63. Creating Circadian-friendly Devices with Anjan Katta of Daylight Computer

In this special episode live from Playa El Zonte, El Salvador, I speak with Anjan Kata and Tristan Scott about the daylight computer, a company founded to solve the problem of health harms of technology abuse.

Anjan Kata, chief engineer and founder, has developed screen technology that doesn't emit harmful isolated blue light wavelengths. It also minimises EMF and flicker. This is a groundbreaking product with amazing implications for re-shaping our relationship with technology.

TIMESTAMPS

00:11:41 Grayscale Display for Calmer Computing
00:15:33 Effect of Light on Eye Strain
00:29:26 Harmful Effects of Technology on Health
00:38:04 Revolutionizing Health Tech With First Principles
00:44:09 Rethinking Technology for a Healthier Future
00:52:06 Daylight Tablet Launch & Community Building

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Website: https://www.daylightcomputer.com
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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel. Do not make medication changes without first consulting your treating clinician.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome back to another episode of the Regenerative Health Podcast. This is a special episode and it's an in-person episode, live from El Salvador, the Central American Republic. Now I'm here for a very special event that is being held called the Age of Light, hosted by Dr Jack Cruz, and this is all about decentralized medicine and light as medicine. So, as part of the events, I've had the special opportunity of sitting down in person with Anjan Kata and Tristan Scott, who are both part of a project called the Daylight Computer Company. So this is something that I've recently become aware of that is attempting to solve a very, very important problem, which is light, specifically artificial light being emitted from devices and the effect that that is having on our biology and our circadian biology, and the effect that that is having on our biology and our circadian biology. So, anjan, tristan, thank you for making the time to have a chat to me today. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2: 1:19

So what is the problem that the daylight computer is trying to solve? I think it starts with my feeling that the relationship we often have with technology is toxic and there's so many ways that it impacts us negatively, you know it's addicting it's distracting, hurts your eyes, keeps you inside.

Speaker 2: 1:35

You can't see it in the sun, um, but one of the cornerstones of it was just realizing. Of all the facets of health, one of the ones that's most foundational and pivotal is light. And if you really think about what a computer is, it's a maze of electrons moving around to change light, how light shines onto you. So it's easy to get lost.

Speaker 2: 1:58

A computer is Moore's law in a CPU, or a computer is a mouse and a keyboard, but actually, at its essence you, a computer is a mouse and a keyboard, but actually, at its essence, a computer is a way of changing how light shines on you. And to me, any rethinking of the computer that needs to start there. And the fact that a computer is shining blue light on you just tells me, at its core it's foundationally corrupt. And so if we talk about the future of computing, to me you can't get started unless you start with the fundamentals and that, to me, light it's ergonomics, it's emf, it's sovereignty, and I could go on and on about what that is. But, um, that was the goal. If you work backwards from the science of light, how could a computer look different?

Speaker 1: 2:38

yeah and look. A lot of my listeners will know, and I've talked about the effect of of harmful blue light on our health and these displays, these OLED displays that we have in iPhones, in computer screens, are such a major contributor, in my mind, to circadian disruption that people are getting, even unwittingly, from perhaps checking their phone first thing in the morning, checking scrolling on their phone last thing at night, and not most people, and no, have no idea how detrimental that is to the circadian signals that their body is receiving. So, and maybe give us an overview of how a conventional display works, how does a normal iPhone display work? And maybe what? How is your engineered design changing that that display? Sure, um?

Speaker 2: 3:30

you can think of a conventional display as a sandwich that creates silhouettes with a flashlight behind it. And so every time you're looking at a computer you're looking at a flashlight, and if the sandwich did nothing, it would just be a white rectangle. And when you block the whole thing, you make the entire thing a black silhouette. That's when you get black, and then each pixel you can choose to make it black or white or some layer in between, some light gray or dark gray. That's how a normal kind of computer display works, and it's got a little layer of color, and so for a specific pixel it's got three colors, and if you make that red, completely white, you don't block it at all. But you block the green and you block the blue, that specific square on the display will look red. You block a little bit of the blue, you block a little bit of the green, you know an orange, or you get purple or you get da-da-da-da-da, and that's called an emissive display, because it's like a flashlight, it's emitting in your face.

Speaker 2: 4:32

So what we're doing instead is kind of the opposite, where, instead of us emitting light, what we're doing is we're reflecting light, we're bouncing light. So any object in our environment if it's not a firefly or a fire or a star, it's not emitting light, it's bouncing the light that's coming from the sun, and so the principle of our thing is our sandwich instead of emitting light, whatever light is coming from your ambient environment goes through the display and then bounces out. And then we put a black silhouette where you want it to be black and we keep it white where it needs to come through. So it's kind of like a piece of paper. A piece of paper is bouncing the light, and the black is the areas where the light is getting absorbed, and so we're essentially replicating the physics of a piece of paper, but now the ink can move. That's kind of what it is.

Speaker 2: 5:23

It looks like a tablet, but the ultimate form factor of this paper-like reflective displays, um, is you get something like the newspaper in harry potter, where it's like a piece of paper, where the ink happens to move. And guess what? That's a computer? Computer is the ability to animate a surface or animate something, changing your relationship to light and the object yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 5:48

So I mean, people might be familiar with a kindle like that. That's their kind of frame of reference of, maybe of a electronic device that doesn't have a massive blue light emission. So how is what you're developing with a the light computer? How is that different or similar to a Kindle? That's a great question.

