How To Use Light To Optimise Your Health & Happiness | Matt Maruca | Modern Wisdom Podcast 203

Matt Maruca is the CEO of Ra Optics and creator of The Light Diet. This episode goes DEEP. Expect to learn how crucial light is to optimising your health, why sunlight and energy levels are intrinsically linked, Matt's favourite protocols for cold exposure, the best type of water to drink, the importance of seafood and much more. Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Get a pair of Ra Optics - https://raoptics.com/modernwisdom Follow Matt on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelightdiet Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #longevity #lightexposure #sunlight - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Light is actually one of the main factors, if not the main factor, that controls how well our engines can make energy. So if you live indoors, they don't work as well. If you're out in the sun, they actually work way, way better. And that simple change affects how well we can actually take the food that we're eating and actually turn it into whatever we want to make it into and how well we can process it. So.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Matt Maruca in the building. How are you doing, man?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Great, man. I'm glad to be here.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  Good to be here as well. What are you drinking? You just got and picked up some fancy looking drink. What you got?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  It's a yerba mate. So, you know, I don't drink coffee personally, just out of preference. Not a big fan of it, but this is a great caffeine boost and it's from like a Brazilian leaf and it's pretty good. It's one bottle contains 140 milligrams of caffeine. That's like two cups of coffee. So I'm not drinking this whole bottle. Otherwise I'll be.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Take your head off. Yeah.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I'll explode.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  So you're talking, today we are talking about light, right? You're an expert in light. You've done a lot of research into it, looked at the data on light. What is a light diet?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  It's a great question. So the light diet is a term that I've come up with for an approach to health and wellness and self-improvement that takes the most advanced research, the stuff that we're going to talk about today, and makes it easy to apply for health in the modern world. So another way to say it is that everyone's focused on food diets, right? Everyone's focused on keto, like you said, paleo, flexible dieting, all these things that address the fuel component of our body, you know, the fuel that's coming in. The light diet addresses the engine component. So the actual engines that are burning our fuel and making sure that they're optimized. And the way I got into this was

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I too was, just like you said, I was in the paleo craze, the keto craze, the autoimmune diet craze, like all these different things to try to heal some gut issues I was having at a younger age. Without really getting the kind of progress I wanted. And then I ran across a genius, actually a neurosurgeon from the United States, writing about these concepts at a way that was so high level. Most people probably couldn't understand it, but I was so motivated, I wanted to decipher it. And sure enough, I did. Took the applicable protocols, applied them, totally transformed my life. And that's sort of how we are, where we are now.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's awesome. Who was the neurosurgeon, neuroscientist? Who was it?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so his name's Dr. Jack Kruse. And he's a, he was big in the paleo diet world in probably 2012 and 2013. Really like at the beginning of paleo. Because, you know, he had these really edgy ideas, fringe ideas that he wanted to share. And he figured that if anyone was going to listen, it might be the ancestral health crowd. Now, he was actually, he would tell you he was wrong about that because they actually were so focused on food, that when he came and told them that blue light at night is worse for you than eating a cheesecake, or as bad as eating a cheesecake at night because of its effects on our hormones and our melatonin production, which is essential for proper sleep and repair. People were like, that's insane, that couldn't possibly be true. No way.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  And same thing like when he said eating, you know, carbohydrates out of season. If you eat a banana in the winter in Boston, you're insane. Cause it's a disruption of our natural circadian biology. And it's, you know, eating food out of season is disruptive. Because it's just, it's a different signal than what the environment is presently offering. And it, so it creates a mismatch basically in our brain. And people just laughed him, laughed him off. But sure enough, he gained a pretty dedicated following over the years. All these people from Bulletproof, from Dave Asprey, from the paleo world, who just weren't able to heal the stuff that they were struggling with. And then when they started focusing on light, they started to have some serious improvements. So it's pretty interesting, interesting stuff.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  But again, he's a neurosurgeon, total genius. And My goal has been, how do I take this really interesting information that fascinates me more than practically anything else and make it something that people can actually apply without reading his blogs, which if you printed all of his blogs out, it would go from the floor to the ceiling of your room there, like thousands of pages, you know? So, you know, most people aren't going to read that stuff.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  You've got to make it accessible. That's such a big part now, I think, with this wealth of information that we have online. There is a huge market for just synthesizing the best of what's out there, you know? Look at James Clear's 321 newsletter. It's about, I think it's about 250 words long every week, but every single word is crafted to dial down one huge concept into a tweet. And then there's another bit that's cut into a tweet. And you just think like, there's a lot of work that goes into that. And with people being strapped for time and stuff like that, I think synthesizing, adding context and bringing it into a usable format for the layperson is a pretty noble use of

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  your time. So you talked about the fuel coming from food and the engine coming from light. Can you explain how that works? What do you mean by engine? How does light interact with that engine?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really interesting story that I actually really love to dive into. So, and in fact, it fascinates me more than almost anything. So it's really good when we talk about health to talk about what is health? And for me, and I actually gave a talk about this in London last September at this health optimization summit. It's on YouTube and I was very, I did a great job, to be honest. You know, it was like, I was surprised at myself how well it turned out in some ways. But basically, you ask, what is, what is health? Well, first of all, you know, it's, it's how well an organism functions. And we would generally say that health is if an organism, a living organism functions well. For me, I want to understand, okay, well, first of all, what is a living organism?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  And how does it function at all? So that I can then understand, what does it mean for it to be functioning well? You know, at the basic, basic level. So if you look at like, what is a living organism? There's a guy actually from the University College of London, who, named Nick Lane, who's written some really great books in the science space. And he has, like you said, you know, as far as the people on the front of the book reviewing it, like, his main book has Bill Gates on the front saying, "This is the most fascinating science book I've ever read." So it's really interesting. Yeah. So this is one of your, your British chaps over there. Yep. And he, he has basically looked at what is life at the deepest level in this book called "The Vital Question," by looking at where did life start? And how did it start? You know, based on the most advanced available research.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  And so what he found is that, you know, most likely, of all the theories, life began in these vents at the bottom of the ocean, but they weren't these like, super turbulent, crazy vents, like, called black smokers that some people think. They were actually these vents that have a very slow percolation of these fluids from inside of the earth, out, and they meet with the ocean water. And it's a mineral kind of vent where there's tons of pores, tons of tiny holes throughout this vent, where this ocean water can meet this alkaline fluid from in the earth, and it causes all sorts of chemical reactions to occur over time, over time, over time. And so what he was able to find, and they've been able to replicate this on a tabletop

• 7:40Speaker 00

  or a benchtop reactor in their labs, is that this alkaline fluid, when it meets this more acidic ocean water, there's a, what they call like, a proton gradient. So there's more protons in the seawater than there is in this fluid coming from the earth. And anytime you have more of a, an atom, essentially, in one place, meeting with an atom from another place, they want to mix to even out. Just like, you know, anything, you mix together. The eventually, all the chemicals balance out, they even out, you know, so so that that difference, the gradient, they call it, is like a potential source of energy because when, let's just say you had a ton of people in a room, and then no one in the other room, they they might be so packed, they want to just kind of migrate into the other room.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  And so there's like energy there. If you had them go through a revolving door that generated electricity, it would actually, their movement would make energy. That's the general idea, right? So that's kind of what was happening in these vents, and that energy that was present was actually causing certain molecules to react in certain ways that formed the first what they call organic molecules, carbon hydrogen based molecules, that eventually started to form like, they they started to, just based on the principles of physics, they started to assemble themselves into these structures, and these structures are what we would call like a proto cell, a pre-life cell almost, that was dependent on this energy gradient in these vents. But eventually,

• 9:07Speaker 00

  just based on physics and molecules, naturally want to bond in certain ways to form more complex structures that are more energetically favorable for the universe in some way, you know, given the energy available in that environment. Eventually, these cells develop sort of innovations where they didn't have to depend on that energy in this vent, and this this sort of natural energy source. So they almost became like like a baby who was like weaned off of its mother and was able to be free. And so the way that these cells make, basically make a living, if you want to put it like that, because that's really what it is, you know, I'll say I do this job to make a living, you know, this.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  But at the end of the day, the the cell is making a living by taking molecules in the environment that are atoms even that want to react together, particles, we could say, but they can't because of their current configuration. So a better way to put that is, To think about a fire, for example, when you have fire, you have hydrogen that's stored in wood or gasoline or anything you can burn, which is always an organic fuel source, whether it's fossil fuel from millions of years ago that was living organisms or like a tree that you just cut down. That's a lot of hydrogen stored on the carbon backbone there. Then you have oxygen in the air. The hydrogens and the oxygens would love to react together to make water, but they can only make water

• 10:31Speaker 00

  once you start freeing the hydrogens from their backbone source. So you add a spark and the spark is energy to cause the hydrogens to break free. And as soon as they do, they start reacting with the free oxygen in the air. They start making water and that reaction releases energy because the molecules are now more satisfied in their new configuration. So they release energy. It's called an exothermic reaction. And that reaction, basically, because of that release of energy, that release acts as the next spark to perpetuate the reaction. So in fire, you know, you only need one spark if it's an easily combustible fuel source and it'll go forever. So how does that go back to life? Well, that's what these organisms were doing. They're finding all kinds of different pairs. This pair is hydrogen and oxygen. It's called a redox couple, causing them to react together

• 11:14Speaker 00

  and then extracting energy from that reaction to fuel more reactions. It's basically what life does. So life was always limited, though, to the size of bacteria and an archaea, which is a very simple molecule or a very simple organism, I should say. We can't even see them with our eye, right? But we're composed of billions of them, essentially trillions. So how do we go from that super duper simple organism to something so complex that we can't even see what we used to be? Because it's so much smaller than us, right? Well, basically, two different organisms merged. So their... The primary function of one of these bacteria, one of these cells, was basically it had to extract energy from the environment

• 11:57Speaker 00

  and use that energy to basically maintain and replicate its own genome. Because that means it's expressing all of its functions as an organism, right? Now, that process is very energy expensive. So just based on the amount of energy that even the most efficient one of these organisms could extract, it was very limited. Now, what happened is two of these organisms actually merged and basically made like a deal a long, long, long time ago. And because of this deal that they made, all complex life today, that's bigger than a bacteria and an archaea, all plants, all animals and all fungus, come from this merger. So basically, what happened is it would be like, if you were really good at structure and function

• 12:41Speaker 00

  and building things, but you weren't good at making energy, or going out and scavenging, you might say, if you have a group of people, you might say, "Hey, guys, I'm gonna build us a house, I'm gonna take care of all that stuff, cuz I'm the brains here, but you guys are really good at going out foraging in the wilderness and getting all the food and stuff, and I'm not so good at that, so you guys do that all day, and I'm just gonna build a house." The effective equivalent would be, for the bacteria, would be if every single bacteria was both building its own house, and going out and getting all of its nutrients. Now, because you're a genius builder, you can build a house big enough for a thousand of them, and now they don't have to use all that energy required to building that house, all that energy can go out to foraging food.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  So basically, what happened is bacteria that used to have a thousand genes, they cut their genes down to about 13 genes, and then you only had to keep two copies of those thousand genes, two copies instead of one, so that you could have sexual reproduction, so you could recombine them and make variations for improved survivability. So, you have now convinced these people to basically be your slaves, but it's a mutual benefit, cuz they get your energy, so you need them too. And now, you have all of their energy that's freed up from them each building their own house, all for energy production. So that energy production now, that's freed up, allows you to build a significantly more complex house, way, way, way more complex, like thousands of times more. And that energy savings is essentially what allowed complex life to get where we are.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  And so, all of our functions in a living organism, like I said from the beginning, it's all dependent on this production of energy. Like, if you have energy, you know you feel great, but it actually means that everything's working well, and if you don't have energy, you're gonna feel bad, but it also means that things aren't working well, and you probably have diseases, cuz your body can't carry out all of its functions properly. Just like a government, that doesn't have enough funds to carry out all of its programs, it's gonna have to cut those programs. That's what happens in our body when we lack energy. So, the whole thing tied together for me, when I sort of started to get this stuff and start to understand it, it was like, okay, well... There's this perspective in medicine that if you have a problem, it's because your genes are bad. But this new researcher from Philadelphia, where I'm from, or he's based in Philadelphia

