Transcript: Dangers of Daylight Savings — Dr. Roger Seheult #018

0:00

The light inside your home is not nearly enough.

You need to get outside.

We're talking 3400 lux, maybe in a bright room.

We're talking 100,000 lux outside on a bright sunny day.

Sundial is. 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

And that's, it's that every day.

0:17

And so the hours are longer hours in the summer, and they're shorter hours in the winter.

But then we've gotten onto civil time, and that means that noon on my watch is almost never noon outside when the sun's actually culminated on the Meridian.

The more somebody exposes their eyes to bright light in the morning, the less sensitive their retina is to that light at night, and the less effect that that light at night has on the circadian rhythm.

0:42

It's.

Just amazing.

Your entire body is translucent to infrared light from the sun.

That's just fascinating.

Wow.

But second, what I'm hearing is something like the built environment is down regulating your cellular metabolism.

Yes, that's a shocking and frightening realization.

1:01

Hopefully that kind of gets people's attention.

Because society has been living inside more and more, because we have switched our lighting from incandescent to LED, and because we have coated our windows with low E glass, we have, either on purpose or inadvertently, essentially isolated ourselves from the precisely the same wavelengths that our body is required to have in order to appropriately regulate the electron transport chain, which is immensely important for a whole host of chronic diseases.

1:37

Doctor Rodger Schwelt is currently an associate clinical professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine and an assistant clinical professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University.

Doctor Schwelt is a quadruple board certified.

1:55

In internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Rodgers current practice is in Beaumont, CA where he's a critical care physician, pulmonologist, and sleep physician at Optum, California.

2:14

He lectures routinely across the country at conferences and for medical PA and RT societies, is the director of a sleep lab, and is the medical director for the Crafton Hills College Respiratory Care Program.

His passion is demystifying medical concepts.

2:33

Dr. Schwelt, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Daniel.

It's good to be here.

How do you do all of these things?

I actually had to really truncate down your the rest of your bio just for space, but you got a pretty full life I'm guessing.

I do and three kids and a wife and yeah, all of those things.

2:51

So I guess it's just a passion.

It's it's, I find it interesting and and it gets me up every morning.

And you're in the hospital right now working, I assume a shift?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, wow.

So just really awesome to see somebody who's given that much of themselves.

3:08

So that's really beautiful.

Could you kind?

Of sum up for me, the work that you're doing, not necessarily there at the hospital, but that people are seeing you online, you know, Huberman Diary, the CEO, you know, you've done a lot of big shows, you've got a good Internet presence.

3:24

What is the kind of work that you primarily are sharing with people in the online space outside of your medical practice?

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there.

There's a lot of information, there's a lot of noise.

People are saying a lot of things because people are genuinely interested in their health.

And I think that's a really noble thing that people are interested in, in living better and being better.

3:44

And where I'm coming from is I'm trying to say that there is really good evidence out there in multiple fields that show that that very deliberate, inexpensive, purposeful changes in your behavior can have dramatic differences in outcomes so that you don't have to buy literally hundreds of dollars worth of supplements or this or that that are being sold.

4:09

There's really some very simple, very easily accomplishable things that you can do in your life that can have a dramatic change.

I'm talking a decade in terms of adding a decade of life to your life if you just make the right choices.

It's interesting as a physician, I'm curious how you have come to that awareness only because in this kind of upside down world we're living in where where most institutions eventually kind of become the opposite of what they're meant to do, You know, everything's kind of been turned on its head and it's very difficult to trust, you know, any of our institutions.

4:46

It's not common for physicians to really understand what creates health anymore.

So how how have you arrived at that kind of uniquely amongst your peers?

I'm sure you have peers who who understand this stuff, but generally speaking, most physicians are a little bit in the dark about what actually creates health.

5:02

Yeah, it's, it's true.

And just like anything else, physicians are, are people too.

And, and, and people are different.

So I, I guess I would say 40 percent, 50% of my understanding came from my upbringing just belonging to a, a faith that believe that things that are natural are, I mean, not all things that are natural, but things like rest and, and eating well and sunlight and fresh air.

5:32

These are the things that really are the pillars of good health.

And we can talk about those, but I have to say that when I went to medical school for four years and I did residency for another three years and chief residency for another year, and then in a fellowship in critical care for another three years and learned a tremendous amount of information.

5:52

And to see how in a sense useless, not completely, but how, how it was sort of rendered very impotence during the pandemic of six years ago.

And I'm not just talking about the infections.

6:07

I'm talking about.

There was a very particular time from about 2020 to about 2022 where we in the inpatient world in the hospital were inundated with more patients than than we could ever handle or had ever seen in our lives.

And there were things that caused me to go back and look at that and to research it and and ask the question why.

6:28

And the answers that I got were astounding to me.

And what was even more astounding was that these lessons were not new lessons.

We, we had learned these lessons before, but we'd forgotten them.

And I guess my job, as I saw it, was to remember those lessons, to go deep down into my upbringing and to, to to relearn with new evidence and new science that's being produced every day, the validity of these very simple, basic practices.

6:58

It's amazing to me whenever it kind of falls to somebody to do that, you know, like it, like it falls to you to kind of like resurrect this lost knowledge.

And it's like really, I mean it, it almost seems like resurrecting common sense.

It's just kind of shocking that we're in this era of so much confusion.

7:14

But I'd love to hear a little bit about some of those lessons.

And I'd love to hear about those pillars of health that you mentioned earlier.

I love that you are talking about how this isn't something you need to purchase or, you know, they're not extreme practices.

This is like really basic stuff.

7:29

But again, we've, we've really complicated it, I think, or under complicated it in some cases too, right?

Made it too simple.

So, so kind of walk us through what health development looks like in your opinion and, and what are the lessons that we needed to kind of remember from the past?

Yeah, I, I'll put it this way.

7:47

If you want to sort of take the 30,000 foot view, you know, I'm a critical care physician.

I give medicines to patients all the time because they're at life's end.

But if you can kind of imagine your life is a as a, a chain of links in it.

And each link is an organ system that has its own functioning.

8:04

Like you and I, we have lungs, we have hearts, we have kidneys.

And we know that as we get older, those things wear out, we're down.

And for certain people, those organs will wear unevenly.

For us here in the United States, it's typically the heart that is wearing out.

And while the rest of the body may be perfectly fine, we have this weakest link.

8:23

And So what we do, and this is sort of a truism is we give medications.

Medications are drugs that have been studied that have very certain effects and very certain side effects.

And, and, and a truism is that every single medication has a side effect and will weaken links in your chain.

8:41

But it does it by it does that, but it also strengthens a particular link.

And so in somebody where we see that the heart link, for instance, is wearing out, it makes sense to put someone on a medication that will strengthen that weakest link to prevent it from breaking at the expense of of some of the other links if we can save a life in that moment.

9:04

So.

Because of the side effects might be damage to the kidneys or or damage.

Exactly Organ system exactly.

And there's there's many examples of this.

People with congestive heart failure get put on blood pressure medications.

If you put people on too much blood pressure medications, it could cause the blood pressure to go down and could cause kidney damage.

9:21

But we have data that shows that, for instance, it extends life for people with heart disease.

I I guess where I would like to say is that I think we've depended far too much on medications to fix weak links.

And I'm not against using those in very specific circumstances where you have to and you have to save a life.

9:41

I do that all the time in the ICU.

What I think we need to spend more time on is learning those practices that strengthen all of the links that don't have side effects but have side benefits.

And, and this is not hypothetical.

We know for instance, that exercise is not only something that builds muscle, not only something that improves your metabolism, it also by the way it improves your mood, it reduces depression, it reduces the risk of stroke.

10:07

So these are side benefits that these typical types of activities and, and, and interventions have.

And so if I were to line all of those up, what are all of these interventions?

And I were to, obviously there's so many of them, right?

But there, if I were to put it into categories, the 8 pillars of health that we call it actually spell out a word called New Start.

10:29

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10:46

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11:09

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11:25

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11:46

Now New START was sort of coined at Weimar University, which is not too far from Stanford University in California.

And they actually have a program, they're called New START where they take people and they will actually both online or even residentially there.

They they come there for two weeks and they put them through a completely amazing transformation.

12:05

But New START stands for nutrition, E stands for exercise, W stands for water.

And that may sound obvious, drinking water, but there's actually some benefits of the external use of water.

For instance, sauna, hot tubs, these sorts of things.

12:22

What you say called bountyopathy?

Yes, yes, exactly.

And and then that moves us to start and the S stands for sunlight.

That's heliotherapy, and that's something that we used many years ago and probably should start using again.

The T, the first T stands for temperance.

12:39

It's an old world term used back in the 1800s for basically not smoking, not drinking, not taking in these toxins.

It's like politically incorrect now most to say temperance.

Yeah.

I mean, if you, if you think about it, you we could also put toxins under there.

12:55

So all the things in our environment that's toxic, we microplastics for instance, would be fit perfectly right in there under temperance.

And there's certain things that you can do to limit yourself from these toxins.

So then a would be air, fresh air.

Now that seems pretty obvious, like we should have filtered air and fresh air.

13:13

But I would propose briefly here that fresh air, or the best type of air is not stuff that it lacks everything and it's just pure air and it's filtered all the way down to its finest components.

But there's actually stuff naturally in fresh air out in nature that includes much more than just oxygen and nitrogen.

13:34

There's also things like fights insides, which are released from trees that actually have beneficial healing properties that we can talk about.

This is all science, not not only that.

Well, right, Like ionic compounds that are.

And not only that, but believe it or not, bacteria, Now we would think of bacteria as an enemy, but there is actually good bacteria that can colonize your Airways and prevent the bad bacteria from moving in.

14:01

So it's a very complicated area, but fresh air is certainly important.

And then we go into an area that's near and dear to my heart, of course, is rest.

I'm a sleep specialist, board certified in Sleep Medicine and we could spend the whole hour talking about sleep, circadian rhythm, slow wave sleep, REM sleep, how sleep affects your diet, how diet affects your sleep, making sure you're getting enough sleep, making sure you get at the right time of the day.

