Pod Insights Danny Jones Podcast #278 - Steve Jobs Warned Us: How Blue Light Technology is Making You Sick | Anjan Katta About this episode Watch every episodes ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones
Anjan Katta is the founder and CEO of Daylight Computer.
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EPISODE LINKS
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OUTLINE
00:00 - Hanuman the monkey god
02:23 - hindering vs. helpful technology
09:11 - Modern tech is rotten
16:44 - Invention of the computer mouse
17:55 - getting laughed out of Silicon Valley
25:27 - Amusing ourselves to death
30:05 - Steve Jobs Knew the Danger of Blue Light
36:23 - Developing a blue light free computer
45:39 - How phone scrolling affects your breathing
49:51 - The grey alien timeline
56:09 - The solar punk timeline
01:01:38 - Banality of evil
01:06:51 - Daylight Computer
01:14:29 - Raising money / venture capital
01:21:59 - Live demo
01:25:47 - New decentralized computing stack
01:32:33 - Changing media & tech legislation
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Transcript 18,246 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:07 Danny Jones? All right, Anjan, thanks for coming, dude.
0:09 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
0:09 Danny Jones? I'm excited to talk to you. We were just talking before Steve started rolling. Your name, your name, that's not, doesn't come from Japan, though, right?
0:17 Speaker 01 No, it's Indian.
0:17 Danny Jones? It's Indian, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:18 Speaker 01 The monkey god, Hanuman.
0:20 Danny Jones? Hanuman, ooh.
0:21 Speaker 01 Have you heard of him?
0:22 Danny Jones? No, I haven't.
0:23 Speaker 01 He's like, it's fascinating, actually, how many cultures have this, like, monkey god or monkey king, even in Chinese cultures. But in Indian culture, he's like the god of strength and energy, and this devoted servant to Rama. Have you heard of the Rama Yanam?
0:37 Danny Jones? Yeah, I've heard of Rama, yeah.
0:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Hanuman's one of the core characters in that. And so, one of his alternative names is Anjuniya, and so that's what I'm named after.
0:47 Danny Jones? Yeah, that's a cool name.
0:49 Speaker 01 I was a hyper energetic kid, monkey like, so.
0:52 Danny Jones? And we were talking about the Shogun documentary, too. And the guy's name is Anjan, Anjan-san. And then you said some of this technology comes from Japan?
1:00 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah. This is, this, this company, this project is a love letter to Japan. It was finding old Japanese technology that was the origin for what this was.
1:11 Danny Jones? Really?
1:12 Speaker 01 But like, the connections go deep. I mean, even the word Anjan-san in Shogun, it means pilot, right? Guess what pilot is in Greek?
1:21 Danny Jones? What?
1:22 Speaker 01 Kuberr, or the origin word for cyber.
1:27 Danny Jones? Really?
1:28 Speaker 01 So if you think of the digital world, right? It's the world of the cyber. It's so interesting that it has this little connection back to Japan here through Anjan-san. I just, little coincidences.
1:40 Danny Jones? That's funny, man. Whenever I think of technology, I always like, we've talked about it before, but like, since the iPhone came out in 2006 or whatever, there really hasn't been anything like that moment since. People, they've just added on to it ever since it came out, right? Like, make it brighter, make the battery last longer, do all this stuff. And we've started from... That was like square one and they've just extrapolated from that. They've never like done a hard reset on a new piece of technology with like a new, a new goal behind it or like a new vision. And what you've done is created this technology that's foundational in health and it's the goal of it is to keep you healthy.
2:24 Danny Jones? For people that don't know who you are, explain like your background and how you got, how you decided to come up with this thing.
2:31 Speaker 01 I grew up in a small nickel mining town in the east side of Canada, the son of a crazy psychiatrist. So our house was covered in books. There was maybe, there's maybe 10 people in the town who were, who were not Caucasian. And so from the beginning, I was just an alien and outsider and the son of a crazy psychiatrist. So Austrian economics, we were early to organic foods, a lot of these different health trends, our cadence rhythms, a long time ago. That's kind of the milieu I grew up in because he, he could see for his patients, how much the conventional practice was not helping, how much just the drug paradigm, the materialist
3:14 Speaker 01 scientific reductive paradigm, just did not understand that, you know, we have psyches. There's a whole, there's a whole deeper human that's just, the factory medicine model is not working. I mean, so he was very anti authoritarian. He was very, could see how much the conventional view did not work. And that was kind of bred into me and that's what this is, is a lifetime of kind of questioning the, the holy cows, as, as Jack puts it. And so I just read widely and was really into astrophysics and just curious about like, what is the universe and what, what's, what goes beyond the, the basics?
3:59 Speaker 01 So I, I, I, as a kid, really looked up because my dad read a lot to me about him, about Bill Gates and all these technologists and I thought they were incredible. You know, they're able to create things that determine the society. Oh my God, this is, this is wonderful. You know, you're pushing the human race forward. There was a
4:23 Speaker 01 There was a Steve Jobs quote at the time. He said, "Computers are bicycles for the mind." Have you heard it?
4:29 Danny Jones? I heard you say it on another podcast, but I haven't heard it before that.
4:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's so captured me, which was, he was like, "Humans are incredible, but actually in so many ways, we're median." And so he gives the example of locomotion. If you look at the energy efficiency of locomotion, humans compared to all other animals were kind of somewhere in the middle. At the top are ospreys and birds like that.
4:58 Speaker 01 But you put a human on a bike, and they are by far the most efficient animal when it comes to locomotion. And his point is like, this is what computers are.
5:11 Danny Jones? Right.
5:12 Speaker 01 A human is not bad, pretty good. But you put them on a bicycle and suddenly we're the best.
5:17 Danny Jones? Mm-hmm.
5:18 Speaker 01 And so as a human, our minds, not bad, pretty good. It's what gets us here. But the point of a computer is what is all the unrealized potential we have that we haven't explored yet?
5:28 Danny Jones? Right.
5:28 Speaker 01 And so that just captured me deeply that, oh, wow. This entire world of technology and computing is to help us be the best version of ourselves, to fully realize our potential. And the journey along the way to get to this is seeing how much that promise has not been fulfilled.
5:48 Danny Jones? Right. The idea, the idea there of technology and being able to use computing and computing power to be able to make ourselves more efficient, to get more shit done, is great until like, the biggest downfall is the screens. Like, you don't, you can't have computers without screens. I mean, sure, you know, other types of computers and there's things like Neuralink and stuff like that. That's hasn't really been developed yet, but every computer has these screens that have this artificial emitting blue light, right? It's emitting, it's a missive blue light that, as Jack Cruz pointed out to me, is part of the new mind control 5.0 MK Ultra that Silicon Valley is doing.
6:33 Danny Jones? Excuse me. And from documentaries like The Social Dilemma, where they talk about how the algorithms are basically incentivized just to keep us scrolling, to keep us seeing more advertisers and to keep us on the platforms longer. Combined with what the light is actually doing to our biology is pretty fucking scary.
6:56 Danny Jones? So how did you do this? How does this work?
7:01 Speaker 01 Let me, let me go out for a second. So people really get to get the picture of this.
7:04 Danny Jones? Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 01 I think the problem here is
7:09 Speaker 01 we have no idea what we're doing.
7:11 Danny Jones? Right.
7:13 Speaker 01 We're used to designing objects. This stuff is alive. This is a total new category. When we invented computing,
7:25 Speaker 01 we started letting the genie out of the bottle. I mean, everything you see with AI and so on is just making obvious what actually has been there for a while, which is this isn't the same as the objects we have previously. This is something that deeply shapes the people using it. This is something that deeply shapes us at all our layers of being, the way we think, our nervous system, our physiology. And so I think the original sin here was we made these things and we're like, okay, people want more RAM. They want to do this. They want to be more productive. Let's just construct these tools. Let's pull it together for, for folks.
8:08 Speaker 01 And along the way, we realized, holy shit, this thing deeply shapes us, the human using it. And we never created computers with a human in mind. We didn't know anything. We didn't know jack about our physiology, about our nervous system, about the science of productivity and focus. And so what we're faced with now is this, this thing that's absolutely crucial to our life, but has never been designed with a human in mind. It's never been designed with the idea you'll use it 12 hours a day. It's never been designed with the idea that there'll be trillion dollar companies on the other side, absolutely trying to steal all the attention they can from you.
8:50 Speaker 01 When you talk to the people who first did computers, they would have never guessed that computers were thought as calculators. They were thought of these tools that just nerds and geeks use. They would have never thought they'd be these dopamine slot machines that, you know, eight year olds would be spending all day on. And so. Finally, there's the possibility today to sit down and say, wait a minute. We can't just keep going forever in this current trajectory. Because the soul of a current computer, the soul of a machine is rotten. It's, it's simply technologists just optimizing something for the sake of optimization.
9:33 Danny Jones? Right.
9:34 Speaker 01 It's, it has no soul. It's lost that early bicycle for the mind that what computing was early in the days, which was this making you the best versions of yourself. Instead, it just got into this object rat race of dissociation of this productivity thing that at the cost of everything else, tries to promise you productivity. And finally, my whole journey to this was seeing the way that impacted my life. I'm super ADHD and I just felt like an idiot all the time on a computer. I would intend to do something and next thing you know, I'm scrolling on ESPN. I have, you know, 200 tabs open, if not more. I just keep beating myself up like, why are you not getting done what you need to get done?
10:18 Speaker 01 I'd stay up late, my eyes would hurt, my sleep was screwed up. We know, I guess we're going to get into it, but all the ways that blue light can really affect you at your nervous system level, your physical health, your sleep, your mental health. And I was like, wait, this thing is my, it's my main relationship to the world. This is the thing I, this is the thing I use for the most amount of hours per day. And it makes me feel like crap and it doesn't help me be the best version of myself. I kind of feel like the worst version of myself. And so at a certain point, I, I was struggling so much, I was deeply depressed.
11:00 Speaker 01 I kind of lived a life where I was just living in my parents' basement and there was no sun, just surrounded by screens and blue light all day. And it just got to the point where I just said, I can't, can't do this anymore. Previous to that, I was in Silicon Valley. I came there hoping, you know, this, the spirit of computing that we could help people's lives. And holy crap, what's the actual reality when you get there is far different than, you know, the picture sold to you. And so just it all kind of came crashing down. And I just said, okay, let's declare bankruptcy on computing. If we were to start again, and this time start with the human in mind, what could it look like?
11:41 Speaker 01 And everything else that I then pursued was just really exploring the possibility of redoing computing. And for me, if there's anything I've learned is the, the basis for so much health is light. The basis for everything else is, is light.
11:57 Danny Jones? Yeah.
11:57 Speaker 01 And so if you want to reimagine computing to now be healthier, to now be holistic, to now be wholesome, you got to start with light. And that's where I wanted to make something where how can you make a computer that respects circadian rhythms? How does it actually not produce junk light? How does it not produce blue light? How can it be used outside in the sun? How could it be used in the environments that are best for us? And that's kind of how I got into the rabbit hole of redesigning a computer and everything else that came.
12:31 Danny Jones? It's, it's a bold move, man, to be able to do something like that. It's got to take, I mean, especially to be able to design a whole new computer. I can't imagine that's something that a lot of people in Silicon Valley have the aspirations to do. I would imagine just from being an outsider, I would imagine, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. If you're in Silicon Valley, it's kind of like you're bogged down in all the small day to day things, designing apps, designing UIs, optimizing different things like with advertising or.