• 14:52Speaker 00

  now, has shown that actually all the modern diseases that they fail to find a cure for or a cause of in the genes are actually caused by damaged energy production systems so that we don't have enough energy to carry out our genes properly. You know, so the genes aren't bad necessarily. Very few percentage, like less than 10% of diseases, even less than 5% are genetic, like Tay-Sachs, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, you know, that kind of disease. Down syndrome, for example. But the majority of diseases, so like the ones we're facing today, now, I'm talking chronic diseases. So we're not talking about like infectious diseases like COVID-19 or malaria. We're not talking about those diseases.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  The diseases that most, that kill most people today are heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, you know, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune diseases, Parkinson's, cancer, autism with kids, you know, that kind of thing. Those aren't like contagious, right? It's just the body's failing. So what he's, this Dr. Wallace has shown is it's actually the mitochondria, the engines are failing. And so to get back to the original question, like, how does this work? Why do we want to focus on the engines and not just the fuel? It's because the clear evidence is that our disease epidemic today, and also instead of focusing just on diseases, if you want to have health, it's dependent on

• 16:16Speaker 00

  how well your energy producers who are going out and scavenging and foraging for all your energy while you're building the house, how well are they working? And so light is actually one of the main factors, if not the main factor, that controls how well our, our engines can make energy. So if you live indoors, they don't work as well. If you're out in the sun, they actually work way, way better. And that simple change affects how well we can actually take the food that we're eating and actually turn it into whatever we want to make it into and how well we can process it. So that's sort of the, the deep overview, you know, of

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Why do we want to do this?

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. I like the little trip back a couple of billion years down

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Is that jump, you know, you were talking about where the two different cells join together. Is that the pro cryotic to eukryotic leap?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, it was that leap.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I knew that's my, that's me dropping knowledge bombs for you there, Matt. You didn't think I knew about procriotic and you, I can't even pronounce it, those two.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Procriotic, you got it.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  I got it, don't worry. That's, uh, that's from Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence for you there.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  A little college biochemistry coming in there.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Don't worry about me, I'm multifaceted, Matt, you know? I've got these things in the locker. Why, why is light so important in this case? We're not a plant, I don't need to photosynthesize the...

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Actually, I do.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. Right, okay, tell me, that's it, my procriotic card's been used up, I'm on, in your hands now, Matt. Why light? Why, why does light matter?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  So it's really interesting. Actually, at the beginning of life, we actually weren't even exposed to sunlight. So in these vents, there's not much sunlight getting down there. So I've asked the question to myself too, how did life become so important?

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  Why is it so fundamental if we never had it when it began?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. So, very good question. So actually, what, what turns out is that we actually did have it when we began. It was just a different type of light. So all of the energy, there's a ton of energy inside of the earth, which is a moving molten core of all kinds of minerals and things. It's ridiculously hot and moving and molten. And so that's a different kind of light. It's infrared light, which we also call heat. So all that movement, these flows of these, um, fluids in these vents that were initially catalyzing the reactions for life, it was actually driven by light still, but by infrared light.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  And so this had a very big impact, which, to be honest, has to be studied a lot more because it just isn't something people have been investing into. You know, this forward-thinking researchers like this guy Nick Lane often don't get the kind of funding that their work should just because, you know, all the funding's going into drugs and all this stuff, which is a big issue. At the end of the day, infrared light was the main driver of that flow of energy down in these vents, causing this water to be really, really, really hot. It was not cold water. It was probably thousands of degrees, right? So that is, if that water, that heat, that light energy stored in the water wasn't actually there, it's very unlikely that these sort of reactions would have taken place at all.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  So light was critical and still is critical. A good way of putting it is that light is a visible range of what everyone calls and knows as just energy, right? So this whole conversation we're having about energy and energy production and if your energy producers work well, those basically servants that we took into ourselves, which we outsourced our energy production to them, but we still need it to stay alive. So again, we need them to work well. If that energy doesn't work well, we have diseases. If it does work really well, we don't. The best way to put it is that, again, light is just a form of energy that we can see.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  There's tons of energy in the spectrum that we actually can't see. So at a basic level, as it, any reaction in physics proceeds more effectively usually, or almost always, with more energy. So like, for example, you know, you know that if you have more energy, you feel better and you can do more things. That's a really high-level way of explaining it. But if you're in a chemical reaction discussion, especially in living organisms, a lot of the time, there are these things called enzymes that lower the energy required for a reaction to happen, because again, you need an initial input of energy to make reactions basically proceed. So

• 21:08Speaker 00

  When you're an organism, if you get an additional source of energy that you can utilize, it's a huge win because you can actually do stuff with that. So when these organisms moved out of the bottoms of the oceans up towards the sun, it's essentially something that would allow these organisms to become more complex. And there's some really good evidence, actually, that indicates that when the sun went through a change in its age, the sun started to put off more ultraviolet light. And this coincides really nicely, and this is something based, you know, that Dr. Kruse has explained very thoroughly in his work. This increase in UV light actually links very nicely with this thing called the Cambrian

• 21:52Speaker 00

  explosion, which is a time when life actually started to get significantly more complex on Earth. This explosion and the complexity of life was actually driven by this increased availability of light energy that living organisms could utilize. So the best way to put it is that although we didn't have full spectrum sunlight in the beginning that was driving our life, as we evolved, we started using light to get to the level of complexity where we are now. And once, just like the government, once you have a certain amount of taxpayer dollars to start funding certain programs, you're going to build up all these, you know, the different departments, Department of Taxes, Department of Agriculture, all these different departments.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  If you cut the initial taxpayer dollars that allowed those organizations to be created, the organizations are going to have to go away too. So it's like, light is so critical because our existence evolved based on the availability of light and we used it to basically... It's weird to say "we used it" because it's more like it just pushed the process forward. The light drove the process and we're still dependent on that exposure to light. So that's kind of like a more high-level overview. Does that make sense?

• 23:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it does. Still, to me, coming at it as someone who's never thought about light as an energy source for us, for me, energy is... Caffeine and food, like that's my, that's my two sources of energy and sleep, I suppose, as well as a human, but I don't think about light, I don't think I need, I'm feeling a little bit tired today because I haven't been out in the sun, but that's not natural to me, that's not just part of my existing paradigm of understanding the inputs that change the way that I operate. So what did you look into that demonstrates the actual effects of sunlight and some of your personal experiences as well to do with changing your exposure to sunlight?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so this is where again, some of the amazing work of Dr. Kruse comes into play. Now, the coolest thing about, about Dr. Kruse, and I'm mentioning him quite a lot here because we are getting a lot into the science, you're asking really good questions, is that he takes, he's taken, you know, he's very modest, he'll say, I'm not a genius, I just shine the flashlight on the researchers who are doing, you know, really great work. So there's, for example, a guy in Germany who studies the biologic effects of light, who has been putting together some really amazing concepts that have been studied for a long time in a simple way that people can understand. There's also dozens of researchers on the, on the health effects of light and the importance of light in, in biology for the last hundred to 200 years. I can't name all of them, we'll just bring them up as

• 24:35Speaker 00

  they come along. But so separately from all the theory we've been talking about, right? Evolution and this and that, what these, there's, there's different angles you can use to approach a problem, right? You can say, you can say, let's look at the history, the historical evidence, but you can also say, why don't we look at the actual real life application today? So like you said, let's, let's look at that, that's kind of really interesting. And, and we can use the historical stuff to understand that better and why it is. But at the end of the day, if you don't, if someone doesn't believe in evolution, you can just say, here's the facts, you know, light affects the body in this way, whether it's God or the universe or evolution or Genesis, whatever it is, this is how it is, based on science and data. And even the Catholic Church is very much

• 25:20Speaker 00

  a fan of science, you know, at least in general, they, they

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  They've all got mobile phones, right?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, exactly. And even if they, you know, someone believes that, you know, there is this intelligent god that created the universe, which I wouldn't necessarily disagree with. It's just one way of looking at a similar or the same idea, whether you say it's the universe and the big bang theory, whether it's intelligent or random, you know, it's kind of like a creative force that pushes everything forward, whether, again, you think it's a god or just random. So anyhow, so let's look at that, that data. So basically, people have known that light affected life for thousands of years. So if you go all the way back to the ancient civilizations, you can see, for example, in Rome, they built their houses with these places called solaria, solariums, or it's a sunbathing room. So

• 26:09Speaker 00

  they knew the sun was really important. Same with the Greeks. They had lots of open air stuff. They knew sun was really important. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, talked about the importance of sunlight for health. There's old accounts of a very great historian named Herodotus, who was going to a big battlefield, this huge battle that happened between these Persian people and these Egyptians. And he was commenting, when he would crack the skulls of the Persian people, the skulls would crack easily. The Egyptian skulls would not crack, no matter how hard you hit them. And he just, he theorized, and you know, the evidence today supports this, that because they were wearing these big hats, the Persians, they weren't getting sunlight on their skulls or on their heads. And you don't, you know, you don't