14:25

All of these things we have very precise studies on.

But I would almost say that that the 24 hour rest, we have done a great job in terms of communicating that there's a seven day rest as well.

That's incorporated into that as well.

And we can talk about some of that evidence and then finally the last T, which is trust.

14:43

And that stands for trust, trust in a higher power, trust in God.

And we know from studies, I mean, people sometimes us get a little bit skirmish when I talk about something that's spiritual there at the end, but realize that science is simply a way of testing hypotheses.

14:59

And if you have an intervention, which even though it's be spiritual, you can actually test that hypotheses in a randomized way, in an observational way.

And there are a whole study of science, a whole, a whole branch of science that looks at this in terms of community, in terms of faith, in terms of reducing stress that works together.

15:22

And this has been shown to be beneficial.

So those are the 8 pillars, New start.

And you know, one of the areas that, that that I think is really very interesting to me, and I know you've just talked about this on a, on a previous podcast is Sunlight, which we can talk about.

15:37

That's the S and there's actually some really very interesting things that have come up even in the last year and maybe even less than that, maybe in the last few weeks months that are really exciting and have actually, I'm, I'll just tell you this, I've, I am Robert Fosbury and Glenn Jeffrey and Scott Zurman have put out a preprint on really a completely different way of looking at sun and how it affects the mitochondria and it brings together a, a bunch of different disciplines.

16:08

That's a very exciting.

Well, there's so much there.

I'd like to pick apart a couple of those pieces and one of them with air.

Something I've always said to, you know, my students is like if you were to, if I was to take a canister and fill it with, you know, 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and I put .5% carbon dioxide and a few noble gases in there and I breathe that.

16:28

Is that going to be like fresh air?

It's like, well, obviously not, there's something that's missing.

And if I take pure H2O and I, you know, distill it down to the pure molecular form I drink, is that like fresh water?

It's not going to taste like it.

There's like something that's not there.

There's missing component.

16:44

We've gotten into thinking about these things from a purely like reductionist chemistry perspective.

And I just really want to say I love the simplicity of the new START acronym.

That's really cool to me.

Lastly, I just want to say something that I, I learned recently, you know, a lot of how I look at health has been to look at indigenous people.

17:03

I'm very interested in how people lived before electricity and how they lived before, you know, all these modern conveniences.

And one of the things I, I learned recently was that something like 10 to 20% of people's day was dedicated to their spiritual practices.

And so like that's a pretty big slice of the pie chart that's for most people today.

17:21

It's like not there anymore and just get a vacuum that gets filled in with whatever it gets filled in with, but usually not things that generate what you're talking about.

Those been those spiritual benefits.

And so that's something I definitely love to talk about more.

But I arrived at talking to you because I was, I was talking to my friend Zaid and I said, do you know anything about daylight savings time and the changes that have been proposed?

17:47

And he said, oh, you got to talk to my friend Rodger.

So I'm so curious too.

I just want to make sure we touch on that at some point today when we're talking about sunlight because I notice how thrown out of whack I get every time we change those clocks and there's discussion about permanent changes and they might not be doing that in the best way possible.

18:04

So I want to hand it back to you to to start anywhere you want to start with regards to any of these pillars.

But it sounds like with sunlight is maybe the area where you have the most excitement.

I am excited about it.

OK, so there's two aspects to sunlight and light in general.

18:20

There is the visible a light that we see and that that has a lot to do with circadian rhythms and daylight saving time.

And we can start there.

And then the, the bigger discussion is the light from the sun that we don't see.

That's the infrared light and that's the mitochondrial aspect.

18:36

And, and we'll, we'll jump into that after.

So circadian rhythm, realize that the circadian rhythm is a clock that's in your brain that is slightly longer than a day.

And that's actually the reason why, by the way, it's called circadian rhythm.

It's circa from the Latin being about and then 80 in being a day.

18:56

So it's about a day.

It's not quite exactly a day.

It's actually.

A little bit longer.

It's longer.

It's about 24.2 in some.

It varies in people, but on average it's probably about 20 minutes longer.

What do?

What is the theories or speculation about why that would be?

I'm curious.

19:11

About Oh, I, there's, there's many different reasons why it would be why they might think that it's because it's easier to, to have something be either longer or shorter, but not both and then have a mechanism for bringing it into into the queue.

19:27

So and, and have it exactly where it needs to be.

So if you can think about a conductor that's about to start an orchestra, let's say it's Beethoven's fifth and you know the 1st 4 notes of Beethoven's fifth, everyone's got to be exactly at the right time.

19:43

The conductor has to, and so you know what, you can imagine what would happen if the strings started at one point and, and the, the, the brass at another.

Everything's got to be right there.

And so people are watching specifically for the conductor to give that downbeat and then the, the music begins.

20:01

And so the, the conductor in this sense is light.

It's the, the Zeitgaber.

The Zeitgaber is, is a term that we use in, in circadian medicine to say it is the effect.

It is the thing that is affecting.

The circadian rhythm, it's regulating the circadian rhythm.

So you can imagine that if you were, if you were to take somebody and put them into a dark cave and so they saw no light, what would happen is they would be free running.

20:26

Essentially what would happen is, is that they would all of their things would happen about 20 minutes later every single day until they would sort of be completely out of sync and then back in the sync.

Kind of think about it when you pull up to a traffic light and every puts their indicator out and the car in front of you has a slightly different frequency of their indicator than you do of your indicator.

20:46

And you can see that after a while it'll be slightly at the same point and then off and then back again.

That's what I'm talking about.

So you could become theoretically in the dark.

You could become untethered from the solar cycle.

Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, not even theoretically, this is what they actually see.

21:02

This is exactly what happens.

And so it's extremely important that you have something that gets you back on track.

And for human beings, the number one Zeitgabor is light, by the way, the number 2 is food.

And so there are there are peripheral clocks in your GI tract.

21:20

We can talk about that too.

But for now, let's keep it simple and talk about light, which is the central Zeitgaber.

So there are essentially two major things that I want to talk about in relation to that and why morning sunlight is so important.

21:36

The first one is this is I gamer.

So your circadian rhythm is looking, it's looking specifically at that time of the day to find out is the sun up and is it morning?

And so you, you might be asking, why is it so important for your circadian rhythm to know whether it's morning or whether it's night?

21:54

And, and this is a very intuitive question.

And, and, and the answer is very simply is that your body is a very different body during the day than it is at night.

There are completely different processes that are going on.

I, I like to give this analogy.

When I was in high school, my friend was an employee at Disneyland.

22:12

I grew, I I'm here in Southern California, so a lot of students like to go get a job at Disneyland because it's kind of fun.

But the interesting thing is that he worked there at night.

So it's a completely different experience as an employee at Disneyland.

After the park closes, they have engineers that shut down the rides.

22:31

They have gardeners that we'd, it's a small world.

They have people.

His job was basically scraping the gum off the streets.

And this is going on throughout the entire night.

The entire park is being regenerated so that at 8:00 in the morning when the park opens up or whenever they decide to open it up, it's a brand new day.

22:51

It's a brand new park.

Literally every flower is perfect.

There's not a weed in the garden.

There's not a gum on the ground.

I mean, this is how we should be when we wake up in the morning.

And if you look at that, if you were to look at Disneyland, the processes that are going on during the day are completely different than what's going on at night.

23:08

During the day, you've got people working the rides, the rides are moving.

During the night, the rides are shut down, they're not working.

People are checking for cracks.

They're, you know, they're looking for mate, they're doing maintenance on it.

And, and this is exactly what happens in any complicated structure.

So it's really important that, that your circadian rhythm knows when the day begins.

23:28

Otherwise it's going to send the engineers in there at the same time as the guest to go on the space mountain and and it's not going to be an optimal experience.

And when your body has non optimal experiences, that's when you get insulin resistance, that's when you get diabetes, that's when you get cancer, that's when you get obesity.

23:45

These are the answers to something working not optimally.

And so it's absolutely essential that your body is clear on when your circadian rhythm is during the day and when it's during the night.

OK, that's basically how I would like to explain it.

That that analogy is excellent, by the way.

24:01

I really like that.

For.

Our ancestors Who?

For whom a relationship with the natural world was kind of non negotiable.

All of these inputs, the zeitgeiber was kind of a given, right?

24:17

I mean, you people live in very small homes typically.

I mean you, you would have been outside quite a bit.

Life was agrarian or hunting and gathering or whatever it was.

So many of these things that you just described, you know, we call like the diseases of civilization, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases is so, so a major component of this could be because, because there's a lot of things people point to, right, excessive calories in low nutrition diets or, or things like that.

24:49

But but it sounds like from what you're saying, maybe one of the foundational components that's leading to many of the diseases of civilization is actually a clock that's Askew in the body.

Absolutely, absolutely yes.

There was a paper that was put out by a friend of mine, Sean Kane.

25:07

He's a researcher in Australia and the title of his paper, which basically showed what I'm about to tell you was Dark Days and Bright Nights.

And, and this is confusing, this is, I imagine if you don't know when the guests should come into the park and when the engineer should come into the park, imagine what confusion is going to rain there.

25:26

You're going to be lined up for Space Mountain and it's not going to be running.

You're going to be in line for it's a small world and the garden is going to be a disaster.

You're going to be walking down Main Street and there's going to be gum on the bottom of your shoes.

I mean, this is this, these are all analogies, but you can imagine what the real world things are in in your body.

25:43

And so sunlight, major Zeitgeber for insulin, sorry for a circadian rhythm and all of these things that we talked about insulin resistance, all that needs to really be there as a strong signal in the morning when as soon as you get up.

25:59

And so it's, it's very important for that to happen.

It would it, I'll tell you what it does.

It does two things.

Number one is it causes a cortisol spike that goes up very, very high and it allows the majority of the cortisol that you need every day to be front loaded at the beginning of the day and not, you know, chronically being secreted throughout the day to get to that level.

26:26

In other words, you have to have a certain amount of cortisol secrete in your body every single day for your body to do what it needs to do.

It's better to get that front loaded up front so everything's running for the rest of the day and have less of it being secreted.