Speaker 2: 6:07

I would say in many ways this project started out as a love letter to the Kindle. It felt like, of all my computers and all my relationships with computing, my Kindle was the one that felt calmest, that felt most respectful of my attention, that felt most like it worked in my environment on my terms. And if you don't use the backlight it doesn't have blue light you can use it in the sun. Holy crap, it checks all the boxes. But then I tried to Kindle-ify more of my life and then you run into the intrinsic limitations of the technology.

Speaker 2: 6:44

There's kind of two limitations, with the biggest one being the refresh rate is enormously slow and what that means is if you want to read Harry Potter and once a minute you're turning the page, it's totally fine. But you're trying to scroll through a Google Doc, you're trying to type, you're trying to search. So much of modern computing depends on high refresh rate for zooming, scrolling, panning, typing, and so you can't actually use it for general purpose computing and that's why they're in the category of e-readers or e-notes. So I feel like our hypothesis was if you could solve the fast refresh rate and then you could solve all the waveform and firmware stuff that's kind of the software stuff in the background that makes it very difficult. You could create the world's first blue light free computer by making high refresh rate E-ink, and I thought it'd be done faster. It's almost now six years since we started, but that's what we have here.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Yeah, epic, and maybe it's a good opportunity to ask you, Tristan, about maybe the addictive effect of blue light emitting pokey machines without access to natural light. Then they could take their money without holding a gun to their face. So what is your perspective on the specific addictive nature of isolated blue light as it relates to our addiction Because it's our collective addiction to these blue-lit devices?

Speaker 3: 8:28

Yeah, that's a great point and something I've been thinking a lot about just trying to market the daylight computer, because it really is such a problem. And before even getting into the science, you can see it, especially in children, just like I was looking at videos of a two-year-old, at videos of you know two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old. What happens when they have an iPad and then you take it away from them. It's, you know, the most traumatic experience they could ever, you know, have. And that's the relationship with technology.

Speaker 3: 8:58

And then you see all these mental health issues, right, like suicide rates are through the roof for teenagers because of this, and I think it comes down to a few things.

Speaker 3: 9:06

I think it comes down to the combination that our society is so low dopamine from these screens, which directly blue light and isolation can lower dopamine, full broad spectrum of sunlight, um. And then it's coming with, you know, other effects, right, like all lighting that's artificial, is pulsed in nature, it's not continuous, so it's alien in multiple ways, um, but then also you're getting the circadian disruption piece of it, so they're more susceptible, right, because they are not optimal from a health perspective. So they have that circadian disruption from the isolated blue light and then they're getting the dopamine lowering effect. So I think it's just making everyone so susceptible and by that case they're just addicted because they have no real fulfillment in their life. And then they're just going back to the screen for more, for that quick dopamine on social media, um, when in reality that's causing their low dopamine and their circadian disruption, which is ruining their health. So, from a foundational level, um indirectly, and then also directly, um affecting the neurotransmitters, it's a, it's a real shame it is.

Speaker 1: 10:21

It is and mechanistically we have a synapse of these, these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells that recognize blue light, and they're synapsing at this herbanular nucleus which is directly influencing mood. What you said reminds me of a clinical case that I had and that was a non-verbally autistic child and he was brought into my clinic room and we were dealing with a different issue, but this child couldn't speak. But when his mother gave him this iphone, the or it was, maybe it was an ipad the speed at which and the, the uh ability at which this kid was able to navigate the, the youtube um algorithm, I think it was. Yeah, he was double tapping and maybe listening to about three seconds of a video and then double tapping, and I was immediately blown away with how this kid was able to use this technology but obviously was not able to do basic human communication skills, and I think blue light toxicity has a pretty deep pathophysiological role in development of autism.

Speaker 1: 11:25

So, and I think that really just gives us an idea of how big the problem is that you guys are tackling with the daylight computer and I think, um, how important this kind of work is. So I I guess people might be interested in uh, understanding. So you've developed a new display. It's similar to kindle, but better. Am I able to watch a movie? Am I able to do all the things that I would normally do?

Speaker 2: 11:52

on a laptop or a computer on your type of device. Yeah, I'd be happy also afterwards to provide some sort of demo so people can see I'm using it right now as a notepad. Yeah, basically you can think about it. Whatever you can do on an iPad, if the screen was black and white, you can do here. So movies, gifs, animations, you want to do Khan Academy, you want to Google Docs, you want to do ChatGPT, you want to do Telegram, anything you can kind of do on a tablet, you can do. And our goal over time is to make every computing category, with our specific take on what leads to health and wellness and focus and mindfulness, sovereignty.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Yeah, okay, cool. So maybe show us what you've got right now. So yeah, basically it's a device that you've written on using a stylo and yeah, there's a fair bit of ambient light in the room where we are now, but it's pretty anti-glare in real life sometimes.

Speaker 2: 12:49

But let me see if I throw up a video here for you people so yeah, for those listening on the podcast and feed, it's immediately.

Speaker 1: 13:01

It's a very, very sensitive display, so it looks. The response of the display is not in any way like, uh, a kindle. By any means it is just as responsive as an, an ipad, but 60 to 100 times faster.

Speaker 3: 13:16

Okay, 120 times 60 to 120 times faster than a Kindle in terms of refresh rate.

