154: Michael Chapiro, Creator of Chroma: The Only Light On The Market That Generates Vitamin D & Delivers Red Light In One!

Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman and I am the founder of Sleep As A Skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex-sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about sleep.

Each week I'll be interviewing world-class experts, ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian-aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health, and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. I have done a bunch of episodes on different types of lighting options that could support your biology and your sleep results, meaning things like red light therapies, sad lamps, if you will, certain things that you could bring into your daily rotation that might support improvement in not only sleep results, but your health results that could show up on some of your sleep trackers.

So we've done a bunch of those interviews already, and yet one of the reasons I wanted to bring today's guest on is because they're the creator of a really unique product among many unique products that they offer, but one of them is a product that can generate vitamin D from a man-made light source.

So that's a big deal. Now we have had. Spurty on the podcast and they can also do that as well and often is covered by insurance. So that's a great offering too. What I like though about Chroma to consider is that they're also balancing this with red light therapy in the mix of all this, and we'll get into all the details.

And beyond that product, they also have additional products that could support sleep as well. For instance, they have something called the Sky Portal, which is this huge and very powerful and strong sad lamp essentially, but it is really like nothing else on the market, so you're definitely gonna wanna check that out.

They also have their carbon Shades, which is basically the opposite of their Sky portal, the carbon shades. Block, 99.8% of all Melanopic Light, and you would use those about two to three hours before bed. Additionally, they have something called the Iron Forge. It's this very powerful red and near-infrared device.

Anyway, there's a lot that we talk about and it definitely gets complex, so get ready, but I think you're gonna really enjoy the genius that is our guest. Now, a bit about him. The founder of Chroma is Michael Shapiro, a NASA NSF Air Force, an MDA funded engineer. And what happened for him is he actually injured himself rock climbing back in the day and while searching for a solution to heal a partially torn A-tube pulley.

In his finger, Michael discovered a clear market gap. All existing red and near-infrared products were simply stock greenhouse panels with the LEDs swapped out before the prototype of the iron Forge. There was nothing built for targeted high-power density, light treatment. So that's where it all began.

And then it blossomed into some of those other products that I spoke to, the Chroma D, which is one that I often mention for people to be aware of, of how they can generate vitamin D from a light source. Why are we talking about all this? Because vitamin D is crucial. If you want to get great sleep and have great health, it is essential hormone.

Sadly, I think because of the name being called a vitamin. It's been sort of discounted, if you will, or just needs better pr, but it is an essential hormone for many components of health and well-being, but certainly sleep. So we're gonna get into all that and more. But first, a few words from our sponsors.

If you're listening to this podcast, you're likely looking to improve your sleep. And one of the first places that many people begin when they talk to me about sleep is they wanna know what's the supplement I can take? Well, I gotta say, I honestly don't take that many supplements nowadays for my sleep, and I'm very grateful for that.

A lot of things you can do for free. I. However, one of the supplements that I do consistently take and have taken for ages is magnesium, specifically magnesium breakthrough. It's an all-natural supplement that helps you reduce fatigue and sleep more peacefully. It even strengthens muscle and improves your heart and brain function.

So while most magnesium supplements aren't full spectrum, magnesium Breakthrough is the only magnesium supplement on the market that contains the optimal ratio of all seven essential types of magnesium. So imagine having to strength and energy to get out of bed every morning and face the day boldly, courageously, to be able to show up as your best self and keep that energy up throughout the day and into the night.

So if you wanna give it a try, go to biooptimizers.com. Forward slash sleep is a skill and you can use the code. Sleep is a skill to get gifts with purchase up to two travel-sized bottles of magnesium breakthrough. So you wanna act fast on this. It's a limited time offer. Again, go to buyoptimizers.com Forward slash sleep is a skill and I think you're gonna be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Today I'm very excited to introduce you to Moonbird, a pioneering biofeedback device that's revolutionizing the way we approach sleep. And they have just sponsored sleep as a skill. So in the realm of sleep science, stress management is always key. And Moonbird leverages the science of heart rate variability or HRV, which you know we're talking about all the time on this podcast.

And it leverages it in a way to combat sleep disturbances caused by stress. This innovative device isn't just for relaxation, it's a tool to activate your body's natural sleep mechanisms. So, according to a significant study in Psychophysiology in 2015. Paced breathing, which is facilitated by something like Moonbird was found to significantly increase vagal activity.

This directly impacts your parasympathetic system leading to improved sleep quality. It's about making tangible physiological changes for better sleep. Now, Moonbird goes beyond being just a sleep aid. It's a scientifically grounded tool for managing stress and achieving deeper, more restorative sleep.

Now for listeners who wanna transform their sleep patterns, Moonbird combines cutting-edge technology with proven scientific strategies so you can visit Moonbird.life and use the code SLEEPASASKILL for a special discount. And just a quick aside, I am using my Moonbird every single day, and it's made a profound difference in how I'm managing my stress and improving my own ability to manage my health and well-being through heart rate variability technology.

And welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. I finally just had to hit record on this one 'cause I was asking our guests so many questions  and we're like, we should probably record these things. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here. This means a ton. And honestly, there are just so many things for us to hit on in this podcast of the novel and unique offerings that you are providing from your company that you've invented, which is like wild.

We have a true real life modern inventor here that you've invented that can help support people in their sleep with two big areas, light and temperature. And we know in the world of chronobiology the science of time, how time affects your biology of the many things that tell our bodies information about what time it is and what to be doing when, which massively impacts our sleep.

Wake cycles light. Darkness, temperature are all the top rungs, uh, that impact our sleep results or sleep-wake cycles. So thank you for taking the time to be here and answer all the questions that are coming your way. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's real honor because I know that you are.

Just really getting your hands dirty on applying and bringing to market so many things that are just needed and we didn't even know that were available. So noteworthy, how I originally heard about your company was about, initially just about the Chroma D light, which is a light that provides and creates vitamin D from a light source, which is what, like a manmade light source, which, I mean, I don't, I only know one other company that does anything remotely similar, and yours actually has a unique spin on it.

So I learned about your company through those me, but then it turns out you've got all these other things that are available that I haven't seen elsewhere. So let's just begin at the beginning. How did you find yourself as this, like modern day Benjamin, Franklin creating all these different inventions?

Sure. Well, in terms of the health products, uh, I started just with, uh, blocking out blue light.  With the Uvex glasses that you know you can get for 10, 15 months on Amazon. Uh, and the reason I was looking into that was actually first keto, that I was interested in the diet. I was struggling to, to maintain what are different things I can do to make that work better.

And I said, okay, there's actually a very deep connection between sleep and metabolic flexibility. So if I want to improve my ability to control my diet, I need to fix my sleep first. And light was one of the things that really stood out to me. So I started with the blocking blue light. Uh, and then I did that for a few years with the, under the brand carbon Shade.

I mean, launched in 2016 as a Kickstarter. Uh, and then later down the road, um, I randomly stumbled across red light when it, it was already sort of gaining a little bit of a cult following at the time. Uh, a friend had mentioned it to me and I saw that it's one of the things that can help with connective tissue injuries.

And rock climbing for a while. And I would always get these A-II pulley injuries. So the A-II pulley is, is the one right here. It's a really common climbing entry. It can happen in any finger where it just ruptures a little bit. And then how do you,  that connective tissue is really slow to heal and then it sort of heals partway and it's, you wanna get back to climbing and then maybe you heard it again and red light therapy stood out as one of these things that could really help accelerate the healing process.