If you have chronic cortisol secretion being secreted throughout the day, that leads to a number of issues and a number of problems.

26:48

That's that's the first reason.

By the way, what that does is it also sets you up for a nice melatonin peak 14 hours later, which is going to be tremendous for your sleep.

So if you want to know how to sleep really well at night, the best thing to do is to look back 14 hours before you want to go to bed, and that's when you get your maximum light exposure.

27:11

And when I say maximum light exposure, I'm not talking about get up and turn on the lights.

That's about 100 lux I'm talking.

They're so dim, right?

They seem right.

But then if you go to try to turn one on outside in the day, you're like, oh, it produces almost no light at.

All exactly, you know, we're talking 100,000 lux.

27:28

When you're outside, that's where you really need to be.

That's where the circadian rhythm is looking for.

It's been primed to look for that.

So the the other thing I wanted to mention about this, and this is very surprising to a lot of people, and a lot of people don't understand this, is we have very good data that shows that when you wake up, going outside, getting bright light into your eyes is great for your circadian rhythm.

27:51

Yeah, we just talked about that.

But what many people don't realize is that bright light leaking into your bedroom in the hour to 20 minutes before you wake up.

It is actually even more beneficial.

There are studies that show that this what they called Don simulation improves cognition, improves well-being a reduces what we call sleep inertia.

28:16

What is that?

What is sleep inertia?

We It's a funny term for something that we all know intuitively.

It's when the alarm goes off and you're like, I really don't want to get out of bed this morning and you sort of go back to sleep.

If you want to eliminate or get rid of much of that, there is a study that shows that exposing your eyes, even with your eyes closed, OK, having that light coming into your bedroom and slowly illuminating it over a period of time can actually have that benefit.

28:44

In fact, there are lamps that you can buy.

So here, here's the one thing where we fall off the tracks.

I said you don't need to buy anything.

I mean.

Everybody wants.

To know these, you can always hack, you know, if you want.

You don't need to buy this, but if you.

This is why we'll talk about daylight saving here shortly.

29:00

They've done studies where they, when they provide dawn simulating lamps that there was in this in a randomized controlled way, there was improved cognition.

I mean, who doesn't want improved cognition in a, in a world where we're we're dying of dementia, improved cognition, better well-being and a less depression and also a reduction in the sleep inertia.

29:23

I, I mean, these are all reasons why if you want to live a natural life, that it's really beneficial that the sun be up at or even before you generally wake up.

Can I ask a question here about this because so I've for me, one of the things I realized early on was rural living for me was going to allow me to my.

29:46

I always joke with people, if you can't walk outside your door naked in the morning, then you probably live too close to your neighbors, you know, but but I've got a eastern facing window and so like this morning, you know, I'm I'm opening my eyes to peak.

Is the sun over the horizon yet or not?

30:02

Once it's over the horizon, I tend to get up, but I'm experiencing all that dawn light.

I'm curious your thoughts on so many people got so into this stuff.

You know, they're always wearing the orange glasses and they're so afraid of the blue light and all of that, which I understand.

But they're really big on the blackout shades.

30:18

And anytime I've used those, like in a hotel for instance, I find it very jarring to go from black cave to I peel those open now it's morning.

And another thing is that it's a hard sell for me, the idea that it's not good for me to see the moonlight and the Starlight.

30:34

Like I also have southern facing windows just at my wife and I had our crown.

So, so I've got, you know, Starlight falling on my face and I can see the moon throughout its phase, you know, at night.

And I, I think there's probably something good about that.

But the idea of blacking it out, I understand some people are going to be in circumstances where that's, you know, they got a street light right outside or something like that.

30:54

But if you were optimally, what I'm hearing from you is the blackout curtains actually would reduce that dawn light, which would be beneficial to initiating this cortisol spike, something I've talked.

32:14

It would.

And I completely agree with you.

There are some people that for that particular situation, that's what they need to do.

You know, I've I've talked about the importance of getting lights into your eyes in the morning.

Equally as important is avoiding lights in the evening time and when you're going to bed.

32:31

I mean, I can tell you when I do call at night and I have to be in the hospital and I might be sleeping in the call room, that's when you start to realize how bright those LE DS on the monitor are.

And the little LED on this thing over there and the little LED on, I mean, it could really lighten up the room.

32:48

And they love to use a blue one, right?

They love to.

Put exactly light on every tape.

You want to put tape over all this stuff?

Say, you know, I travel with gaffe tape because it doesn't leave any residue.

And it's like, OK on all of the, the, you know, if I'm in a hotel, it's like on the TV, on the phone, on the, on the fire detector, like everything needs a little bit of tape.

33:07

Yeah.

So here's the here's the interesting thing that I found out in a study.

I didn't do the study, but I read the study is what they found is that the more somebody exposes their eyes to bright light in the morning, the less sensitive their retina is to that light at night and the less effect that that light at night has on the circadian rhythm.

33:28

So it's, it's really interesting as we start to, to delve into this, we start to see that there are things that sort of mixed together.

So bright light exposure in the morning, avoiding light at night.

The more you do 1, the easier it is to do the other.

Wow.

33:44

But no, you're absolutely right that the ideal thing would be for those blackout curtains to raise themselves at about 3:00 in the morning, so that anything after that would come in beautifully.

Yeah, wow, that makes so much sense.

I'm curious about maybe it's too early if I'm, if I'm saying this too early, you push me out a little here, but there's so many people wearing sunglasses all the time.

34:08

More I think to me it just seems like more of a fashion statement than it is about like, it's the cool, it's cool, you know, But you know, are they signalling to their body that it's cloudy, low light, dark outside?

Like if somebody's chronically wearing sunglasses, do we know like.

34:26

I've never been able to.

Get a clear answer on this, if this is something that people should avoid or not.

Especially, you know, there's so many colors.

So obviously they're allowing different wavelengths of light.

But I see a lot of black and Gray sunglass lenses that to me, it's like I put them on.

It's like, oh, it's overcast.

34:42

Yeah, I would say that the data seems to indicate, and again, this was that study that was published, Sean Kane, he was one of the authors.

Dark Days, Bright Nights, really interesting data.

They used a little device that basically tracked lights and they put it on these people and they they monitor and they followed them and they were able to actually see who died and who didn't die.

35:04

And what they found was really interesting is they actually map this out from the different hours of the day.

They could see that in for every single hour of the day.

If you were exposed to the greater than 90% of the light for your population, what would that do to your mortality?

35:22

Mortality, OK.

And what they found was that after about 9:00 or 10:00 at night, if you were exposed to light after that until about 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, you had a above 1.0 chance of of dying in a particular amount of time.

35:40

Anytime after that, the higher the exposure to light was, the less chance you had of dying.

So just based on that, you know, notwithstanding the 1980s song, I wear my sunglasses at night.

That's actually a very good thing to do in the day.

35:56

Wearing sunglasses is basically taking you from a place where you're actually getting the benefit of those bright days and making it less effective.

So I would say that the daytime is the last place that you would want to be wearing sunglasses and, and at night wearing sunglasses.

36:12

I'll tell you where I I recommend people wearing sunglasses.

It's, this is a little obscure, but it's usually a red eye from Los Angeles to London.

It's usually about 6:30 local London time when you're flying over the Atlantic Ocean where your circadian rhythm is still 2 in the morning and the flight attendant tells everybody to open the windows.

36:29

The bright light comes in and it's 2:30 in the morning for you from a circadian rhythm standpoint, and you're trying to advance your circadian rhythm, and light in your eyes at 2:30 in the morning is going to do the opposite of that.

So that's when I tell them, you know, make like you're a celebrity and put sunglasses on.

36:45

Always follow what the flight attendant tells you to do, but put the sunglasses on.

How adaptable is our circadian rhythm that resetting itself?

How quickly can it do that for those of us who travel across time zones?

I mean, we all know how challenging and jarring it can be.

And are there any tips for making that transition easier?

37:04

Yeah.

So there is a, a wonderful graph that everyone should look at and it has to do with the phase shift on the Y axis and on the X axis it is the the time of day.

And this is for light, this is for melatonin.

37:19

You can look at it and, and basically what happens is this, I can tell you what it looks like is the closer you are to 4:00 in the morning, the the more dramatically things shift in terms of light.

The closer you are to about four or 5:00 in the evening, maybe 6:00 in the evening, the more dramatic melatonin will have a shift.

37:39

So let's talk about that a little bit.

Melatonin taken at night is going to advance your circadian rhythm.

Things are going to happen more quickly.

This is what you want to do when you're traveling E is take melatonin closer to about 6 O clock in the evening and you can probably, probably within a day jump maybe about two or three time zones if you do that correctly.

37:59

If you're just talking about avoiding sunlight and and having bright light in your eyes, you're talking more about maybe 1 day per day or one time zone per day.

Generally speaking, people have difficulty when they travel east and not when they travel West.

38:16

And the reason for that is what we've already talked about, people, circadian rhythms are actually longer than 24 hours.

And so it's easier to make something that's already longer even longer.

So when you're traveling W you, you have no problem with that.

You probably have experience going West if you're going to Hawaii from the United States after a day or two.

38:34

I live in Maine so coming home is always challenging.

Shell yeah.

So this is what you do.

Here's here's the the randomized controlled trial data that was done years ago that is proven to work.

And you shouldn't have a problem if you just do this very simple thing when you're travelling.

E #1 is and and this was a study that was done looking at people travelling from San Francisco to London.

38:54

These are people that were living in London.

They ship them out to San Francisco and they did this randomized control trial.

So this is what they did.

They gave everybody in the intervention group 5 milligrams of the immediate release melatonin at 6:00 PM San Francisco time, three days before they travelled east.

39:12

So three days before travel, at 6:00 PM, every single evening for the three days that you're there, take 5 milligrams of melatonin, immediate release.

Then you fly and then when you finally arrive in London, you take again for another three or four days, 5 milligrams of melatonin right before you would, you know, culturally go to bed.

39:33

So at 11:00, ten o'clock London time, take your 5 milligrams of melatonin immediate release.