13:03 Danny Jones? Operating systems and stuff like that, or like making things better, improving on past products. I can't imagine there's a lot of people out there who are like zooming out and seeing the forest for the trees and trying to figure out, how can we make something new, right?
13:18 Speaker 01 Well, that was what was so disillusioning about the process, like growing up in Canada, idealizing Silicon Valley, the guy who started Atari, Nolan Bushnell, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, these like, guys who who were the first to kind of say, hey, the point of this technology is to make us the best version of ourselves. They had the big views. They're they're this guy named Alan Kay. In many ways, a lot of what Steve Jobs did was what Alan Kay came up with. Not many people know him, but he was like the true, true visionary.
13:48 Danny Jones? Who is he?
13:50 Speaker 01 He's kind of this early computing visionary. There's a place called Xerox PARC. And so Xerox PARC, like Xerox, the copyright company, they they thought computers were going to put copyrighters their business. So they created they created this research center near Stanford in the middle of Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. And their idea was let's dream up what the future of computing is. So instead of somebody else putting out of us out of business, at least we can we can do it. The funny part of this story is Xerox never did anything with what came of it. But they basically, the modern computer with a graphical user interface, before that, it was just,
14:32 Speaker 01 it was just like letters and numbers. There was no images. There was no desktop. There was no mouse. There was no keyboard. And so Xerox PARC, what you see when you sit down at your MacBook, believe it or not, somebody actually had to come up with that paradigm. Before then, computers were the same as like typewriters.
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16:23 Speaker 01 You know, there were just symbols on a screen that you would type in and you do commands and you get it back. To actually think of something that was visual and you could click on, you can drag stuff and it would actually look like a document.
16:33 Danny Jones? Like a touchscreen?
16:35 Speaker 01 No, no, they didn't have touch back then. Just think of your, your, your, your Mac.
16:38 Danny Jones? Right?
16:40 Speaker 01 Oh, you mean with the mouse like clicking and dragging stuff? They didn't have a mouse. If you go actually far enough back, they, everything was just keyboard. So the idea of literally having a mouse, the idea of having a cursor, of dragging and dropping files and moving it around. And actually you can be able to see that. That was literally all had to be invented and at the time not obvious. And so folks like Doug Engelbart, um, there's an amazing demo you can look up. Even this is, these are the people who inspired Alan Kay. He had basically predicted like in 50 years ago, what computing was going to be. The possibility of networked communication that we could message each other.
17:25 Speaker 01 The idea of the mouse, believe it or not, that was like, people were skeptical that people would ever use a mouse or that was even a good idea. But essentially at Xerox PARC, they came up with the future of computing, what would be a normal desktop. What's your MacBook today?
17:44 Danny Jones? Wow.
17:45 Speaker 01 And Apple and so on, basically just got their ideas from Xerox PARC and implemented it.
17:52 Danny Jones? No way.
17:55 Danny Jones? What do people say to you when you're rubbing shoulders with some of these Silicon Valley, Valley big shots? That are like balls deep in companies like Apple and Facebook, social media companies? Like what, what is their initial reaction to what you're doing?
18:13 Speaker 01 They laugh. I mean, they think it's naive. That's why it was so disillusioning for me. I thought it was this place of idealism and I kind of believe the whole like, hey, they're trying to change the world for the better. And you get there and it's not that at all. It's sterile. It's transactional.
18:32 Danny Jones? Yeah.
18:33 Speaker 01 It's like pre-med and Goldman Sachs and McKinsey energy masquerading for, you know, wine and vent things. It's just, it's now the high status thing to do is to be in startups or technology or Silicon Valley.
18:47 Danny Jones? Right.
18:48 Speaker 01 And so there's something that just shifts deeply in culture when you go from kind of hippies and idealists and nerds and people who almost do this because they don't know what else they'll do.
18:58 Danny Jones? Right.
18:58 Speaker 01 Right? Like they don't, they're not employable elsewhere. They're not, you know, they're not going to fit into normal culture. Now it's the exact opposite. It's the people who are the optimizers, the performers. And so when you, when you try to come back to these deeper ideals that, you know, technology deeply shapes us and therefore, you know, we have a moral responsibility to make it in a way that's actually wise.
19:24 Speaker 01 You're laughed at. That's like, you're laughed at the same way when you brought up healthy food back in the day. People are like, are you kidding me? You think you're gonna stop people from eating junk food? You're gonna stop people from eating the thing that is like, evolutionarily, they're built for to be vulnerable to? Like, give me a break, right? You're considered naive as hell. And so that's the first thing is people, it's, they look down at you, consider you to be super naive. No, humans wanna be addicted. We wanna be distracted. We wanna be controlled. We wanna be overstimulated. How are you gonna stop that? And that just absolutely just fucking pissed me off to no end. Cause...
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20:51 Speaker 01 What the hell happened to the idea that, hey, we have a responsibility to try to make amazing things for people and improve their lives? When the hell did this become a pandering culture? When the hell did this become a culture of, we'll just do what's easiest for people?
21:06 Danny Jones? Yeah.
21:07 Speaker 01 When did this become a culture of like, we'll have the most cynical viewpoints of what human nature is? And that's the big problem here, is the way computers are being designed, is they're not optimistic at all about human nature. They're not optimistic at all about our ability to self-empower ourselves. They're completely cynical. And so even if you think of a normal computer screen or blue light, they're like, yeah, whatever, people aren't ever gonna know about that. And I think the point of a podcast like yours and others is like, no, dude. People aren't dumb. We want things to change. We want the best things for ourselves and our families. And these guys are never gonna do it because they just, it's far more profitable.
21:50 Speaker 01 It's far easier to just be cynical and pander to people and sell them junk food. And I think that's the problem with computers today is they're junk food computers.
21:58 Danny Jones? I was kind of shocked when Jack Cruz told me that out of all the contributing factors to all the diseases and cancers and obesity and diabetes and the stuff in the US, he thinks that food is like second or third on the rung as far as like key contributors to this stuff. He thinks that the light is this number one factor for all these explosion of diseases that are in our country. He thinks that because people, not only because the light is addictive and it's like you said, a dopamine slot, that's great, dopamine slot machine, and it's keeping people stuck on these screens and keeping them up late at night and keeping them distracted and keeping them in this sympathetic state.
22:43 Speaker 01 Exactly.
22:45 Danny Jones? That combined with the fact that they're not outside, they're staying inside all the time is what's doing this. And I got on my phone and my laptop, I got all the apps Jack had to like make the screen red and I noticed, I've already noticed a huge difference. Like I'm waking up at like, I used to like have to drag my carcass out of bed at 7:00 AM. Now I'm like wide awake at 6:30 and I've noticed it because I'm laying in bed at night with my phone and it's like fully red and I'll try to, I'll scroll through Instagram or like check my emails or my messages. 10 minutes in, I'm just done. I can't do it anymore. Literally like falling asleep when normally without that, with the regular light on the
23:27 Danny Jones? screen, I would probably stay up till 1:00 AM. So there's definitely, there's definitely a huge difference.
23:33 Speaker 01 That's, that's the big idea here is we're so numb and overstimulated.
23:38 Danny Jones? Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 01 And so bombarded. We have normalized the way we feel, the way computers make us feel, the way it impacts us. And until you actually go out of your way, you don't realize what the hell, how tired I am.
23:52 Danny Jones? Right.
23:52 Speaker 01 How, how much brain fog I have, how much it screws up your sleeping. I mean, I think this is why you feel so good when you go camping and you just get away from everything for a week.
24:01 Danny Jones? Totally.
24:01 Speaker 01 Suddenly you start sleeping well, suddenly you get up with the sun, suddenly everything.
24:06 Danny Jones? I feel the same way, like even when I go to like third world countries where there's not normal everyday conveniences that we have in the modern world here. Like we, where there's not traffic lights on every corner, where you basically have to pull up to an intersection and like look, look at people to make sure like, okay, I'm going, right? Or like, you're not going to kill me. You have to actually stay alive without using traffic lights and stop signs and, and all this stuff. It keeps you like in a, in a, um, like an active state of mind where you're like always like fight or flight. You're trying to figure out your way around. And like, instead of getting in the car, going down the street, stopping at the stoplight, scrolling on your phone, going to the grocery store, filling your car, like,
24:51 Danny Jones? it kind of, I feel like society in general, with how convenient everything is, is sort of like compounding onto all of this stuff and making us, making us slower and fatter and dumber.
25:03 Speaker 01 It's, it's, it's almost crazy that we've ended up this way. Cause if you were diabolical and you were to design a society, you would come up with something similar to this.
25:13 Danny Jones? Yeah.
25:13 Speaker 01 Jack up everybody's nervous system.
25:15 Danny Jones? Yeah.
25:16 Speaker 01 Such that they can't really think or feel, they're just reacting to things. And give them something in front of them that can give them endless stimulation. That's an endless slot machine of variable reward. And put their physiology in a state between the blue light, the fact that it is bright light and it's flickering, such that you're always craving stimulation.
25:38 Danny Jones? Hmm.
25:40 Speaker 01 Boom. Boom. That Brave New World right there. That is exactly, have you, have you read Brave New World or Neil Postman?
25:50 Danny Jones? No, I haven't.
25:52 Speaker 01 I almost want to read it out loud. It's so good.
25:54 Danny Jones? Yeah, yeah, pull it up.
25:55 Speaker 01 Let's see if I can pull this up.
25:58 Danny Jones? He's pulling it up on his daylight computer right now. We got a little shot, he can show you how it works. I think so cool, man.
26:11 Speaker 01 Okay, so this guy named Neil Postman wrote this book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Okay. I think his foreword to the book just describes what we're talking about so incredibly. So I'm going to read it out.
26:26 Speaker 01 "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we at least had not been visited by Orvalian nightmares.
26:47 Speaker 01 But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another, slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
27:01 Speaker 01 Contrary to common belief even amongst the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophecy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no brig brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
27:31 Speaker 01 What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
27:44 Speaker 01 Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we'd be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned out in a sea of irrelevance.
28:06 Speaker 01 Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we'd become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy."
28:20 Speaker 01 As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil liberties and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to prose tyranny, failed to take in account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. In 1984, Huxley added, "People are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they're controlled by inflicting pleasure." In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley and not Orwell was right.
29:06 Danny Jones? That's, it's spot on. It really is.
29:10 Speaker 01 Whether it be the perspective of government, whether it be the perspective of these multi-trillion dollar tech companies that, you know, hit their earnings and please Wall Street by ever having our attention. The setup we have right now with computers is, we're passive. They control us. They dominate our lives. They stimulate us. They keep us away from actually thinking. Because guess what? If you could actually think, you could start questioning the system. And so we have, in my opinion, an incredible societal setup to have no freedom and not even know it, because we're so busy indulging in information and stimulation and
29:52 Speaker 01 addiction and distraction. And so there's a, there's a way in which reforming computers is actually core to reforming freedom, is core to reforming our ability to think for ourselves. And what I got really interested in was the idea that the actual physical hardware of a computer plays a big role with the blue light, with the flickering, with the emissive light in keeping us enraptured and stuck. And so, yeah, my big idea was if you were to change that, you were like, kind of what you're hinting towards, if you could change the display technology. To not have that physiological enrapturing effect.