But when I looked at the devices that were available online, I saw that it was just really large panels, which were taken from greenhouse lighting with the idea of, you know, apply this on your entire body. Uh, but I wanted something that was really concentrated in one area, and I also wanted something that actually would pack a punch.

Uh, and so that's when I developed my first device. Which I just built for myself. Actually, I just soldered a really janky thing. Uh, the cooling on it was entirely inappropriate. It was, it was a CPU fan on, uh, have a aluminum that I cut out and it had about a sixty-second duty cycle before it would overheat and I would have to turn it off, but that was enough.

Uh, so I used that for about nine months. Uh, and only at that point I realized, Hey, there's actually a bit of a market here. And that was a little bit after I'd left a, a prior company, an aerospace materials engineering project. Uh, and so I thought, you know, I can, uh, make a version of this that other people would also want.

Um, and then from that, was that all the other products, the D-Lite and, and Visible Lights, and just sort of tying the whole picture together.  Wow, so interesting. Okay, so that's such a great background of understanding kind of your journey and how it began as a kind of personal project, if I'm hearing you correctly, of, you know, really wanting to solve your own individual problems and then starting to see, ooh, okay, this could actually support other people in their health and wellbeing journey.

And there's really something here. This is like a void in the marketplace. Again, certainly some of the things that we're gonna talk about today, I don't know of where else to get some of these things that you're, that you've created. I guess that's a place to potentially begin is why don't we, well, I guess it's hard for you to answer this question, but why don't we see more companies bringing to market what you're doing?

Is it particularly challenging to execute on what you've created? Why don't we see more of these things? I think there's probably a few different reasons. One, it's a relatively small group of people that are really interested in optimizing their health. Uh, from a, from a medical, uh, uh, you know, industry perspective, there's not a ton of money going into devices.

Uh, the, the problem is you have an LED, it can run 30,000 hours. It can be made relatively cheaply. It's not as good as, you know, getting someone hooked on a drug and getting the IP on that drug. Uh, and, and so the, the medical industry is just not set up. Uh, to really build devices that make people healthier and have preventative health.

Uh, so, and, and even basic things like, uh, how health insurance works and laws around that, uh, loss ratios, uh, mandate that, uh, health insurance companies have a fixed profit of 20% and Oh, yeah. You know, you, you prevent, uh, companies from making too much money. What it actually means is that the only way to make more profit is by making things less affordable.

And that's why things like premiums have been going up. Uh, it means that a company can't come in and say, Hey, I have a thing that is 10 times cheaper, a hundred times cheaper, and, you know, maybe I make a 50% profit on it. Uh, but your cost falls 10 to a hundred. X. Got it. Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense.

And I really wanna get the message out for, uh, the masses. That light can be utilized like a drug in a particular way. You can think about it like that has drug-like effects, and yet much of it is available for free if we were to utilize and going outside more routinely. And yet for many of us, we need some options to fill in the void, whether or not we're in northern latitude locations at different parts of the year, or if we find ourselves indoors, which most of us are for big chunks of time.

There's lots of reasons why in this journey for optimal health, we could use some real smart support as it relates to light. So maybe we could begin with the first item that I became aware of you all through, which is that Chroma D Light, and I believe you actually just recently sold out. It's been so popular and there's more coming into stock, but there's people that are getting, especially I'd imagine since the pandemic and a lot of buzz around the importance of vitamin D across the board for many indicators for health.

And on our podcast we talk a lot about how vitamin D can support your sleep results. So vitamin D from a light, how did you achieve this? What does this look like and why is yours unique? From the only other one that I can think of on the market? Well, getting vitamin D from the light is sort of the default, this idea of a supplement that later.

So yeah, we can always get vitamin directly from sunlight, uh, depending on the time of year and, and what the latitude is. Uh, and one problem is that the supplements don't always have the same effect as the sunlight. And that actually ties into, i i, if you start digging into the research of how the synthesis happens, there's a bunch of variants within vitamin D.

There's a bunch of different conversion steps, and I'm very skeptical as to the idea that you're getting the exact same thing if you're just taking a supplement. Yeah. Even if that's something where, you know, you can then take a test and show it's elevated. Uh, and so if, if you have a light that is as simulating that effect of sunlight that's actually creating the, those same wavelengths, then you can generate it through those processes that the body has evolved to, to really take advantage of.

Sure. Okay. I think that's a really good point too, because we do see things like that. Actually we have a guest coming on the podcast coming up that speaks exactly to that when you might hyperdose vitamin D, or not even hyperdose, just dose it as designed and then we might see snowball effect of other problems down the road.

It might deplete vitamin B and there's certain other concerns that we might see just in practicality as far as when we start to get routine lab tests for people, that it's not always as simple as just take a supplement. And then there's other concerns as you're pointing to, to that we're missing certain benefits that happen when light hits the skin and hits the eyes.

What can happen there. And of course with the call out that I know that the vitamin D one, we're very careful with the eyes, of course, with that one, but. How is this one unique? Because you are adding in, uh, these different spectra of red light, and so I'm curious your thinking on that, how you're able to achieve that and then still be producing that vitamin D.

Yeah,  so I have actually one of the, it's a slightly older version here. Oh, great. We have a PCB board with all the LEDs, so we can select the wavelengths that we want and get those all put together on a single board. Uh, and so that's where we bring in the, the red wavelengths, the near infrared wavelengths, and really having a, a broad range of those, uh, since that's very well established, that there's a protective effect of red light.

So when you're getting UV e everyone's heard there, there's in mainstream media, there's excessive,  even though it's well established that sunlight reduces all cause mortality. Uh, but overall, just because it it's net positive doesn't mean the, the risk of DNA damage of a carcinogenic effect is not present to some extent.

It's always about, uh, the benefit versus the risk. And so when you're getting light from the sun, you're getting all the red, you're getting these near IR wavelengths. And, and it's important to say that if you have a broad spectrum IR, uh, like a, an infrared sauna, uh, in infrared goes from about a, a thousandth of a millimeter to a millimeter.

So it's this 1000 x range. Your visible light goes from 300 to 700 nanometers, so a little over two X. So it's a much smaller range. And then your near IR is just this sort of sliver next to that, up to, you know, about a thousand nanometers. Uh, so it, that spectrum is what's in sunlight. So from the sun, you can look at what temperature is the sun, what does that black body radiation curve look like?

And there's a decent peak in the visible light range, and it trails off into near IR.  Uh, but it's really, those are the wavelengths that are really protective. And with the D light, we make sure we're hitting all those points in what's called the, the cytochrome C oxidase. So all those points for the receptors, um, for the, the copper A and B complexes.

Uh, so that's, you know, the, the 6 30, 6 67, 68, 28 50, those sorts of numbers. Um, so with the LEDs, we're able to target those really precisely.  That's a great thing about, you know, light emitting diodes. Uh, they're a lot less expensive than lasers and, you know,  a lot of people associate LEDs with overexposure to, to blue light indoors and at night, and that's definitely a concern.

Uh, the thing to realize is LEDs have only really picked up in the past decade or two mm-Hmm. And before that they were incredibly expensive.  Uh, and, and so that's sort of why you see these legacy products. Talking about o other forms of getting on the UV side, uh, vitamin D, you have broad spectrum fluorescent light where you can't control the output.