So a total of 6 or 7 days, three days before you travel, another three to four days after you travel, 6:00 PM before you travel local time, you know, 9/10, 11:00 at night, local time after you arrive home.

39:51

That was able to practically eliminate jet lag.

Wow, wow.

Yeah.

Wow, that's fascinating.

So try that next time and see if that works.

I absolutely will.

Yeah.

I'm fascinated by this whole idea of what time it is in general.

40:07

I, I did some work in my past with sundials, just learning a little bit about what natural time is and how, you know, it's like if you read the Bible and your, your cons, they're saying in the third hour, the, the third watch of the night or, you know, the 6th hour and you're like, what's the 6th hour?

40:24

It's noon.

You know, it's like, but we have fallen off of that cause the, the day on the, on the sundial is 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM and that's, it's that everyday.

And so the hours are longer hours in the summer and they're shorter hours in the winter, but they run this six to six.

40:40

But then we've gotten on to civil time, and that means that noon on my watch is almost never noon outside when the sun's actually culminated on the, you know, on the Meridian line in the South.

And so.

So we've kind of like lost track of what time it even is.

40:57

It's gotten kind of confusing.

Obviously there's a sense in that so that people don't have to have different time in each city, but locally, but it's led to us losing track of time.

Right.

And this gets us into the whole discussion of daylight saving time.

You know, initially at the turn of the last century, it was about saving money.

41:16

It was about, you know, getting the trains in on time because for the first time we were actually able to travel through a time zone in in in a very short amount of time.

Obviously in the jet age, this is a big deal.

So this is the this is the bottom line.

The bottom line is when you go to daylight saving time, when you turn the hour ahead, what you're essentially doing is you are making it more likely that when you wake up at a particular clock time that you're going to not have sunlight.

41:45

OK, That's the the bottom line.

It's done this way on purpose.

It's taking the hour of sunlight in the morning and it's and it's basically attaching it at the end of the day.

Why would we do this?

Well, you don't need to illuminate as much When you do that, you have more time to do business transactions because people driving home from work will be more likely to go into a store if it's light outside than if it's dark.

42:11

Because when it's dark outside, it's some people might feel that it's it's not as a safe.

So these there's a whole host of reasons why they do this.

Obviously if you army.

Thing I didn't realize it was like social engineering like that.

Oh, it it is.

In fact, if you look at, you know, in the last 50 years, every single time this has come up in the US Congress, there are very specific lobbies that have lobbied for this to happen.

42:37

And it's, it's no secret.

You can look this up.

It's not like I'm trying to conjecture who the lobbies are there.

It's well documented who they are, who they were. 711, by the way, was a big part of that lobby in 2000.

I think it was, I think it was 2010 around there.

42:54

I have to look back exactly at the day.

But we expanded the time that we have daylight saving, instead of it being in April to till August or September, I should say, it got expanded to March to October.

In fact, it was the candy lobby that wanted to have it after Halloween.

43:15

So that's why we are now the first weekend look there.

There was a 2016 study that was done by JP Morgan Chase.

You can look this up.

They actually looked at Los Angeles and compared it to Phoenix.

You may know this.

In Phoenix, there is no time, right?

43:31

Yeah, they don't change your time.

And so they wanted to know what happened to retail sales.

This is back in 2016, so this is 10 years ago.

But they found that there was a 1% increase in sales when in Los Angeles compared to Phoenix when they went to daylight saving.

43:48

And then when they went back to Standard Time in the fall, there was a 3 1/2% reduction in retail transactions in, in Los Angeles compared to Phoenix.

So they put that all together, they put out a, a study and they said, look at the time, there was actually some political movement in California to get rid of daylight saving and go to Standard Time.

44:09

And their position was to their clients who had, you know, asked them for the study was that this was not going to be revenue neutral when they when they did this.

It's an economic stimulus that that's really detestable to me, you know, like because there I'm got to assume there's health consequences.

44:26

Is it true?

I've heard that there's more cardiovascular events and things like that.

Is that accurate?

OK.

So there's two aspects that we have to talk about.

There's the actual changing of the time.

And you're absolutely correct when you change the time for the first couple of days after, as they've seen in some studies, they've seen an increase in heart attacks and things and then for others not.

44:45

But I'm not even going to get into that because everyone is pretty clear that it's best to not have any time changes.

Where I'm going to ask is, is it better to have that light in the morning or is it better to have that light in the evening?

And I think based on our conversation that we've had, you can probably guess where I would prefer to have it.

45:01

But it's not just my preference.

I'm actually a night owl, by the way.

If it's in the morning, that's just Standard Time.

Yes.

And so savings time is where they've tacked it on the other end because they've bumped it forward, OK, Correct.

OK.

So is the is this discussion about locking in Standard Time or locking in savings time?

45:22

Well, there are two bills in the Congress.

One has already passed the House, and that is the Save Our Sunlight bill.

I think I'm getting it correct.

The other one has to do with kids.

They're just funny names.

But basically, yeah, there's there's one bill that has already passed the House that is going to say no more time changes.

45:39

It's going to be permanent daylight saving all year round.

OK.

And that one's already passed the House.

It's it's running into trouble in the Senate for good reason.

There is also another bill in the House that is the OP that that is similar in that it eliminates all the time change, but it says it's permanent Standard Time the whole year round, no light, no more daylight saving.

46:00

So you'd realize that that bill is an anathema to retail because they've spent the better part of it last century basically meticulously increasing the amount of time during the year that we are having during daylight saving.

And that would go to basically eliminate it.

46:15

It's gone.

Yeah, right.

So a lot of people get concerned.

They think that the extra days or extra hours of of sunlight that they have in the day is related to somehow what we do to the clock.

It's not it has to do with the the rotation of the planet, the fact that it's on a tilt and it goes around the sun and there's no Congress or a clock that's going to change that.

46:37

The question really is, is we're going to get rid of that tilt.

Yeah, Yeah.

The the tilt called in and they said they're not impressed.

So yeah, so the so here's, here's a really interesting experiment that's actually been done.

And I want you to think about this.

46:52

If you look at a particular time zone, which is, you know, it's the distance that it takes the sun to go one hour, right?

So let's look at, for instance, the Eastern Time zone.

Since you're there on the east, let's look at Boston, let's look at Indiana.

47:08

They're both in the Eastern Time zone.

Boston is way far in the eastern portion of that time zone.

Indiana is way far in the western portion of that time zone.

So what does that mean?

That means that they actually have the same clock at every single time of the day.

47:25

But where is the sun going to rise first?

The sun is going to rise first in Boston, and about an hour later it's going to rise in Indiana.

So here's a great experiment that we can do.

We can look at and compare the health consequences of people who live in Boston and likewise all the way up and down that time zone compared to people who live in the western portion of that time zone, people who live in Indiana.

47:50

And that's that's essentially exactly the same question that we're asking is what's going to happen if we all of a sudden decide that we're going to have the clock turned an hour ahead and leave it there?

What it means is, is that we're going to be like Indiana, Daylight saving is like Indiana, and Standard Time is like Boston.

48:10

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Sure, of course.

OK.

So when they do this and we're not just talking about the Eastern Time zone, we're not just talking about the central or the mountain or the Pacific.

In fact, we're not even just talking about the United States.

They see this exactly in in China.

48:26

They see this in in Germany, by the way, China and India, by the way, have no time zones.

They have just one time zone for the whole country.

So it's very easy to see there's a lot of extremes there in the whole country.

And what they see is this, that there is an increased risk of diabetes, There is an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

48:43

There are even some studies that show an increased risk of cancer Daniel.

When we compare people who live on the western portion of time zones and compare them to the eastern portion of of the same time zone, but.

These are the candy sales.

The candy sales though, are good.

48:59

I know, I know, I know, you know and.

We talk about things we can talk about.

Processed candies.

We're, we're, we're, we're, you know, anyway, so some people might say, well, Boston is a very different population than Indiana.

Well, you're right.

So what they've actually done is they've looked at the line itself, at the, at the border of the line, and they've looked at communities that are very similar on one side of the line versus other.

49:25

Because obviously when you get to Indiana, as soon as you cross over on that line, you're now in the eastern portion of the next time zone.

You have almost identical solar time, but you have an hour difference.

Exactly.

And that's, that's actually even more representative of what the question is, is should we turn the hour ahead?

49:44

And the answer is you see the same thing.

In fact, it's not even that for every, I believe every six degrees in the in one study that looked at there, they could show for every six degrees of of longitude that you move, there was an increased risk of these diseases, which are well, a tide to circadian rhythm disturbances.

50:08

So imagine you get up now you're, you're an American.

You have a job.

You get up in the morning and you get ready for work and then you go to work.

And when you get to work, you park in an underground parking structure.

You go into an office that is, you know, got low E glass LED bulbs and it's a dark day inside that that building because the lights are not as bright.

50:29

You've got about an hour perhaps between when you get up in the morning, get ready, get all your stuff ready to go and then get into your car and go.

And so there's this window period in the morning where people have actually have limited access to bright light outside.

50:45

And what I'm saying here, you know, people say, what's the difference?

It's just an hour.

We're just doing it by an hour.

What possibly big problem could that 'cause if it's enough for a huge amount of population where that now that that very limited hour that you have in the morning is now devoid of light?

52:21

That could be a difference because again, it's on a curve.

And so now, you know, everybody sort of has this for maybe a month of the year.

Now it's going to be 3 months of the year because of the way the sun comes up and the sun goes down.

And this is different in all parts of the country.

Like for instance, in in Baren Springs, Michigan, in the western part of Michigan, which is way up there, like they call it Michiana, right?

52:43

That is the severe western portion of that time zone.

They've got the sun coming up at like 9:30 in the morning if you were to go to Standard Time.

Sorry if you.

Were going to go to daylight saving time in the winter time.

So imagine, you know, kids are off to school, they they get up in the morning, they're trying to catch the bus, they go to their first period and then as they're going to second period, that's when the sun is coming up.

53:06

That's that's what we're talking about with permanent daylight saving time.

It's it's funny to think about because it's like our day has been tethered to civil time.

So like if I was living in a place like that and I get up because I've got to get to work at a certain time, so I wake up at a certain time.