• 26:51Speaker 00

  need to not have hair to get the light. It still passes through and gets on to us. But they were wearing these big extra protective hats, whereas the Egyptians would actually shave their heads to get more sun on their skulls. And he said, you know, it seems pretty obvious that the Egyptians' practices led to them having harder skulls. So this is also like more old stuff. You could go way further in the future to like Florence Nightingale, who's one of the mothers of modern medicine and everything. She observed in the wards that in the hospital she worked at. That people in dark wards where they didn't get a lot of natural light would almost not heal from whatever sickness they had, no matter what you did. Whereas people who had, were in wards with tons of light would heal really, really well.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  And then you fast forward into the early 1900s, there was these outbreaks, especially in the UK and all over Europe, of tuberculosis of the skin. So they called it lupus vulgaris, or just lupus. And basically, it would just have these bacterial lesions that would make someone's face look horrible and it was, it would kill people. And what this guy named Niels Svensson found, he's a Danish scientist. He found that ultraviolet light shined onto the skin actually killed bacteria. And so it would actually cure tuberculosis. And he also found that the red and infrared light portion of the spectrum was very healing, which is something that's kind of resurfacing now, 100 plus years later. And he was actually the first Scandinavian person ever to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  So it was like big back then. And then based on his work, these guys named August Rolié and a couple others, a French, French Swiss guy, started these clinics where they practiced something called heliotherapy. So Helios is the Greek god of sunlight. And he, you know, so they, heliotherapy just means light therapy or sunlight therapy. And they would take people with, whether it was tuberculosis or during World War One and, yeah, World War One in particular, they would use sunlight heliotherapy to actually heal wounds faster because it would disinfect the wound and the healing red and infrared would allow the wounds to heal a lot faster. The Germans did this during World War One. They used heliotherapy to heal their soldiers' wounds. It would help kids who had rickets.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  This was something they discovered in the United Kingdom. Kids who were working in factories or living under that smog, you already don't get a lot of sunlight in the UK, you know that, right? But when you have like industrial revolution smog, you got no sunlight the whole year. And so these kids, because they didn't have any vitamin D to get calcium into their bones, they would actually develop rickets. Their bones would be totally deformed. Just getting ultraviolet light in their young ages allowed their bones to actually re-straighten out. So they would cure all this stuff in these heliotherapy clinics. He had dozens actually at, at the peak in the early 1900s in Switzerland. Anyway. The issue is people had this whole sunbathing craze going on, especially in the United States.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  And for multiple reasons, and Dr. Cruz again dives deep into these on his blog. But one of the main ones was babies had jaundice if their mothers had some health issues. So babies would be born with yellow eyes and they knew that sunlight could actually heal the jaundice. But when they were in hospitals, um, they would use, they tried to isolate sunlight. So they just use isolated ultraviolet light, which without the full spectrum of sunlight and the healing light, it would actually become damaging. And so these babies would develop problems with their eyes and so on. And so they started to say that UV light, ultraviolet light from the sun, or just in general. Making it worse. Yeah, causes cancer. Well, it, it might heal the, the jaundice, but it would cause cancer, cataracts, all these things. So sunlight started to get a really bad rap.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  And this was the same time that antibiotics were developed. You no longer needed sunlight to kill bacteria. So basically sunlight was thrown out the window for the next 70 years, leading up until today. When you have guys like Dr. Alexander Wunsch in Germany, kind of resurfacing all this research. So the best way to put it to answer your question is, I learned about, um, someone who was teaching these ideas. Right? I mentioned Dr. Cruz. And then I started reading from all these different experts who he was kind of shining a light on. And it just was like, whoa, sunlight was known to be important. It's always been important. In fact, some people even believe that, uh, and I'm, I'm sort of of this tribe almost. That, that when we're exposed to sun in a certain manner, it actually elevates our consciousness

• 31:10Speaker 00

  or our potential for consciousness significantly because of its effects on our pineal gland, increased production of serotonin, melatonin, which if you, if you ever listen like Joe Dispenza, he talks about how melatonin allows us to change our brainwaves and get into a more elevated state of consciousness. And there was an Egyptian pharaoh named.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Akhenaten, who basically his name meant the worship of the Aten, which is the sun disk. And he built an entire city around this, you know, sun worship. But this is more of a conspiracy theory type of thing. But once he died, his name was removed from the list of pharaohs. And the reason why people believe is that they didn't want the masses to know about how you could use sunlight to basically increase your consciousness and not be as easily controlled. You know, when you got people to cover their, in particular, when you get people to cover their sex organs from sunlight, they become more docile because you're making less testosterone and so on.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  So just, you could almost posit that the innovation of clothing was to make us like a more docile species so that we could function more effectively in, you know, units and civilization without so much conflict and, you know, testosterone loaded men and women who are, you know, less submissive and all this stuff. So again, that's more down the conspiracy theory route, although the evidence is there. So all this stuff, dude, I was like, wow, there's a lot more to this. And then if you combine that with some of the more recent work on how, you know, photobiomodulation makes our mitochondria just work better because they utilize this free energy. You're just like, holy mackerel. How, how does everyone come to believe that the thing that literally drove evolution for us causes cancer and the data isn't even there to support it?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  It's a sunscreen, sunglasses and dermatology industry belief system that they're perpetuating. Just like pharmaceutical companies say, you need drugs to heal your diseases. Everyone knows that that's not true, or most people know that's not true at this point, or at least actually that's not true. Most people believe it, but in our community, people aren't believing it. So you get the idea. People aren't aware of this dermatology whole thing going on with sunglasses and sunscreen, but they're hiding the truth about light.

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned there that it's not just light through the eyes, but light on the skin. So you've talked about, I mean, the sex organ thing is going to be at least a little bit prohibitive for some people, you know, you want to go to the park, have a little walk around, but there's a playground nearby and you don't have time, you don't have time to get sun on your schlong.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  You'll notice, everyone that is watching will notice that we both have a pair of your company's glasses on, Rar Optics. Thank you very much for sending these out to me. My pleasure. Before we get deeper into the light diet and how people can apply some of these lessons, we've looked at the science, which I think is really cool. And I like contextualising stuff before we get into the particulars. I want to sort of give my experience with specifically the red glasses that you have, and we can kind of loop back to why they're that way. I've never used an advanced pair of blue blocking glasses before, and I'm not even kidding you, man. The first time that I put those red glasses on, within 45 minutes of putting them on, I'm like, told my housemate, I'm like, dude, I'm gonna have to go to bed. I need to go to sleep. It was about nine o'clock at night. I'm not

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  used to being tired until 11 o'clock. I was like, bro, I'm gonna have to go. And I thought, ah, placebo effect, screw you, blah, blah, blah. Like, I'll give it another crack in a couple of nights' time, or whatever. And I've just kept on wearing them religiously each night. And I don't, I don't blow smoke up products' arses. Like, I don't need to. There is, I don't know what it is. I'm nowhere near educated enough to work out what the hell's going on. But there is something happening when I put those on. Maybe you've embedded some little compound in the ear bit that's like seeping into my brain, or I don't know what it is. But something is happening when I put those glasses on, when I start to change the way that light comes into my eyes on an evening time. And I thought, we've talked tons on this podcast, and everyone that's listening will know about night mode

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  on your iPhone, and sunrise, sunset, yellow light, and stuff like that on your laptop. And I thought, yeah, yeah, like, I'm used to this. I have got, I've got an idea what's going on. And then started playing around with that. And I was like, okay, maybe I don't quite actually know all that much about what's happening at the moment. So yeah, we've talked about light coming into our eyes, and I wanted to bring that up because both of us have these glasses on. But how important is your, are your eyes to the sun reception versus your skin and your body and other stuff like that?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Dude, you're loaded, you're full of good questions. That's an amazing question. So it's uh, yeah, there you go. So it is uh, very, very important. In fact, a recent book I read about light from one of the foremost experts in the world, who's based in uh, Hawaii. He was basically saying that actually 98% of the light in the body enters through the eye, which I was like, what? Because I've always thought, yeah, the eye is critical and I've believed that, but I didn't, you know, you know, the skin, we also absorb quite a lot through the skin. So I was thinking, wow, that's-

• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  It's a bigger surface area, right? How big are your eyes? Maybe two centimeters squared?

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Barely. Yeah, I mean, the pupil is even half a centimeter, if that, you know? But the, yeah, you're right. The, the skin is the biggest organ in the body. So that was a bit shocking. I'd have to actually do a little bit more digging and into what, how, you know, if I quite understand the way he's explaining that. But here's the thing that's really interesting though, is the skin is designed to generally, you know, block out substances, you know, protect our internal stuff from the, and separate us from the external world, right? So even with light, uh, the skin has melanin in it, which is this natural pigment that actually, well, there's different views on melanin. There's some really new, interesting views, but in general, melanin protects us from ultraviolet light in excess, you know? So that's why if you sunbathe, uh, you get

• 37:09Speaker 00

  the stimulus to make more melanocytes, which make more melanin, which give you a nice tan. And the top layer of our skin cells actually die and scatter their DNA. And it's a super interesting is that another bit of the research I didn't mention about the deep science in light over the last hundred years, is that being, that we are actually beings of light, and this is a great thing to mention, our cells actually communicate with ultraviolet light. So there was some people trying to figure out like, what causes cells to divide? And you know, how does that stimulus happen? And eventually through a huge series of experiments, they determined that it was very clearly that it was low-frequency ultraviolet light pulses that the cells actually generate themselves. So our cells actually make their own light.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  They generate this light and that causes cell division, mitosis and meiosis to occur.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  And so, um, then these researchers, back in the day, there was a couple, one was named Alexander Gurwitch, a Russian guy, and one guy named Fritz Albert Pop, or, yeah, Fritz Albert Pop. He was doing this research, and actually, this frame called Pop is named after him. Your, your frame Wallace is named after the mitochondrial researcher I was mentioning earlier. So, they, um, they discovered this and they started studying, holy shit, this is insane, you know, all the properties of bio photons in our organism. And they found, for example, some amazing things like, when a cell is sick, when an, uh, yeah, a cell or an organism is sick, the light that it is emitting is, is less coherent. It's kind of more chaotic. Whereas when you have a healthy organism, it's light, kind of just like our brainwaves

• 38:44Speaker 00

  being less coherent when we're stressed versus more coherent when we're in a meditation. The light is more coherent in a healthy cell. So, kind of like, a sick cell is leaking light. It's lost its ability to retain light very well. Even more interesting for me, was that they found that when an organism actually died, it was leaking a lot of this light for many hours. So, it's like, when you die, it's the ultimate loss of your body's ability to contain your light and use your light, so you leak it all out. And this is getting into a spiritual territory, but when I read that, I was like, whoa. Didn't they say in the, in the Bible and all these spiritual texts, that when you die, your soul leaves your body? And these researchers found that when you die, your cells are leaking light, and the soul is light, and the spirit is light, and God is love and light?