So if you want to get the UV, uh, that you need for vitamin D, it's coming with a lot of other UV light. And that means in terms of that risk-benefit ratio, you're getting a lot of risk. And only a part of it is the benefit. And so with an LED.  We can take very narrow  slivers of the UV range exactly where we want to get a, an optimal, uh, risk-benefit ratio.

I so appreciate you breaking that down because I have noticed for some people blanket upset around LEDs or kind of a misdirection potentially on thinking that LEDs are gonna all be bad across the board for this goal around improving our sleep with the thinking that so many blanket LEDs that you'll have on the market being blue, rich and what have you, and you're speaking to how they can actually have a place in our health regimen along with this thoughtful way of kind of putting together really a safety profile for a light device that can help produce vitamin D.

Because there are, you know, the other lights that I can think of on the market that. Are putting out, that are putting out right now, that are available, they are missing and have the absence of this kind of healing properties of the red light that's available. That's. Fantastic. And for other people too.

Even beyond sleep, we know that there's so many other benefits that are really clearly established, even in kind of mainstream media for light and vitamin D and certain skin benefits. So knowing eczema and psoriasis can be something that's really well established. And then of course we know there's so many other ripple effects for these benefits.

Now is this something that you see for people? Like what do you see for the cadence for people using this if they're thinking, okay, I hadn't considered getting a light source for vitamin D production. How would they use this? When do they use it? How long is the commitment for them? What does that all look like?

Yeah, so the device we built is very powerful and, and the idea is, uh, the way photobiomodulation works is it's sort of like a photon counter. And to, to some extent, that's the,  the similar thing with vitamin D. As long as you know, you don't have a laser that's burning someone, then you're gonna be fine.

And on the other side, if you have too low of an intensity, you actually somehow don't get the, the additive effect even if you say, Hey, we delivered this many photons. And so that's just the total energy that's, uh, delivered. Uh, so I, I forget offhand exactly what the numbers are, but Sure. It's something like a thousand IU in 30 seconds.

Wow. On Take Two Skin, if I'm remembering correctly, was that estimate.  So we were able to, uh, initially the cost was really high and it's still significant, but we were able to bring the cost down on getting the UVB LEDs, uh, and that allowed us to just boost the power on that further, um, have a, a better user experience.

So it's something where you only need to use it for maybe a minute a day, and that's fine. Another thing is, uh, vitamin D, the how it diminishes it, it doesn't diminish, uh, o over a day. So if someone found that inconvenient, it would be possible to use, say a couple minutes, maybe. Uh, two, three minutes. Two or three times a week would also work.

Yeah. 'cause for people listening, I think that this potentially is like a whole new concept, but I like how on your site, I have your site up and you say you are using it in that very short period of time. It can be anywhere from like 30 seconds to two minutes like you were pointing to in this continuous motion.

And you say it's, it use it sort of like a toothbrush for the whole body, you know? So you're just like a quick process. So it doesn't have to be this arduous thing. 'cause I think sometimes people might imagine, oh man, now I gotta add in this, sitting in front of a lamp process and all these things. And it can seem like a lot, but what this is pointing to is it can be a fast process, uh, what I'm hearing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It puts out quite a bit of heat. I, I just noticed, for instance here, I have a plastic cover that was getting melted from the UV. So that's how it's blocking the UV at, at one point I had, uh, one of the infrared ones, I had it at my desk behind my keyboard. This thing. Okay, I'll, I'll just leave it here while I'm working a little bit.

And it started melting the caps of my keyboard. Wow. So the thing is,  you can feel the heat off this. So people who have tried full body panels say, wow, this thing feels completely different. Uh, but it's not like touching a hot stove or it's like, oh, it burned me. You feel the heat and you naturally move it.

So it's, you're not gonna hurt yourself as long as you're not really dumb about saying, you know, I'm just gonna put it here and I'm not gonna move it even when it's hurting.  Exactly. Exactly. Oh man. Okay. So that's fantastic. So we can have this whole new way of relating to light. And one of the things I've seen for myself, we have these cohorts where we bring people through to improve their sleep.

They all get aura rings, we bring them through the process of improving their circadian health, and we have a whole huge section on light and. One thing that we saw is that people would get confused on, they would say, okay, so I do my vitamin D piece. So whether they're getting it from outside or maybe in the winter in Northern Latitude locations, some of them would be investing in some of these lamps that they can create vitamin D.

But then they would think, okay, so that's it. But it turns out that, as you've pointed to, that's just one piece of this light story is the creation of vitamin D. There's also the consistent exposure to bright light throughout the course of the day. So you've also created a product or different products that can help support people in that regard.

'cause what do we see be a problem? One of the things we had, um, uh, NASA subject matter expert, which I. Understand that you, your products, you said that this is all designed by NASA, NSF Air Force and MDA-funded engineers, right? Yes. That's, yeah. So, so that's me. So, so that's my background. Exactly. I was previously working on, uh, a composite manufacturing process.

Um, and, and we got funding from the DOD, from NASA, from NSF,  and I was working on taking machine metal components and making those a lot lighter with, uh, a multi-axial carbon fiber, um, uh, process.  And then transitioning to, to some high-temperature applications that are pretty interesting. Uh, so yeah, I was there for about four and a half, five years, uh, getting that off the ground and now I'm more of an advisor there and I still have some now materials projects I'm working on.

Uh, so it's sort of oscillating back and forth in terms of. In, in, in a lot of ways the, the health stuff is a hobby for me. Wow. Well thank you for doing this. We're all benefiting. Well, and the reason I brought up the NASA piece was we had a subject matter expert in the light component from NASA or uh, for NASA.

And one of the things that he pointed to was in his estimation that a very large swath of the globe is hanging out by day. This is his words in environments that are three times too dark by day and three times too light at night. And my understanding is that you've kind of created some options for us.

One of them really noteworthy is this white sky portal. Is this all correct that you can utilize by day? Okay. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, so, and to the three X thing, maybe that's sort of the baseline, the actual difference in brightness though, compared to direct sunlight. If you're out in the sun, that's a hundred thousand lux.

If you're inside an area that you think is bright, it's a thousand lux, it's a hundred times lower. And a more normally lit place could easily be 200 lux. And then,  uh, the, the thing is the eye is able to adjust to orders of magnitude. So you transition from when it's like, oh, it's a bit brighter. You don't realize how big of an intensity shift there really is.

Thank you for breaking that down. I've been really encouraging a lot of people I work with to get connected to their light environments and they'll go into like their local Starbucks that they might be working from like all day long, and then they pull up their lux meters and then they find out, oh my gosh, it's only 700 lux in here and they're spending like their whole day.

And to your point, the difference is astounding. I mean, I think we're just only starting to begin to scratch the surface of our understanding of how those discrepancies have real physiological effects. So you're aiming to kind of help support people. So when they are inside and having to be at their computer for hours and hours, what can they do and how is, because some people might say, well, can I just go on Amazon and buy like a, you know, a little light box for 30 bucks?

Like what's the difference there? Yeah. And, and for anyone isn't aware, uh, any phone, there's tons of free apps that allow you to check the lock suit. Whenever you're sitting somewhere, you can see that you can sit by a window if you don't have the light with you. And this goes back to your question of why aren't there better solutions?

