once in a while because we can adapt to the heat. We need to allow ourselves to be flexible, we need to eat once in a while and have great big meals and we need to not eat once in a while. Like all of these things are necessary for us to be flexible as humans. And when we constantly do the same thing all the time, the same number of calories every day, the same temperature every day, all year round, the lights are on all day. The body doesn't want that constant coddling. It, it needs some fluctuation.

[Podcast Host]

Have you dry fasted before?

[Sean]

I mean when I sleep. So I have never tried dry fasting for even a whole day. I've done water fasting for up to three to four days, but I have not personally attempted dry fast.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I've done the water one. Dry one scares me.

[Sean]

You haven't done a dry fast?

[Podcast Host]

No, I've done water for three days.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And I felt really good after.

[Sean]

I think after like day two, I typically start feeling really good. Day one is sometimes the hardest. So I try to like start my fasts at dinner. So most people are even intermittent fasting. If you're only intermittent fasting for 18 hours a day or less, most people try to do it at breakfast and that might be the wrong meal to skip. Even from a circadian rhythm standpoint and a weight standpoint and like a hormone standpoint, it's better to eat breakfast. So what I find is I'll eat breakfast and lunch and then I'll skip dinner and start my fast at dinner. Whether it's intermittent fast or a multi day fast.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Sean]

And then I feel like on my last day of fasting I get to eat dinner and so I don't have to wait till breakfast the next day. It just makes psychologically it makes it seem easier.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's very smart.

[Sean]

How come you haven't done a dry fast before?

[Podcast Host]

I'm a little scared of it and I'm also pre. I hit the sauna every day, so I feel like it'd be even tougher because of that.

[Sean]

Yeah, you may not want to be signing.

[Podcast Host]

There was actually like rest in peace. I don't know if you saw this. A 24 year old died last week in a sauna.

[Sean]

I did not see it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it was really sad.

[Sean]

Really.

[Podcast Host]

In Miami.

[Sean]

Did they say why?

[Podcast Host]

No, but he was like a pretty known influencer, so. Wow.

[Sean]

That.

[Podcast Host]

That like me up. Honestly, I didn't even think that was a possibility in asana.

[Sean]

Yeah, I mean you gotta. If you're gonna. I don't encourage people to dry fast. I know lots of people that have dry fasted and they seem super successful with it. I had never even heard of it till three or four years ago. I think you need to be really careful if you're gonna dry fast because it's. I mean it's literally no hydration even.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Like I'm playing basketball. I'm like filming all day under bright lights.

[Sean]

No, you'd want to be meditating all day and just stay.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Staying outdoors.

[Podcast Host]

I am going to do a darkness retreat. Have you seen those?

[Sean]

I've heard of.

[Podcast Host]

You're in a cave for a couple days.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I'm going to do that next year.

[Sean]

Did you learn about from as Dave Asprey? I know he's done something.

[Podcast Host]

No, it came up on my Instagram. I don't know whose post it was, but. Did Dave do it?

[Sean]

He did a. A set where he sat in a cave for a number of days.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Sean]

This was before he did the bulletproof anything when he was trying to figure out all his own stuff. He was in a cave for I think he says like five days.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

Just trying to figure all his stuff out and, and see what benefit it was. What. What do you think is going to be the benefit of a darkness?

[Podcast Host]

I want to reset my dopamine system. But now with what you're saying with the whole light stuff could be additional benefits.

[Sean]

You know, you get dopamine from being in the sunlight and so you do. You definitely do. And so wearing sunglasses can. Can dim your dopamine response. So then you crave more dopamine from your phone, from all your social media. Right. Like you want those dopamine hits which the phone. There. There are these patents. Anybody can look these up. And so anytime there's a public patent, I get a little questionable on whether they're real. But these patents are public under the name Hendrickus Luce. And they talk about how to use screens for mind control. Like that's literally the name of the patent is like mind control through screen use. And they were done, I think, in the late 90s to early 2000s. So whether Hendrickus Loose is a made up name or not, they talk about how to manipulate your neurotransmitters like dopamine through screen use. And so all these people with screens in front of us all the time, we've got just an altered dopamine system. And if we're wearing sunglasses outside, we crave more dopamine. So when we don't wear sunglasses, we get natural sunlight. We do get more dopamine hits by being addicted essentially to the sunlight. So like something like a darkness retreat, resetting dopamine. I mean, anytime you're off a device for multiple days, I think that's a huge, huge dopamine.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Not only that, I just had the founder of Pernuvo on. Are you familiar with that company?