30:36 Speaker 01 Maybe we could start to change computers from being these portals and slot machines and these black holes of all of our attention and time into just another object or tool that you find useful and you put away.
30:50 Danny Jones? Do you think people in Silicon Valley and people that work at these giant tech companies are aware of this? Are there, is there anyone who's aware of this? And if they are, what do you think? What is their view on it?
31:01 Speaker 01 Well, I think that's what's so heartbreaking about this is they're the most conscious about this. People don't know this fact. I think it should be absolutely well known. Steve Jobs didn't allow his own kids to have iPhones or iPads until they were 16. But he is happy as hell to sell it to your kids. How is that not like on the front page of everything?
31:25 Danny Jones? Is that real? That's for real?
31:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can look it up.
31:28 Danny Jones? Wow.
31:28 Speaker 01 How is that not on the front page of everything that this guy who invented it knew what its negative impact was on a developing brain? And he's happy to sell it to the rest of you. You look at Mark Zuckerberg, he doesn't allow his kids to have social media or phones.
31:45 Danny Jones? Right.
31:46 Speaker 01 He himself uses, uses an, you know, an e-paper tablet. But he's trying to get you to put the screen to be your entire life.
31:56 Danny Jones? Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, did not allow his children to use iPads or other technology at home. Wow. In his 2011 interview with the New York Times, he said that we don't allow iPads in the home. We think it's too dangerous for them in effect. And he recognized the iPad's addictive nature and believed it would be difficult for children to resist the allure.
32:14 Speaker 01 Wow.
32:15 Danny Jones? Wow. Holy shit. Yep. He, and Gates did not allow his children cell phones until they were 14 years old. Prohibited them during meals and before bed.
32:31 Danny Jones? Wasn't there something though, did you hear about the, um, I don't know if it was a study or if it was an article that came out about, um, surgeons that played video games were like 90% better at like performing surgery. It might have even been brain surgeons. Can you find, uh, yeah, surgeons who played video games study? You just have to type in surgeon played video games to find it. The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century. Scroll down. There you go. No, no, it was, it was the link below that. Yeah, right there.
33:07 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
33:08 Danny Jones? 2017. So what's the, what's the background? Video games have become extremely, uh, become extensively integrated in popular culture. Anecdotal observations of young surgeons suggest that video game playing contributes to performance and contributes to performance excellence in laparoscopic surgery. Training benefits for surgeons who play video games should be quantifiable. Is there, uh, the hypothesis is, is there a potential link between video game play and, uh, surgical skill and suturing? And I guess, um, can you go down to the result? Yeah, yeah. Past video game play in excess of three hours a week correlated with 37%
33:47 Danny Jones? fewer errors and 27% or 27% faster completion. Overall Top Gun score was 33% better for video game players and 42% better if they played more than three hours a week. How fucking wild is that shit, dude? You gotta create a video game console.
34:08 Speaker 01 Dude, I think that's the point here is like, it's not to be Luddites and throw this stuff away. Right. And say completely, no, we can't have technology.
34:16 Danny Jones? Right, right.
34:17 Speaker 01 This, this, the stuff is incredible.
34:19 Danny Jones? Video game is not, like, playing a video game is not like scrolling mindlessly through social media. It's way different.
34:24 Speaker 01 And that, exactly. It's how do we carve out the better for you parts of computing?
34:29 Danny Jones? Yeah.
34:29 Speaker 01 And remove all the ways in which it's, it's predatory.
34:33 Danny Jones? Yes.
34:34 Speaker 01 That it's not been optimized for hu- human health, for human psychology, for any of it. Um, and early days, computers, they were not like this. Like you sat down with a computer and you like, could do your work and then you put it away. It's the problem now is they're always on you all the time. And these algorithms are so incredibly good at finding out exactly what you like and then just feeding it to you till ever. And yeah, there's a, I love this quote, which is, back in the day, Gary Kasparov, you know, the world's best chess player was playing Deep Blue, this AI by IBM.
35:13 Speaker 01 And the, the famous thing here is for the first time ever, a computer had beaten the world's best chess player. And that computer, Deep Blue, that AI that beat Gary Kasparov back then, that was a million times less powerful than the AIs and computers we have today. So you now today have a million times more powerful computer every minute playing a game against you, which is addict you and get you to spend as much time as possible. That's what they have on their internal dashboard, their OKRs, how much time, how much engagement we get from a customer. And you don't even know you're playing a game against this. If Gary Kasparov lost back then, what chance do we have today?
35:58 Speaker 01 And I don't think people realize it because it just seems like, oh, I'm just reading something or watching something. They do not understand.
36:05 Danny Jones? And also.
36:05 Speaker 01 The system of control that.
36:07 Danny Jones? And also he was aware he was playing.
36:09 Speaker 01 He was aware he was playing the game.
36:11 Danny Jones? We're not.
36:12 Speaker 01 We have no. And so that's, it's like, when you start to realize actually how much this benefits the current status quo of society to have people this way, no wonder they don't want to change computers. And you can't come out and suddenly if you're Tim Cook and say, hey, this is the iPad healthy edition. You know, it no longer has blue light and no longer flickers. Cause you're gonna be like, so every iPad before was not healthy, like.
36:44 Danny Jones? Right.
36:44 Speaker 01 You're not, you're not gonna come out and
36:46 Danny Jones? Yeah, that's not, yeah, right.
36:47 Speaker 01 Jeopardize your entire business and every, everything you sell.
36:51 Danny Jones? Yeah, I see what you're saying.
36:52 Speaker 01 And so if more people just knew that so many of the people in Silicon Valley don't allow their kids to use phones and iPads and social media and unrestricted access, they're all incredibly careful.
37:08 Danny Jones? Has no one tried to buy you out or silence you just to shut this down? Like Apple coming, hey, Anjan, here's a $10 million, just go away.
37:16 Speaker 01 We, we got, we got some early offers to, to buy ourselves out from some, one of the big guys, but
37:22 Danny Jones? Really?
37:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that's
37:24 Danny Jones? And then what was the, like, what was the terms of it? Like, they wanted to buy, like, basically take it and you walk away?
37:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, they wanted to completely take it over.
37:32 Danny Jones? Oh, my God.
37:33 Speaker 01 But we got a bigger mission here, so.
37:35 Danny Jones? So who are some of the people that are taking you seriously?
37:39 Danny Jones? Other than Jack, how'd you meet Jack, by the way?
37:43 Speaker 01 I've been a long time, uh,
37:46 Speaker 01 follower of Jack's, but believe it or not, my dad.
37:49 Danny Jones? Oh, no way.
37:50 Speaker 01 My dad actually emailed Jack saying, hey, my, my son has built a blue light free computer, uh, and then, you know, the rest is history.
37:59 Danny Jones? Wow.
38:00 Speaker 01 But, yeah.
38:01 Danny Jones? How long ago was that?
38:03 Speaker 01 Early 2023.
38:04 Danny Jones? Oh, wow, that's cool.
38:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been, been a whirlwind. But the, I started working on this mid 2018. And the basic idea I started with is, okay, let's reimagine computing from a blank sheet. And how do we make it wiser and healthier? And, okay, so how do you make an operating system that isn't addicting and distracting and
38:23 Danny Jones? Right.
38:23 Speaker 01 just trying to steal all your attention? And so there's this whole side of the software. And then at the hardware, how do we kind of change its ergonomics? How do we change the way it emits radiation? But the biggest one was, how do we change your relationship to its light? How do we make it, get rid of its junk light, its blue light and flicker? Make it possible so you can be outside, so you can get natural light, which is the best form of light there is.
38:52 Speaker 01 And then over time, how can we have it have a bit of healing light with photobiomodulation, which is some of these longer infrared frequencies? We don't have that in this version, but that's something that, you know, we're heading towards. And so
39:08 Speaker 01 the journey here was basically creating a computer screen that doesn't produce light yet. You can see it.
39:15 Danny Jones? Right.
39:17 Danny Jones? So this is essentially, it's so from what I can pick up from this is it's, it looks like when you, when you're reading text on it, or you're looking at any sort of graphics, it looks like, yeah, it's like one of those Kindles or the, uh, the scra, what's the other one called? The, it looks like a Kindle paper light, right? Where it looks like real ink on there, but you can essentially zoom in and zoom out and move around like a hundred times faster than you can on any of those Kindle e-ink tablets.
39:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. So the big breakthrough here is basically normal computers, they're fast. You can do your email, you can do your docs, you can do everything on it.
39:54 Danny Jones? Yes.
39:54 Speaker 01 And it's your question of like, who's into this or who likes this?
39:57 Danny Jones? Right.
39:58 Speaker 01 But the problem is they have blue light, they flicker.
40:01 Danny Jones? Yeah.
40:01 Speaker 01 And you can't use them outside in the sun.
40:03 Danny Jones? Right.
40:04 Speaker 01 And my, my whole thing here is that deeply actually affects your sleep, your metabolism, your physiology, we, we could get into that, but yeah, with Jack and Alexis. And there's this small niche of computers,
40:19 Speaker 01 like the Kindle and so on, but the problem is they're so incredibly slow. You can't do much on it. You can read Harry Potter. The actual screen technology of the Kindle is called e-ink or e-paper, literally only can refresh at one or two FPS. And so you can take notes, you can read Harry Potter and change the page, but you can't scroll, you can't type.
40:44 Danny Jones? Super laggy.
40:45 Speaker 01 You can't have video. It's super, super laggy.
40:47 Danny Jones? Yeah.
40:48 Speaker 01 And so the core thing that we invented is a way to make these paper-like reflective
40:53 Danny Jones? You could never get that on a Kindle, what that thing is doing.
40:57 Speaker 01 No chance at all. And so basically what we did is we made it as fast as an iPad. But it is a screen you can use outside in the sun.
41:05 Danny Jones? Dude.
41:06 Speaker 01 And so.
41:07 Danny Jones? And this looks, for people that are watching this, you can see it, it looks great right now. We're in this, this is kind of a dimly lit podcast studio, but if you go outside, it pops like 10 times more and looks like the, the contrast and the text, it just, it brightens up when you're in the sunlight.
41:24 Speaker 01 The core insight here was normal computer screens are artificial. They try to be, they're like a flashlight.
41:31 Danny Jones? Yes.
41:31 Speaker 01 They shine light in your eyes to, to stand out. Um, that's great for Netflix and video games and making really overstimulating colors. But that's not how it works in nature. Everything in nature is reflective.
41:45 Speaker 01 You know, it's like a piece of paper, whatever, you're looking outside. And so the point here is to make something that's more natural, that's reflective. And that's why a normal screen, you can't see it in the sun, because it's trying to compete with nature. It's, it's trying to make its flashlight bright enough that you could see it, but there's no chance versus sunlight. And that's why you can't see anything. Your screen's covered in glare.
42:06 Danny Jones? Right.
42:07 Speaker 01 But because we're a reflective display, we're in harmony with nature. So we're actually using the sunlight. So when you're outside, the sunlight is literally hitting this, reflecting off of that, and that's what you're able to see.
42:21 Speaker 01 And I think that's the big philosophical change is how do you make technology that's more natural and in harmony with our nature and nature? Rather than trying to be artificial and
42:30 Danny Jones? Right.
42:31 Speaker 01 overstimulating.