I saw a few years ago that Mark Cuban invested in a company called Circadian Optics, and what they did was they said, we're gonna make these fixtures that are more elegant. So when you see the fixture sitting on your desk, you think, ah, how beautiful. It's a, a light has a purpose, which is to shine light.

And so they took the same shitty lights and put it in a different box.  And that's the thing people invest in. Oh yeah. And so  a billionaire, you think. Does he not have the bandwidth to do things right? Why does he do the cheap? That's my shirt is about that. It's, this is the genesis block of Bitcoin. It really comes down to, to the money.

And we don't have to get into that. Yeah. But it, it shifts the psychology of, of how people invest. They have a very short-term focus and they don't have the mindfulness to say, Hey, let's actually think about what's the problem and really build a better solution. Mm. And so that's the why are some LEDs bad?

The, the thing that LEDs get a bad rep, it's because they're almost entirely what's called a blue phosphor pump. And, and actually, uh, coincidentally, uh, one of my advisors in the prior materials company, he worked alongside the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the Blue LED Shuji Nakamura. And so he did a lot of stuff with sort of violet and ultraviolet LEDs as well.

Um, but that's the standard. Anytime you have an LED, it's this blue phosphor pump. And what that means is you're taking pure blue light, pretty much around 444 50 nanometers, right in the peak of the blue light hazard. And you're putting a layer of phosphor on top of that, and that phosphor is what turns it into a white light.

So it gets absorbed and then re-emitted in this broader spectrum. And what happens is when you do that, that's the light spectrum you see in an LED of this spike that remains in the blue, and then there's immediately a dip. It's called the cyan gap.  And so we're talking about the need for bright light during the day as part of the circadian rhythms.

That bright light is primarily tuned to, uh, something that's called melanopsin, the melanopic receptor in eye, which doesn't form images so people know, okay, you have your rods and cones. That's how you see this is a completely parallel cell, and it's actually something that was only discovered in humans about twenty-five years ago.

So you look at the different, uh, light boxes, a lot of the light boxes. One, it was way before we had precise control of LEDs two, it was before people even knew what is the thing that's being targeted. So you just should throw a bunch of light at it.  Uh, and so that's why you still have the, the idea of 10,000 lux that people have it, it turns out lux also.

It, it's a very particular measurement. Lux is luminous intensity, and, and luminosity is not a physical property of light. It's not a physics property. It's a property that's relating between the light and how a human responds to light. And so humans see green light, about 550 nanometers as the brightest light.

And as you go onto the peaks, if you go into red, you go, you know, 6 50, 6 60, 6 80, you can have the same power of light, the same uh, e energy, and it's going to be perceived as far dimmer. It's the same thing. If you go toward violet, it gets a lot dimmer. And so lux is normalizing your light for what is the brightness you are going to see  That peaks at five 50.

The peak response for the circadian rhythm is at four 80.  So you can have something that is optimi and that's also what are the LEDs optimized for in buildings, they're optimized for these luminosity ratings and the efficiency. So say, oh, it's slightly less efficient. And you look at how is a building built?

The person specifying the lights.  Is someone involved in the architectural design and the construction who builds the building for someone else who maybe then is building that for a property management company and then they lease it to some other company. So you have all these degrees of separation.

Uh, and so it's hard to say, well, you know, I, it would've been nice if the lights had been done differently. And so everything just goes, what's the cheapest thing? And the cheapest thing is always gonna be this blue phosphor pump. And so that's the starting point, is how you get away from that is there's something called a violet phosphor pump.

And that allows you to get a much better spectrum, uh, that's much more uniform and doesn't have this huge cyan gap. And, and so what we did with the Sky portal was we combined that with a cyan, LED, at least that's the current version. Now we're actually, um, upgrading the, the entire line that, that, that's still maybe a few months out.

Um. So adding just specifically cyan light that you can then blend with this really high-fidelity white. Okay. And you said that other version is coming down the road? Yeah. So, okay. Exciting. That's the thing in a, in a few months, I'm sort of tied back a little bit to the D-Lite indirectly, which is the UV.

Um,  so, and this is the thing that, that Jack Cruz and the, um, the Rick Rubin podcast with the Heuerman was talking about. He had actually mentioned some of this stuff to me about a year and a half ago or, or maybe close to two years ago. And, and I really didn't pay attention because I thought he was talking about the nitric oxide effect of UVA quite effectively.

I thought from the red light. And I thought, well, of going back to the risk benefit, do we really want a ton of UVA just for that? And I didn't think it was worth it. Um, what I realized is there's actually, it was talking about something completely different, which now that I listen to that podcast. I understand.

Yeah. Which is.  The opsin-III receptor neroxin.  And this is deeply tied to, to the mTOR AMPK pathway. It is tied to one's sense of, well-being,  it, it triggers beta endorphins. Uh, it seems that it, it has, as Huermin was mentioning, understanding, and I don't have the background, that Huermin has the biologist.

When you go from this thing of, Hey, this is the thing for vitamin D, I can get that. Sure. When you get op-III, it just is connected to so many different biological processes.  A biologist can explain it better. There aren't many that will though, because if, if you look at the reason, you can look at the scholar, there's a relatively small number of papers on this receptor.

Mm. But that's the receptor that we can trigger within the deep violet range. And it's actually, if you look at exposure limits, it's very safe to view with the eye without any eye protection. Hmm.  With the blue phosphor pumps is because they're just focused on what's bright and violet light is not bright, it's completely cut off.

So if you look at the curves of the OPM-III response and the the light, there's almost zero interception. So you're getting zero stimulation of this OPM-III cell with the regular white light. And so, uh, what I'm trying to do with the next version of Sky Portals is really push up that violet.  Because even at 400 nanometers, purely in the visible light, you're actually getting 70% stimulation of that cell relative to the peak, which is at 385 nanometers.

Wow. Okay. So for anyone that's listening and they're like, this person knows so much to this area. If so, to bring context one, what you're alluding to in the Jack Cruz piece, 'cause you and I were chatting about that before we hit record. If anyone is like, what is that? I highly recommend listening to this Epic two-part series podcast episode on Rick Rubin's podcast, where it's an action-packed podcast with Dr.

Jack Cruz, Andrew Huberman, and really going to town on a lot of the topic. Mainly, I would say are a large portion about light among other things and among other things that largely can absolutely impact certainly our circadian rhythm, our health, but have implications across every piece of our biology if some of these thesis statements are kind of true or what's being created, certainly out of what Jack Cruz is speaking to.

So I really recommend that people listen to that. Really, really fascinating. And Jack Cruz alludes to your company. I think it was on the, maybe part two, if I'm remembering correctly. And so he was looking for a. A light that can solve this problem. And now you're gonna be releasing this light that does that for him.

Or not just him, but does that for the masses. And you said that's coming up very soon? Yeah, I'd say in maybe three months. So, okay. We, some of the current ones in stock, so I'd say for this season, don't necessarily hold your breath, but, you know, hopefully in the new year, maybe. Okay. Yeah. Great. Um,  I, I wanna make sure it's, it's really done well.

Yeah, no, I get that sense. There's definitely, it feels like a high integrity company is what I've gathered from all my interactions with you and your team. So really cool. And even aside from what's coming, one more thing with that though, the, the thing that Jack does, so we're including those aspects in the Skype, but we have a dedicated device that we're working on.