Speaker 1: 13:21

Yeah, the display isn't colorful. I mean, that is one obvious, just looking at it, real life. So we are lacking color. So are you able to have any degree of color, or is that inherent in the?

Speaker 2: 13:35

design. We have a color prototype. It's just going to take us some time to get that into production. Yeah, it's tremendously hard. So you can see here this is our best attempt at trying to replicate, you know, moving ink on paper. This is a video playing at 60 FPS.

Speaker 1: 13:49

Yeah, so it's like a grace. This is obviously. This is the first design or iteration or the prototype.

Speaker 2: 13:56

Yeah, it's the first product.

Speaker 1: 13:58

So we are lacking color, but it is basically like watching a normal iPad, but with a kind of gray scale, right.

Speaker 2: 14:07

And we think color is going to be useful in serving more people and more applications. But I think we've been surprised for how many people the lack of color is not a bug, it's a feature Interesting. There's something about it just feeling calmer. It feels more minimalistic, it feels different. It's almost like it puts you in a particular headspace. We're used to color and it's almost like our nervous system clenches a bit. It's overstimulating, it's oversaturated. Imagine putting an Apple Vision Pro on. You're just getting bombarded. There's something about how black and white makes this boring. It's just like your head isn't in a place of high stimulation. Yeah, so writing that homework assignment you have to do reading that thing that's important, but it's a little bit hard to do. Just gets a little bit easier. So that's been interesting.

Speaker 1: 15:08

The psychology of having a more boring computer can sometimes be in your service. I think that is targeting a very, very old and evolutionarily conserved pathway of alert danger, kind of with red. So it makes complete sense to me that if you're having a more calm, grayscale display, that you're not kind of hijacking that pathway that most people are experiencing on a daily basis.

Speaker 2: 15:33

You said better than I can to you on a daily basis. I said better than I can and I talk about it with the team that even in the design of our software, the key prompt is how can we use color responsibly, not to manipulate or take advantage of a user, but use it in places where it's actually helpful to you? And I think that using color responsibly and not manipulatively is actually a huge design challenge because it's going against the best practices of UI, ux, for now decades.

Speaker 3: 16:04

Yeah, and we have the optionality with the backlight and the amber LEDs in there to change the warmth and change the amount of backlight LEDs. So we do have some LEDs in there. But what's really cool is that you know, it's very heavy in the red spectrum and then it's also DC. So I said this, I think, briefly, talking about blue light all LEDs, all lighting, pretty much all RFs, they're pulsed, they're controlled with pulse, with modulation, which is an inherent issue because sunlight is continuous and it's broad spectrum and it's typically unpolarized, whereas all of our light and radio frequencies they're highly pulsed. So they're not. What that means is they're not on continuously, they're just like on off. There's a duty cycle percentage of how fast they're on. It's typically in the thousands of cycles per second range.

Speaker 3: 16:57

So you can't see it. So that's really a major factor in eye strain is and you can. If you've ever taken a video or a picture of a screen with your phone, you see that and you know eye strain to me, just after realizing this is probably the most pervasive health issue, like worldwide, like everybody who uses screens has some form of eye strain because it's such an unnatural light being, you know, emitted um and that's like the most sensitive, you know, debatably most important area, or one of the most important areas of our biology. Um, so what andre did that's incredible is it seems like a simple fix from an engineering perspective. Oh, just change the lighting control, the the LED from PWM pulse to DC direct current on all the time. But it was actually quite a hurdle, but we got it done, so maybe he can talk about that a little. It's pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 17:48

And just to give a little bit of context, I was explaining how a normal display is emissive. It's like a flashlight in your face and our thing is like a piece of paper. It's bouncing the light. We actually were able to invent a kind of cool breakthrough that kind of resolves the trade-off, and so what we were able to find out is how to make these micro-perforations in our piece of paper, so to speak, the back of our display, such that we do actually have a backlight that by default is off, so it just is like a moving piece of paper. But in the evening or at nighttime or if you want higher contrast, you can actually start to turn our backlight on and through those micro-perforations, the screen can start to brighten up. It's similar to the warm light on a Kindle, but ours is further redshifted. And the key thing we did is at a hardware level, we created I think we're the only ones who've done this is we created a custom multiplex backlight where we have LEDs that have specific phosphors that make them very redshifted, so they include a little bit of 720 nanometer, 68020 some of these, you know, healing red, infrared frequencies and totally eliminates, uh, blue, and so the base idea there is if you use an ipad in night shift or in red mode.

Speaker 2: 19:08

Underneath is still white leds going through a color filter where it's going through the red square. Those are pretty inefficient. They still allow 20 of the blue light, 10 it varies with our thing. At the led level with high efficiency phosphors we're blocking the blue light and so what you're getting is like 99 or 99.9 blue light free, and so on our website you can kind of see the spectrum difference.

Speaker 2: 19:32

We measured on an ipad with night shift and our thing, and so the hope here is, even though the company's called daylight, and one of the cool things is now you can use a computer near a window, in the courtyard, outside of Starbucks, you know, at a picnic table. One of the greatest applications of this is now, when the sun goes down, you can put away your conventional devices and you don't need to wear blue blockers. You can just use this, and it's hard to explain until you see it, but the combination of a reflective display and these kind of like amber leds really make it feel different. Best way I can describe it is it feels like you're holding a legal pad beside a campfire.