42:32 Danny Jones? So, correct me if I'm wrong, but early on, when Apple was making iPads and iPhones, there were companies that were competing to figure out what type of screen technology they were going to use. They didn't know if they were going to do the emissive or the reflective, right? And this is, this goes back to Japan. There was a company in Japan, I think, that had the reflective stuff and it ended up not working out.
42:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, people just assume the way iPhones and iPads look today, like that's the only way computers can look. But if you go back to the Xerox PARC days, what kind of what we were saying before in the early days, there was actually two
43:10 Speaker 01 viable paths to computing. One was this emissive immersive displays, which you take it to its logical progression, and that's VR and AR.
43:19 Danny Jones? Right.
43:19 Speaker 01 You know, from what we have now, which is maximally immersive maximalist.
43:25 Speaker 01 And this other trajectory to computing has really kind of, no one's really known about it. It's not really the big one. It's kind of withered. This is, it was called at the time, com-computing. The basic idea was computers that just feel like analog objects, but happen to have computational powers.
43:46 Danny Jones? Right.
43:47 Speaker 01 So if you think of like in Harry Potter, Tom Riddle's diary, or the newspaper, or the marauder's map, they just look like analog objects, like paper or books. But if you think about it, they're computational.
44:01 Danny Jones? They're magic.
44:02 Speaker 01 They're magical. And the point of computing is simply to animate things. Anima is the word soul, is to simply give a soul to analog objects, to animate them. And that trajectory of what reflective or paper-like displays are, is a way to basically make matter movable. That's what this is. This is, this is not a portal. This is literally a piece of paper that is, you know, animating. That whole trajectory is what we're trying to bring back in computing. Trying to make, you know, more mainstream. And the way I got, the way I came up with
44:44 Speaker 01 this is I found a really old Japanese technology that's been thrown away. Because, you know, at the time, they were like, oh, it's not colorful. If you don't have color, it doesn't matter. It's, it had all of these flaws that kind of made it not viable. And in the 30 years since, there's been just some crazy professors in the Netherlands, in Germany, especially in Japan, that have just sat there and whacked away at problem after problem after problem. You know, there's a paper that comes out in 1997, solving one of the core problems of this technology. Another comes out in 2002, 2008, blah, blah, blah. And basically, when I started working on this in mid 2018, I just got very lucky that finally enough of these problems had been solved.
45:30 Speaker 01 That if you were to put together all of these different technologies, kind of what I was able to come up with, suddenly this old Japanese withered technology could be viable again. And that's ultimately what I was able to pull together and create here with Live Paper. Is resurrecting an old Japanese technology, kind of now finally making it good enough. And our whole premise here is now you can make phones, laptops, monitors, you can make all of computing now interactive and dynamic, but they no longer need to be portals, they no longer have to have blue light, they no longer need to flicker, they no longer need to be addicting and distracting. They can just be a tool that you can use, kind of to your example of, you know, the games and the surgeons, you can use the parts of computing that are useful for you, but
46:15 Speaker 01 it's no longer going to have that compulsiveness, that draw in your life.
46:20 Danny Jones? Yes.
46:22 Speaker 01 And.
46:24 Danny Jones? Had there ever been any like legit studies or like placebo controlled trials on people with iPhone screens and iPad screens and like people who don't do it or like, had there ever been any like actual measurable comparisons on like how this shit actually affects us?
46:46 Speaker 01 I so wish there was way more and way better academic research about this, like you'd be surprised by how little there is and how bad the quality what exists is, but some of the things that are like pretty stark are, there's a phenomenon called screen apnea. So there's sleep apnea, which is when, you know, you go to sleep, you stop breathing and you.
47:07 Danny Jones? Swallow your tongue, right?
47:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, you basically stop breathing, you're choking for a while.
47:11 Danny Jones? Right.
47:13 Speaker 01 The point being is it has, you know, that lack of oxygen has deep, deep impact on the rest of your life. So there's this, there's this phenomena that they've labeled screen apnea, which is when you're using a normal emissive flickering display on your iPhone, your iPad, whatever, your breathing rate slows down, your breathing volume, your tidal volume gets shallow. So we are all literally a little bit more in a sympathetic response because the way we're actually affected at a breathing physiological level when we use these displays.
47:48 Danny Jones? Wow, dude.
47:51 Danny Jones? That's freaky.
47:54 Speaker 01 That's why we feel a little bit more stressed when we use these things. We don't even notice that, that it's actually the way we're interacting with the light.
48:04 Danny Jones? So it's something to do with not just the light, but us, it's like turning off our frontal cortex, right? Like keeping us in that sympathetic, so us being in that sympathetic state, sitting there and just scrolling on a phone, it's essentially, it's like similar to being like you're kind of asleep, but you're not. And when that's a, people, when that affects your breathing, I guess, like, I guess you wouldn't notice it. But, um, how was that?
48:37 Speaker 01 We just assume it's normal.
48:38 Danny Jones? How was that discovered?
48:41 Speaker 01 I think people started to realize how much more stress there is when you use computers and they were trying to figure out what's going on here.
48:49 Danny Jones? Yeah.
48:50 Speaker 01 And, uh, oh yeah, like, they, they can measure your intranasal temperature from afar. And they can literally tell when you get a notification, when it goes bing, because there's actually a slight stress response and it shows up as a temperature change on the inside of your nose. And so.
49:09 Danny Jones? Dude, there's people out there who are so addicted to VR, they literally like go home from work and they strap into that headset helmet for like hours until like the wee hours of the morning and like live in this alternate universe where they're like playing Sims and playing like house, I guess, in VR with other people doing shit, like going to strip clubs, getting lap dances, like basically like Grand Theft Auto, but in VR. And like, I can't imagine how much worse that's gotta be.
49:40 Speaker 01 It's, it's, it's the end state of this all.
49:43 Danny Jones? Yeah.
49:44 Speaker 01 My, my point of this Silicon Valley pandering culture. What's more than getting people live in their fake fantasy or totally artificial worlds? And completely just indulge and masturbate yourself to death. That's the amusing ourselves to death. That's what Neil Postman is saying. It's our, it's our pleasures. We'll oppress ourselves to death in our own pleasures. And the possibility here is to create more sovereign computing. That isn't going to be maximalist and immersive. It's not about computers. It's about having the least computer possible. And having the rest of your life, your actual relationships, nature. And so that's what we're trying to create is we call it like solar punk computing.
50:26 Speaker 01 Or a third timeline.
50:27 Danny Jones? That's cool.
50:28 Speaker 01 Have you heard of solar punk or looked into? It's worth a Google.
50:31 Danny Jones? Is that real?
50:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:33 Danny Jones? Solar punk?
50:33 Speaker 01 It's, it's the best capture. For me, the way to describe the Silicon Valley technology is it's the gray alien timeline.
50:40 Danny Jones? The gray alien timeline?
50:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:43 Danny Jones? Explain that.
50:43 Speaker 01 And then you can either have another timeline. That's like the Unabomber or the collapse timeline where you completely reject technology. And we get all super primitive. Or what I think is the other way is the third timeline, the solar punk timeline. Where it's this combination of.
51:01 Danny Jones? Is this what we're supposed to be looking at these pictures?
51:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:03 Danny Jones? Okay.
51:03 Speaker 01 It kind of, it's.
51:04 Danny Jones? Oh, wow.
51:05 Speaker 01 The photos will give you an aesthetic, but the point here is.
51:07 Danny Jones? Technological jungle, technological rainforest.
51:10 Speaker 01 What it looks like to actually humanely combine technology, nature and, and magic. The mystical and the spiritual.
51:18 Danny Jones? Yeah.
51:20 Speaker 01 And the, the problem with the, the VR future, with the, the basic technology trajectory today is there is no respect for nature. There is no respect for the body. There is no respect for the spiritual or the transcendent. And that's the gray alien timeline.
51:36 Danny Jones? Yeah, it's almost like. You know, the most logical, the most logical way to innovate from a keyboard and like buttons is to create this screen that you can interact with in touch. And that was like the iPhone one, right? That I remember when that thing came out, I don't know if you, do you remember, did you get one?
51:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:57 Danny Jones? That was so mind bendingly amazing. Like that thing blew my fucking, my world apart. Like seeing that that thing existed, being able to hold that and like text people by doing on a screen.
52:11 Speaker 01 Scrolling.
52:12 Danny Jones? Scrolling that was like.
52:16 Danny Jones? And it was like, from there, that was the start of it. It was like, we, it's kind of like the combustion engine, right? Like, we, once you create the first combustion engine, you just expand on that and extrapolate on that and keep making it better and better until you have like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or something. But like, to create something completely on a separate timeline, or something on a completely separate technology like anti-gravity, you're not going to get to anti-gravity from combustion engines. So like,
52:58 Danny Jones? it's gonna take, it's gonna take something so crazy and like a, like a ground roots movement, or like some sort of, something big would have to happen to compel society or Silicon Valley or all these companies to sort of jump ship to a whole nother,
53:25 Danny Jones? a whole nother like goal of what they're doing with technology, right? Because like, right now they're combustion engines and like here you are trying to create anti-gravity. You can't, there's no bridge, right? Like, there's no bridge from what Apple's doing to what you're doing right here. Like you said before, like they, how can you release an iPad Health? When every single piece of technology you ever released relies on this blue light stuff? It's kind of like, it's kind of intuitive. So, so yeah, that's kind of just like gets back to my question of who, like what kind of people in that world are like seeing the light, no pun intended here, and like, like wow, you know, like maybe this is something
54:07 Danny Jones? that we really have to start taking seriously and start investing like tons of money into.
54:11 Speaker 01 Right.
54:14 Speaker 01 It's, it's bottom up, it's grassroots.
54:15 Danny Jones? Yeah.
54:16 Speaker 01 It's those of us who are educating ourselves through these podcasts.
54:24 Speaker 01 Learning actually what's leads to human health, learning actually how we work and looking for better, healthier, safer choices. And it's not going to happen with the the gray alien timeline, the big tech timeline. They are not, I don't think they're going to be able to move in this direction. They're just so set in their ways. The fact that the people running these companies.
54:51 Danny Jones? Yeah, they're too much, they're going too fast.
54:53 Speaker 01 What they're doing for their kids is making these healthier, safer choices. But for the big corporations, the Titanic's that they're running, they're not even attempting it at all. Tells you how much, you know, they're not even in control of the machine or the trend there. There, there's a, there's a way you can kind of think of it like, maybe even humans are not in control. It's like the machines are in control. And they're taking us down this path of where we are simply, you know, the, the sex organs of the machine, as Marcus McCluhan puts it.
55:25 Danny Jones? Yeah.
55:26 Speaker 01 We're just trying to create this, you know, techno dystopia future from them. And that's where the matrix and all of us being in VR all the time is. Is it actually, are the human, are we as humans actually in charge? Or are we being dragged by the machines into that timeline? And so who's into this? It's those of us who say, no, fuck that. We're not passively going to let ourselves be dragged into this timeline of absolute human disempowerment.
55:53 Danny Jones? Yeah.
55:53 Speaker 01 And so it's got to be grassroots and.
55:55 Danny Jones? That's kind of the worst parts of, that's like the worst part of capitalism, right? It's because you, it's such a big machine that's all reliant on profit and money and these board, the board that basically lives in charge of the biggest investors of these companies that like, all they care about is the P and L statement and the profits and are they going to go public? And then like from then on out, you just have people that are accountable to them that are just trying to climb the ladder and get a promotion and get a raise. Like, none of these people are gonna walk out into the middle of the square and, you know, say that everything's fucked, everything's wrong, we need to like turn the ship around because that's gonna.