[Sean]

I am not.

[Podcast Host]

They do the full body MRIs. Oh, yeah. But anyways, he was saying there's a rapid aging of the spine going on right now, and he thinks it's linked to the phone because we're just like hunched over on our phones all day.

[Sean]

So it's based on body posture.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And he's saying with young people specifically, the spines are aging 10 to 20 years.

[Sean]

I'd wonder about the neck too, because what I. I mean, I've got kids, my youngest is now 14, so they're getting a little older. But what I notice with these kids is like, not only are their shoulder like, you watch them walk and their shoulders are really hunched. And then I see these older people that have like a hunchback and I'm always like standing up straighter. But what I see is their heads are down. Even if they keep their posture great. Their head, your head is so heavy and it puts so much pressure on, on your neck. I'm curious what he would say about, like, just how much neck damage we're seeing.

[Podcast Host]

I'm sure there's a lot. I have arthritis in my neck, in my back. I'm only 28.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Podcast Host]

You know, it's pretty scary.

[Sean]

And you, were you on devices a lot?

[Podcast Host]

I'm on my phone eight hours a day. I'm a PC gamer, so I'm like gaming. I'm also slouching. When I sit. So. So I think it was just accumulation of everything.

[Sean]

Yeah. I mean, the postures we're in all day start to fix. Like your body will conform because we're. I mean, we're so flexible. Like the body is. Yeah, right. But it'll start to conform to the positions you put it in all day. So I mean, even people that sit all day, not great. So then they say, well, sitting is the new smoking. But then you'll stand. But standing in one spot all day is also not.

[Podcast Host]

You can't win.

[Sean]

So it's like you got to do like slow movement all day, but it's.

[Podcast Host]

Got to get a treadmill desk.

[Sean]

You. I have like under my desk, I have a pedal.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, the pedal.

[Sean]

So it's like I just pedal all day and people, I'm like moving back and forth.

[Podcast Host]

I might have to get that.

[Sean]

You know, it's. It's pretty good because you can pretty, pretty much do it with people not noticing. Even right here.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Your body might sway a little bit. And people are always ask me, like, are you walking? No, I'm just pedaling.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Get used to it.

[Podcast Host]

Got to get the steps in, man.

[Sean]

Oh my gosh. I mean, we sit so much.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Anything you can do to move your body more because like the blood flow, the lymph flow. So we're not moving our lymph. We're not getting that blood to flow. And so the lymph stagnates. And we wonder why we're getting more sick. And we wonder why we have more modern diseases like emf, the wrong type of light. We're not moving. We poison the food supply. Like all these things are against us.

[Podcast Host]

It's rough right now. What do you think is doing the most damage? You think it's light?

[Sean]

So that's a really good question. I think it's a combination I. I have personally with everything that I've studied and the benefit that I found. Right. So I had massive insomnia for 16 years.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sean]

And I had anxiety for like 20, 25 years since the end of high school. And I limited my career. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 10 years as a research scientist. So I was in the lab mixing up pharmaceutical chemicals. And I had so much insomnia, which led to more anxiety that I just couldn't even look for another job. Like I couldn't think about talking one on one to somebody or giving a big presentation or interviewing. So I just sat in the pharmaceutical lab pouring these like fiber pack drums, fish 55 gallon drums with skull and crossbones that say cancer into a children's medicine product.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Sean]