Speaker 1: 20:10

it's got that same kind of warm feel to it that sounds epic and the listeners will have recently heard my episode with andrew latour of gemba red and we discussed the whole field of photobiomodulation and the fact that these longer wavelengths of light are actually being used for healing and therapeutic benefit. So to me it sounds incredible that we've gone from this conventional ipad emitting a whole bunch of blue light in this 400 like 480 nanometer range, having all these health effects that we discussed earlier, compared to what you guys are developing, which is not only a computer that you can use but might even be having a photobiomodulation beneficial effect on health.

Speaker 2: 20:50

Right, I would say it's still in the early stages. We're only getting a little bit of those highest frequencies. But the way I like to say is we have three goals with light One, eliminate junk light. Two, spend more time in natural light. And three, have more healing light. And I think we've done a good job at nailing the first two and I think the goal of the second gen and onwards is to do a better job at the healing light. So there's some pretty interesting research about 1064 nanometers other long non-visible wavelengths yeah, exactly. And then the possibility here is you do sudoku puzzles on this and the whole time you're getting pbm. But I think that could potentially, especially for children, to be kind of whatever blue light is impacting them, this could potentially reverse.

Speaker 1: 21:35

I think that's one of the ways we really can have a lot of impact yeah, that sounds incredibly exciting and and the couple of thoughts that I also have is with regard to this mission and when people people might have used something like f lux or um, another blue blocking kind of filter, on their iPad Iris, and how, and if you hold a, if you look at the spectrum using you know measuring, that you can see that there's actually still blue peaks. And I think that is a key point for people to understand is that with artificial light, we can essentially trick our ocular system into perceiving one color, but there's actually peaks in different wavelengths. So how does your daylight computer compare in a spectral mission compared to, say, an ipad on using a night shift?

Speaker 2: 22:25

it might be hard for the audience to see, but at least maybe you can read out what you're seeing there. So that's us and that's an ipad with night shift yeah, so.

Speaker 1: 22:32

So the ipad pro on night shift still has this typical, highly ancestrally inappropriate peak in the blue wavelengths and getting just after a green as well. So compared to the daylight computer, which it looks a lot more like an incandescent globe, essentially on that spectral pattern. So that is. And there's nothing in that 400 range which would trigger melanopsin, and obviously people who've been following the podcast know that that is the pathway by which the circadian biology is being sabotaged. So that looks fantastic. What about? There's another couple of metrics that we think about when it comes to health harms of devices and light, and that is Flickr and non-native EMF. So can maybe both of you talk about those two concepts as it relates to this computer?

Speaker 2: 23:22

Yeah, tristan can get into it, but what he was talking about, about PWM versus DC. A synonym for PWM is Flickr. So the basic way, what we're saying we have a screen that bounces light, we have these tiny little holes. So we're saying we have a screen that bounces light, we have these tiny little holes so we can actually optionally put a backlight behind it and light it. And we've done it with these zero blue, amber LEDs that we custom designed.

Speaker 2: 23:47

Now the question is how do you light these LEDs? And then how do you change their brightness? So you light them as you connect them to electricity. Simple, right, but the way you change your brightness, it turns out the way most modern things change their brightness is they quickly switch them on and off. So if you want something to be super bright let's say the LED out of the box is rated as X brightness you just constantly give it electricity and it'll just be that brightness the entire time it's at its highest brightness. If you give it zero electricity, it'll be completely dark.

Speaker 2: 24:16

And so the trick engineers have figured out because they didn't think about biology, they were just thinking about how do we save cost on LEDs and on driver circuits and things like. That is, if you really quickly change it from being on and off and you change the proportion in one second, from how often it's on, from how often it's off, you can change the brightness. So what I? From how often it's on, from how often it's off, you can change the brightness. So what I mean is, if it's like 10 milliseconds off, 2 milliseconds on, 10 milliseconds off, 2 milliseconds on, and you do that really fast, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, it looks like it's 20% brightness, right, and you change that proportion. Where it's 10 seconds, like whatever it is, you can then get it to go brighter or darker, and that's called flicker or that's called pulse width modulation or PWM, and that's how almost all modern electronics work, and so we picked an older technology before PWM was invented.

Speaker 2: 25:08

That turns out to Tristan's point. It's really simple, but it is so hard to do something. That's against the conventional supply chain. I think this is why there isn't as much innovation as people think there is, because every layer is going to fight you the driver, controller, maker, the supplier, the engineers, the firmware. The amount of work we have to do for something so simple is enormous.

Speaker 2: 25:28

What we do is we drive it with direct current or DC, where the way you change the brightness is. You simply increase, uh uh, you increase the, the voltage across the led. And the problem with that is each person's led is slightly different. So 0.1 volts to somebody else will be this brightness, 0.1 volts to somebody else will be that. But our hope is through education we can tell our customers, hey, just you'll have to figure it out for yourself what exactly is the brightness. But the power from this is we get to be the first flicker-free computer. So we're flicker-free by default. If you don't use the backlight, there's no flicker at all. There's no backlight, it's just bouncing the light. The sun doesn't have flicker. I mean, clearly, if you're inside that might, but if you're, using our backlight.