56:37 Speaker 01 It'll be too late.
56:37 Danny Jones? You're gonna, yeah, it'd be too, well, not only will it be too late, but you're also would be sacrificing yourself and your own career and, you know, putting food on the table for yourself and your family. So it's like.
56:51 Danny Jones? I don't know how you, I don't know how you turn that ship around.
56:53 Speaker 01 I think you just gotta create your own ark. You gotta create a new ship.
56:57 Danny Jones? Hmm, yeah.
57:00 Speaker 01 And
57:02 Speaker 01 it's, I think uniquely possible to do that today. If we tried to this before, we didn't, funny enough, we didn't have the technology to be able to communicate and aggregate and teach each other and educate.
57:12 Danny Jones? Right.
57:13 Speaker 01 And so in a weird way, these same pipes that are, you know, addicting us and manipulating that are also the same ways that we can actually self empower. And so the point of the solar punk timeline, this third timeline is, yeah, how do we create? How do we refactor this entire stack to actually be in alignment with human flourishing? You know, payments, identity, banking systems, currencies, accounting, computers, internet protocols, networks. How can we make all of that such that it's not stuck to this rent seeking techno capitalist? Kind of, you know, machine gray alien timeline. When I say gray alien timeline, you had Michael Masters on the show.
57:53 Danny Jones? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You familiar with them?
57:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, so.
57:55 Danny Jones? I love that theory, dude.
57:57 Speaker 01 So for me.
57:58 Danny Jones? That's my favorite theory.
57:59 Speaker 01 For, for me, that is actually what the current Silicon Valley tech trend is. Is it's, it's the gray alien timeline. That's, if you follow Mark Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg and so on, you end up at gray aliens. That's my, that's my feeling is that is the best way to describe what that current conventional timeline we're all being sucked into is. Cause it's a complete dissociation of the body, the soul of emotion. It's the complete overemphasis on the brain and the intellect.
58:31 Danny Jones? Well, what Michael Masters kind of explains, he's a, an anthropologist. So
58:37 Danny Jones? what, the way I understood it is that he's explaining how if you go look at primates, early, early primates, right? They have these big bodies, these like small, like bulging forward foreheads, these big,
58:51 Danny Jones? like mouth, chin, skeleton, you know, jawlines down here. And then as they progressed, you know, they start to look more and more like what we look today, we look more like baby chimps. Like when a chimp is first born, it's got like more of like, like sits up straight. It's got kind of a bigger head, more proportionate with the body. And that's a phenomenon called pedomorphism. The idea is. The farther down the timeline of evolution you get, the adults look more like the babies of the ancestors or the children of the ancestors. So I guess his theory is that in a hundred thousand years to a million years, if we were to survive,
59:34 Danny Jones? he thinks we would look like those things on that book right there with the big eye and the big head and the little muscleless bodies.
59:40 Speaker 01 And what I'm arguing is that doesn't need to be an inevitability. That's, that's the, like, the key thing is what, what's there? There's just like a complete disregard for life, for the body, for the soul, for emotion, for feeling. Everything is being thrown away in that gray alien timeline for optimization, for efficiency.
1:00:00 Danny Jones? Right.
1:00:01 Speaker 01 Progress, whatever that means. But you lose your soul, you lose the actual parts of what it means to be human. And so what I'm actually arguing is
1:00:09 Danny Jones? I see what you're saying now.
1:00:10 Speaker 01 The gray alien timeline doesn't need to be an inevitability. We can create our own other timeline if enough of us come together, where the body actually matters, the soul matters, feeling matters, emotion matters. And we can design our world, our technologies and so on, in a total different way. That, that to me is the core thing here is that doesn't need to be an inevitability.
1:00:34 Danny Jones? Right.
1:00:35 Speaker 01 That we all end up as emaciated gray little beings.
1:00:38 Danny Jones? Right, with these big bulbous eyes and giant heads. The top, well, they do talk telepathically, which is pretty cool.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 That's, uh.
1:00:45 Danny Jones? You know what's also crazy is there's lots of documented cases where these things came down and talked to children.
1:00:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:51 Danny Jones? At schools and told them to beware of technology. Technology is going to end up killing you guys.
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1:01:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, the RRL School in Zimbabwe.
1:01:58 Danny Jones? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 That's fascinating.
1:02:00 Danny Jones? Yeah, dude, crazy. But what are they talking about? Technology, you know, there's so much. Like, they're talking about atom bombs, thermonuclear bombs? Are they talking about screens?
1:02:08 Speaker 01 Right. I mean, we talk, we talk about nukes and things like that as being one of the potential great filters. You know, every civilization that comes to be, do they blow themselves up?
1:02:17 Danny Jones? Right.
1:02:17 Speaker 01 I think the other great filter is computers and AI and machines.
1:02:20 Danny Jones? Mm-hmm.
1:02:21 Speaker 01 You know, are we able to actually use them and use them effectively as tools? Or do we become the servants and then the masters? And, you know, we either kill ourselves in the process or completely dehumanize ourselves.
1:02:35 Danny Jones? Right. Do you, do you, um, buy into Jack's idea that this is like a real MKUltra 2.5.0 mind control thing? Where they basically, they know they're doing this to people? And it's easier to control society if everyone's got these screens in front of them all the time? And they can manipulate what the truth is? Because it's, you know, right now, like, I've been saying this a lot lately, that, like, the truth is really, really flexible and slippery nowadays. Like, it's really hard to know what's true with social media. And there's always news popping up on every single app on your phone all the time. And there's always
1:03:16 Speaker 01 Exactly, yeah.
1:03:17 Danny Jones? Different narratives to everything that's going on. So it's like, it's impossible. It's impossible to know what's real anymore.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 I, I think it's the banality of evil. Do you know the Hannah Arendt quote?
1:03:31 Danny Jones? No, but I'm familiar with Hannah Arendt.
1:03:33 Speaker 01 It's basically, she was like, one of the most heartbreaking things about the world is the banality of evil. If the problems that we have around us, if evil was committed because there were simply just a lot of really, really, really evil people, the solution's a little simpler. Shoot them. Find the evil people and shoot them. She said, what's actually terrifying, what's truly terrifying is when you see much of the world is good or well-meaning, or at least neutral people committing evil.
1:04:08 Danny Jones? Right.
1:04:09 Speaker 01 Because it's, it's the structure.
1:04:12 Danny Jones? Hmm.
1:04:13 Speaker 01 It's the game. It's not necessarily the people. I think that's, I think that's the big thing here is, did anybody intend, did anybody design this? Maybe, but also potentially what's scarier is, nobody designed this and this is just where it ended up.
1:04:29 Danny Jones? Right.
1:04:30 Speaker 01 And it's absolutely convenient for all the people who are in power or want things to be the way it is, or disempower us. And, you know, from future machines looking to make humans their slaves or disempower us. It's a damn good setup for that.
1:04:46 Danny Jones? Yeah, man, that makes a lot of sense. You know, it's like the question, can evil people, do evil people sleep good at night? Right? They probably do, because there's no angel on the other shoulder telling them what they're doing is wrong. It's probably like, they're doing exactly what they think is the right thing to do. And then you have people like, I think Hannah Arendt, was she the one that was, she was a Jewish woman who dated the Nazi? And the guy, the Nazi that she fell in love with, I guess, like operated a train, transportation on a train. And the guy was just taking orders. He was just doing his job, like, and that, everybody he knew did the same thing in his world. So like, is he evil?
1:05:28 Danny Jones? Wow, man.
1:05:29 Speaker 01 That's why I think your point here of like, who's into this? How is this gonna be? It's just, we, one person at a time, looking up, looking out, saying, I'm not okay with this. I think we literally have to create this third timeline, brick by brick. Otherwise, this existing timeline is structurally evil, regardless of how many people you shoot.
1:05:52 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:05:53 Speaker 01 And that's the part that makes it powerful, is it's not even about people anymore. There's a machine running there.
1:05:58 Danny Jones? Yeah, that's fucking terrifying, bro.
1:06:02 Speaker 01 Have you heard of the concept of egregores?
1:06:05 Danny Jones? Yes, but I forgot what it is.
1:06:07 Speaker 01 It's the idea that, you know, we as humans are doing things and, you know, there's a concept like, oh, markets are like the invisible hand. You end up creating this like intelligence that's able to like, you know, figure out things better than we could on our own. You know, tells, figures out what's like the ideal price for bread through enough buyers and sellers in a market, blah, blah, blah. The point of an egregore is what happens when the intelligence that comes out of our human behaviors and small individual choices is actually something that's not necessarily beneficial?
1:06:37 Speaker 01 What if it's actually like, it's like you're birthing like
1:06:43 Speaker 01 an entity in the news sphere at the higher levels that starts to actually prey on us and use us for its own goals?
1:06:52 Speaker 01 And so there's like the concept of like Moloch comes from and so on, that there are some like big entities or egregores or so on that is using technology to get us to kind of domesticate us, to disempower us, to make us into the, you know, the future, the matrix future where we're nothing but batteries. And they're actually the ones in charge. We're not even in charge anymore. And it recruits capitalism and technology and whatever that machine is to kind of perpetuate.
1:07:25 Danny Jones? Hmm. Kind of like ethereal demons that are here to just destroy society.
1:07:32 Speaker 01 And whether they're actually actual demons or are there more of these like the intelligent hand working in the worst possible way?
1:07:41 Danny Jones? Right, right.
1:07:42 Speaker 01 What if?
1:07:43 Danny Jones? It is happening whether they are real things or not.
1:07:46 Speaker 01 Yes. So we can't just like wait. We gotta do something. And the problem with technology is it's so hard to build computers. It's so hard to make technological things. It requires so much capital.
1:08:07 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:08:08 Speaker 01 You have to kind of be part of the system or game to be able to get the resources. At that point, you're fully captured.
1:08:13 Danny Jones? Right.
1:08:14 Speaker 01 And so one of the hardest parts here in kind of creating an arc or a third timeline, or those of us trying to get outside of that, you know, gray alien inevitability, is how do you actually get the resources? How do you find enough people? How do you find your own tribe to be able to actually start making some alternatives?
1:08:34 Speaker 01 And so.
1:08:37 Danny Jones? What have you noticed since you, first of all, how long have you had your first prototype of this?
1:08:43 Speaker 01 So I started working on this mid 2018 and we didn't have the proof of concept, the first proof of concept of that I could prove I could do the display technology was near the end of 2021. So it took a while. So I've had it. And our first tablet came at the beginning of 2023. So I've had it for almost two years now.
1:09:04 Danny Jones? And since then, you, is this basically all you use for your computer? Do you, do you ever have to use like a laptop or a MacBook or anything?
1:09:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, I'd say we're still a generation or two away from being able to do everything. So I still have to use my iPhone and MacBook and, but I try to do as much as possible on a daylight.
1:09:26 Danny Jones? What have you or people that you've sold this to, like what kind of people are reaching out to you? And like trying to get their hands on these or even like trying to invest with you?
1:09:37 Speaker 01 It's a lot of parents, actually.
1:09:39 Danny Jones? Really?