53:25

So this is all affecting me.

But if I'm like a homeless guy living in a tent and I don't have a schedule, it's just the same.

Like this is all made-up, but everybody's following the made-up schedule and so hence it has the health impact.

It's not like they can actually slow the sundown.

53:40

So this is like arbitrary stuff, but because we have schedules that we keep, it affects us because we change our habits around the civil time.

That's right.

I mean, I mean, as a physician, you don't want me rolling into clinic when whenever I feel like the sun's coming up, but I want to come in you've.

Got the snow, people. 10 people in the waiting room.

53:59

I mean, the, the trains have have to run on time, the planes have to run on time.

Otherwise we don't have a society.

So I mean, this idea that, you know, well, people will say, well, why don't we just start schools an hour later?

Well, you could do that, but you're basically reinventing Standard Time.

I mean, why, why move all of these things when you really the problem is, is that what we really need is the sun being up honestly slightly before we wake up.

54:21

And in fact, to your point, Daniel, you talked about, you know, just being out there and, and let's say on a desert island, when people go into nature, they've actually done these studies when people go into nature and they let them just free run, you know, no external lights, no artificial lights, nothing like that.

54:38

You're basically the sun is regulating your circadian rhythm.

They tend to basically wake up just before sunrise or sorry, just after sunrise.

And So what we're seeing here is that the, if you, if you were to take that as being the most healthy experience, then what you really want is sun coming up slightly before you wake up.

55:00

And, and, you know, people talk about, well, I don't want the sun.

You know, hey, look, if you do Standard Time in the summertime, we're going to have the the sun coming up at like 4:30 in the morning.

Bring it, you know, great.

I mean, first of all, you're inside, your eyes are closed.

55:16

You're not going to even know that the sun is coming up at 4:30 in the morning, but those photons, when it gets brighter, will start to penetrate your eyelid, will go to the back of your eyes, will tell your body it's time to wake up.

And so when you do wake up, you're going to feel far more refreshed and you're going to have less of that sleep inertia.

55:33

So I mean, I, I think it's, it's a it to me, it's a no brainer.

And I've been, I've been someone that's that's really tried to emphasize this.

I have two questions that are coming up.

I'm going to put them both out there.

The first one, I want to know if, if to your knowledge, is anybody bringing these arguments to the Congress as this stuff's being talked about.

55:53

But second to that, obviously the sun is putting out a tremendous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and only some of that we see as visible light.

But but a lot of this is important to us.

If you have glass that's filtering out, let's say ultraviolet light, is the light coming in the window that visible light enough to initiate these, this cortisol spike?

56:17

Or do I need UV?

You know what I'm saying?

Like, is it matter if I'm outside, or it's a screen, or it's a glass window, or is it just visible light that matters to this part of our circadian rhythm?

It is visible light, but the light inside your home is not nearly enough.

You need to get outside.

56:33

We're talking 3400 lux maybe in a bright room.

We're talking 100,000 lux outside on a bright sunny day.

So it's when the sun is coming up and and and you know, there's nothing obstructing it 50,100 thousand.

And this is all time based, right?

56:49

So what I would say is that it would take you 50 times longer to get the effect of 1000 lux than it would to get the effect of 50,000 lux.

Generally speaking, people to avoid depression, you know they need about 3000 lux hours.

57:07

OK, and what does that mean?

That means if, you know, you do these satellites where the sun is not coming up, you're getting up in the morning, you're off to work, there is no sun.

How do you avoid seasonal affective disorder?

Well, you can go online for 30 bucks and buy a satellite.

What is that?

It's a 10,000 lux light.

57:23

And since you need about 3000 lux hours, you put it on for about 1/3 of an hour, which is about 20 minutes.

And that's exactly what we do.

So it's what I'm trying to say here is that it's linearly integrated.

It's, it's time integrated.

So that what that means is that the brighter light that you are observing, the less amount of time you need to be in under that condition to get the same benefit.

57:46

So it's, it's going to be much, much better for you to go outside.

It's going to be much faster for you to get that effect if you go outside than if you stay inside and try to get it somehow inside.

But this effect you were talking about before, like the dawn light, if that's coming into my bedroom, initiating my cortisol in the morning like that light does, it doesn't matter that it's being filtered by, filtered by.

58:05

Glass.

No.

Oh, yeah.

OK, I see what you're saying.

I apologize.

Yeah, No, it doesn't.

So even if you've got low E glass, which we'll talk about later, that's filtering out the infrared light.

It's the visible.

It's specifically the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells at the back of your eye that are picking up these visible photons that have nothing to do with infrared as far as we know, that's actually causing this to change.

58:27

We we know this is working by the way, because we can put artificial lights as part of the the Dawn simulator lamps and it has the same effect.

Now I'm not saying that that artificial light is OK, I'm just saying for this particular aspect we need visible light.

OK, cool.

58:42

And then regarding the health impacts of this, is that being discussed at the congressional level or are they just looking at this as an economic stimulus, you know?

Well, it depends on who, who's who's coming up there and talking.

So I can tell you that this is not a partisan issue.

58:59

There are there are Republicans and Democrats that are in favor and against the bills.

So it's it's not a political, it's not a partisan political debate.

It's more of a northern state.

Southern states debate.

The northern states are against permanent daylight saving for obvious reason, and the southern states are are are for it.

59:20

So if and and you might, it might not become clear as to why.

Realize that the difference between the amount of sun that you get over the year is is much smaller.

The differences are much smaller in the southern states.

It's not really a big deal for them.

Whereas in the northern states that varies dramatically.

59:39

They get much more sun in the summertime, much less sun in the winter time and so.

You know, our summer solstice here in Maine is almost, it's about 16 hour day, 8 hour night, and then our winter solstice is about an 8 hour day, 16 hour night.

So it's a pretty big swing.

And you know, for people who don't know this, you go down to the equator, sunrise is at six, that's at six.

1:00:00

It's like, Yep.

And it's every day, every day.

And it's almost a little like, oh geez, when you're used to the ships, it can be almost a little boring.

But it's extremely consistent.

So yeah, that makes sense what you're saying.

Yeah.

So your real question is, is are they, are people hearing this?

1:00:17

The answer is yes.

They're the American Academy of Sleep Medicine official position is against permanent daylight saving.

Actually, it's permanent Standard Time is what they want and they have the, the, the studies to back it up.

The California Sleep Medicine Foundation is same thing.

1:00:33

This is this is pretty much across the board.

And, and people have heard these, these arguments, but it's interesting what I have heard the opponents of the of permanent daylight saving talk about these arguments.

They do bring up the health benefits.

They don't get into the details probably because they're not very comfortable talking about it.

1:00:51

They're they're politicians and lawyers.

They're not trained as physicians.

But what they do bring up is this is something that's probably more politically robust, which is this idea of, you know, sending our kids off to school in the dark.

I think that's, that's what they're, that's what they bring up more often than some of these health issues, which are are real.

1:01:10

Yeah, I'd love to shift gears into talking a little bit about the spectrum of of sunlight and all that's contained in it.

And in particular I'm fascinated by.

So another thing about living in the Northern Tier states is that in the summertime, I mean in the winter time here, you know, I'm just stacking my wood right now, you know, four or five cords of wood I'm going to burn.

1:01:34

And I'm sitting in front of beautiful infrared light every night and I feel it as warmth soaking into me.

But I also find that even in the era of short form content that's so addictive, I can completely forget about my phone.

1:01:51

Just looking into a, it's amazing that even in this era, a fire is such an entertaining thing to look at.

But also it occurs to me, I, I was watching an interview of yours and you were talking about infrared light and you and your, the hosts were talking about, you know, different red light panels and the face masks and all those kind of things that are coming out.

1:02:11

And I was thinking to myself about the historical record, you know, whether you take a creationist or an evolutionary biology perspective or whatever, no denying humans spent almost every single night in front of a fire and that stimulus is gone now.

But that's in, that's very direct infrared.

1:02:28

It's got to be as or more powerful than a lot of these red light panels, I would suspect.

Just, you know, I know what it's like to be in my infrared sauna versus in front of a fire and, and what I felt coming off of it.

So I, I was curious if you could talk a little bit about the power of infrared and what we're learning about it.

And then also like, you know, some of these, yeah, I'm, I guess I'm curious if you know anything about the effect of fire, light and heat and you in infrared.

1:02:53

Yeah, this.

So this is really something I got excited about and something that I think we can really address that you're concerned here.

And you know the, the, the thing that I would say here is yes, certainly about 50% or more of the photons coming from the sun are in the infrared spectrum.

1:03:11

So a lot more than more than 50% are in the infrared spectrum.

And so here.

Here's.

Yeah.

So here's what we know.

Let's talk about these things step by step and we'll go from the sun down to the mitochondria level and explain why this is, this is so important and why red light may be helping.

1:03:32

But I don't think is the is the ultimate answer.

I think the ultimate answer is getting back to the sun and it'll become clear as to why.

So there is, there's something called black body radiation.

Black body radiation is a, is a, is a physics thing that basically describes if you have a, a really hot object, the type of radiation that comes off of that object.

1:03:56

And, and if you use that to describe the sun, we find that the sun does not particularly follow black body radiation distribution.

There's something weird about it.

And, and what's weird about it is we see a lot more infrared photons coming from the sun than we should normally see from a ball that size and that hot.

1:04:16

And scientists learned about this years ago.

And what there is, is there's a, what they call the photosphere around the sun.

And that photosphere essentially is full of hydride atoms.

So these are, if you can imagine, if you remember from chemistry, you've got a proton and you've got an electron spinning around it, that's hydrogen.

1:04:33

Well, you may also remember that in the outer shell there's supposed to be two electrons.

That's the happy atom.

And so if you put that electron, another electron in there, you have an H minus because you have one more electron than you have a proton.

Well, if you look at the energy that it takes to kick that that second electron out, that's called the, you know, the, the escape energy of that electron.

1:04:57

It's something in the order of about .75 electron volts.

Now think about that number.

We're going to come back to that number.

When you have a photosphere that's actually made-up of these hydride atoms around the sun, what happens essentially is that all sorts of light is coming out of the sun.