It's gonna be called the Lux Vittal that is purely focused on the UVA range. So it's gonna be the same format as the D-Lite, but it's gonna be focused on the UVA with a very broad range of. Red lights along with that too. And we're actually going to introduce something that I haven't seen in any other product, which is, um, and this might be a limited run, but 9, 9 59 60 nanometers and 10 50 nanometers.

Uh, so a little bit farther into the near IR range. So I think we hit something like seven different, uh, peaks there, and you really don't need a lot of those. It seems those are getting absorbed by water and the, uh, the dose needed. Um, at 9 60, 10 50 it seems is, is really low. Wow. So interesting. Now, I have had a few clients that have purchased the Sky Portal now and love it.

I work with a lot of high stakes poker players and they are at, especially the online players, are at their computer like  hours and hours and hours out of the day. And this has been a real game changer for them to improve their, how alert they are, their emotional regulation, their aptitude by day. So one, I would definitely encourage people to check this out if they are in the conversation is of one that I get all the time where people are saying, I heard that you need to have more light in your space by day.

What do I get? And I would absolutely recommend checking this out for one. So really exciting stuff and there's so much for us to cover because then you have other things. It's not just those things. I know you also mentioned some kind of innovative blue light blockers, and so I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about those.

Yeah, that's right. So yeah, we, we developed the, the first red lens blue blocking glasses. And, and so this was, or maybe you kind of, we made the first stylish looking ones and then there were a bunch of copycats that scale a lot more 'cause I wasn't really focused on it. Sure. Uh, the thing is, if, if you have the right orange, and the thing about orange is it can be lighting in quite a bit of light, like the uvex ones.

Those work great in terms of the function. Sure. Uh,  it, it's a bit counterintuitive to, why would you go red? It makes it harder to see. The reason to go red is that orange is an color than red and it's more stylish, have red. So that was the first thing we had. A lot of people like those glasses. They work really well.

Um. They do take some getting used to and not everyone wants to use it or you know, only wants to use it 10 minutes before going to bed because it makes everything look solid red. There's no such thing as something that's a clear lens that is also blocking blue light. If, if it's clear, it's because you're getting the blue light, you know, you can look at something blue, you can see it.

It means the blue coming through. Yeah, right. Thank you. I dunno why it's so confusing for people, but I know it seems,  yeah. Uh, thank you for clarifying that in the, literally, no pun intended, the clearest of manners, which if you can still see the blue, probably not blocking blue.  Yeah. And so back to where I was talking about with what is the curve that actually determines whether it's making you stay up at night, telling the brain, Hey, the Sun's still out.

Don't start secreting melatonin yet. It's that peak at four 80 and that peak actually drops down toward the violent range. And so my idea, and this isn't, uh, other people have have played around with this from the LED side. The, the company Sora has, uh, a bulb. It's, it's pretty expensive that emits this violet light.

And so my thought was, you know, can we do this in a lens? Have a band-pass filter that is blocking the blue and the green range that's most relevant and let in a bit of violet light. And it turns out that is possible. And that's not the thing that's gonna block out all the light. Even in that middle band, you might be letting in 15% light.

The reality is there's a dose response in terms of the suppression of melatonin. Um, so you don't necessarily wanna use that end. And some people who are die-hard people aren't gonna want to use this at all. But I think for most people, that eighty-five percent reduction with that peak, and violet is really.

What this does is something really interesting in terms of how a display works and interacting with a device and, and you know, maybe the ideal person is, doesn't touch any device after the sunsets, but I think most people in practice do, or, you know, being at a computer. The thing about a computer is a computer can't control the spectrum very accurately.

All it has to play with are these three pixels, red, green, and blue. And if you're fine with putting all of those into your eye, you can basically make whatever color you want. Pretty broad range, uh, but you can't control how you're doing that.  And, and so this actually ties into a really interesting, uh, aspect of light and color, which is something called metamerism, which is that any particular color you say, oh, this thing is this shade of orange.

You can generate it with multiple different spectrums. Because it's based on your eye only has these three reception. Think about it like a bucket. So like how much light are you getting into each bucket? And at least in theory, and you can match it. There's some really weird things that have  been  Metameric failure where it, you know, the, the physics doesn't work out for whatever reason.

Lots of weird effects. Yeah. Uh, but it, it means that you can generate the, the same color with multiple spectrums. But when you only have an RGB display, you only have one way of making any particular color. And what that means is sometimes you're getting a lot of this blue, it's also in that blue light hazard, and that's not the, the thing that you want from a sleep perspective.

So you have something like, say a night shift, uh, on, on a device or a half dot lux as some people remember. All that can do is move the pixel up and down in terms of intensity. Uh, it can't change the shape with the lens. You can basically slice off part of that pixel spectrum and say, Hey, I want this light.

And then you're able to still trigger the cell in the eye that forms the color. And when the difference between say zero and 10% stimulus is a huge range in terms of your ability to see different colors and for instance, see different things on an app that might not have thought, Hey, someone's gonna suppress all the blue and green.

Is this gonna be visible or not? Or what does a movie look like? A TV show? How much of a loss in enjoyment is there from the color? And so this lens, uh, letting in violet light allows you to take a slice of that blue, which is the blue that is least wakeful, and allows you to still form that color. Oh wow.

That's something that we're not currently selling because everything I just explained to you Yeah. Is complex enough. People don't want to think about it. Uh.  I am reluctantly talking to a manufacturer getting this back, and because it's also tricky to get made. Um, so what we're gonna do is, uh, yeah, we're, we're gonna have continue having the, the line of, you know, the really dark red, it blocks everything.

Um, yep.  And then we have a new lens coming, um, maybe in the next few months that will have this effect of letting, uh, violet light in and we're actually gonna do it with a mirror coating. Uh, I,  I'm not great with marketing and branding. I don't know how people are gonna feel about that. Maybe it's like, okay, you're gonna look like a jerk wearing these mirrored glasses in the evening.

I don't know.  I'm excited for those. Well, I will definitely be testing those out. Those sound amazing. And out of the bounds of what I've heard of anywhere else. 'cause this will be, we believe the first on the market, right? From what I'm gathering. Absolutely. Okay. Really exciting. And it doesn't stop there.

I mean, and people are gonna be like, oh man, what is your obsession with this company? And yet it's just because, so to clarify, I have no affiliation beyond the fact that I've gotten to test out your cold pillow, which is super cold and super great. Uh, really impacts. And anyone that has listened to anything I've shared, if we can sleep as cool as possible, we know that that's gonna make a big difference in our sleep quality.

The ability for us to wake up feeling more rested the subsequent day and just change your experience of life. And so you have that cooling pillow. That's one of those that have gotten the chance to test out. I've also gotten the chance to test out. Your vitamin D, the Chroma D, which is just so powerful, so awesome.

And I'm excited actually in going into, I've moved to Austin, literally for the sun, but there's still some other concerns about Austin with EMFs and what have you, but at least how to create a circadian aligned lifestyle. And I'm excited to have this product now to add into that repertoire, that toolbox of things that I can pull from in various regards.

So for me, it's uh, exercising, getting to learn more about some of these things that I plan to bring into my own life. And then share for others that want to improve their sleep results, because I think people are missing the boat on how much the light component and temperature impact our, our experience of life so profoundly.