• 39:28Speaker 00

  It's like, huh, very interesting. So, very cool connections from that work. But how does that relate back to, you know, your question of, of light coming through the eye? Well, the, the, the, the topic of through this, of the skin is that our DNA, it communicates with light, but so when we use it, we can use it as an effective sunscreen, is the point. It, it very well absorbs light, takes the high-energy ultraviolet, and then re-emits it essentially as infrared, which is healing, right? So, so that's how it works. Now, back to your question about the eye, and why that's so important. Well- Again, the skin is more blocking out light than it is letting it in. But the eye is black, and the reason it's black is because it lets all of the light in.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  You know, if it reflected it all, it would be white. But it lets it all in. That's why it's black. And so that's really fascinating. That means we are absorbing a ton of light through the eye. And the best way to put that question without getting way too deep into science is that you could think of our eye both as the charging socket, just like an iPhone. It's the charging plug on the bottom of the iPhone, and it's the information plug. So both and also, well, the visual stuff we have is also information. But so some people don't think about the eye as anything more than just a camera to see. But before it was a camera to see color vision. The eye was more of like a general sensor for us to know, is it day? Is it night? You know, even before we had what we would consider eyes.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  We just had sensors from which the eyes evolved to know, is it day? Is it night? Because when you can tell about that basic change in the environment, you can adapt better to all the things that need to happen, right? So that's the eye's first function was actually more like a sensor and a clock rather than a camera. And within the sensor function, the eye actually just were able to receive light energy, and it's able to help advance a lot of chemical reactions in the brain that don't proceed as quickly if the light isn't there. So for example, the production of serotonin, this wakefulness hormone, the production of a lot of our sex hormones is optimized and stimulated through light coming through the eye.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  The production of a opi- effectively an opioid hormone, or I should say, chemical in our body called beta endorphin is like a natural painkiller, a natural endorphin that makes us feel good. When people don't get any sunlight, you're going to have none of your own natural endorphins. And so you're going to need to literally use something like crystal meth, or like cocaine, or crack, or heroin, all the drugs that we have a huge epidemic in the United States right now of opiates. Because no one's getting sunlight. And it's especially bad in one of the darkest, cloudiest places in the country, the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Washington. So it kind of makes sense, given that we're not only not going outside and getting sun. We're additionally putting the wrong signals into our eyes with artificial light.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  So we're getting all this blue light from our screens, which is instead of saying, make these hormones heal your body. You know, this is the time of the day, do this now, do this later, and all these different things, sleep now, regenerate, repair. Instead, we're just getting this chronic primarily blue light stimulus from our screen devices, which is saying, be stressed out, make more cortisol stress hormone, and create more oxidative damage in the cells without the red and infrared light to balance it, which is always present in the sun, to balance the blue and the ultraviolet light, which is a little more damaging if you don't have the red and infrared. So it's basically like we're getting one component of sun, which when it's in the sun, the blue, it's beneficial for a lot of things.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  But it's balanced by red and infrared in our body, the healing red and infrared. When we're getting it from these screens, none of them emit any red and infrared. The only light sources that emit red and infrared are fire and candles, which can be very good to get some of that, especially at night to use candles in your house. But also, old incandescent bulbs, you know, the ones people used to use in their houses before LEDs and fluorescents. Those are also pretty good compared to LEDs. They're not the best. They're not as good as sunlight. But so that's kind of like a good overview of light coming through the eyes, controlling all these processes in the body. It's controlling our circadian rhythm first and foremost, our biologic clock, which controls a ton of hormones.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  It's actually powering a lot of processes, increasing the stimulus of, for certain hormones and neurotransmitters. And then, like you said about the glasses at night, Joe Dispenza, again, he also, and a lot of people might relate to Joe Dispenza's work because he's totally life-changing. I've been actually going through his progressive course lately. He talks about how when you wake up in the morning, the light stimulates your optic nerve and it communicates with your brain, and that causes your brainwaves to change. You make serotonin to wake up, right? Well, when you remove, it's specifically the blue wavelengths that stimulate this part of the system. That's why we have blue blockers and not just like complete black eye mask that blocks all the light.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. You block the blue, you get rid of the stimulus that drives the majority of that process that Dr. Dispenza talks about. And now your brain thinks it's dark, and so you make more melatonin rather than serotonin because that blue light stimulus is no longer present. And that's really... The best way to put it, so the eye is, you know, and one more thing to add is like in the Bible, it even says, you know, for those who are a fan of the Bible, it says, "The lamp or the light of the body is the eye." And therefore, if your eye is clear or clean, then your whole body will be full of light. And literally, it couldn't be more accurate. The eye is like the lamp of the body. The light comes in and illuminates the entire inside.

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  That's cool, man. Two things that I've learned about the eyes over the last couple of years. First one being, there's 14 million sense cells in the body, and 11 million of them are dedicated to sight. And we are the only primates, potentially the only mammals, but definitely the only primates that have white around our eyes. The reason that we have that is because of how social beings we are. We want to be able to see when someone is looking at us. We want to have extra expressive eyes. An awful lot is able to be told through the eyes. If you've ever watched that, I think it's that Liar Police TV program, where the guy's able to detect micro-movements. "Oh, he looked slightly down and to the left, and there was a little flutter of this happening." And it's all, it's all fiction, but super cool,

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  and kind of just extrapolates out what some people have a natural capacity for.

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  The reason that we have white around the eyes is that I can see where you're looking. I can tell if you are fearful, or interested, or deceptive, or whatever it might be. Whereas if the area around the eye was black, I wouldn't be able to detect that eye movement as much. So a lot of it is to do with this reciprocal altruism, and the trust-bearing between different people. So, we've talked about-

• 46:26Speaker 00

  That's fascinating, by the way.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  That's cool as fuck, isn't it? Yeah, the, uh, the one about the sense cells is from James Clear's Atomic Habits. I can't remember who told me that one. Everyone will know, it was on this podcast, anyway. We've talked about the science that underpins all of this stuff. How can people apply this to their life? We've got a lot of information that we've gone through there. What are, actually, first thing, what are the biggest mistakes that normal people make with light? What are the most common mistakes that you people, that you see people making?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  That's actually an amazing question. So I made those mistakes for the whole of my young life, and so I can definitely express those after having learned about it. So probably the biggest, and again, speaking from what I made, and then I can see what other, you know, I can say what others are doing, but just so people know that like, I'm not some perfect person here who has got it all figured out right now. We're just, we're all learning along the way. So the biggest thing is not getting any sunlight. I mean, honestly, that's, I would say that's probably the biggest, one of the two biggest, not getting any sunlight because, like we discussed, light from the sun is kind of this almost free energy source that drove a lot of evolution. And even you could argue, because we evolved in Equatorial

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Africa, drove the evolution of the human brain. And so when certain humans went like way further north, like obviously, you know, Europeans who have light skin, the reason our skin is white, like people got to think about this. This is a very basic concept that people don't even consider. It's like, how can I say, people take this for granted, is a good way to put it. Our skin became light because we wanted to absorb more sunlight. It was a beneficial adaptation to be able to live in a very cloudy place for a long time. And we weren't getting our vitamin D through our diet like Inuit people, because there's Inuit people who also live very far north in Canada and Africa, or not Africa,

• 48:26Speaker 00

  what am I saying, Canada and Asia, the north of Asia, the Arctic, right? So they eat so much seafood that they are able to actually get a lot of vitamin D from their seafood. So they didn't necessarily have to have lighter skin. And there's other reasons too. But Europeans, especially inland in Germany and so on, weren't necessarily eating a ton of seafood. And so that adaptation to get lighter skin, to be able to make vitamin D through the skin, more and more and more, because we all do it, but we can do it more with this adaptation, is tremendously beneficial and allowed Europeans to thrive at a very high latitude compared to where we evolved.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean that black families are at a greater risk of vitamin D deficiency?

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Yes, very, very well, well said. It is exactly correct. And that is part of the reason that I believe, Dr. Cruz believes, other researchers believe, that African American people have been more severely affected by COVID-19, almost double in the United States, because they were moved from their natural environment during slavery and all these terrible times. And so that there, you know, if you live in the south of the United States, you'll get more sun, although in the winter, it's still not enough compared to what these people's skin has been evolved for.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  That evolutionary heritage has a mismatch at the moment, right?

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And it's, and you could say the same thing, like, if I go to a really sunny place, I have more sun present, so I can burn and have an increased rate of skin cancer if I'm doing the wrong things, if I'm only getting the strong midday sun. Here's another thing regarding the eye, we didn't talk about, that's a stimulus for a tan to make more melanocyte stimulating hormone, which stimulates the melanin. The signal for that hormone is through the eye, light through the eye. So if you wear sunglasses and block the light, the UV light coming into the eye in the summer, when you're out in the sun, your body, your brain isn't going to stimulate, isn't going to create as much melanocyte stimulating hormone to make the melanocytes, to make more melanin in the

• 50:32Speaker 00

  skin. And therefore, you're increasing your rate of, your risk for skin cancer by wearing sunglasses, because you're no longer getting the protective signal from the light to actually signal to your skin.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  So you tell me when I'm, when I'm sunbathing this summer, and I need to supercharge my tan, take the glasses off, that's what you're saying?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Yes. Do not, I would recommend not wearing sunglasses in general, unless it's like, you're at a ski slope, and it's short periods, and you're getting tons of light reflecting, where it could be blinding. Or, you know, if, I mean, obviously, if you're driving a car and you're getting blinded, you might want to tone down the light. The thing is, when you're driving a car, the windows are already, if the windows are up, the light's already being distorted. So putting on sunglasses isn't necessarily going to make a huge difference at that point. But it's when you're out sunbathing in particular, or just out on a walk, if you do not need them, don't wear them. And especially, people say, oh, my eyes water. So did mine. When I was like 12 years old, I remember that I could barely even keep my eyes open on a sunny, bright summer day.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  And actually, that's just a, the tearing is just a mechanism of the eye to cool its surface so that it can actually better assimilate the light that's there. And again, as you work that muscle and eat a healthier diet and various other factors with like natural seafood in the diet to get the omega-3 in your eye, which is where we concentrate most of our omega-3, along with our nerves for our brain. That's where you get it. So, so let's get back to, you know,

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Biggest problems that people take is they don't get enough sunlight. What you've mentioned is that that's not, that's not just looking at sunlight. You work in an office and you can see the outdoors out of your window. That is sun, from sun to eye, no stops in between. Like on the Monopoly board, do not pass go, do not reflect off the building opposite me, go straight into my eye, go straight

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, you want a direct sunlight exposure. So again, here's the cool thing is that if it's the winter, you know, Dr. Alexander Wunsch from Germany, he, who's like pretty much the leading expert in the world right now, he on, on light's effect on the body or photobiology is the field. He told me that he believes minimum two hours of unfiltered sunlight exposure per day, at least on the eye, is good. And that, that doesn't mean looking directly at the sun.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  That's a bad, that is not the piece of advice to take away from this podcast.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  No, no, do not look directly at the sun. You can do it if it's sunrise or sunset, because that's actually really a beneficial stimulus to let the light go straight through your retina. But only for the first 15 to 30 minutes after sun rising over the horizon and setting over the horizon, not after coming over a big mountain that's next to your house because then it's going to be a way higher angle. And when it's at a higher angle, it has more UV and that's when it can actually burn your eye. When it comes over the horizon, people ask this question all the time, it's filtered by so much atmosphere, that's why it's actually more orange than it is yellow or white. And so, for the same reason, a lot of the high-energy blue and the high-energy ultraviolet are totally not present for that first 15 to 20 minutes where it looks more golden.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  So you can look at the sun directly at that time, it's called sun gazing. You can Google "safe way to sun gaze" and look at these videos. Again, I'm not a medical doctor, so this isn't medical advice, but that has been found to be tremendously beneficial. So, like you said, biggest problems, not getting sunlight is huge, huge risk. So not getting sunlight is one. Another is wearing sunglasses. That's another huge, huge, huge risk. And then I would say, one of the biggest ones that I've started to learn more and study more into lately, is actually misusing our inner light, or abusing our inner light. So, we talk about this more during the steps of the light diet, but what I mean by that

• 54:12Speaker 00

  is, if you, you know, I've gone through this, still working through plenty of stuff, you know, with my own life and always will be, just like everyone, you know, you're always working to be better and undo your emotional things that you picked up from your childhood when you were in that easily programmable state. But if we choose to, like Joe Dispenza talks about, if we choose to keep buying into that same belief, we're actually creating an emotional chronically stressed state in our brain, and like what we talked about earlier, that's causing the cells to constantly leak light. So you could be sunbathing all the time, getting more light in and feeling high from that, but if you have these belief systems, or you're chronically in a state of fear, which is somewhere I've been before, just from not even having a real thing to be afraid

• 54:57Speaker 00

  about, but just from like some, you know, childhood experience that made me insecure about money, or this or that, like... You're gonna, you're gonna drain yourself, no matter what you're doing. So that's probably the second biggest mistake that, that is also generally wouldn't be looked at by many people in the health world. Another way of phrasing that would be like not taking care of your soul, you know, like not putting the time into the stuff that truly lights you up and, and you love, which I've also been a, I've been guilty of with working on my business so much.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Everyone is, man. Everyone is. There's, there's things that you get to do and there's things that you have to do. And if you're not careful, the have to do's take up so much time that the get to do's don't get to do.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  I live in Winterfell. If you've watched Game of Thrones, the place that Winterfell is based on is the city that I'm in now. It's the last city in the UK before Scotland. And there's an actual, there's an actual wall. I don't know whether you know this, Hadrian's Wall? So there's a wall between England and Scotland built by, there's actually two, there's the Antonine Wall as well, but there's a genuine wall. So that's, it's only about, it's ruins now, but it goes the full width of the country. It's like the neck of the country goes in. So it's only about 80 miles wide. A lot of ultra distance runners run the trail. And my buddy holds the unofficial world record for doing it as well, which is pretty cool. If you've got to run, if you're running the wall, it's, it's hardly like a flat surface. It's not like

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  running 80 mile ultra on a track or something like that. But that's a side point.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  That's epic.