1:05:13

And any type of light that or photon that has an energy at .75 electron volts or more is going to get absorbed by that electron.

It's going to kick that electron out and it's going to generate a hydrogen neutral atom which is going to get recycled.

1:05:30

But essentially what it does, it's kind of like a low pass filter at what it allows is the photosphere allows deeper areas in the sun that are hotter and brighter to come through that photosphere.

And what you see is a shift in the distribution so that we see a lot more infrared photons coming from a sun than we would normally expect to see for this size and temperature of a sun.

1:05:53

Does that make sense?

Vaguely.

Basically what you're saying though, is that that's the working theory for why there are more.

There's more infrared than what we would expect to see from a body like that.

Exactly.

And, and, and I'm not, this is not a theory.

1:06:10

This is what I'm just, I'm just telling you.

This is what astrophysicists have well documented in textbooks since the 19. 50s and the photosphere being like an atmosphere of light and it's.

It's an atmosphere of of of hydrogen atoms that are negative exactly hydro.

So, So what we have here from the sun is a, is a distribution of light that is very rich and has a, a maximum, this is important to understand, has a maximum distribution around .75 electron volts.

1:06:38

OK, OK, now let's go to planet Earth, 93,000,000 miles away.

Our atmosphere is made-up of of a number of gases, OK, There are hydrogen gases, there's nitrogen gases, there's NN bonds, there's all of these bonds have residences in the infrared spectrum.

1:06:56

That's important to understand because when infrared light comes through the planet and hits the atmosphere, some of it is going to get absorbed because it's resonating with some of these atoms that are jiggling around.

But there's other aspects of the infrared spectrum where there's no jiggling and there's what we call a transparency window.

1:07:15

In other words, this light comes through on unhindered, unencumbered directly to the surface of the planet.

It turns out that the area of of distribution of .75 electron volts that we see in the photosphere of the planet of of the sun coming to the planet that there is a transparency window in the atmosphere that allows that light to come through without any absorption.

1:07:42

OK, these are two different heavenly.

These are two different bodies, the sun and the earth.

But we have a fortunate coincidence here where the peak of photons at .75 electron volts is made at the sun, and the Earth has an atmosphere that open, opens up and accepts it in without absorbing any of it.

1:08:04

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do.

OK, So what I what I'm saying here, I'm not, this is not a new proposal.

This is just fact.

This is not controversial.

I'm not making this stuff.

I'm not making a hypothesis.

You can look this up.

You can ask Rock, You can, you can ask any AI and it'll tell you that this is this has been standard and known for decades.

1:08:22

OK, Now we're talking about mitochondria.

And I know you had AI know you had a, an episode of a few maybe a few months ago where we talked about we looked at infrared light from the sun that's able to penetrate into the body and actually affect changes and up regulate ATP production.

1:08:41

The mitochondria.

Just really briefly, I'll there was Glenn Jeffries paper that was published last year in 2025 where he basically took people outside.

This was published in, by the way, Nature Scientific Reports.

It's a very prestigious journal.

And it showed that he could measure infrared light on the other side of a human body penetrating through the body and coming out the other side being absorbed as it went through.

1:09:06

OK, So obviously it was a very small through on the other side.

Yeah, it was a very small amount because a lot of it got absorbed, but it still was able to be detectable on the other side of a 30cm thorax.

And that's because of how long these waves are or.

Correct.

So that these wavelengths are sufficiently long enough that they're able to go through.

1:09:26

I mean, if you have you ever done this before you go into a bathroom, turn off the light in your home and put like a flashlight on your head and see what trans illuminates.

Have you ever done that before?

Put your hand over.

OK, I you have to be curious about this to see, but you'll see that even visible light.

Well, oh, yeah.

1:09:41

Oh, yeah, No, absolutely done that.

Like looking at your bones through your hands kind of a thing, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, infrared light is even even more transparent.

The human body is even more transparent to infrared light.

And they showed this in the study.

1:09:57

So this is not even controversial.

This is not, hey, I think that this happens is like they showed it.

They showed the spectrum, it was peer reviewed, it's published, it's scientific fact, infrared light.

And the maximum by the way was 850 to 880 nanometers, OK.

By the way, the the .75 electron volts, if you were to transcribe that into a nanometer, it's about 1600 nanometers.

1:10:18

So it's not exactly the same, but it's in that, that general transparency window.

All right.

We have very good observational data from Glenn Jeffries lab, other labs that show that when you expose mitochondria to red light, infrared light, there is an increase in ATP production.

1:10:42

There is an increase in carbon dioxide production, which is the result of oxidative phosphorylation metabolism in the mitochondria.

And we see a reduction in glucose which is the building product or the OR the the fuel I should say of metabolism in the mitochondria.

1:11:01

We have good.

Data in glucose because they're up regulating how much they're using.

Exactly.

So you're.

Eating that's more of that glucose at the mitochondrial level.

What we're seeing serum glucose drop.

Yeah, serum glucose drop.

1:11:18

We have good data that shows that infrared light can actually stimulate cytochrome oxidase which is complex 4 of the electron transport chain and up regulate that and many believe that this is the reason why red light therapy works.

1:11:35

OK so you and I are talking about the subtle differences and the teleological philosophical viewpoint of is our future going to be red lights and red light therapy and and things that we need to buy to be healthy or is our future our past that we simply go out into the sun and get the benefits.

1:11:55

Here is the mind blowing thing that I'm going to tell you about that we are putting together.

We just put a pre print out and the data seems to show that this is actually what's going on here.

All right, so here we go.

What we are proposing and I will talk about the evidence that we have is that electron transfer.

1:12:16

Well, we let me first of all tell you what we know.

We know that electron transfer in the mitochondria is the rate limiting step for energy production in the cell.

OK.

It's not glycolysis, it's not Krebs cycle, it's not, you know, the citric acid cycle, it's not getting the NADH or the FADH 2 to the electron.

1:12:35

None of that is the rate limiting step.

The rate limiting step is taking an A highly charged electron.

For those of you who are not aware of the electron transport chain, basically what's happening is you have very highly reduced or charged electrons and they're being passed between proton, between proteins, And at each step they lose some of their energy.

1:12:57

And that energy is harvested and coupled to pumping protons out from the matrix of the mitochondria into the intermembrane space, which then flow back and produce ATP.

But what happens is every time that electron is passed down to a lower and lower level as this, as these protons are being pumped, they're having to be transferred between one protein which is sitting in a solvent and another protein which is sitting in the solvent, and another protein which is sitting in the solvent, and another protein which is sitting in the solvent.

1:13:27

Until finally that hits the very last protein, which is cytochrome oxidase, a complex 4.

And then it gets passed on to the lowest thing that would accept that drain of an electron, which is oxygen, and it makes water.

OK.

This is essentially what happens.

1:13:42

But what I want you to imagine now to think about this, I want you to imagine a hill that these electrons are rolling down.

OK, but they're not rolling down, right?

This is the rate limiting step.

They're not rolling down.

They're actually are bumps along the way.

1:13:59

This is a this is a hill with bumps in it.

So what happens is an electron rolls down the hill and it gets stuck in a little valley, a mini valley.

And then it's got to go over that hump again to go down to the next one.

Those little humps I will call activation energies.

1:14:14

And and this is the reason why they exist.

It's because when you have an electron sitting on a protein and you want to transfer that electron to the next protein, there is what we call a reorganization energy.

Think of the reorganization energy as a barrier.

1:14:31

What has to happen here is that when you pluck off an electron from the protein, that means you have a positive charge now that is remaining and the solvent around that.

Protein move to negative range so you're leaving behind a positive.

Charge.

Exactly.

You're removing a negative charge, an electron, and so you have a positive charge sitting on the surface of this protein.

1:14:52

And so the solvents have to rearrange themselves in a way to, to, to buffer that.

And then you're putting an electron onto a, a protein, which is going to make it a negatively charged and then the solvent has to rearrange itself around that.

And so when, when we look at the activation, we're sorry, when we look at the, the, the free energy that's released from this electron, we're seeing where it starts and where it goes.

1:15:16

What we're not taking into consideration in that, in that equation, we're not taking into consideration what the solvent around it needs to do, what the membranes need to do, what the proteins and the fats and all of these.

Water.

This is cytoplasm.

What is the solvent?

All of those things, it's cytoplasm, it's water.

1:15:33

This, this reorganization energy is is known as Lambda.

It's been around for a long time.

We've known about this.

There's a inner shell, that's the inner Lambda.

And then there's the the outer shell, which is the outer Lambda.

And this was actually the the subject of Rudolf Marcus, who won the Nobel Prize in in chemistry got in 1992 for describing this exact process with parabolas, which we can talk about.

1:16:00

And it was actually shown to be the case.

So this is this is exactly what we're talking about.

So what happened was, so in other words, the regulation of these electrons as they go down that little electron transport chain are regulated by these bumps, which are determined by the reorganization energies of the solvent that's surrounding these proteins where the electrons are going.

1:16:26

Does that make sense?

Kind of, yeah.

I'm following you.

OK.

So what we are proposing is that infrared light that is able to come in from the sun through the atmosphere into the body is actually causing a harmonic vibration of the solvent around to the point that it's reducing the reorganization energy and it's reducing the activation energy.

1:16:55

And so instead of instead of having these electrons go down into a valley and wait around for a little bit and then go over again because we're excited and then go over, what we're saying is because we're able to reduce the height of those bumps, these electrons start to move more freely.

1:17:11

And because those electron movements are the rate limiting step for energy production in the mitochondria, we start to see increased ATP when infrared light is coming through.

That is basically our proposal.

Now, what is the proof of that?

When you measure the activation energy of most of the reactions on the planet that involve life, we're not just talking about humans.

1:17:36

We're not just talking about the mitochondria.

We're talking about activation or reorganization energies in all living matter on the planets.

Do you know what the range is, Daniel, of that energy in electron volts?

It's about .6 to .8 electron volts.

1:17:56

OK, so let's just let's just step back again.