Speaker 3: 26:19

We've completely eliminated that flexor. Do you want to talk about the EMF stuff? Yeah, I just think it's so powerful Like people don't even realize, you know, when you just get tired eyes, at the end of the day you think it's like a blue light problem. You know it can help with eye strain, but it's multifaceted. So you know we're attacking that from all angles. Which is is you know, it's just so cool and and having worked in electronics, in the semiconductor industry, like I, I realized all this and it's just like, yeah, there's all ics are are switching, all like power converters, all electronics have, they have so much switching going on and that's, I mean, that is the source of of emfs, of of non-native frequencies. Um, I would say on from you know the typical notion of of non-native frequencies. I would say, from you know the typical notion of non-native EMFs. You know radio frequencies, low frequencies, in the power realm of 50 to 60 hertz.

Speaker 3: 27:07

You know, at the hardware level there's a lot that we want to do and this is why you know I came on board as really excited to you know, think of ideas, but there's actually so much we can do from the software side of things, even with our Gen 1 tablet and that's what we're working on now the Wi-Fi, for example, could just be off by default. Smart airplane mode is what we're calling it, and we can implement some software changes to where maybe the Wi-Fi only turns on when you open an internet browser and if you're just taking notes or like writing things down, like Anjan is right now and he's holding it, like you know, close to his body, it's just off and the device itself controls that. Because you know you could have all the shortcuts. You know you could have the user intention, but most people probably aren't as deliberate about their EMFs as you know the user intention, but most people probably aren't as deliberate about their EMFs. As you know, maybe you and I are Max, so having that baked in from a software perspective can be huge. And then, yeah, like I said, we're thinking about creative ways to lower EMFs from.

Speaker 3: 28:11

You know the electronic side of things, maybe having, you know, accessories that people can easily hardwire.

Speaker 3: 28:18

You know, getting an ethernet port, like all these things, creating adapters, because I know there's a huge gap in terms of the actual hardware accessories needed to properly have hardwired internet with like a modern device and then just education around, like using devices right, like we know that distance is the best mitigation tool for EMF. So we're going to have a lot of educational content on our website, which will be, you know, fully launched here in a couple months, and I think that's massive. So but we have an opportunity to really study these things and what works and have engineers not just holding, you know, or having real tools like a spectrum analyzer, like oscilloscopes, looking at the waveforms and understanding what is working from an EMF perspective and what's not, as opposed to, you know, holding like an RF meter, which is pretty hard to make conclusions from. So I think we can really be a leader in this space and set the example of what can be done when you think about health upstream and engineer technologies with health in mind.

Speaker 1: 29:24

Yeah, man, it's extremely exciting. I want to emphasize a couple points for the listener. And this concept of flicker is inherent in artificial light and for people to really get their head around it the sun does not flicker, it is a very, very constant source of light and full spectrum light. So flicker is just one aspect of the harm of these devices and it's a good opportunity to really break that down for people Because as I see it, there's kind of three facets to the harm of these devices. One is the isolated blue light emission without any kind of infrared or balanced spectrum. Two is the flicker and the fact that it's pulsing, as you guys have described, and that has been linked to migraine in people. It's been linked to a whole bunch of health effects that people can have improvements when they block blue light or they get out of this flickering light environment. And then the third is the non-native EMF and the fact that this device is also emitting radio frequency emission that has these effects on our mitochondria that, tristan, you and I have talked about in two episodes, I've talked to Dr Jack Cruz about in two episodes. So those are like the three kind of big attack vectors on human health from these devices, and it sounds like this product is kind of really addressing all of them.

Speaker 1: 30:35

The idea of using a software to modulate the emission or the safety of the device is also very interesting, because, you know, I use something called one tap, zap or, and that is. It enables you to manually turn off, like bluetooth and wi-fi, but it makes so much sense to me to build that feature into the device. What, why, why kind of have to make people download an extra app? If it's already in the device, then it is, by default, a much more safer product for a kid to use. And that also reminds me of something that Dr Jack Cruz has talked about, which is the fact that Steve Jobs knew that the iPad and his tech devices were emitting radio frequency radiation that was harmful, so much so that he built in a motion sensor that was able to potentially turn that off, but it was never activated. So maybe talk to this idea of Silicon Valley or this whole tech behemoth industry that how have they got so far away from what you guys are doing and and looking at health first in terms of engineering devices?

Speaker 2: 31:41

yeah, um, I think one of the fun contradictions and superpowers that our daylight could develop is we're based in san francisco, we're in the belly of the beast and the hope is we can harness the powers of the beast being incredible at software, all all aspects of technology. We're also doing this podcast in El Salvador. I think that's the second dynamic we want to bring is that kind of spirit of decentralized and alternative and on the frontiers and on the fringe, and that kind of rebel attitude to things. And so I think we fail if we allow one of these to compromise the other. So I think we fail if we allow one of these to compromise the other.

Speaker 2: 32:17

To your point, there's a lot of medical companies doing things. So where it's hard for them to get to the next level is they don't have the software, they don't have the branding, they don't have the whole massive vertical integration that Apple can do. And so I think I'd like to joke with the team that imagine Apple got run over by people like us. They forgot to lock the door one day and we ran in. What would we be able to do with that? And that's how I think about us. It's like we're like trying to be baby apple, but for our community and for our values and um, I think it's an open question. I don't think anybody's been able to pull this off. There's a lot of risk of being in the belly of the beast it's really easy to get sucked in. So I think just what's going to be crucial for us is being on the ground with people like yourself being on the ground, with people always coming back to what are the problems, what matters, and just being disciplined in. What are the benefits of this conventional system of silicon valley and of that world?