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  I live in a place that gets in winter, sunrise at the winter solstice will be 9:00 AM, sunset, sunset will be 4:15 PM.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Wow, yeah.

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  What do I do? I can't, dude, I gotta, I gotta have a life. I gotta do my things. I can't be outside for two hours. How can I maximize in a low sunlight environment? How can I maximize the effects of sunlight? What can I do?

• 57:01Speaker 00

  This is a great, great, great question. And it's a really good way to segue into the light diet. And again, that's one of the most frequently asked questions is if I live in Scandinavia or Scotland or North England, what do I do? You know? Newcastle, there you go. So Newcastle, as you say. So basically, this is a good place to go into the steps of the light diet. So the first step of the light diet, and these are all applying to you, is to actually sleep, sleep with the sun to the extent possible. Now again, if it's winter, you've got a life. You're probably not going to go to sleep at four fifteen, but instead, instead of staying up till eleven, go to sleep at like eight or nine, if you can. That might not be realistic, but you know,

• 57:41Speaker 00

  the, the most successful people in the world, a lot of them go to sleep earlier, you know, eight or nine, or maybe ten at the latest, and they get up earlier. So that's something you can do in general, and I recommend everyone do that, you know, going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier. And the other thing is wearing your blue blockers. So that's already something great that you're doing is once it gets dark, you know, maybe you don't put them on at four fifteen, once it's dark, but put them on three or four hours before bed and you're going to get the best benefit or a great benefit from it. Now, the best benefit is if you wear them before the sun comes up while you're doing stuff in the morning and after the sun goes down. So at least your brain has a recollection of the circadian rhythm. And if you don't want to wear the darker

• 58:23Speaker 00

  red lenses, because it's a little too much, it's hard to see stuff, at least use the day lenses until the light comes up. And then if you're inside on screens, you just want to keep them on throughout the day to protect from that blue that isn't balanced by the red and the infrared.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  Man, going, going for a walk, my evening time walk, when it's about eight forty-five in the UK now, sun's going down, probably sunset's maybe about nine o'clock. So it's still like visible, but not super bright. Wearing the red lenses and going for a walk feels like you're in a computer game.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:56Chris Williamson?

  It's so crazy, man. Like the way when the sun bounces off little clouds that are in the sky, all of the colors are changed and the things that are light stand out tons and things that are dark stand out less. It's like, um, it's like watching a computer game, but it's you walking through it. So mad. I was doing it last night, listening to The Precipice by Toby Ord, which is this new book on existential risk. So you can imagine, I'm walking through the streets of Newcastle, right? And I'm listening to this discussion about how civilization could end, all of the different ways that the world could come to an end. Is it going to be anthropological risk? Is it going to be a future takeover of artificial general intelligence with misaligned perverse instantiations? Is it going to be a natural risk that we've seen before, but hasn't actually caused all?

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  And I've got these glasses on that are turning the whole fucking world red. And I'm listening, I'm just in the zone, the AirPods are in, I'm just walking along. It was so, it was wild, man. That's, that's how wild my lockdown has got. That's as wild as I could get, right?

• 59:55Speaker 00

  I bet the people on the street were like, who is this guy?

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  You know, I, I, I think this moustache, those red glasses, I don't give a fuck, man. I was wearing purple socks as well. I don't care. Yeah. Okay. So sleep with the sun and wake with the sun.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  Steps, one and two of the light diet.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  That's actually, that's correct. Yeah. Steps one and two. Now, um, one thing I would add is just so you know, if, and this is good for you right now. I actually would say, don't, next time you go for that evening walk, don't wear the glasses. And the reason why is because the whole idea is you don't, you want to get as much of that light as you can. And where you are, you have, the cool thing is everywhere on the planet gets the same amount of sunlight across 365 days of the year, which is very interesting concept. It's just the difference in distribution. So if you're on the Arctic circle or the Antarctic circle, you're getting 24 hours at one point and then zero hours at the other.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  What do those people do? Or what do I do in summer? Because I can't be going to bed at 11 or 10:30 and getting up at like four. But I'm going to, I'm going to annihilate myself.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  So it's interesting. Actually, if you look at the wild animals, they often do, uh, shorten their sleep in the summer and lengthen it in the winter. Because when you have more light, your body has more basically free power to function with. So you actually, you could argue, one could argue, you actually need less sleep in the summer and more in the winter. So you don't have to go all the way, but you know, yeah. So if you want to go to sleep earlier, put the glasses on, you can definitely do that. But, um, you don't necessarily have to. And again, it's, it's hard to extrapolate what I just said to modern life because none of us are as healthy and optimal as William Wallace, you know, back in the day.

• 1:01:37Chris Williamson?

  It's a piece of piss for my buddy Sam Bish, who will be listening and Dave Driscoll from Bali. Because all year round, 6am, 6pm, and then in summer.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  That's what I was gonna say.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  6:15am until 6:15pm. Like it wobbles such a tiny amount.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  It's, that's amazing. There's, I was in Bali and it's seven degrees south of the equator. So you're, it's exactly right. It's just 12 and 12 and 12 and 12. So you don't get those longer nights. But you also don't get those really short days in the in the winter, or I should say longer days or the shorter days. So so that's a that's a very use. It's very easy to do everything like this when you're in that kind of environment. That's why I like being

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  All these Indonesians with unbelievable light diets that they didn't even they didn't even know about it. Okay, so we're going

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  One issue Indonesians actually there's largely Muslim countries. So there actually a lot of them are covered up too much. So that can be a problem. But anyway, let's keep going. So

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  Everyone who's Indonesian that's listening, sunbathe in the in the comfort of your own home. So sleep with the sun, use blue blockers like Rott Optics linked in show notes below with exclusive discount code, which I'll put in the pre roll, which we'll sort out at some point if anyone wants to pick up a pair. Sleep with the sun, wake with the sun. What is first thing in the morning? What are some ways that people can use the insights you've gained to do with light to help kickstart their day?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  So like, what do I do in general? I try to go to sleep like we said earlier. So that and also another thing of step one, I'm reiterating here, avoid eating late. You know, that's something that like you mentioned, actually specifically can be really hard.

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  Email back and forth. Yeah.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. But so it's like, if you're eating, you know, the food, depending on how much protein you ate, how heavy the meal is, it's going to be in your gut for the next three or four hours. And you want to be repairing your cells. You want that light to be healing your cells, not all the blood in your gut, trying to digest your food while you're asleep. So that's a researcher named Sachin Panda, right here in San Diego, actually where I am right now, who has he's huge now. His research is getting really a lot of recognition, a book called The Circadian Code, he wrote. But basically, what they found is animals that eat the unhealthy foods at the wrong time of day with their circadian rhythm. So the equivalent of a human eating a, I should say, no, no, animals eating healthy foods at the wrong time of day. So if you ate like a big steak, if you think steak's healthy

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  or a salad, if you think salad's healthy at night. And then you ate

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  A Coca-Cola can in the middle of the day when the light is the strongest and our metabolism is the most active, the research that they've done on various animals indicates that the animals that eat that unhealthy food when their metabolism is properly active and functioning have less metabolic damage than the ones that eat the healthy food at the wrong time of the day because of the disruption to sleep. So the whole point there is like, you can eat late, but it's, it's basically turning whatever healthy food you're eating into unhealthy food because it's disrupting our sleep and repair, which couldn't be more critical.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  What's a rule of thumb that people can follow? You mentioned four hours, four hours might be challenging?

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Three to four hours before bed. If you can just have your last meal, you know, and if you want to eat later, either like you can have a cup of tea, that can kill the appetite, water can kill the appetite, something small and light can be okay. But yeah, if, if the sun's going down at eight or nine, try to eat before five. If it's going down around nine or 10, try to eat before six or around six. And it's, it's a general rule of thumb, but that's how actually a lot of cultures that are still living a more native lifestyle have done it is that they eat, even in like when I was living in Europe, in Eastern Europe for a year on an exchange program in Bosnia, like lunch or dinner technically is like at two o'clock and then dinner in the evening that we think of supper is like a smaller lighter meal.

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  The Spanish, the Spanish people tearing the fucking hair out here because they love about to chain smoke five cigarettes in a row with a coffee, with a coffee and a ton of pastries at like 10 o'clock at night. I love Palmer, Palmer Port, Barcelona, there's restaurants and bars that are serving food until 11 o'clock at night, but I guess it's kind of horses and horses. And to be fair, they've probably still got sunlight, especially in summer when I've been there, it'll probably still be light at like half past 10 or 10 o'clock there.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  It will.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  So sleep with the sun.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Just to add, they, if they live their natural lifestyle like the Spanish people, you know, did before, more outdoors, less screen devices, they can actually get away with that. Same with the Italians, they eat their big dinners at nine or 10. Like it's, it's not, uh, it's not optimal, right? But, but people have eaten like this for a long time and they still, they still live till a hundred plus years old, right? So it's like, if you get the foundational basics right, that's why I'm not focused all on food. Cause if you get these mitochondrial things right, dude, you could kind of, you can, as Jack Cruz says, you can eat shit on a shingle and, and still be pretty healthy. So it's like

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  There's more leeway, the more things that you get right, the more leeway you have to get small things wrong that aren't part of that.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:06:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so sleep with the sun, avoid eating too late, wake, what we doing? We wake up, what's optimal?