So having said that, the last one I wanna talk to you about before, my most exciting thing with you is I wanna just hear, understand, like how you use all these things in your life. But before we get there, tell us about the cold pillow that you now have. I think I had an idea for something similar to this, uh, a few years ago, which was, I, I had read that if you have a water bed without a heater, so, you know, and no one uses a water bed anymore, they all have heaters underneath because if you don't, the entire water bed is a big enough heat sink, it can give you hypothermia.

Yeah. I'm not sure if that's, that, that seems reasonable yet. It is. It's basically your body is not gonna be able to warm it up if it's thick enough. Yeah. And so my thought was, uh, make something like that. And I did get a prototype made of, um, it's, it's similar to if people know the Purple Mattress that jails toward red.

So we got that about two inches of, of thickness and enclosed it in a waterproof membrane as sort of a mattress topper.  And I had done some calculations on, okay, how much heat can you pull out with this thing? Uh, and, and I made an error in what I was thinking, which is I referenced, um. The chili pad style cooling devices.

Yep, sure. Um, that circulate water, which use thermoelectric coolers to actively cool the water. And I looked at how powerful those are, and I looked at what is the efficiency and said, okay, so this is the amount of power that it's taking out. So this should be similarly cold. Uh, I got it backwards. Um, thermoelectric coolers, I thought, oh, it's only five to 7% efficient.

That's if you're taking heat, uh, a heat, uh, differential, a temperature differential, and turning the heat back into electricity. You're going the other way around electricity into the thermal grid. It's actually more like, you know, 30% or a bit more efficient, which is a lot higher. So I was off by, you know, buybacks.

All in the, all in a day's work for an inventor. You know, you gotta test these things.  Yeah. So I got it and I made it. It was like, it's not that cold. It's like you fall asleep cold and it's, but then you wake up and it's not quite cold enough. Um,  and the other thing is, it was big, it was really cumbersome.

It's really heavy if it's that big and the cost of it at that size, it didn't have the right, uh, cost value, um, that would make it feasible. And that's when I thought of the pillow. So you can just dump so much heat from your head and neck where the pillow, it's still actually pretty heavy. Um, it's the similar concept.

It's thicker, it's a gel grid, you know, it's maybe five inches thick or something like that. You fill it with water and you know, now you have 30 to 40 pounds of water. So other people have made pillows that have like a thin layer saying, oh, it's foam to, to cool a little bit more. It's foams that doesn't come close to, to water that's still based on an insulator.

This is a giant heat sink, and it, it just, you can dump, uh, heat into it. Uh,  and it's totally passive. And this is the thing that Dr. Humerman was asking, and that's why I jacked right up, which is, is there something that you don't need Wi-Fi or subscription for? It's really simple. It's basically, it's a bag of water and if you want it colder, we don't have the ice packs for it.

But the heat of fusion for water is enormous. So it takes a ton of energy to take ice and turn into water. So we just find on Amazon, just any sort of big flat ice pack. Put that underneath, then it'll get really cold and stay really, in fact, it'll get maybe too cold for some people. So one thing if, if you wanna say, okay, this is the temperature overnight, it warms up a little bit.

So maybe you will notice it's not gonna feel freezing when you wake up. Um, it, it will over the course of the night, pull some heat from your body. Um, and so that's also why some people get a two-pack. 'cause then that sort of solves that issue. But another thing is that means you're not getting a uniform temperature and you're not, especially if you want it to be coldest at a certain time in the sleep cycle.

Sure. At the deep sleep, um, and ice pack plus a very thin topper pillow, a blanket would act like an insulator. 'cause it is basically close to. Uncomfortably cold if you have a really big ice pack on it. Yes. So it's basically, it'll get to the freezing temperature then. So, great. I mean, and for anyone that's looking for something more portable like this is, if you're watching the video, this is an example and it's very, you know, it's something that, what I'm really curious about are things that I can have available too when traveling or just a bit more portable.

Because some of these things you might get yourself set up with in your home environment are just not able to bring along on the road. And this is something that you actually really can do. And to your point, don't require the Wi-Fi and subscriptions and all these other accoutrements. Really cool. So, alright.

No pun intended with the really cool. So from that I would love to just kind of walk through a little bit around your lifestyle, given what you know, which I'm clear we only got a little glimpse into on this conversation, in this conversation.  So we do ask every person that comes on the podcast for questions and for yours, I am curious how some of these products work into your day-to-Day lifestyle.

So the first question we ask is, what does your nightly sleep routine look like right now? So, I don't know if I have the best routine. I'm probably honestly not the best example of, you know, sleeping. Yes.  I, I, myself, as you know, I'm an engineer who, who likes these things and I'll, I'll, I'll build different products and I just want to get the thing done and, and add it into things.

Um,  it, it's more of a secondary thing for me. So in, in terms of the things I do though, it's the glasses for me. So  I use the glasses every night and. It's to the point where, uh, if I don't have it, it's really unpleasant for me to be looking at my phone, to be looking at a computer. And the thing is also, it's not just the computer, it's the ambient light.

And I just moved into a new environment, so now I'm, I'm tweaking the ambient lights as well. Um,  it's, yeah. Now that I think about most people don't use the glasses and I don't know how I, if, if I somehow am traveling and forget them, yeah, it's really unpleasant to not have them. Same. Uh, and even if it's not necessarily a few hours, at least 30 to 60 minutes, I'll have the, the, the glasses.

Oh yeah. I used to have a better routine. I used to more consistently wear them two, three hours before I would, if I was out and about, I would wear them as well. Um, and.  I think that is really gonna be the best outcome and that's why the, the two glasses have one that you would use, you know, maybe three hours whenever the sun sets, and then another that's the last 30 minutes.

Um, I'll use a bit of red light before going to bed just because that's a convenient time to do it. Sure, absolutely. Are you actively using the cooling pillow or is that something that you use at different points throughout the year or just sporadically? What do you see there? Oh, yeah, I have that every evening that's on my bed.

Oh, okay. Great. Yeah, and, and the thing about that, because I don't think it's about the time of year, it's the housing environment. And, and so this is, I'll, I'll tell you how I sleep. The, the best after this, which is the, the regular houses, they're these thermal batteries. The sun is hitting them all day.

And I guess if it's really cloudy or you're in the north, you don't have, but the sun hits them all day. They're absorbing a ton of heat. And then at night you can have your AC running, but the walls are still absorbing heat. And so there's some people notice something like, Hey, you know, if it's really hot, maybe I sent my AC say to sixty-eight Fahrenheit.

And you feel like, yeah, it's okay now in the winter, you set your heat to sixty-eight and it'll be 60. And you'll say, this feels really cold. What's the difference? It's the thermal radiation. Mm-Hmm. So a, a crazy thing about the human body is, um, uh, on, on net in terms of, you know, the body's constantly losing heat.

That's why, you know, you, you eat 2000 calories a day and people think about exercising and doing physical work. The proportion of calories that are built in factual exertion is a tiny fraction of the amount that is just the thermal burn-up. So you're losing about a hundred watts continuously, roughly.

An interesting thing though is the body radiates out a thousand watts. How does that work? I just said a hundred. It's very, yeah, it's because you get most of it right back.  Mm. Radiate a thousand watts, but your environment is not at absolute zero. It's quite a bit warmer than that. So it radiates it back and, and radiation from thermal.