I've already told you that it's well known that the sun produces an excess, based on its size and shape, of photons with the energy of about .75 electron volts.

1:18:15

I've already told you that we have an atmosphere that we live on a planet of that has a transparency window which is smack dab right in the middle.

That transparency window is .75 electron volts.

I've already told you it's well known that most of the reorganization energies of most living organisms that have electron transfer reactions is in the range of about .75 electron volts.

1:18:41

Now all of that was well known years ago, but unfortunately the people that knew that we're living in different silos.

The biologists were living in the biology silo, the chemists were living in the chemistry silo.

The, the astrophysicists were in the astrophysicists, A silo.

1:18:58

And what happened when Bob and, and Glenn and myself and Scott importantly got together as we started to notice that these things started to line up and maybe that these things actually had there was not just a coincidence.

So I will tell you in the last two years, 2 amazing papers have come out that have given tremendous evidence for what we are talking about.

1:19:22

The first piece of evidence was evidence on yeast, which is a living substance at the bottom of the ocean near a thermal vent, and this is what they found.

They found that increased temperature improved yeast's ability to grow.

1:19:40

That should not be a surprise.

You make sourdough bread, you know it.

Right.

But what they believe that is because of is because the access thermal heat moves these electrons down these bumps faster.

And because of that they have more ATP, which is the rate limiting step for growth.

1:19:58

Here's what they did in the experiment, Daniel.

They moved these this yeast away from the heat into the colder areas, but they supplemented it with infrared lights.

They were able to maintain the growth.

In other words, they showed that in a living Organism.

1:20:14

They were able to essentially they, they actually published this in their paper.

They said we were able to reduce the activation energy of these bumps by simply providing infrared lights to this yeast.

And that was peer reviewed and published.

1:20:30

I don't believe the authors of that paper understood the bigger implication for us lived in the built environment.

OK, Now a paper that was just published this year, in fact in May of this year, while we were still, you know, cutting, getting together and looking at this fascinating paper is what they were able to do is they excited and this is not a living substance.

1:20:53

This is this is we're now talking about inanimate objects.

They had a they had a surface of gold and of course electrons are are floating around the surface of gold.

They're able to excite the electron and they tried to direct that electron to another substance, but there was a activation barrier in between that substance, which they knew.

1:21:14

They built it this way.

What they were able to do is they were able to shine infrared lights at the precise frequency that they knew would be harmonic with the isolation of ACH bond so that it would harmonize and it would cause the same sort of thing to happen.

1:21:32

And what they were able to do and they, they did this in femtoseconds, at like 150 femtoseconds, you will see this, it's flat, there's no electron transfer.

And as soon as they gave this pulse of light, which is essentially equal to 41, sorry, .41 electron volts in this particular example, there was a dramatic improvement, dramatic improvement in the electron transferability to the substance on the gold surface, essentially proving that, yes, infrared light can be used in electron transfer reactions to improve and reduce the activation energy.

1:22:08

So we've seen this now in inanimate objects.

We've seen this in living substances.

I believe that there are multiple frequencies, multiple frequencies, multiple substances in the electron transport chain, all of which would benefit from a broad range of infrared lights.

1:22:34

That being said, I could see how a particular wavelength in the infrared spectrum may actually be able to harmonize with a particular area of that electron transport chain and allow the the the the electrons to move faster.

But I believe that what we need, what we were, what we were designed for or evolved, however you want to think about it, what we have been used to for generations until the last maybe 50 years, is that we need infrared lights to regulate, not to produce, but to regulate the electron transport chain and the amount of energy that we're getting.

1:23:12

I would go for as far as to say is that because society has been living inside more and more because we have switched our lighting from incandescent to LED, which specifically gets rid of infrared light.

And because we have coated our windows with low E glass so that we don't have to spend a lot of money to cool down a building that's hot.

1:23:33

Because infrared lights coming through.

We have either on purpose or inadvertently essentially isolated ourselves from the precisely the same wavelengths that our body is required to have in order to appropriately regulate the electron transport chain, which is immensely important for a whole host of chronic diseases.

1:23:55

So can I try to?

Can I propose?

That in a simpler way and see if if I'm on track here for for those who are chemically chemistry challenged.

I'm hearing first thing I want to go back to is that I think it's just amazing your entire body is translucent to infrared light from the sun.

1:24:12

That's just fascinating.

Wow.

But second, what I'm hearing is something like the built environment is down regulating your cellular metabolism.

Yes, that's that's a shocking and frightening realization.

1:24:30

Hopefully that kind of gets people's attention because, you know, my work for two decades has been go outside and I and what one of the things I sometimes, you know, my buddy Ben Greenfield and I were talking recently and he's like a biohacking guy and he has a film that came out recently.

1:24:46

And in the film you see like a lot of the things that he and other folks are doing to like create like optimization.

And so much of it I look at and I like, scratch my head, 'cause I'm like, man, you get all that outside, you know?

And it's like a lot like the amount of not just money spent, but the amount of technology and work required to try to replicate.

1:25:04

Yes.

What were designed and built around indoors, it's all it gets so cumbersome that it's like almost, it's like not worth it.

It just makes it more worth it and.

Let me let me put another layer on this.

Because of the infrared light that we get from the sun reflects off of leaves and trees which are highly reflective of infrared light.

1:25:26

So in other words, you're going to get three times much infrared light if you just go outside and there are trees and grass in your environment.

In fact, in fact, the amount of infrared light there.

There was a study that was done that really caught my attention.

It was a COVID study.

It was from Brazil, 30 subjects, and they show that those getting 29 watts per square meter intensity of 940 nanometer light for 50 minutes a day for seven days reduced the length of stay by 30%.

1:25:57

There was another study in the intensive period.

Yeah, this is in a hospital.

Yeah.

There was another study where they reduced the length of stay in the intensive care unit using infrared light.

So I believe this works.

And what I wanted to do was I took a, a little light sensor again, Sean Kane, a friend of mine, he's actually gone into sort of a business where people are wanting to measure light because they're doing studies on this.

1:26:21

He actually has a little sensor that I, I've, I've actually had it's called the my IMI and then EYE and it can measure infrared lights and measure rhodopsin photo, all this sort of things.

And what I was able to find sitting in my dining room, which has a whole wall of glass, albeit low E glass, and then measuring the amount of infrared light going outside under a tree in the shade, one of those environments had 500 times more infrared lights and it was not my dining room.

1:27:02

So how much, so how much is coming off of my infrared sauna or one of these red light walls versus what's coming out of the sun?

Because before, like when we were talking about photons and the lux, I mean, it's, it's obviously not comparable.

So do we still see benefits from these lower yield devices?

1:27:21

I mean, it sounds like the real solution is that it happens outdoors, but many of us live in artificial canyons in the city or we we live in light poor environments or we live in extreme latitudes.

So I'm trying to like leave room for the fact that some people are going to want to have a technological intervention and then if we're lucky, blessed or put ourselves in the right circumstances.

1:27:43

You know, I do.

My wife and I just go out on our deck and 10 and 10 on either side is kind of our morning routine, you know, getting that sun on us.

But do these machines create light enough light?

Yeah, I, I am also very interested in photobiomodulation in these lights too.

1:28:00

Obviously not every one of my patients in the intensive care unit can get outside.

Some of them are too unstable.

Obviously some people, you know, because of their lives and their situation, their circumstances don't have access to that.

So, so I'm not opposed to it, but you know, the, the, this infrared sauna gives off very not near infrared light, but but far infrared light.

1:28:22

So if you want, if you have the option to, the best option is to get outside.

That's going to give you the, the, the, the light that is designed perfectly for the body that you have.

But if you can't do that, certainly there are studies that show that, you know that even red light at a particular wavelength used for 15 minutes a day for seven days is beneficial.

1:28:48

Look, I think about it this way, Daniel.

This is how I think about it. 203 hundred years ago, when the British were sailing around the world and people went on these British ships, they had to store food.

And unfortunately they didn't know this.

But the way that they stored food at the time was in a way that completely made the food devoid of vitamin C, no vitamin C whatsoever.

1:29:11

And so, you know, no surprise people got scurvy as a result of, of that.

And then they figured out that this is what was going on.

And so they started to have a ration of lime juice.

And lo and behold, the lime juice did very well.

People didn't get scurvy as much.

1:29:28

I, I guess what I'm saying here is that we in society are on a British ship and instead of having scurvy, we have a chronic deficiency of sunlight.

Now the alternative is we can have our ration of lime juice and that would be these red light things.

1:29:46

But I guess the, the analogy to sunlight here would be just having a balanced diet.

Like if you were to have a balanced diet in the 1st place on that ship, or you find out a way to preserve the food that didn't get rid of the vitamin C, that would be sunlight.

That would be the natural cure for that.

1:30:02

But, but it may not be available, right.

So I would say that lime juice is better than nothing.

What's even better than lime juice and eating a diet that's devoid of vitamin C is eat a diet that has vitamin C.

So I, I don't want to be forced into a situation where you have to choose one versus the other.

1:30:20

I see both as solutions.

I see one as a much cheaper solution as as I started this whole podcast with, with you, I'm looking for solutions that people can do that are very inexpensive and that can give and deliver the best.

And here's a situation where you're going to pay a lot of money to get something that I believe at the end of the day is not as good as getting outside into the sunlight.

1:30:43

Yeah, yeah.

And there's like, for me, there's like a spiritual component to this too, because it's like this idea of working with this incredible creation we are blessed to be in or being like, no, I'm going to create my own artificial version indoors.

And, and like you said, I understand the need for it in certain circumstances, but for most of us, it just seems so much simpler.

1:31:05

And it seems also like this is like what you just described right now is frontier science.

It sounds like, but but who we don't know what else we're missing.

So when we get the red light and we don't know what we're not getting from the red light that we later on realize, Oh, and it, it's just like you constant technological fixes for the problems caused by technology.

1:31:26

You know, we keep we're like stuck in this loop of the technology creates a problem.

So we create a new technology and the more we do it, the further away we're, we're coming troglodytes as we get further and further away into The Cave and from the sun and from the fresh air and all these things.