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  So let's ideally, we're waking up early, you know, and some people would even argue like Dr. Cruz, like another one of his students, a good friend of mine, uh, who's a, a doctor, someone people might want to check him out, Dylan Petkis, Optimal Circadian Health, he dives really deep into the circadian thing, you might even want to have him on your show, um, it could be interesting discussion, but basically, uh, you might want to set an alarm if you're trying to reset your circadian rhythm, especially if you're someone who's waking up every day at nine or 10 or 11, you might want to start setting an alarm earlier, even though I'm not a big fan of alarms, so that you can reset your circadian rhythm, start, just like as if you took a flight, uh, west, because if you fly west, it's basically if you were waking up at nine o'clock and it's three hours time change, now you're waking up at

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  six o'clock and you're like, oh, I'm, I'm stoked, but because of the, the blue light at night and the lack of sunlight in the morning, eventually you shift back to where you were. And so that means the key thing is you're missing that key hormonal signaling from the first hour of some, of sunrise onward, and you don't get that the rest of the day. Uh, you get some at sunset. So anyway, get up as early as you can. Uh, I'd recommend people set their alarm for 10 minutes before sunrise and actually go and watch the sunrise if you can. But if you really don't want to do that, you can wake up and just go out in the light and literally I'll just look at the sky because it's been gray and like white sky out here in San Diego, just because in California in this, in the summer, uh, the hot sun heats a lot of the cold ocean and then it causes this cloud cover for like

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  a month in June, they call it June gloom. So I'll just look at the, at the gray sky, just let the light hit me for whether it's one minute, 10 minutes, but in general, like because there was some people doing some yard work, I closed this door, but I have a sliding glass door and I'll just leave it open and have the screen there, the glass blocks the ultraviolet, but the screen doesn't because the, the mesh on the screen is way too big to block any light. So. That is the best thing you can do. Wherever you're working, you know, when we say two hours outside, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to be on a walk for two hours or laying in the sun directly for two hours. It just means open your window, make sure you're getting unfiltered sunlight, like that window you have in front of you. If you can open it, get that light. And that's pretty much as simple as it is, like just drink your coffee

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  on the porch instead of in your kitchen. You know, just get out more. It's really actually pretty easy.

• 1:09:00Chris Williamson?

  David Allen's getting things done. He has this next action response. The Stoics, they have the dichotomy of control response. It sounds here like you are suggesting that there is a get in the sun response. If you have something that you need to do, we're big fans of the Pomodoro technique, 25 minutes on and five minutes off as a working cadence on this podcast. So you could perhaps make sure that all of your five minute breaks are spent outside, that all of your coffee breaks, if you choose to have a coffee break, it's outside. You could buy some cheap garden furniture for the summertime. And whenever you're eating, you could eat outside and probably

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  accumulate throughout the day without actually needing to spend a ton of purposeful time outside. You could quite easily accumulate two hours of sunlight, the same way as people that want to increase their neat energy expenditure just by, oh, well, I'll just take the stairs or I'll walk to the corner shop or I'll do whatever. What are the next actions that you can do that allow you to accumulate this light throughout the day?

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  Without you necessarily having to impose on your day. It's just little, small changes here and there.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. And I would just add, you know, getting those few breaks is great. If it's sunny, take your shirt off and let yourself get the light on the skin if you can too. That's a huge benefit for people to get. And so, yeah, I think, like you said, your show's the Modern Wisdom Podcast, like that's a really great way of throwing the modern wisdom, you know, that people can actually easily utilize. And again, the biggest thing I tell people is you don't have to be indirect sunlight. One of the biggest things I should say, you don't have to be indirect sunlight to be getting the benefit of full spectrum light on your eye. You just have to be outside. So if you can work on a patio that has a covering over it or an awning, you're still getting a lot more of the light

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  than if it's coming through a window or if it's coming through, or if you're just behind a wall. So again, you wanna, like you said, the body has this light response in a way, it actually does. You don't want to get too much sun, but the body will say I've gotten enough in general, unless you're super deficient, then your body might ask you to stay out when you're actually going to burn. So you have to be careful in the beginning. But once you get a little bit dialed in, I get in the sun like right now, the sun's starting to shine through. After this, I'm going to go, uh, cause I have some calls, I'll, I'll take my calls and I'll actually sit in the sun with my shirt off for a little while. But after a while, I get really hot and my, my body's basically saying, all right, you've got enough, you're getting really hot. So then I'll just be in the shade or I'll be back inside, but with my big sliding glass door open, letting the light come in. So, you know, we've crushed

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  the first two steps, I think, and the third step inadvertently, which is live outdoors during the day. We already knocked that out. Do you want me to kind of just cover? I can even cover the others at a sort of high level. So

• 1:11:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, let's do the number four, avoid tap water and drink spring water.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's great. I'm, I'm actually glad you have. I guess I sent over that document, didn't I?

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  Don't, don't you worry, your boy is prepared.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Dude, you're mad prepared. I love it. And that's funny. I'm actually, that guide that you have, we're actually refining it and we're going to release it in a much different visual format. It's a bit crazy colorful. It was a first draft a designer sent me, but the content's amazing. So, um, yeah, water is the key repository of light in our body essentially. So if you're drinking water, there you go. Perfect. Couldn't be more prepared. If you're drinking water that's, uh, high in, in, you know, from tap, that's high in chemicals that the, the city is putting in to, you know, clean it. First of all, we can't get into this right now, but it's too much time, but fluoride is, is really bad for the body and people, you know, they say that fluoride they put in the water to clean your teeth, but like, that's just insane. Why do you need to put a chemical without

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  people's choice into this, the water supply? It's, it's, uh,

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  I've gone down some mad conspiracy rabbit holes about, about fluoride and the reason that's in, yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Good. Yeah. So we don't need to get into that, but like people can look into that for themselves and know that's not good. Just drink good quality, you know, bottled water. If you can get it in glass, if you can get it from a spring yourself, amazing, probably, especially where you are. There's probably a lot of good springs you could access if you wanted near the mountains or something.

• 1:13:08Chris Williamson?

  You advise in the light diet guide that I've got, you advise just Googling spring water delivery and pretty much anywhere that's sort of Western world is probably going to have some form of that. My strategy for the last five years since I bought this house has been to use a Brita filter. Where does that rank on your?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Honestly, to be honest, it's not really good enough depending on what your local people are putting in the water because Brita, it doesn't take out fluoride or chloride. You would have to have like reverse osmosis filter that re mineral, maybe re mineralizes the water. But yeah, spring water delivery service, like you get these five gallon jugs or I don't even know what that is in liters. It's like 40 liters or 20 liters or something like that. Pretty big and you know, they're about this big, they're real heavy. Good workout to carry those out of the store and stuff, but basically that's probably five or $10 or five or 10 pounds tops for each of those jugs, if that it might even be three or four or five pounds. So that's a really great option and it's super easy.

• 1:14:11Chris Williamson?

  I'd love to hear some of the people that are listening will be doing this tomorrow. I'd love to hear some of the ways that you implement this, particularly the water strategy to make it as passive as possible. So I'm thinking about if you were to have a fridge which had a plumbed in water dispenser, would there be a way to adapt a spring water multi gallon delivery so that that was what came out of the fridge pre-cooled? I'm wondering whether or not there'd be a way of that. Someone leave it in the comments below or give me a message and tell me what the solution is because I know that one of you have got it. So just tell me, tell me what it is. Okay, avoid tap water, drink spring water where you can. Number five, eat a seafood based diet.

• 1:14:56Chris Williamson?

  I think out of all of the different things that you've put in here, number five is where I am the most deficient. I can't remember the last time that I ate seafood.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Really? So, okay, this is a really interesting concept that it's actually probably one of the more controversial subjects in the light diet and one that I've questioned to some extent as well. But basically the most accurate evidence on how humans evolved. So we were talking about life and mitochondria and the origins of life in the beginning, but talking about how humans evolved from apes is a very interesting discussion that again, not a lot of people have very good data on, but Dr. Cruz is one of the foremost experts in the world, I would say, on. Human evolution from apes, as far as like, at least his theories are the most coherent and they make the most sense. He's not just looking at the bone structure and this and that, he's

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  looking at the genes, different adaptations that make us separate from, um, different apes. And so, the most advanced evidence indicates that we evolved as coastal apes. So, these apes that were living in the savanna, actually got pushed off to the coast, and had to change their diet, because it was a different climate and there was access to a lot of shellfish there. And not so much to the, the grasses that we were, we were eating previously. So, we started eating shellfish. Shellfish is really high in omega-3, particularly one called DHA, which is an omega-3 fatty acid that we don't break down for energy. We actually incorporate it into our cell membranes, and more than anywhere else, we incorporate

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  it into our retina, and we incorporate it into our nerves. Specifically, it's the main building component of myelin, which is the, kind of like rubbery, yeah, exactly, it's, it's a sheathing around our nerves that allows them to conduct electricity very efficiently. So, it's also a primary component that a mother passes to her baby in, in pregnancy and in her breast milk, because it's so essential for brain development. And so, DHA is this kind of magical molecule. The reason it's used in all these places is because, based on the physics of it, it's very efficient at, um, at taking energy and basically transmuting it. So, for conducting electrical currents on the nerve cells, or for taking light energy

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  from the eye, that's hitting the eye, and turning it into those electrical impulses that activate all these different systems in our brain. That's why DHA is so important. And so, if you look especially at the ranking of intelligence of animals, and there's various factors, uh, that go into this, but, one thing you can see is that, the kind of- We could say dumbest or less intelligent animals have less DHA proportionate to their brain size. Humans have pretty much the highest of any animal on land. And then the other highest would be dolphins, for example, because they eat all seafood. So, and people consider dolphins to probably be the most intelligent other mammal or even animal.

• 1:17:51Chris Williamson?

  Fucking octopuses, dude. They are, they're the, the, the real master race species of the earth. I swear to God, man. Keep on watching.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  I don't disagree.

• 1:18:02Chris Williamson?

  Bro, I keep on going down these cephalopod rabbit holes on YouTube and they're just, they're terrifying. And then, then I read this sci-fi book where they sent, they sent a genetically enhanced octopus off into the future. And then they ended up in billions and billions of years later, and they ended up having to have a war with them. So I'm just saying, everybody needs to be a little bit more worried about what octopuses are doing.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  Octopuses.

• 1:18:28Chris Williamson?

  That octopi takeover, that's what we've got to be worried about. Okay, so seafood, DHA, can I not just have, can I just supplement, can I just supplement with omega-3?

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  That's a really great question. So I wouldn't, because there's some good evidence from a guy named Bartholomew Kay, based in New Zealand, that almost every supplement, what they have to do is they have to extract it. Sometimes it's cold extracted, which would probably be way better. But if they heat extract it, which they do with a lot of them, these, this very, it's a very delicate molecule. If it's not in the, in the proper form, it's not properly protected, it's easily oxidized. So if you're taking supplements, I've intuitively always stayed away from that because I thought, oh, if I can just eat it, why don't I just supplement it like crazy and get all the benefits? Well, then you're potentially putting in the place of something that's critical for our brain function and our, and our visual function, you're putting an already oxidized version of that in place, which is potentially going to create huge problems for the body. And plus-

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  For fuck's sake, Matt.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  I know, it makes things hard.

• 1:19:26Chris Williamson?

  I thought I had it sorted. All right. So shellfish, shellfish and, it's, don't worry. Shellfish and seafood, give us your two easiest to make or favorite seafood meals. What, what would you say? Someone wants to say, I'm going to put more, that Matt guy, sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I'm going to put more seafood in my diet. What do they get from the shop and how do they cook it?

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. So, like, low toxin, low mercury, very safe seafood would be like sardines. If you like, some people hate them, some people love them. If you like canned sardines, I would eat those every day or multiple times a week, and you don't have to cook them. Eat them out of the can, maybe have them with some crackers, although maybe you don't if you're trying to not eat carbs, put them on a salad. Sardines are super easy. I like a good wild-caught fish. If, you know, generally, I don't recommend farm-raised fish. If you can find a maybe really reliable, trustworthy, farm-raised, you know, source of fish, you might consider that, especially if you're pretty healthy, so any toxins that you might face, you can detox them pretty well.