Every object is, is radiating heat out to some degree. It's proportional to the temperature in absolute terms. So in Kelvin, so you know your regular temperature, you're at 300 Kelvin, right? You're about 25 C minus 2 73. So about 300.  And now you say if you shift it, how does the radiation shift?  It's the fourth power.

So you double your temperature. You have 16 times the radiation course doubling from 300 Kelvin to 600. That's a pretty big range. So we're not talking the 50 to a hundred F. That's not double. Uh,  uh, but those small variations in temperature can have a large variation in that radiative environment. And so I think most houses, wherever they are day or night, they're usually radiating a lot more than an environment we evolve to.

Uh, so I think it usually is necessary to add in an additional cooling element. And I, I don't have any evidence for this, but my gut tells me there's something that's different from having the same sort of thermal environment generated by cooling down the air versus slightly warmer air, slightly cooler from a radiative perspective.

Um, but that's why I'm always using the pillow. And so when I slept the best was actually, um, as a climber, uh, on and off I would do the van life.  Oh, sure. So  to different places, biked to different places.  A van very different from a house. It's just this metal box. And some are insane to some degree, but the amount of mass you have in terms of acting as a thermal battery is much less.

So that means at night when you say, Hey, what temperature is at night, it actually gets pretty close to that. And I would actually add, and I have a propane heater, but sometimes I would leave it off and I could wake up and I expect the temperature, it might be low forties mm. And the best possible sleep is as cold as possible without it waking me up.

Yeah. And it's just incredible. Oh, absolutely. I think people so rarely are tapping into the amazing results of being able to get our temperature to such cooler temps than we would normally be exposed to in our modern society. So you're pointing to that we can do this. People just shudder sometimes when I even suggest going below 70, which is just alarming, and you're pointing to that there's a whole spectrum that's available and then with this radiation kind of component.

And so many of us are trapped in our duvets and our foam bedding and all these things, and we're just cooking like, you know, rotisserie style throughout the whole night, and you're providing some of these other options that can help us so that it's more mimicking how we would've lived for thousands of years outdoors.

So really appreciate that piece. And I feel like, just as an aside, if you ever. Wanna put your brain to other things. Do you think you'd ever get into building biology? Because I feel like we could use your mind on some of the ways that we're constructing our bedroom environments and ways that we might be able to think more intelligently around that.

Yeah. I, I think that the challenging thing is, um, it, it, it's about the, the cost and the practicality of, of doing things in a different way. I messaged one of these startups that, you know, raised a hundred million dollars or whatever, because they're reinventing housing or whatever. And it's funny, you know, I, I messaged that I didn't follow up.

I just freely telling them, Hey, you should really be doing this. And they do. Don't do it again. So you have this opportunity to say, Hey, you're saying you're making these super great housing. Why not go, uh, look into LEDs? Because the LEDs, yes, the LEDs to do a violet phosphor pump are more expensive. But if you look at what are the actual margins, how people use it, it is absolutely worth it.

It's, it's not like  you'll spend way more on like a kitchen or a bathroom remodel, orders of magnitude more. Um, so in terms of an environment, the, the challenge is if you're changing the entire environment, you're putting more light, you're putting more heat, you're, you're having more materials. So back to, for instance, the Sky Portal concept.

Why do we focus on that? And I am thinking about some light bulbs that I want to potentially get at at some point. But the Sky Portal, the idea is if you wanna change the light in the entire room, you need a lot more power. You need a potentially a complex installation. So you say the sky pearl just puts like on you right where you're sitting?

Mm.  They say that intensity. If you were to put it in the whole room, be a huge amount of one, your upfront LEDs to the power that would actually, it would be like having a space heater in each room. The amount of LEDs just for the entire space. Right. And so it's the same with the bedroom in the thermal environment.

The thing I did think about and, and, and I got this idea, um, when I was in Squamish, British Columbia, uh, Boulder. So there's this forest, it can get hot in the summers. And so I was out and I walked into the forested area and as soon as you walk into the forest, it feels cooler. But then there was this area in between two boulders, and I walked down in between the boulders and instantly I could feel the coolness of the boulders.

And it felt really pleasant. And I, yeah, I boulder stay cold and it's this radiative aspect. Oh, right. Boulder bedrooms.  Yeah. So could you, and yeah, it would be very expensive if you wanted to recreate it with actual stone. But then it's back to, you know, we have technology to potentially do things in better ways and then back to the thermoelectric or that, um,  the, the water, um, the, the active devices used.

Instead of cooling water, what I imagined is putting thermoelectric coolers on a panel of aluminum or graphite or something, or aluminum. You paint it black  and you have a panel that's would sit maybe two feet above you going over the edge. So it's sort of, what is this radiative cone? And you get this surface above you as you sleep and get that surface really cold.

Wow. And then, yeah, the thing is, this is actually gonna warm up the room slightly because you're making it cold on the bottom, hot on the top. You, uh, you're dumping heat off the top. Uh, but the idea is if you have the, that cold environment concentrated of the, the body might feel quite a bit colder. And could that create a, a unique feeling that's different from, say, having a more powerful AC, bringing it down to whatever temperature.

Ooh. Very cool. Well, I love all these possibilities in our future around ways that we could create an environment from the get-go that's set up for, to be conducive to our biology, to, to support great sleep and kind of get that temperature right. So love that. Keep that brain, all that process. I know Jack Cruz has talked about the possibilities of down the road even, um.

Standalone, almost like could you buy individual kind of like bedroom offerings that are almost like prefab, that are totally lead lined and EMF proof and just fully optimized to support the temperature components and all these things that you're pointing to. And if anyone's listening and getting lost in what we're sharing, don't worry.

Even if you get nothing out of what all these possibilities and you know, things that could be in the future. I think the big takeaway is the fact that. Right now is available, these items that can help support the problem that we have, which is this indoor lifestyle that we're all living in. You know, at least over 90% of our days, indoors, if not a lot more for the average person.

And so from that place, we need to get creative on what we're gonna do to supplement this problem because it's affecting our health and well-being. And so you have some of these items that can support that right now, and then potentially more things to come. So then the next question would be, what might we see in your morning routine with the argument that how we start our day very well could impact our sleep?

Yeah, so the morning routine, I have that more consistently, which is usually I'll try to, you know, avoid getting, uh, any, uh,  digital, uh, light from, from my phone. I, I want the sun to be the, the first thing I see if I do check my phone, I'll actually put my glasses on in bed before I look at anything on my phone.

So it's basically, it's red light. Uh, and then I'll get up and, and very soon I will get out and I will also take my shirt off and I will make sure to get a lot of my skin in the sun. Usually have coffee sitting 10, 15 minutes facing the sun. Uh, great. Love that. The simplicity of that. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is the visible light, it's, it's really straightforward.

It's, there's this peak that is, you know, that's in training the, the wake cycle, especially in the morning. That's really helpful. Another thing is the UV components, both the vitamin D and also this other thing with the UV and then your opsin, there are,  there is a good evidence for that being an entrainer of the circadian rhythm as well.

Absolutely. So good. And then tell me, where do you envision, and so I'm gathering that you, I mean, even on this podcast, you're outside, it sounds like setting up a lifestyle where you largely are outside where possible, but for you, where do you fit in, say the vitamin D option or the sky portal or any of those items?

Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. I, I'm now living in a place where, you know, there's a good amount of sun throughout the year. Um, and, and, and so I see all the likes as, as supplements. I don't see it as, as the first thing to go to. Yeah. Uh, I try to have an active outdoor lifestyle. I think part of this, everything during the day, it's, it's contributing to the sleep, which is sort of how much bright light are you getting during the day.

The other thing that's interesting is the more bright light you get during the day, you're actually better able to tolerate, um, the light at night, which it's better to not get it, but to the extent that you have the bright light, it creates this contrast effect. Absolutely. Oh, huge point right there for people to understand too, because we might be so fixated on, well, what type of light do I get at night and are all trying to block all our blue light, which is important.

We wanna do that. But you're also pointing to another piece of that puzzle that if you  amplify the amount of bright light you're getting by day, it helps kind of inoculate you a bit, not fully, but makes it less of an impact on the deleterious effects of that blue light at night. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I do is I look at, for instance, also the season, um, and I was looking at the angles because I was thinking of different latitudes where people have, there's such a huge difference where if you're in the U.S from most of the U.S, there's a, a, a big chunk of the year where you're just really not generating any vitamin D because it is this narrow UVB band, uh, what I was talking about that just gets cut off.

Um. Absolutely. And so that's where the D-Lite is, is really helpful. The, the red light, the, the Iron Forks that we have, I try to use that every day. Um, because I, unless you're outside, you know, all day, I don't think you're anywhere close to the, the benefits of that. Uh, whenever I have any injuries, localized areas, I'll really focus the, the red near IR light in, in that area.

And it, it's, like I say, I'm, I'm not the person who's ultra-precise about measuring things. I have read some things suggest that the red and your infrared light does help with sleep. Um, there's a lot of cognitive effects, uh, around it as well. So I'll pass it over my head as well. Uh, and that's probably doing something for my sleep.

Um, that, that's a nice thing about the handheld device. So if you have a large panel, you can sort of hit your whole body. And you, but you can't concentrate it. If you have a small, really powerful thing, you can hit the spots you want, but you can also hit your whole body with it. Um, so that's how I use it.

And, and to me it's, I still want more. So, um, probably in the next couple months with it, when we get the next batch of, of lights built, um, I'm gonna just build a really simple frame that takes a bunch of individual units, combines them all together. Probably we'll have to plug into multiple outlets and, or maybe make a basic video, show some images of that.

So if someone wants to have a full body system, it will be possible and it can be way more powerful than the beds that people have, uh, today, which are really overpriced compared to, you know, how many watts you're getting for the, the smaller compact device that we have. Amazing. Okay. And then the third question is, what might we visually see on your nightstand, but that could extend into your bedroom environment?

Anything noteworthy there? I don't think there's really anything noteworthy there. Just, yeah, maybe the, the LEDs, I have those, uh, available and you'll, you'll have, you'll see the glasses there. Always got it. Yes. And sometimes that minimalism can be a really important component and not having to rely on all kinds of things.

Some people come on and they have 90 million supplements and all gadgets and all the things to try to coax themselves to sleep. And that could create its own problems, so, love that. The last question would be, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game? Or said another way, maybe biggest aha moment in managing your own sleep.

I think really the glasses were the biggest thing, and that's something that people don't need my glasses, even the Urex glasses for 10 bucks will do this, which is, that was the thing that got me, uh, going to sleep at a really regular time. Um, I'd say that, that, that was huge. Uh, when I was in college there, there was a while where my sleep timing was, was really off.

And I didn't notice at the time all the things were, were, were out of where they should have been. It was also too hot. Um, but for me, that was the thing that really started off. I'd say that. And, and the, the temperature definitely the next thing. That's why I love the van so much in terms of being able to, I, I just sleep so well where after having been in the man noticing what sleep should be like in a properly cold environment, I really notice, um, when I'm not in that environment.

The only other thing I'd say is just sort of a general awareness of, you know, different types such as not eating at night. Um, yeah, that also helped quite a bit. I noticed, um, aerobic exercise for me, I'll sleep better when I do that versus if really heavy, um, then uh, my heart rate variability will go down.

Yeah. And the other thing is I. Um, even though carbs are sort of sedative and might trigger the, the tryptophan to, to serotonin to melatonin pathway, once I'm carnivorous, which I've done on and off at the longest I've done is 18 months. Um, my, my heart rate variability at night is a lot higher. My, uh, average breathing rate will be lower and, uh, my resting heart rate will, will drop a bit.

So I think there is something there that might also be related to the avoiding seed oils, actually working on a, a, a cooking oil product as well now. Oh my god. In your spare time. All right.  I love it. Cool. Well, maybe at some point I'll have to have a part two if we can nab you from in between all your inventions.

So that's exciting. More to come. Okay, cool. Well, so lastly, since we, there's so many things that we can touch on that are novel and outside. I mean, I'm looking at all these different companies all the time and there's just few companies that I know that have so many things that I can't find elsewhere.

So how can people follow you, learn more about you check out these products, what are the steps to do that? Yeah, so I have a, a, a newsletter, which is, that's sort of the newsletter is the unfiltered stuff that's coming from me, not the well branded stuff and I don't really that often, but that's criminal.substack.com.

Um, so that's sort of the raw thing. And then, um, rest of the team will sort of take that and, and filter it in this more digestible bit, which, you know, got our Instagram, getchroma.co, Instagram, and then Getchroma.co is is the, the main website. Um, also active on Twitter. Um, okay. And then one thing I'd say in terms of, you know, you're just saying that, you know, inventing all these different things to anyone else that's, that's building products.

The thing that I do is I take a lot of people go to Alibaba and they'll just take the thing  from China. It's like, okay, here's the widget and just slap a logo on it.  Make two things and combine them. That's all you need. So you make one thing that's changed. So anyone who's trying to build a product, if you can get one thing from one person, one thing from another, and just change it to solve the actual problem.

That can be a good way to move forward. So sometimes, uh, a lot of people are at extremes. It's either they're just putting a logo on it or it's, I need to build this from the ground up and I need these custom injection molds and I need every, and, and none of the stuff we've done has been a hundred percent custom from every single component because, you know, you start doing that and it's extremely expensive to get even the first.

So we try to say, you know, if something exists, we're gonna take what's good and we are going to change the things that actually matter. Uh, so there's a.  And if people find that sweet spot, I think a lot more great products can get built. Oh wow. That's actually a really great point. A million years ago, one of the bucket list items that I'd always wanted to have was have a patent of some sort in the area of sleep and just, you know, just like one of those random things that you wanna achieve in your life.

And I've never ventured into that area. It sounds like you've had clearly have been playing in this arena for a long time, and I appreciate that you're pointing to ways that the more of us can get into this conversation without having the. Being hindered by the cost or what could feel like more of an overwhelming kind of endeavor.

I think that's really important to get those new ideas out there. So really great points. Maybe you can do an inventor's club or something. Some sometime down the road.  Amazing. Well, I so appreciate you taking the time. Means a ton and really excited personally. Just the interest for me also comes in my own life, and then for the people that I work with to be able to stay abreast of some of these noteworthy things that are available now that you all have put out and then that are coming.

So thank you for sharing about those things for the work that you do, and excited for more to come. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Thank you.  You've been listening to The Sleep As A Skill Podcast, the top podcast for people who wanna take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday, I send out the Sleep Obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet.

Fun Facts. I've never missed A Monday for over five years and counting, and it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep. Head on over to Sleep as a skill.com/newsletter to sign up.

‍