Speaker 2: 33:17

And I think the problem most people have is they read similar books on the weekend. It's just they're terrified to bring this up with their colleagues. You're in the middle of a pitch meeting in apple and you're like guys, blue light's bad and everybody's like what's your evidence? What's the thing? Show me the studies. Where's the 50 meta review?

Speaker 2: 33:35

And I just think I don't blame them. It's so hard to be courageous in that environment where, if you're right, it takes years and years and years and you don't gain much from it, but if you're wrong, you're fired. So I previously looked at them as villains. Some of that might be true, but more and more when I I look at it as like, oh, they're just, they're just systematically set up to not be courageous and we can fail. We can do DC dimming and have all of our engineers yell at us. You know, uh, put a year extra work to get that to work and who knows Just, I don't really care if we fail or succeed. It's just important to me of the world has an attempt at trying to do it the right way and just see where the uh where the cards kind of lie, yeah, and I think it's a good point that it's.

Speaker 3: 34:23

Like you know, maybe in the beginning there was some intentionality. You know, flashy lights and and picturesque screens, I mean people want to to make a really aesthetic product, right, and blue light definitely helps with that, I mean for sure. But it's kind of a byproduct to me of just like fiat money. Right, there's no incentive for them to really go out of their way to make a product that's better for their consumer, especially that all the big tech companies have such a monopoly and it's just coming in like minor innovations now, like it's not, they're fiat farming us and it's just a reality of it. And why should they change? You know nothing's disrupting them and you know you can think what you want of like Elon Musk, but at least he brings like he's shaking up like a couple of different industries. And then, going back to what you said originally and what Anja mentioned, it's like, yeah, there's, there's health tech companies out there, but are they really addressing the root cause of the issues? Do blue light blockers address the root cause? No, they're all bandaid solutions like red light panels. They're not actually addressing the problem.

Speaker 3: 35:31

The elephant in the room and that's that we're spending an increasing amount of time on our devices every single passing year, every single one of us.

Speaker 3: 35:40

I mean just think of I don't know five years ago, eight years ago, how much time you spent on your phone then versus now.

Speaker 3: 35:47

It's substantially different and it's so ubiquitous. And then think about what I'm really passionate about and you mentioned we talked about in the beginning it's just the next generation, the children, and that's where we think we can have the biggest impact is setting them up for success at an early age, instead of the opposite, giving them a blue light, heavy EMF, heavy, you know, ipad at age two and completely just like causing mitochondrial dysfunction at the earliest age and then by the time they get to middle school, they're already having, you know, mental illness and so many issues. So I think that's where we can have the biggest impact and that's kind of how I think about it. But it's a challenge, right? You know it's such an uphill battle and that's why I just said it's taken so long and it takes a lot of investment. It takes longer to do things and engineers aren't happy when you try and do it the right way, because suppliers it's a challenge when you do things completely against the grain from all angles, really.

Speaker 2: 36:48

And I kind of think cowardice is pretty much a sin. I kind of think cowardice is pretty much a sin. But having said that, I think a lot of these problems are structural, not because people are evil. I got to meet the person who invented the VA LCD one of the most popular types of LCD and I asked him like these things are not so great. Man Like, how do you feel? These things are not so great. Man Like, how do you feel? And he just looked at me and he was like, if I knew my grandson would be spending 10 hours a day on this thing, I would have never designed it the way I did.

Speaker 2: 37:23

He's like none of us had any clue that people are going to use computers so much and young people are going to use them so much. He's like none of us in our wildest dreams would have thought that these things were for technicians and nerds and business executives who use it for a couple hours a day. And so I think they're just on an old value system, on an old knowledge base, on an old ideology. And now the new information, the new wisdom, the new knowledge is coming, and there's no adults in the room. They're all like we're public market companies. We can't start telling people that our stuff is bad, because if we start making healthier computers, they're going to be like wait, is your existing stuff not healthy? So they're stuck right and they're just cowards.

Speaker 2: 38:04

You look at someone like Elon Musk, for all of his whatever. At least he's courageous, he's willing to try things, and I just think a lot of these companies don't really have founders running the place anymore. It's hard to be courageous, and so I think Hannah Arendt has a quote the banality of evil. There's a huge banality to the evil that's coming out of big tech.

Speaker 1: 38:24

Yeah, man, the reference to Elon Musk is an interesting one, and for anyone who's read his biography which is by Ashley Vance, maybe 10 years ago now, it gets an insight into this concept of first principles thinking, and he essentially attacked the problem of rocketry from a complete first principles approach. So if I'd never designed a rocket, how would I do it? And I think that is the same line of reasoning that we need in health and tech, and that is how I approach this problem of health optimization and not reasoning by analogy of what maybe centralized medicine has done before me. But how that applies to what you guys are doing is, if you put health as the first and most highest goal, then the designs that you've developed make complete sense and all the designs come as a flow on of putting this first-principle thinking, of putting human health first.

Speaker 1: 39:15

And clearly, what Apple and all these other Samsung and tech companies are doing is not even thinking about the human biological effects. And, tristan, we've talked about the fact that engineers don't have a biological background. So the absence of this multidisciplinary thinking is to the detriment of simple people, of the two year old kid flicking on the ipad, because the tech guy who designed it had no idea that that blue light is destroying that kid's melanopsin, is depleting his dha is setting him up for parkinson's disease at the age of 45, and so I I think that what we've come to now by what you guys are doing by blending these disciplines of biology human health optimization with technology is amazing, because you're essentially able to design a product that is allowing us to harness the benefits of technology without the detrimental health effects.