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  And I like just a good grilled piece of fish, you know, just get it, you gotta look up how to do it properly, because it's, fish is, I think, the hardest, one of the hardest proteins to cook properly.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  I reckon, man. That's one of the reasons I don't eat it so much, is just because I, I'm not, I'm hardly a massive chef.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  Oh dude, you can do it.

• 1:20:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so, we've got seafood in our diet. Number six, you're gonna be...

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  I'll just, one other thing I'll throw up, because there's a lot of objection to this. People say, "Don't eat seafood because there's a lot of mercury, there's plastics in the ocean, there's all this pollution," which is true. But i- in my opinion, based on the knowledge of how DHA helped to drive the evolution of the human brain from apes, it would be like saying, "The air is dirty, so don't breathe oxygen anymore," because you can't, it's like, well, yeah, now that's a much more extreme and immediate example of death. But as a human being who has a brain based on DHA, if you're eating, if you're not eating DHA or any seafood, and we can't efficiently convert it from flax, vegans will say we can, but really the evidence is clear, we cannot.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  It implies that evolutionarily, we had a source of it, because we're not efficient at converting it, yet we use so much. It implies that there must have been a time in our evolution where we did have a lot of it in the environment, so we didn't have to make it from grass like cows do, or from flax like vegans try, or from phytoplankton, people will try to eat phytoplankton. It's not, it's not as... Uh, or algae, it's not in the, in the same form as once a fish has eaten that algae. So that's the idea.

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  If, if you've got people in your country eating fucking algae, you guys are so much further down the rabbit hole on this, the wellness, the wellness movement than we are. Number six, you're not going to have a lot of work to do to convince people that cold therapy is good for them. Myself, Johnny and Youssef, the three, my two regular buddies that are always on the show, huge proponents of cold therapy. I have in six months sober, which is one of the courses that I've put out. I have a week's challenge where they have to, the people going through the course have to do cold therapy. Um, what I want to know is what's your protocol for it? And how do you advise using cold therapy for fat loss?

• 1:22:46Chris Williamson?

  Because I was really interested in that when I read through it. So what's your, what's your protocol? How do you do it?

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is fascinating and you, you guys already have the science covered on how, or at least some of it covered on how it works. But simply put, when we get in the cold, it activates this ancient pathway in our brain that causes our cells to start releasing basically a burning energy from our fat, but as heat instead of making ATP. Cause all this energy could just be released as heat, right? And so that is a very fascinating adaptation because like, if you got into cold water, like I was, I surf here in San Diego, the water's probably 68 Fahrenheit, which is probably 17 or 18 Celsius. So it's actually pretty cold, especially if it's windy. I was freezing last night. If I didn't have a way to keep my body warm through thermogenesis, heat creation.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  So it's called cold thermogenesis. Uh, I would have been dead probably within five minutes because my core temperature will drop, right? So it's amazing, the system that the body has here, uh, in the process of burning fat. If you do it a lot, you actually could lose weight. Now, this is where again, I'll go back to Dr. Jack Cruz being a pioneer on this one as well. He has a protocol that I recommend people would do called the leptin reset. So leptin's this key hormone that signals satiety when you've eaten enough food in your brain. Now what happens for a variety of factors that he explains in his, uh, blog series that first got him famous on the internet called the leptin series. Um, he explains that. Chronic excess blue light at night, so it's another risk of getting too much artificial light, disrupts our sleep, disrupts the natural functioning of our leptin production and

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  our brain's ability to receive it. And then, lack of sunlight during the day also throws this process off, and so we get what's called leptin resistance. So the fat still makes leptin and says, "Hey, you know, we have X amount of fat, we're good, don't eat more, or eat more," or whatever. The brain doesn't get that signal anymore, and so that's how people become obese, is because they become leptin resistant. And so you eat more and more and more when you already have more than enough fat stored, but you just can't utilize it optimally. So that's the issue here. So you would want to do, if you want to lose weight, the leptin reset first, which for a lot of people, just by, it's a dietary strategy plus circadian rhythm strategy to reset your circadian rhythm and reset your hormones, essentially. So it involves eating, just like Tim Ferriss recommends in his The 4-Hour Body, in the

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  slow carb diet, it's like 50 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking. Tim Ferriss did 30 grams, but ideally, it's 50 grams of protein within 30 minutes of watching the sunrise in particular. So you want to get up, watch the sunrise, eat a huge protein breakfast, because you're not going to be craving carbs if you eat 50 grams of protein and then any fat that you need on top of that to feel really full. So that's a great start, and that helps to not just reset the brain's circadian rhythm through the light, but it resets the gut and the other organ's circadian rhythms, because when you eat, that stimulates digestion, which gets all those, resyncs the peripheral circadian clocks, because they're not just in our brain, they're in every cell, every organ, resets them with that light stimulus on the eye.

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  So you do that, and then, really cool is that you can add the cold thermogenesis, and since your leptin should be working after four to six weeks on that protocol, if you do it properly, and don't cheat and don't eat a ton of carbs at night, which is a good way to break that cycle, then you can start effectively burning your fat as heat. And not only having really cool ability to stay in cold water for a long period of time, which will impress your friends, potentially, but actually... Being able to burn fat. So Dr. Cruz, again, people could check this stuff out. He actually burned off in his first time doing this stuff about a hundred and sixty pounds, which is like eighty kilos in just under a year and a half, just from taking ice baths with no exercise, if you can imagine.

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  He was a big boy before he started doing this. Anyone that's got eighty kilos to lose. If he lost, if I lost eighty kilos, I'd lose, I'd lose me.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  You'd be dead.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  I'd be gone. I would just, Chris wouldn't be here anymore. It'd just be a foot.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  He was, he was definitely morbidly obese. That was why he became interested in all these concepts. Now, people give him a hard time if you look him up.

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  He, people say, oh, he's, he's still a bit overweight. Um, you know, that's something people can look into on their own, but uh, basically, one of the ideas is that when you're older and your body is um, aging, this is kind of an interesting one, but most of the people who lived over a hundred years, a lot of them have a higher body mass index than, you know, just being totally ripped. So it's, you know, some, there's some evidence indicate that slight weight gain as you age is like a protective mechanism. Now, he, he would argue that he's got that issue because of all of his years of neurosurgery, night shifts all the time, which caused him to have this disruption, that you can only keep it down

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  uh, to a certain amount. So that's just something, because people will say, oh, he's, he's, he still looks overweight. I don't want to take his advice. Just look at the science and, and make the judgments for yourself. But uh,

• 1:27:43Chris Williamson?

  How long? So about how long? How often?

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  Dude, you can go as long as you want. If your goal is to lose weight, you might want to do every day for a couple of hours, but realistically, if you're just trying to do a health benefit, I personally try to get in the ocean and surf every day for about one to two hours. So if I just had an ice bath, I would do like thirty minutes because it's eventually boring just to sit there all the time. But I would probably try to make it colder than the ocean is here because I'm only doing a shorter time. So, temperature, I would do, if you have good cold tap water around throughout the year. That's really great, but if you live somewhere like most places in the summer, the tap water heats up a lot. So you might want to go and buy ice or even better. Uh, you could, you know, easiest takeaway, if you really want to do this really well and you don't have a cold ocean near you.

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  Then I would Google Luke's story, Ben Greenfield ice bath hack. And they did a, a, a co blog, Ben and Luke. Uh, Luke showcased his idea on Ben's blog, actually, where he bought a chest freezer, a big chest freezer for, you know, that you could put a ton of meat into, but instead you put yourself into it and you fill it with water and you let the water stay there and you keep the chest freezer on. So instead of freezing your meat, it just keeps that water very, very cold. And that is a great hack, really good hack. Um, I would maybe unplug it when you actually get into it. So you don't have any risk of electrocution or something. But it'll keep the water cold if you leave it full and you leave it on.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  So, and then you can get it really cold if you want, you can change the freezer setting and figure out what's, what one, two, three, four, five is going to make the water.

• 1:29:18Chris Williamson?

  There is someone out there that is going to repurpose the same way as these percussion massage devices are essentially just a reciprocating hammer. That's been replaced with a massage ball on the end. Someone is going to create the ultimate ice bath thermostat regulated, hyper cool barrack chamber machine, which is a chest freezer. That's been rebranded and had some cool, uh, got a cool Instagram on it.

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, dude, I bet it'll be one of your listeners too.

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  Someone's, hey, there's someone out there who's got the, the spring water idea and got that. Um, I did December, the 10th in the northeast of England. It was minus one air temperature and the water was three degrees in,

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Geez.

• 1:30:09Chris Williamson?

  In Lake Windermere and me and my buddy and a couple of his friends went there, went into the lake. That was the same day that I podcasted with Kamal Ravikant. And by the time that I had that podcast on the nighttime, I was like in a total different space, but that was really, really fun. So, okay. Final, final two, avoid native EMF and living in.

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  Non-native.

• 1:30:29Chris Williamson?

  Non-native, uh, EMF. What's EMF?

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Alright, that's a great question. So have you heard of like the whole 5G conspiracy theory?

• 1:30:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, we hate Brian Rose on this podcast, so yes, we've heard of it.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Alright, so, um, so basically, the, there is a lot, and this is something where it's also very controversial, but there is tons of evidence from the last 50 years, um, especially from the initial people who are building high voltage transmission lines, these big lines you see, and then the Navy was using a lot of radar during the Cold War. And so in Russia and the United States, people were studying the health effects of what we call non, so EMF is electromagnetic fields. So it's like light is an electromagnetic field. Non-native means electromagnetic fields that aren't native to the Earth. So on Earth, we have the Earth's magnetic field, we have the Schumann resonance, which is a naturally generated resonance, which matches our brain's alpha waves

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  between the ionosphere of the atmosphere and the Earth's surface, just naturally produced based on the physics of the Earth. And then there's sunlight, it's another native EMF. So our body and life has been shaped by these. Now, we're using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a lot of other things to communicate that actually are not native and actually disrupt our cells. So even though it's a lot less power density when you use your phone compared to a microwave, it's affecting the water in our cells the same way that a microwave does, but at a longer, slower level. So people talk about, you know, you get a tumor, like brain cancer, where you use your cellphone. Again, this can be very controversial, but the evidence is very clear.

• 1:32:04Speaker 00

  And it's one of those quote-unquote conspiracy theories that's actually very well-founded by research that most people don't know about. So simply put, the takeaways are, try using like a hardwired connection, like I have a hardwired internet connection here rather than Wi-Fi. Um, avoid AirPods. We've maybe talked about this with you, or maybe not. I know, I'm killing you.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:32:28Chris Williamson?

  So good.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So that's a really tough one for a lot of people.

• 1:32:33Chris Williamson?

  That's the hardest pill to swallow of all of this stuff. Man, I'll go to bed for three hours. I'll eat seafood all day long. But if you want me to stop using my fucking AirPods, that's the, that's the, that's just the final step, you know, that's when I've completed black belt, light diet. That's me.

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  Right. That's funny. So, so it's just that the thing is effectively all the work you do, if you get too much of this, it can undo your work. Like the body can be resilient. But that's the idea. So the biggest thing, like you said, avoid living in major cities. Now that they're actually laying out 5G again, I'm not sure about your take on the whole 5G thing. I know Brian Rose.

• 1:33:04Chris Williamson?