And I'm like, what am I doing with my life? I can't keep doing this. So what I found for me personally is, like, when I started addressing my light environment, things got massively better for me. My insomnia cleared up. I was able to use the energy that I had to do the inner work to help alleviate and cure my anxiety. I just didn't have capacity to do that. So for me, the most powerful tool was light. That doesn't mean that it is for everybody, but we're all biologically the same. Like, in our biology, we are all sensitive to the same type of light, and we've just messed up our light environment. So I think that if people first address their light environment, then they can affect other things that they want to fix. Like, if you want to lose weight, change your light environment. So I have, like, this analogy of a hammer, right? And Tylenol is really big in the news right now. So I'll use a Tylenol analogy. If somebody's hitting you in the hand with a hammer and you're taking Tylenol to get rid of the pain, like, maybe you should think about the environment of the hammer and removing the hammer, and then you don't need the Tylenol. So for most of us, if the light environment is causing a lot of stress on our body and causing reduction in melatonin, and our own National Institute of Health. So that's like our U.S. government, NIH, has had the studies for decades that show artificial light exposure at night is associated with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity. They've known this for decades. Then maybe if you fix the light environment, you don't have to take the sleeping pill. A hundred million people a year.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Sean]

100 million people a day take sleeping pills. Geez, that's a third of Americans.

[Podcast Host]

That's insane.

[Sean]

A third of us need a pill to go to sleep every night. Maybe fix the light environment so you don't need the pillow. And then when you start seeing what else is a problem for you, like, do you want to lose weight? Then when you do the work to fix those things, it sticks. Because we all know someone who lost weight and then gained it all back. We all know someone who's had cancer, and we all know someone who has insomnia. So fixing that light environment then allows. I think that's just the big lever that allows you to do other things in your life way easier.

[Podcast Host]

You got me? Yeah. I got to change my light bulbs. You got me convinced, man.

[Sean]

We should be seeing firelight at night. And there are light bulbs that can mimic more of a firelight.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, for sure.

[Sean]

Like, you just want blue light free light bulbs. So they have amber, they have red, they have infrared incandescent. Still not the greatest. The studies show they still reduce about 40% of your nighttime melatonin, even using an incandescent or a halogen. So they do make some LEDs that are blue light free that kind of more mimic firelight. So you can just get those. They do sell them on Amazon. We sell them on our store. But you can get them almost anywhere now. And that I do think if people literally just swapped out their light bulbs for healthier light bulbs, like, that could be a massive change for almost everybody in our country.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's crazy how one little tweak like that can have such profound impacts. Right?

[Sean]

Well, from those mouse studies, right? Light is a drug. So, like, if light is a drug and you're taking drugs all day long, like, stop taking the drug and maybe you'll find a benefit that you never even knew that you needed.

[Podcast Host]

Where can people keep up with you? Get your book. Do you have a podcast, too?

[Sean]

We have a podcast that we'll be recording season three of starting this winter. So that podcast is called the Primal Hacker podcast. It's on Spotify, Apple, everywhere. You can find it, including YouTube, @ primal hacker. And then our current business is focused on circadian luxury wellness for women. So a lot of the biohacker space is focused on.

[Podcast Host]

Men. Yeah, that's.

[Sean]

True. Like, it's all, like, bros. That's so.

[Podcast Host]

True. Every time I go to a biohacking event, it's like 90%.

[Sean]

Guys. It is. And, you know, interestingly, Dave Asprey's audience has started to flip to now more women. But most of the biohacking space is focused all on men. They talk to men only. There's not a lot of products that are focused on helping women. So our company is called Dreamwalkers with a Z. So it's DreamWalkers AI. And you can find us also at DreamWalkers AI on YouTube, where we talk all about women's health from a circadian wellness.

[Podcast Host]

Standpoint. Check them out, guys. We'll link below. Thanks for coming.

[Sean]

On. Awesome. Thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Sean. Get some light bulbs, guys.

[Sean]

Peace. All right, thanks.

[Podcast Host]

Everybody. I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the show a lot with the algorithm. Thank.