Speaker 2: 40:11

And what comes to mind here is also the risk and reward of working from principles, as you're saying. First, principles is you get a lot of two birds with one stone, if you get lucky. What's an example of this? You can use this outside. What's the main possibility of that? You can establish natural circadian rhythms, you can get full spectrum sunlight. But here's another possibility you can have your feet in the ground and so now, whatever EMFs are being produced by this, you can ground it.

Speaker 2: 40:38

We never kind of really thought that through. That's just like a cool thing that came out from this principle of get back into nature. Here's another thing we really wanted the stylus to not have any electronics in it, so you're not touching something that is, you're not touching something that has got a bluetooth chip or a battery in it or some sort of receiver. Um, it never occurred to me for electro sensitive people. Now they have a way to use technology without having to touch the capacitive touchscreen, because this is passive, there's no battery, there's no charging. Once again, just we went with the principle of if you can do something in analog, do something in analog, right. Only go to digital if you have to. And so I think the hope is, by working backwards from principles we can get lucky, and there's been a couple examples so far yeah, amazing and the.

Speaker 1: 41:28

I guess maybe we've talked about this along the way, but why has big tech not kind of come up with this idea before? And maybe it is this fiat economy that you talked about, and maybe it is the absence of this multiple, multiple dictionary thinking. Um, you know, why did steve jobs not himself come up with a product similar to this?

Speaker 2: 41:51

um, maybe it's a bit campy, but one thing we think about is if steve jobs reincarnated and he made a computer for his kids, what would it look like? He's famous for not allowing his kids to have iphones or ipads until they were 16. I think there's something really screwed up with selling stuff to everybody else's kids and not allowing it for his own kids. So I think one once again is by the time they realized it's bad for people, they were stuck and trapped and their stock price is dependent on ever increasing growth, and rather than do the courageous thing and take their stock or do whatever, I think they just kind of go with the status quo. And so I think a lot of this comes back to courage and taking the small stuff seriously.

Speaker 2: 42:36

I think it's easy to dissociate and be like oh, I'm stressed, I have a horrible sleep, but I just need to keep working and working, and working, and I just couldn't do that. I'm like dude, I'm miserable, my eyes hurt, my sleep is screwed up, I just can't do this anymore. I don't care if I'm successful, I don't care if things come my way. It's just not worth it. So I think there's a certain embodiment of where you're starting to respect yourself and respect your body. I think modern society only respects achievements in numbers and not the simple things.

Speaker 1: 43:04

Yeah, I mean, there's such incredible power in following our passions and following our truth, whether or not that is supported by society and the kind of status quo. So it's admirable that you guys are following that and kind of building that out and it's very, very interesting to follow. So talk about the potential market and talk about the maybe vision you guys have, because the Apple Pro VR headset has just been released and for anyone who's in the health space and aware of circadian biology and the non-visual photoreceptor system, this is like a, you know, I think I tweeted once that might be the quickest way of inducing neurodegeneration in you know ever invented. So what is your vision for daylight computing and perhaps replacing not only the iPad but other devices with this technology?

Speaker 3: 43:54

Yeah, I'll give it back to Anjan in a second. But other devices with this technology, yeah, I'll give it back to Anjan in a second. But I just want to say I just thought about this and it's like you know, if Apple didn't succeed, we didn't, the internet didn't succeed Like we. Actually, none of us would probably know anything about how artificial light is harmful for our biology, right? So to me it's almost like a natural progression. It's like you kind of have to. You know you make mistakes, right. Like people make mistakes, that happens at a societal level as well. And then it just becomes so entrenched, I think because of, you know, the failing monetary system that we're entrenched in. But now we have this opportunity because of the internet, because of the ability to connect online. Now we can go back and see oh, like John Ott was onto something in the 70s, robert O Becker was also onto something. Now let's bring that work back and give it a platform, have this, you know, extremely powerful, you know connection and multi-disciplines, and then put that energy into a product like Daylight and the tablet for the first product. And I think that's a humble way to think about it, because at the individual level, I don't think you know specific, most people are not evil and a lot of people are probably, like Ansh said, really proud of what they invented and it was really cool, but it's almost like there has to be some progression. But now it's like how do we make sure that the healthier alternative catches on and that kind of gets into. You know how do we market this and I mean I think in the past few years since COVID, it's really been a turning point, right for everyone.

Speaker 3: 45:24

People are more skeptical. Well, even before COVID, there's, like you know, the data farming. People don't like big tech. They don't like Apple. I mean Apple might be like 10% better than Google and Facebook. They really hate Zuckerberg and that's an advantage of people have increasing distrust in big tech. And then they also have increasing awareness of health being a priority and the information they're receiving on a daily basis from the governing bodies, from whoever what we were taught in school is false or misleading or not.