  I don't have a problem with the 5G. My problem is with Brian Rose. Um, which is, I just don't like Brian Rose. Like that's the five, the 5G thing. I've seen and heard tons and tons of stuff about this. I went down the rabbit hole to do with 5G, uh, less so from broadcast towers, more so from the receivers coming through your phone. I've said this to everyone that I know, as soon as 5G comes out, I'll be turning it off on my phone. Like I'm not, I don't want, I don't need to be able to stream something at a pace quicker than I can currently wifi something and sacrifice my health for the same. I, I looked at a stat as well when I went down that rabbit hole that said a 20 minute phone call

• 1:33:44Chris Williamson?

  to your head is the same amount of radiation that a year wifi router gives off.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  20 minute phone call, phone to head, same radiation as a wifi router in your room for an entire year.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  That's very interesting. I, uh, it's actually not necessarily untrue. That, that could, that could be accurate because of the scale of these things. It's like exponential differences in power.

• 1:34:10Chris Williamson?

  If you look at, if you look at the way that they, uh, set these little measurement devices and they start to move the thing which is causing the radiation away by just millimeters, like literally just lifting it off the surface of the, um, detector. And as it starts to get a little bit away, a little bit away, it, it just totally dissipates the amount of, the amount of difference. So yeah, you're right. It's an exponential curve that you have as you get closer to it, right?

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  It is, yeah. So like Ben Greenfield, for example, he has, he calls his house a dumb home rather than a smart home because he's had this guy named Brian Hoyer, who would probably be someone you might really like to interview, talking about, you know, he actually had him go out and test his whole house. Brian Hoyer is one of what they call a building biologist. They have these actual science-based standards of what kind of exposure to these EMF, you know, sources is safe and or is, is like where you don't want to be crossing that line.

• 1:35:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  Basically, I recommend the best thing people can do is get a meter. It's called a CORNET, C-O-R-N-E-T-E-D-8-8-T. You can get them on Amazon. I'm sure you can get them in the UK. And it has the ability to measure radio frequencies, which come from all our communication devices, AirPods, you know, phones, computers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, all that stuff. You can also measure magnetic and electric fields, which come from power lines, electrical appliances, also magnetic fields come from the computer because of the, the processor. So you just want to look up building biology safety standards. But if you have that meter and it's going into the yellow constantly, or even into the red,

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  it's like, you got a problem. So that's just something, if someone really wants to take this seriously and be careful there, great. Now, again, I'm not saying that someone can't be ridiculously healthy and still be exposed to some EMF. Obviously, there are people who are exposed to it and don't get cancer or don't have issues. But then there are a lot of people who are, and they don't even know what's causing them to feel tired or this or that. So for me, it's another variable to just remove. So it isn't like risking threatening your health. So I think that's a great way to just kind of sum that one up. I could literally do a whole podcast on that because that's been an area of interest to me.

• 1:36:23Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's interesting, Mike. It is cool. I, I enjoyed Ben on Joe's podcast, the first time that I actually heard of him. And I enjoyed him going down the rabbit hole to do with that as well. So final one, spend time with good people, read good books and prioritize yourself.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very interesting. So I've actually changed that one to just say cultivate your inner light. And we actually did talk about why that's important earlier. Because, again, it's like, you could do all this stuff we're talking about here, but if you're chronically stressed, or you're buying into some emotional belief system that's not true. You know, again, this is where I defer to Joe Dispenza, because he is one of the experts on that, who's taking old eastern wisdom and madly redoing it with western science, or reteaching it in an amazing way. So I think that people just should check out some of his work, or whoever's your preferred spiritual or, you know, mindset teacher of choice, whether it's Tony Robbins, or Deepak Chopra,

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  or Sadhguru, or whoever, and actually apply the stuff. Like, my uncle, who lives out in Idaho, is like, kind of a, he describes himself as a redneck, you know, like we say in the United States. He told me one time about whether it's workout systems, or like mindset coaches, whatever you want to apply to, or diets. This was kind of his take. He's like, they all work. You just actually have to do them. You know, it's like, people, people, not that they actually do all work, but the idea is like, people just have so many options, they won't just pick one and apply it all the way. So it's like, let's just pick one and apply it all the way, and then get it, get some results from it, and then pivot if you need.

• 1:38:00Chris Williamson?

  The rule that I always tell people is, compliance is the biggest indicator of whether a plan is going to work or not. The best workout plan is the one that you do every day. The best diet is the one that you stick to. The best sleep and weight, the best productivity tool that you have is the one that you're able to use. Compliance is the important factor when it comes to this stuff. How can someone that decides to go flexible dieting, counting macros, and do the carnivore diet, and do keto, and do all of these different things, how can people that do all of these different forms of exercise, training, work, productivity?

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  They all get results. There's nothing that unifies all of these different strategies, apart from the fact that people stick to the fucking plan. They have a plan and they don't deviate from it. And that's what people don't get, that what's the best workout regime? The one that you stick to. And when people do one, they decide to go and do a functional bodybuilding style thing because they're a bit sick of CrossFit or they're a bit sick of bodybuilding, they're somewhere in the middle and they decide to do that for three weeks and then pivot. You're like, well, of course it's not going to fucking work. Of course it isn't because you didn't stick to the plan. And that's why, one of the most important things I think that we need to try and do, especially that I'm trying to get across with this show, is the minimum viable product for habits is

• 1:39:24Chris Williamson?

  the important thing. Get yourself over the line. Start to get into the rhythm of, okay, I'm gonna have a hard digital sunset, two hours before I go to bed. I'm gonna get myself some good quality blue blockers. Raw optics, perfect example, link in show notes below. I'm going to try and get, you know, some fish. That's why I'm saying, look, how like, how minimum could we get through? Should we have one day a week, I'm going to do pescatarian day or whatever it might be.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  For seafood, I do like three to five meals a week if you can at minimum. That'd be good. But again, just replace one of your steaks with a nice piece of fish. Just learn how to cook it once. You'll, you'll be so glad you did. It'll add great variety. Anyway, continue.

• 1:40:01Chris Williamson?

  That's it, man. That's all, that's all I gotta say. Dude, today has been so much fun. Like, you've dropped some, you've dropped some fucking knowledge bombs, man.

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  Dude, I love it. Your day's ending, my day's just getting started. Couldn't be a better way for you to get in your evening and for me to get into the rest of my workday. So I'm super stoked. I'll throw one more thought out here. People ask when you talk about the, like you said, compliance, compliance, compliance. People say, how are you gonna tell people that they shouldn't be worried and at the same time tell them that EMF could be killing them, fluoridated water could be killing them, you're not eating enough seafood, your phone's killing you. It's like, how do you, how do you reconcile that? And I, because someone asked me this question and it was probably, it was a great podcast question. And I said, huh, it's a good point. So what, the way I took it is like, you know, it's just like with Joe Dispenza, he talks about real stress. If you have a cougar

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  or a lion attacking you, like, you need to respond. And so that's, that's when you get that new information. It's kind of like a cougar or something like that, that you actually need to. There's a reason you have a stress for it, right? What you don't, so you want to like quickly make a change, whether it's, you know, fight or flight or freeze, whatever you do. Um, you make a quick change, get out of the stress dan- danger situation and then you're done. With this stuff, it might not be as quick as running away from a cougar, but effectively it's like, take what we've talked about, like you said, decide what the next action is, decide, I always say the next action is, is just learn more, listen to more podcasts I've done, like learn more so you, you know, when you know better, you do better is the idea. So learn more and then decide if it's something you're going to act on, decide

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  what you're going to act on, act on it, and then don't carry the stress on forever. Cause that's just going to be way worse for you. Um, but make the benefit, make the decisions, make the actions. And then if there's something like AirPods, if you're like, I'm not giving up my AirPods, it's like, that's fine. Don't stress.

• 1:41:53Chris Williamson?

  You've done the good work outside of that, right? And there's this quote from, uh, Why Buddhism is True, which is unbelievable and it ties into so much stuff and it ties into kind of what you're saying here. This book by Robert Wright and it's a Rinpoche quote that says, ultimately happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. And this sort of eye opening that you can do with things like this, where you go, look, this is the way the world is, this is the way that your body works. The fact that you are now, your eyes are open, you've done Plato's allegory of the cave and you've seen what the real world looks like, you know that light is important. Would it be better for you to be ignorant to the fact that light is important and unable

• 1:42:37Chris Williamson?

  to do anything about it and saved from the stress of having to worry or having to deal with the stress of worrying, but having the power in your hands to enact that stress and then convert it into something that you can actually use to build you, uh, and make you into a better human? So dude, where can people go? They're gonna have, they're gonna have tons of, tons of questions. Um, your stuff and any of the blog posts that you think people should check out that want to delve deeper.

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a couple places I'd say. So personally, I haven't been using my own Instagram much, but I'm starting a little bit. It's called The Light Diet. So if someone wants to follow the @TheLightDiet on Instagram, that's probably the main place. I'm gonna be launching The Light Diet Podcast probably a month and a half from now. So that'll be really cool. I'm gonna dive deep with all these experts. And then at some point, I think it'd be cool for us to do an interview there, too, and kinda take all the stuff you've learned from your experiences, throw that on there. So that'd be really cool. The Light Diet Podcast, The Light Diet Instagram is where I'll announce that stuff. And then raoptics.com, that's R-A, like Ra, the Egyptian sun god of healing and medicine. That is raoptics.com, R-A

• 1:43:47Speaker 00

  optics.com. And people can go to our Instagram, raw underscore optics, where we have some cool, just great photos. People can see the product.

• 1:43:56Chris Williamson?

  Dude, they can see, they don't need to see the product. They can see me and you in them, looking cool as hell, handsome as fuck. And if you, if you want to check out my evening walk, you'll also be able to see a different pair with me in the red lenses, just playing around.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got red lenses here. I'll just show people, just gonna have an idea. It's a bit of a more deep orange-red, pretty much a red color. So, so yeah, that's where people can find us. I think that's a great start. And then, I mean, if someone does wanna read more about the deep science, they can check out Dr. Jack Cruz if they want. Obviously, people can check out Dr. Joe Dispenza and his progressive online workshop. That's a great resource for people to make huge changes to their life. And I'd say, that's a great start, you know? And check out some of the other podcasts I've done. If you wanna kinda hear the same message with slightly different questions with slightly less cool hosts on the podcast, potentially.

• 1:44:47Chris Williamson?

  I knew, I knew that there was a reason. I thought I'd really like that Matt guy. And it's because flagrant compliments. Finish a podcast with just total, total compliments. That's all we need. Look, everything that we have spoken about will be linked in the show notes below. Raw Optics make the best blue blockers on the planet. So if you are considering going and getting a pair, they will be linked in the show notes below. There is also a code, I'm sure I'll be able to twist Matt's arm. And get some sort of a discount for you.

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:45:16Chris Williamson?

  I will have already spoken about that in the pre-roll to this podcast. So I'm referencing myself in the future, which will have already happened in your particular experience of this. But look, Matt, man, thank you so much. I know that I've taken a ton from reading the light diet a couple of months ago and really trying to think actively, proactively about the way that I do expose myself to light, about trying to reset my circadian rhythm in a more effective manner. And I'm, I need to go buy some, some sardines now, don't I?

• 1:45:46Speaker 00

  Oh, that'd be great. Whatever you like. Oysters are great. But yeah, go for it, dude. Great, great chatting here.

• 1:45:53Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.