1:09:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. I'd say the biggest communities are people first who, funny enough, they don't even care about any of this. They're just. They're just want, they want performance. They're lawyers, they're hedge fund managers, they're researchers, whatever it is. And one of the advantages of making a computer screen that's more natural is if you're spending all day on a computer screen for your job, you're able to do it without your eyes hurting or getting headaches or screwing up your sleep. So there's a ton of people who basically just read and write a lot, who are buying this as a performance tool. It's like soccer cleats if you're a lawyer, you know, instead of using tennis shoes. But the other main groups are people who are conscious of health and blue light and circadian rhythms. And they, they see how
1:10:24 Speaker 01 much it impacts, impacts them and they want a healthier computer. And the third group is, and the one I think we could really have a ton of impact in society is parents wanting a, a non-zombifying computer for their kid. I mean, if you've seen the videos of kids, when you take away their iPads, it's insane.
1:10:42 Danny Jones? I know what it's like. They turn into little devils. But with this, the idea is that with, if you were going to replace an iPad, can you get the iPad games on here?
1:10:51 Speaker 01 So that's actually one, when you, when you talk about how people are using this, that's one of my favorite validations, that this approach of more natural technology evens the playing field, is we've had people put really addicting games on this, put TikTok, put Instagram, even put YouTube on this. And they get bored. When you put kids on a daylight with whatever was the most addicting thing elsewhere, they get bored of it. And there's just something so fascinating about evening, evening the playing field, such that, you know, you can engage in these things, but they're no longer as addicting or as compulsive. And that to me is what's magical. When's the last time, you know, you've gotten
1:11:36 Speaker 01 bored of YouTube? When's the last time you've like?
1:11:39 Danny Jones? You never get bored, you just run out of time.
1:11:40 Speaker 01 You just run out of time. And so when, like, it's a fascinating feeling to using YouTube on this and getting bored.
1:11:47 Danny Jones? So that's essentially the experience, what the feedback that you've gotten from people who have given this to their kids, like they'll, at least when they want to get the iPad, they can get that fix of having that thing in their hands and playing on it or whatever. And then after an hour, they just, they're done with it. They put it down and go outside or go do something else.
1:12:03 Speaker 01 And I think that is the best way to think about technology is, I'll tell you what, one of my favorite things somebody told me is, they got this for their kid, and they said, what makes, what makes this so, what makes this so compelling? Is to my son, it is more interesting than picking his nose or bullying his sister, but less interesting than the backyard. And so at a certain point, he gets bored and he goes and plays outside.
1:12:30 Danny Jones? Right.
1:12:31 Speaker 01 And that's the point.
1:12:32 Danny Jones? Yes.
1:12:32 Speaker 01 It's like the least amount of computer we need. Do your homework, listen to an audiobook. You know, play some games that help you learn math or whatever.
1:12:39 Danny Jones? Can you connect headphones to this?
1:12:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:42 Danny Jones? Really?
1:12:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can.
1:12:43 Danny Jones? That's fucking cool.
1:12:44 Speaker 01 So, so one of the hopes of this is to be able to carve out the parts of computing that are actually like beneficial.
1:12:52 Danny Jones? Right. It's optimizing, it's optimizing for productivity. No?
1:12:59 Speaker 01 That, that's, I'd say that is the cardinal sin of, of conventional tech is it's just optimizing for productivity. The point of-
1:13:08 Danny Jones? Well, it's optimizing for distractions, right? It's optimizing, it's, you mean, like, I think you made the point, like before you would go on a computer and try to like research something and you end up with a hundred thousand tabs open and you're not getting anything done. But with this, you can actually complete a task because you're not like, you're not sitting there and enjoying like, ah, this is so nice being in front of this thing. I can turn on my music here. If I get bored, I can go to Instagram real quick, then come back. And then like, you're just like, you gotta get it done.
1:13:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. But my point is maybe, maybe I'm saying it in a bit of a semantic way is the productivity is what comes out. Once you make this, you remove all the crap.
1:13:46 Danny Jones? Okay, I see.
1:13:47 Speaker 01 The computer's not optimizing for productivity. What it's optimizing for is minimalism for constraint.
1:13:51 Danny Jones? Right.
1:13:52 Speaker 01 For doing the least.
1:13:53 Danny Jones? Yes.
1:13:53 Speaker 01 And then it turns out then humans, we just are more productive, right? Like, I struggle to read a book. I go sit outside and away from my phone and everything, suddenly.
1:14:03 Danny Jones? Right.
1:14:03 Speaker 01 I'm reading that book. You know, it's like the most productive place for me in the world is a, is a airplane with no wifi. Cause suddenly the thing I had in my hand that had been procrastinating for six months is more interesting than picking my nose and I start to do it. And I think that's the point here is like- So many of us feel like we're low willpower, we're distracted, you know, we're like, we're not able to be the best versions of ourselves. And I think actually all it takes is designing our environment, redesigning our computers. And suddenly you're able to read books, you're able to finish things, you're able to, you know, think, write, draw, make poetry, whatever it may be. I think all of those things are, can emerge once we're not always stuffing our face with information and being overstimulated.
1:14:47 Danny Jones? Right.
1:14:48 Speaker 01 And so that's the goal of creating computers that, you know, allow us to discover cool things a human does.
1:14:55 Danny Jones? Hmm. It's like a nice, big juicy bone in ribeye with no sides. All you get is just the big juicy steak, no bullshit fries or
1:15:03 Speaker 01 There you go.
1:15:04 Danny Jones? Fucking hamburgers or chicken nuggets, just the good shit.
1:15:08 Speaker 01 There's a lot of, there's a lot of carnivore people who are into daylight, so.
1:15:11 Danny Jones? Oh, is there?
1:15:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's the same principle, right? Like, how do we rethink things from like an evolutionary perspective and what's natural? And that's what this is. It's like, okay, humans evolved our ocular system, our eyes or.
1:15:24 Danny Jones? Yeah, no, that's another big thing that I actually had an eye doctor on here telling me that like the, um, the prevalence of myopia has like shot through the stratosphere in the last decade or two. After, ever since like, you know, phone screens have become a thing. There's more, there's more nearsighted people than ever.
1:15:43 Speaker 01 Right. I think that's what's powerful about this third timeline is the principles are to get back to what is most transcendent and real. And that's like the natural.
1:15:53 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:15:53 Speaker 01 Like nature, like there's a, there's a reason this is tried and tested throughout billions of years and millions of years. Right? There's an arrogance as a human to think we can, you know, figure it all on our own and do better. And I think what's best is when we use technology to kind of come back to core human universals and wisdom.
1:16:13 Danny Jones? Yeah. What's it, so what has it been like, and I'm, I assume you didn't have like a background in like venture capital? When you got into this. So what was that like for you, getting into that world and like going out and trying to raise money for it?
1:16:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, first I, I spent my entire life savings to develop the technology to start. Cause I wasn't even sure whether it's possible to, you know, invent this type of a healthier display. So first I had to kind of go all in and once I saw, okay, it works. I tried to put some money together to, to bring this to production and into the world. Completely rejected by all of venture capital.
1:16:51 Danny Jones? And how did you get these meetings?
1:16:59 Speaker 01 It's that's you have to meet the right person who introduces you to the right person, introduces you to the right person. It's just, it's its own little network and so on. So I tried to to get into it and.
1:17:11 Danny Jones? Got to go, you gotta go to some parties.
1:17:12 Speaker 01 You just get laughed out. Yeah, I I just over and over again, I I just heard the thing which was, hey, which of the which of the sins does this cater to? Because that's how we invest, you know, is this gluttony? Is this envy like? We invest, we think, you know, the best consumer products are those who cater to sins.
1:17:35 Speaker 01 You know, you're a boy scout if you think people want healthier, more humane computers. And so you're trying to compete against Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and all of the big tech companies? Are you crazy?
1:17:50 Danny Jones? Right.
1:17:50 Speaker 01 And so Silicon Valley, which is supposed to be this idealistic place, like I thought there would still be people who, you know, they're already making these choices for their kids. I thought, you know, they'd all say, you know, I know I do this for my kid, but I just like, I don't know if others are going to do it. It's going to be niche like, eh, I don't know, man. And everybody was basically cynical. So we couldn't raise any money from Silicon Valley institutions. So all the money we pulled together to be able to fund this is just from individuals, from people who actually believe that this is what, you know, they want their kids to grow up with. They don't want their kids to grow up with VR. They don't want to grow up with more screens in their life that are sucking you. So.
1:18:33 Danny Jones? So how many have you created so far?
1:18:35 Speaker 01 So we.
1:18:36 Danny Jones? Or how many of you guys shipped out?
1:18:37 Speaker 01 Our first batch is 5,000 units. So.
1:18:41 Danny Jones? And this is the one I got as part of the first batch?
1:18:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:44 Danny Jones? Wow, dude.
1:18:46 Danny Jones? Yeah, I imagine there's gotta be a lot of like hardcore early adopters to this.
1:18:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, the the people who are into this is like I said, it's like people who have to use a computer screen all day, so they buy it for performance, you know, they they read all the time. But yeah, a lot of it is folks who are, you know, this is the computer they use now. So they can, you can be outside in the sun, like, why not be in your happy place?
1:19:09 Danny Jones? Right, exactly.
1:19:10 Speaker 01 At nighttime, you know, sometimes you still want to use a computer, but now you don't. This is completely blue light free.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 So it produces no light at all. It's a reflective screen, but we optionally at nighttime, we put tiny little holes into the reflective material, such that you get a flicker free, blue light free, a light at nighttime. Could show what that's like. And so people use it as their.
1:19:36 Danny Jones? Steve, you got that on there?
1:19:39 Danny Jones? Okay, there we go.
1:19:42 Speaker 01 Let me get something here. So yeah, you can see this is it's this is producing no light at all. This is like a piece of paper.
1:19:47 Danny Jones? Yep.
1:19:48 Speaker 01 And so then what we have.
1:19:49 Danny Jones? This is the backlight that you can turn on.
1:19:51 Speaker 01 This is the the light. So we built our own custom LED. So it's completely blue light free and it's flicker free. We made the spectrum similar to a campfire.
1:20:03 Danny Jones? Wow.
1:20:03 Speaker 01 And so even when you put like your iPhone into red mode, or you put it into the night mode, underlying it is still a blue LED.
1:20:11 Danny Jones? Yeah, it's just tinting over it, right?
1:20:13 Speaker 01 It's just tinting over, so you still have a small percentage, 20% more of the blue light coming through. Here is actually at the hardware level. We're driving the LEDs differently, so it's direct current. So there's no flicker. So a normal, a normal iPhone or iPad LED is driven by something called PWM, which is what causes it to flicker. And so this is not flickering at all. And believe it or not, to make that just even one change was a was a big deal.
1:20:43 Danny Jones? What does the little fire thing do?
1:20:46 Danny Jones? Is that a little flame?
1:20:49 Speaker 01 That changes the the spectrum, but yeah.
1:20:51 Danny Jones? That changes the spectrum? What do you mean?
1:20:54 Speaker 01 So.
1:20:56 Speaker 01 Basically, if you're all the way.
1:20:59 Speaker 01 If you're all the way over to the left, it's just using.
1:21:02 Danny Jones? Show us on, show us on that one here, so people can see.
1:21:04 Speaker 01 Okay, so basically. When you're here, this is completely blue light free and just using our amber LEDs.
1:21:11 Danny Jones? Okay.
1:21:13 Speaker 01 If you go all the way here, this is what an iPad is.