Speaker 3: 45:58

The full picture, and you know that's the momentum that we're trying to tap into and I mean just you know you and I know just the podcasting space, like on social media, on Instagram, on Twitter it's proliferating. There's more and more people and you know it started with diet and exercise like carnivore and all these things, seed oils but then that light story is becoming more and more heard. You know, people like Huberman are helpful, they have big platforms, but we really want to tap into that and we want to be the people who take that to the next level and then be like here you go. Here's something that now solves a major portion of that issue in a modern lifestyle because, like I always said about emfs, like we're not going backwards in technological evolution, we just need to think inwards instead of having, you know, technology that's just so outwards facing damn yeah, no, a very, very interesting perspective and yeah, so talk to where you guys gonna want to take this.

Speaker 2: 47:01

Explain to me where, where the vision, please, yeah, um I think you could say there's two main ways to look at our project. One is a middle finger to technology. Fuck you, technology. Fuck you for distracting my son, fuck you for hurting my eyes, fuck you for messing my sleep. Fuck you for not respecting my sovereignty. I think that's a very legitimate way to think about our thing. I think there's actually an equally valid, if not sounding contradictory, perspective, which is this is a love letter to technology. Daylight at its core is a love letter to technology Because we're saying don't throw it out, don't burn it at the stake, don't demonize it. There's a certain conception of it that we've all been told is the only way technology can be, and that conception, sure, you can burn at the stake, but what we're doing is saying, no, technology can actually be something that's humbler, more beautiful, more respectful, more caring, actually play a part as part of your healing rather than your degradation. And I think that's what we're trying to say is we don't need to throw this out. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's take the criticisms, let's take the wisdom, but let's show how technology can be humane, how it can fit in, and I think that's our vision is if Apple was founded today. Steve Jobs came back with a consciousness and he wanted Apple to be a public benefit corporation that cared about health and wellness and healthy social relationships and the health of our planet and everything in between. What would they do differently? That same skill set of being able to go from color theory and community and design to deep, deep supply chain innovation and all the software in between. What if you take that same skill set of vertical integration, which I think matters to create really good experiences and at the end of the day, that's what we are as a company is to create great experiences. What's possible If we go through each category of computing and rethink it with this value set? What's a distraction-free phone look like? What does a minimalist typewriter laptop thing look like? What does a monitor look like? What does a minimalist typewriter laptop thing look like? What does a monitor look like? What does a watch look like? And I think our hope is there's something interesting at the end of each of those rainbows, and I'd say that's category one of our vision. And category two of our vision is what's a more healthier, humane, more embodied future to computing that isn't VR? You can't tell me that the rest of my life, as you're saying, stick something on my face and call that my reality and screw up my brain. Come on, guys, this is just because Mark Zuckerberg wants this to be the future, because he doesn't want Apple to dominate them, right, and the rest of us are having to pay the price for it. So I think the possibility from what we've invented is a second trajectory to computing, which is VR, our iPhones.

Speaker 2: 49:58

I call them portals. They're like little shining beacons that pull you into a world. If you look at what we've made, it's boring. Why is it boring? Because it doesn't pull you into the world, it's part of your world. It's literally using the same light. The same light, the same saturation, the same hue, the same intensity of everything else in your environment. So the way I think about it is it's less a portal and it's more an object. It's in the same category as a kitchen knife or a key to a door or a really good book, and so what's the possibility of being able to take computers and, instead of putting it on your face, throwing it into the environment?

Speaker 2: 50:34

Imagine like a whiteboard that just looks like a piece of paper, but it's a magical whiteboard because it's got our screen technology and operating system. So when you get in front of it in the morning it switches to your workout and, because it can animate, it shows you the different postures to do it. You go to your bathroom and you got a calendar on the wall that tells you your to-do list for the day, so on and so on. That's spatial computing. It's part of your environment but it's done in a humane way. There's a lot of problems to solve in doing that, but I think that's category two of the way we think it is. There's a more grounded, humane, embodied future to computing that we think we can play a role in.

Speaker 1: 51:08

Yeah, it's epic and I really think it gets to this double-edged sword of technology.

Speaker 1: 51:12

And, yes, it, and I really think it gets to this double-edged sword of technology and, yes, it's destroying our biology if it's blue-lit and in the way that it's currently implemented. But the value that it's provided to society, to personal interactions, to advancement of the human race is enormous and you know, Cruise is famous for describing blue light as this asteroid that is kind of going to potentially take us out. And what you guys are developing in this vision that you've just painted for us to me really provides an antidote or an alternative path, a fork in the road where we can harness the benefits of interconnectedness, of this amazing repository of online information, to make our lives better and become more intelligent and more efficient, more productive, without having that detrimental effect on our biology. So that's a fantastic kind of maybe place to end it and it's a great exposition of what you guys are doing. So maybe share with us where people can find this product, where can they follow your work, when can they learn more? Where can they buy one of these Daylight tablets?

Speaker 2: 52:15

So if you go to daylightcomputercom that's singular, not daylightcomputers daylightcomputercom you can find out more and buy the product, and you can follow us on Twitter, at Daylight Co, on other socials as well. And we're just coming out into the world, so you guys are some of the earliest folks who are finding out about us.

Speaker 2: 52:35

But we're going to launch in May and so we're hoping to start organically on the ground with the people we're most aligned with before we go out into the world. And then who knows who's going to buy this and who's going to be part of this. So our hope is to build community, be humble, listen, learn, be aligned with the folks who most care about this.

Speaker 1: 52:53

Yeah, amazing, great. Well, anjan, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation and I'll include all that information in the show notes. So, yeah, great, and yeah, we'll talk again soon. Thanks a lot, max. Thanks, man, we appreciate it. Thank you.