1:21:15 Danny Jones? Oh, you can make it blue light?
1:21:17 Speaker 01 So we actually have a second set of LEDs that are white and blue. And so if you want to, you could use it this way, but it's kind of almost to make.
1:21:25 Danny Jones? MKUltra mode.
1:21:26 Speaker 01 It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's almost to make the difference extremely stark to you. Wow. How big of a deal it is.
1:21:32 Danny Jones? That's crazy.
1:21:33 Speaker 01 So it's a two different set of LEDs that are underneath it.
1:21:36 Danny Jones? So why would you ever want to have that mode on?
1:21:39 Speaker 01 Just because some people are not as militant as us, so they kind of, you know, like if you go here, instead of looking bright orange and amber, it looks a little bit, you know.
1:21:48 Danny Jones? Like maybe if you need to stay awake a little bit, like an extra hour, get a little bit more reading done, you just put a little blue in there.
1:21:54 Speaker 01 I, I don't recommend using it. I use it completely just in the, you know, the pure amber.
1:21:58 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:21:58 Speaker 01 Some people, they don't mind 10% more blue light for something that they think looks nicer, but yeah. The core idea here is you use it this way, no light being produced at all. It's like looking at a piece of paper or you can use it like that and it's completely blue light free.
1:22:13 Danny Jones? Have you ever met with RFK and said, RFK, say, we gotta get these things mandated? We gotta get, we gotta get the, uh. The anti-blue light, like, you know, cause he's like the big health guy working with Trump now. So supposedly we're gonna make America healthy again.
1:22:26 Speaker 01 I think that would be huge if we could, if we could get kids everywhere to move away from normal blue light, emissive screens and tablets to, to things like this that are healthy.
1:22:35 Danny Jones? They're in schools now, you know that. They have laptops, literally, and iPads for kids, for literal kindergarteners.
1:22:42 Speaker 01 Look at the rates of ADHD, autism, so on. There's lots of reasons, but it's fascinating, yeah.
1:22:48 Danny Jones? No, dude, it's scary as fuck.
1:22:50 Speaker 01 That's the point. Computers, especially for kids, are literally rewiring the way we are. It's, this is, this is an experiment we've never run before. It is literally rewiring our memory, our rewards, our dopamine system, like.
1:23:04 Danny Jones? It's crazy to me that, well, I mean, yeah, it is just crazy that, that no, like.
1:23:11 Danny Jones? Serious institution has come out and actually like done any kind of like extrapolation hypothesis on what this is gonna do to human beings in a hundred years, right? Like, what are the downstream effects of this?
1:23:25 Speaker 01 For aliens.
1:23:28 Danny Jones? It's fucking scary, dude. It is, it's and, and why don't you, why don't you give us like sort of like a, like a, a demo on like how the PDF reader works and like how much you can actually zoom in and draw on it? So people can see how quick it is compared to like other readers or e-readers.
1:23:44 Speaker 01 So, so you could think of it as like basically a healthier iPad. Whatever you can do on iPad, you can basically do on here. So one simple way to use this is, you know, you can read, read things on it.
1:23:55 Danny Jones? So this is a PDF right here?
1:23:57 Speaker 01 So this is a PDF that we have here. Um, and there, there, this is a total passive stylus. There's no battery, there's no Bluetooth in this. Um, it just works off of magnetic resonance. So.
1:24:09 Danny Jones? That, that zoom is ungodly. How, how clean and fast that is.
1:24:13 Speaker 01 So we built our own software to be able to do that, or it's called a PDF renderer. And if you can, maybe it's hard to hear, but.
1:24:22 Danny Jones? Here, put the mic down towards it.
1:24:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
1:24:24 Danny Jones? There you go.
1:24:28 Danny Jones? That sounds like paper.
1:24:29 Speaker 01 We, we made, we engineered the, the, the surface to have nano dots to best replicate my favorite Japanese paper called Campus Kyoko. So that's literally making a physical sound. And that's our whole point. Let's see if it's back. That's our whole point is computers don't need to feel like shit. They don't need to be these metallic, cold, inorganic, you know, emotionless things. They, they can have some kinesthetic, they can have this appeal. So basically you can use it for reading things, you can take notes, you can write.
1:25:06 Speaker 01 You know, you can, you can do your email on this. Uh, you can put a keyboard, kind of like a Microsoft Surface or an iPad Pro. You know, I like to take notes on this.
1:25:19 Danny Jones? And
1:25:19 Speaker 01 Great experience.
1:25:20 Danny Jones? And you can get pretty much any app on here. Then you can like import your note thing like, like the one you use and Obsidian.
1:25:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:29 Danny Jones? Or Scrivener.
1:25:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, whatever. If you, you can use this to listen to, you know, Audible, Spotify, podcasts, audiobooks. You know, you can do basically anything on this because you get Android apps and web apps and things like that. And so we're going to build a version of the software that's got a more focused lockdown mode.
1:25:47 Danny Jones? But what's that mean?
1:25:49 Speaker 01 Just basically it helps curate apps that are better for you.
1:25:53 Danny Jones? Okay.
1:25:54 Speaker 01 And tries to like create some friction for the things that are distracting and that. But basically this mode that it's in right now is the hardware, the display difference so evens the playing field. Actually, it's fine to kind of have access to everything. You don't end up getting distracted or
1:26:09 Danny Jones? Right.
1:26:10 Speaker 01 addicted on this. So this is just, I'm in the browser, you're able to, you know,
1:26:17 Speaker 01 to, to read, read the news, read newsletters.
1:26:22 Speaker 01 You could go on YouTube if you want to and listen to
1:26:24 Danny Jones? You can actually watch YouTube videos. And but they're in black and white. Imagine if every, every single person on earth automatically got these instead of, instead of their regular computers.
1:26:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:35 Danny Jones? Media companies would be going out of business left and right.
1:26:37 Speaker 01 And that's the thing is the entire ad model starts to fall apart.
1:26:42 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:26:42 Speaker 01 When you, it's not super stimulating and addicting and compulsive.
1:26:47 Danny Jones? The ad model falls, falls apart and then I wouldn't have a podcast anymore. I'd have to go get a real job.
1:26:54 Danny Jones? That's not true because you can listen to audio on here.
1:26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, good content, good products and so on. Well, I think we'll always stand the test of time.
1:27:00 Danny Jones? To get better.
1:27:00 Speaker 01 It's the stuff that needs to pander to you because it's, it's, it's not actually good for you. It doesn't deliver on its promise. To your point, it has all these negative long-term effects.
1:27:09 Danny Jones? Mm hmm.
1:27:09 Speaker 01 And so.
1:27:12 Danny Jones? So what do you want to do? What is going to be like the next thing? Or this is going to be like a, a version 2.0 or like, what are you currently doing now? To, other than like, you're actively still like raising money, I'm sure, right?
1:27:28 Danny Jones? But like, as far as the, the hardware and the technology, like what is your goal?
1:27:33 Speaker 01 Well, so the big, the big vision of daylight is Basically, if you made Apple a public benefit corporation, its primarily alignment was to help people. And it wasn't captured by public markets and shareholders and so on. How could it make technology healthier, more humane? And so our goal is to basically go through each of the different categories of computing. And so, starting with the tablet, but then making a phone, making a laptop, making monitors, making screens that you can put on your walls, you know, kind of like digital whiteboards or whatever.
1:28:08 Speaker 01 Go and redo computing to be healthier. So with our screen technology, with software that is far less distracting.
1:28:18 Speaker 01 Our vision is to kind of create a new ecosystem of tech. And there's a lot to be done in terms of also changing the primitives of an operating system. You're locked in in many ways because by default, Apple's going to put iCloud everything, Apple logins and this and that.
1:28:34 Danny Jones? Yeah, they've built this like amazing walled garden around Apple products. It's, which is fucking genius.
1:28:41 Speaker 01 It's brilliant. But you know, if they want to charge $40 a month, are you going to like give up all your photos that you've ever had?
1:28:47 Danny Jones? I've been thinking about trying to switch phones.
1:28:49 Speaker 01 Do you have it stored anywhere else? Like, it's.
1:28:52 Danny Jones? I have literally on my phone, I have every photo I've taken for like the last 10 years, which gets to like, whenever I update my phone, it just sucks it right into the new phone. So I have photos I took in like 2010.
1:29:04 Speaker 01 And by the way, we live on a finite planet, but the public markets expect infinite growth. So at a certain point, how does Apple make more money? It's by, you know, turning up the screws even more and more. And so the possibility of a new operating system and a new computing ecosystem is we could have a total different set of primitives. So, identity can be decentralized.
1:29:28 Speaker 01 It doesn't need to be provided by daylight. It can be, it's called a DID. So this could be Blue Sky, it could be Noster. There's a bunch of new technologies that are sovereign. They're not controlled by any corporation or any individual. They're completely decentralized, kinda like Bitcoin.
1:29:46 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:29:47 Speaker 01 And so similar thing with payments is instead of having Visa and Mastercard and all of that only be the way to do it. What if you could also build in some of these new decentralized payment technologies like Bitcoin and so on? And so there's a way to have a new computing stack that is far more private, far more yours. Not covered in tracking and spying and all these, all these kinda tendrils. But it's completely sovereign and private and decentralized. And it's really hard to get people to adopt that on their existing system or computers. But if you're gonna start computing basically from scratch again, you can now rebuild it with this new stack. For example, the storage could be decentralized.
1:30:30 Speaker 01 So rather than your Apple Photos being in Apple's servers, let's say we were to have, you know, a storage app or so on. It could basically take your files and there's a kind of a, there's an algorithm, a distributed algorithm where it sends it across your network of friends, 150 people. And it stores a little bit with each person or a thousand people and so on.
1:30:52 Danny Jones? Like blockchain?
1:30:54 Speaker 01 Uh, it's complicated.
1:30:56 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:30:56 Speaker 01 The specific, but the basic idea is we now have the technology to basically have community or people or peers store things and stuff like that.
1:31:04 Danny Jones? Oh, wow.
1:31:05 Speaker 01 And so therefore, even if daylight, you know, you don't like daylight, daylight can't control you. You can't start trying to charge you for that because we don't actually store it and therefore get you from it. You're storing it amongst your own network. And so the possibility of peer to peer and actually community-driven computing starts to become available. If we build it in as the defaults into this future operating systems. And Apple, so on, they're not gonna do it. They make a lot of money spying on you. They make a lot of money keeping you in the walled garden. So the only way as a society is to create these kind of new alternatives and new computing platforms. So that's, that's our vision is from the software, from the hardware, how do we reimagine it all to be more socially beneficial?
1:31:47 Danny Jones? How much harder would it be to act, to make a phone like this?
1:31:50 Speaker 01 Oh, that's what we have coming next.
1:31:52 Danny Jones? Oh, that's the next thing?
1:31:53 Speaker 01 That's the next thing, yeah.
1:31:55 Danny Jones? I imagine it's got to be crazy because you got to have like, you got to be able to connect it with the cellular providers and like text messaging apps and stuff like that. I imagine it's quite a bit different than than just like something that's connected to Wi-Fi.
1:32:08 Speaker 01 It's harder too, and iMessage, at least in America, is such a strong lock-in.
1:32:13 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:32:13 Speaker 01 That's an Apple.
1:32:14 Danny Jones? Well, the new one, with the new update, you can actually like see when people on Androids are typing and you can see when they read your messages.
1:32:21 Speaker 01 It's getting closer, yeah. So that's, that's what we're trying to do here is like, there's hopefully some opportunities and breaking points and tipping points here that, you know, allow these other options to actually, you know, be able to compete with the existing system. So yeah, well, a phone that, you know, comes with this live paper screen that's blue light free, flicker free, distraction free, usable in the sun, not addicting.
1:32:45 Danny Jones? Do you think you would include the ability to make it like with full spectrum color and all that stuff? Or would you keep it kind of like monochrome like this?
1:32:54 Speaker 01 I think this is how we're able to kind of level the playing field right now is with this kind of non-stimulating computer screen. I think if we can show and prove that we're able to do color in a way that's responsible, that's not addicting and overstimulating, maybe eventually we'll be able to do it. But it's not, it's not a plan for the first couple of years.
1:33:15 Danny Jones? Right. And the battery life?
1:33:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, the battery life is substantially better because you're not trying to compete with nature. You're not trying to compete with the light from the sun or from your environment. So this, for example, lasts 62 hours if you use it for reading continuously. So.
1:33:30 Danny Jones? That's amazing. 62 hours.
1:33:33 Speaker 01 So the idea of, so we're not sure if it can replace somebody's iPhone to start.
1:33:38 Danny Jones? Right.
1:33:38 Speaker 01 But maybe, you know, if you want to give your kid a phone, you finally have a way to do it and not be worried that it's going to be, you know, super addicting or take over their lives. Because you, games, TikTok, that type of stuff, it just like is not interesting.
1:33:52 Danny Jones? Right.
1:33:52 Speaker 01 On, you know, on a daylight screen. Um, so.
1:33:57 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:33:57 Speaker 01 That's what we're kind of starting with. And for other people, maybe it's a nighttime phone or a weekend phone or something like that.
1:34:03 Danny Jones? Hmm.
1:34:03 Speaker 01 But our, our, our idea is let's just create healthier computers in each of these categories and see what sticks.
1:34:09 Danny Jones? I figure, I, I think, I've ever thought about, like, I, I imagine other countries might be more interested in, in implementing shit like this, like earlier than the US would.
1:34:18 Speaker 01 Well, the US is finally catching up, right? They're like banning phones in schools. Um, California did that this year.
1:34:25 Danny Jones? Did they really?
1:34:26 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:34:28 Danny Jones? They banned phones in schools?
1:34:30 Speaker 01 Look up the, look up the legislation. Yeah, it's, it's
1:34:32 Danny Jones? Who did this?
1:34:33 Speaker 01 Across a ton of states now.
1:34:34 Danny Jones? Gavin Newsom?
1:34:36 Speaker 01 But, uh, it's, it's, it's all over the place. So, but in, in, in China too. Uh, phones are banned from schools because of myopia and they're worried about the incidence of Australia, France. I think the world's waking up to actually how bad this is.
1:34:50 Danny Jones? Did you know about how TikTok regulates their platform in China versus here?
1:34:54 Speaker 01 No.
1:34:55 Danny Jones? After, I think it's after, um, after like 6pm, you can only get educational content on TikTok in China.
1:35:03 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:35:04 Danny Jones? And here it's, there's no limits on it at all.
1:35:06 Speaker 01 That's crazy.
1:35:08 Danny Jones? And then I think it's like, so after like, between like six and 10, it's educational stuff. And then I, I, I could be wrong here, but I want to say that like, between like 11pm and like 6am, you just can't use it at all.
1:35:22 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:35:24 Danny Jones? That says a lot about, especially if they're the ones that created TikTok, right?
1:35:29 Danny Jones? What you need to know, Governor Gavin Newsom today signed Assembly Bill 3216, the Phone Free School Act, to require every school district, charter school and county office of education to develop a policy limiting the use of smartphones, starting July 1st, 2026.
1:35:50 Danny Jones? Huh. That's interesting.
1:35:56 Speaker 01 That's so interesting that TikTok is a free for all in America and China is.
1:36:00 Danny Jones? Yeah, right. Isn't that crazy?
1:36:03 Danny Jones? And there's so much like, you know, even with stuff that that you get on TikTok, I'm not, I mean, this isn't just TikTok, but it's like the way, the way stuff is shared on social media too. It's like the most outrageous stuff is the stuff that naturally gets shared more and goes viral more. Like, we recently had a podcast where we had this dude who's a former CIA officer. And we were watching some news story on TikTok about China implementing these exploding helmets for their, uh, for their Navy pilots. So like, if a pilot who's on a mission, like flying their jet in China, decides to go rogue or do something that they're not supposed to do.
1:36:47 Danny Jones? The Chinese military, god damn it.
1:36:51 Danny Jones? Excuse me. The Chinese military has the ability to make their helmet explode to kill them. And it was a TikTok. I'm like, I saw it on TikTok. We found the actual TikTok. And then we like did some more research, like we dug into it and found out it was completely a fake story.
1:37:06 Danny Jones? So like, you know, if you get rid of that, that whole element of social media and like, and how it, how just like the, the most outrageous stuff gets shared more, I wonder how that would affect just information in general. You know what I mean? The dissemination of information. Because, you know, obviously like we're flooded by all this like misinformation and disinformation and strategic disinformation, strategic deception and, you know, it's, it's like the, and then even in Silicon Valley, you have lots of companies like, um, Palantir, which is in Silicon Valley. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but that's Peter Thiel and, uh,
1:37:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:46 Danny Jones? I forget the other guy's name. But there was this other guy who's, uh, the CEO of Palantir.
1:37:53 Danny Jones? Alex Karp. And, uh, he's like the super progressive liberal guy, but he, he, in his New York Times interview, he says,
1:38:05 Danny Jones? Quoted saying, "The idea of saving lives and ending lives is very interesting to me."
1:38:15 Danny Jones? You know, he's like, "If I have this company, this super powerful technological company that I can integrate into the world, and the US military is going to give me billions of dollars to do it, I'm going to take advantage of that." And, you know, he believes in, obviously, in
1:38:34 Danny Jones? United States supremacy over the rest of the world. And at the same time, he like portrays himself as being this really progressive and liberal guy. And he's best friends with Peter Thiel, which is interesting.
1:38:47 Danny Jones? So like, it just like, like what Jack said, incentives dictate outcomes. So like, it's just interesting how the military and companies like In-Qtel, the CIA are so involved with so many tech companies. And, and, you know, the foundation of it is spying on people and taking and getting all the information of all the citizens and what they're doing at all times.
1:39:13 Danny Jones? So.
1:39:15 Speaker 01 I think that's why there's potentially going to be a lot of people who are going to be really pissed off that this exists. Because you start to be able to make technology that doesn't have backdoors, that is private, that isn't sending all your information, that doesn't allow you to get tracked, doesn't allow you to get bombarded by ads the same way. The goal here is, let's create a computer where my opinion doesn't determine what happens to you. Let's create something that's sovereign, that's safe, that follows natural principles. And you get to choose what to do with it.
1:39:49 Danny Jones? Right.
1:39:50 Speaker 01 Versus somebody else from afar controlling your attention and time and making choices on your behalf. So that to me is like, society needs technology that isn't, that's free.
1:40:02 Danny Jones? Right.
1:40:03 Speaker 01 And that's, that's the real thing here is if we don't, if we don't go out of our way to do this, if we don't go out of our way to make it, we're, I think we're, I think we're pulled by the machine.
1:40:15 Danny Jones? How far off do you think you are from making the phone?
1:40:20 Speaker 01 It depends how well this tablet does, but you can expect it from us in the next two years or so.
1:40:25 Danny Jones? So you you have, the first batch was 5,000 tablets.
1:40:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:31 Danny Jones? And how many orders do you have?
1:40:32 Speaker 01 Well, sold out. We completely sold out of all.
1:40:36 Danny Jones? You still have people that have orders that haven't received them yet, right? So like, so how many total orders have you gotten?
1:40:42 Speaker 01 So, yeah, we we've gotten like 5,000.
1:40:45 Danny Jones? Oh, so you haven't delivered all the 5,000. So so so far you've gotten 5,000.
1:40:49 Speaker 01 We've delivered about 1,600 of them, and we're gonna deliver another 1,000 this week and kind of until the end of the year. So we we spent the summer getting production. It's a hard thing to do, and now we're we're delivering. And the hope here is, yeah, keep keep keep spreading the word and keep growing this and hopefully creating.
1:41:08 Danny Jones? And where are you like building them and assembling them?
1:41:11 Speaker 01 In the the the display technology is made in Japan and then Taiwan is where. So maybe one of these days we'll be able to make it.
1:41:19 Danny Jones? Japan's, dude, they're they're always on the cutting edge of shit. There, did you, there was something that came out yesterday that Japan's trying to create a wooden satellite. Did you see that? They're they're actually, they built a satellite made of wood.
1:41:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:33 Danny Jones? And they're they're gonna put it into orbit and they're gonna, I think they're gonna let it orbit the Earth for six months to see how how the wood can withstand and something to do with, yeah, there you go. Click on the first one.
1:41:47 Speaker 01 If they're giving a satellite out of wood, we have no excuse that we can't make computers out of wood and natural materials.
1:41:53 Danny Jones? Dude, imagine if you made one of these made out of fucking wood.
1:41:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:57 Danny Jones? Yeah. What does it say? What's the first thing say? Yeah, the world's first wooden satellite built by the Japanese researchers was launched. Oh, it was launched into space already on Tuesday in an early test using timber in lunar and Mars exploration. Developed at Kyoto in university and home builder Sumitomo Forestry will be flown to the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission and later released into orbit around 400 kilometers or 250 miles above Earth. Named after the Latin word for wood, the palm-sized Lignosat. It's a palm-sized satellite.
1:42:37 Danny Jones? Is tasked to demonstrate the cosmic potential of renewable materials as humans explore. So yeah, I guess the idea is when it comes back and reenters the atmosphere, it'll just be burned up by the atmosphere. So you won't have any kind of waste or anything, you want to go and retrieve it.
1:42:52 Speaker 01 No satellites still burn up, so.
1:42:53 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:42:57 Danny Jones? Wild shit, man. Well, dude, thanks. Thanks for coming. This is fun and thank you for the, thank you for the daylight computer. I'm so psyched to use this thing, man.
1:43:07 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me on. I feel like if, if.
1:43:11 Danny Jones? I've been loving this rabbit hole, this light rabbit hole.
1:43:14 Speaker 01 I don't think people, I think if the more and more we become aware of the way computers are affecting us at, you know, all levels of health, physical health, mental health, addiction, distraction, the more we're gonna have a chance to be free. And so thanks for having me on and hopefully we can escape the inevitability of the Kraylian Matrix VR timeline and.
1:43:32 Danny Jones? Yeah.
1:43:33 Speaker 01 Create a more solar punk.
1:43:34 Danny Jones? Yeah, hopefully we can, we can stay, stay in our, our human form now and not evolve into the little gray aliens.
1:43:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:41 Danny Jones? That's cool shit, man. Well, thanks again. Obviously I'll, I'll link all your stuff below so people can find out more about it.
1:43:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. And if anybody wants to email me, I'm [email protected] and feel free to reach out. Always looking for interesting new folks to collaborate with.
1:43:57 Danny Jones? Awesome, dude. All right. Good night, everybody.
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1:44:41 Speaker 03 And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
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