And, and that's what's funny too is because earlier in the 8 pillars, you brought up fresh air, for instance.

1:31:43

So it's like, OK, now I've got my red light down in the basement, but I'm not getting that fresh air or, or, you know, how do I, what are the, you know, you look at the blue zones kind of thing and you're like, well, all those conditions are present.

Fresh air, sunlight, community, faith, you know, all these things are like in one and nobody's thinking about the like, oh, I got to fit all those in.

1:32:02

They're just the life versus trying to like, OK, I've got 87 things I got to fit in today.

To try to like, hit my health goals right gets very overwhelming.

So if you go outside, you're going to get sunlight, you're going to get fresh air, hopefully if you're in a good area and you're more likely to get exercise.

1:32:17

So you can already see here how it, it sort of helps itself.

I, you know, I'm, I'm working in the ICU today.

We, we've taken our patient outside already.

He's in an intensive care unit.

We've wheeled him outside.

He's already gotten his 15 to 20 minutes of sunlight because I think that's actually more beneficial than just putting red light on people.

1:32:36

So you're right, there is a spiritual aspect to this.

I'll give you an example.

Years ago, maybe in the 80s, early 90s, scientists discovered that vitamin E and vitamin A, people that had diets rich in vitamin E&A seem to benefit people with lung cancer.

1:32:54

And so they thought exactly as, as we just talked about here, with this medical reductionism.

So they extracted it, they gave it in high concentrations.

And four or five years later when they did the studies, they found that that giving high doses of vitamin E and vitamin A to lung cancer patients actually made them worse.

1:33:11

In fact, they had to stop the study early.

So what was it?

It's vitamin E&A is is packaged in vegetables and in fruits in a way that was beneficial for human beings.

But when you extracted them out of that environment and gave it to them in high doses, it had the opposite effect.

1:33:31

I think this is a really interesting point that I really want to make is too often we have been primed to look at ingredients as they are.

And in other words, there's none of this idea of Gestalt biology where the sum is, you know, the, the, the, the sum of the parts is less than the actual total, right?

1:33:51

The total is greater than sum of its parts.

It's just stalled.

So here's a situation where you can look at the ingredient list, but it may not tell you everything.

It's you have to look at how it's packaged.

And this is the thing that this is the truism that I would say in terms of nutrition is the closer we get to eating something the way it looks naturally, the better it's going to be for us.

1:34:14

The the the.

In other words, when you walk into a supermarket, you should buy generally the things on the outside of the supermarket and not the things on those aisles that are running down the middle of it.

I there's also, it's just, it's just like Tower of Babel thing too, where we're like, well, I'm not satisfied with what's here.

1:34:36

I'm going to build my own version and it's going to be better and then it's always worse, you know?

There's theme that runs all through the scriptures.

Yeah, we just keep doing and we're still doing it right.

And it's like, on that note, no pressure to answer this question.

You can pass, but I'm just going to frame it anyway up for you.

1:34:52

When you look at the big picture of what's going on in our, for instance, it's like the average person's afraid to go in the sun.

They forget that people have always been in the sun.

You know, I lifeguarded at the oceans for five or six years, I think five years, never wore sunblock one time out out there, raised platform in the sun everyday.

1:35:12

I'm almost 50.

It's like, I don't know, people told me it was going to destroy my skin.

It did not.

But when you look at this, it's like the food in all of those aisles that the changing to permanent daylight savings, like almost every single place we look.

You couldn't be blamed for thinking it was like a nefarious plot against you right now.

1:35:33

And I don't think that it's a bunch of people in a room with a nefarious plot, but I'm curious if at a spiritual level, what, what I, I, I've gotten to this place where I, I just can't believe at this point that it's just greed.

I feel like it's beyond that.

And so I lean into a spiritual paradigm around this, but I know that not everybody does.

1:35:51

And I'm just curious for you like.

Yeah.

It's just hard not to feel like we're there's like a war against our biology, against our minds, against our bodies, and maybe against our souls.

Yeah, I do think that there is a war, maybe an unseen war.

I don't know how much human beings are accomplices or maybe accomplices, but willing accomplices or knowledgeable accomplices.

1:36:14

I believe that there is a perfection there.

There is something that is that is perfect and and a perfection and anything that deviates from that is going to encourage more deviation.

So I see, you know, the love of money being the root of all evil and that, that leading to a whole host of, of depravities where people will be willing to poison other people just for an extra dollar.

1:36:37

That's, that's not going to lead to anything that's good.

Whether or not someone is, you know, some human being is sitting behind a curtain and, and conspiring to, to bring all these things together.

I, I think it, it could, I can't rule that out, But I don't know if you need, you need that to get to the point where we are today, where if, if people are simply in it for themselves and they're looking for how they can take care of themselves, they're willing to do anything.

1:37:03

And that obviously that turns into, into bad things.

So what we need to do is to be the, the counter of that.

And, and, and I believe that if we focus on putting positive thoughts in our minds that that actually will, will be a, a benefit.

1:37:21

In other words, meditating on things that are good as opposed to meditating on things that are bad, even if we're trying to fix those things that are bad, if we constantly are filling our minds.

And, and I'm not saying that you are at all, but I'm just I'm looking at the counter.

I'm prone.

I am prone to that, actually.

1:37:37

This is a constant challenge because I want to be as wise as a serpent, but I also want.

To be harmless as a dog.

And it's very easy to lean in too heavily into what they're doing and and it's toxic and poisonous to the mind.

So.

Yeah, I mean, evil thinking is actually breeds evil in US.

1:37:56

And, and, and that's, that's by the way, the whole reason for forgiveness.

Now, forgiveness is not a a situation where you are just letting someone go free without consequences, right?

Because obviously the state has consequences.

There is justice that has to be done.

What forgiveness does is it releases you from cognating on that and, and realize that you have to do something about that.

1:38:16

It doesn't, by the way, mean that you have to accept what they've done or that you even have to be put yourself in a position where you can be wronged.

Again, forgiveness is, is something different.

It, it basically you don't need to reconcile with the person, but you, you've taken whatever they've done to you and you no longer have this need to retaliate or to do something back to pay evil with evil.

1:38:36

And it's, it's remarkably liberating for the person who is the victim in this case that they they can move on.

There's a great story about this.

I've just been made aware of a of a story that happened many years ago.

There was some missionaries in in in South S South Pacific islands and I'm blanking on the name of it.

1:38:59

And there was a family a a mother father and a son and a daughter.

And this person who was on drugs basically broke into their home and murdered all of them and kidnapped the daughter who remained alive and basically left her for dead, threw over a Cliff.

1:39:16

And the next thing is she actually tells the story.

So obviously know that she survives.

And she was found and basically at this is a very small island where everybody knew each other.

And there was a lot of shame associated with the guy who was really or the family that was related to this murder that they finally caught.

1:39:33

Well, he was in prison for life.

And at the funeral, at this, this person, the, the the the ants of this, of this girl who was there at the funeral, remembers it forgave the perpetrator and the family.

1:39:49

And this was a very, very powerful in terms of healing that island of what had happened many years later.

Oh, it's a very interesting is that the guy who who eventually replaced the replacement of that pastor who was murdered, came to that island, went to the prison where this guy was.

1:40:10

And this guy basically, to make a Long story short, basically converted to Christianity and was baptized by that guy and was able to have a reunion.

And everybody's forgiving each other over this horrible, absolutely horrible incident.

1:40:25

And, and there's actually a story, a movie being made about this, but it shows the power of forgiveness.

It doesn't undo any of the of the dastardly deed that had been done, doesn't make it better, but it's brings tremendous healing.

And I think that's that's something that we could learn from.

Wow, beautiful.

1:40:42

Hey, before we go, do you have a moment to say anything about the role of faith in or a trust, as you said it in health?

And, and you don't have to say a lot, but just kind of noticing that this is a, a unique cultural window where people really want to hear this who didn't want to hear it a couple years ago.

1:40:58

Yeah, and you know, when I talk about new starts, I talk about all of the, the scientific aspects of nutrition, exercise, water, sunlight, temperance, air rest.

And you know, after I've shown that, I, I talked about the science and, and, and being very rational and, and telling about what we know and what we don't know.

1:41:16

Then we talked about trust and the, the, the studies are there, the data is there.

People who forgive unconditionally, people who forgive first of all, unconditionally.

They have, they have less depression, they have less anxiety.

I work with patients in the intensive care unit.

1:41:32

Many of them have anxiety about their future.

They see death coming to them and they're very anxious.

We, we know that people who are able to forgive because of forgiveness and because of faith have less of that.

They have less depression.

They're being, they have actually more acceptance.

And so this is, these are hard numbers and facts.

1:41:49

What's really interesting about this, Daniel, is there was a researcher that looked at this from Texas University of Texas, blanking on exactly that author's name.

But he asked the question because he saw that people who forgave unconditionally seem to have more of these attributes than those that forgave conditionally.

1:42:09

What I mean by that is that people who forgave only if somebody came and asked them for forgiveness, or they came back and they tried to make it up to them, or they came back and apologized.

Those people who forgive conditionally didn't seem to benefit as much from that forgiveness as those who forgave.

1:42:27

Even if the person didn't come back, even if the person didn't ask for forgiveness, they just forgave them and they moved on.

So we asked, well, what is it?

What is it about people that makes them forgive unconditionally versus forgiving conditionally?

1:42:43

And the answer was amazing.

The answer was this, the knowledge that you are forgiven.

And this was a tremendous study that was published in the scientific literature that when people have an understanding that they are forgiven, they are much more likely to forgive others unconditionally and to enter into all of those health benefits that are opened up when they do that type of behavior.

1:43:12

It's it's, it's incredible.

Wow, it's been so that this last couple pieces are really valuable for me.

Thank you so much for sharing that and holding up about that.

I, I imagine it's sometimes at odds with your career field to talk about these kind of matters, so I appreciate you going into that.

1:43:29

Where do we send people to learn more about your work?

Well, I have the sort of for those who are interested in the science and are in the medical field and they want to learn more about medicine and, and what we're doing. medcram.com is a place where we have a number of, of topics, congestive heart failure, asthma, COPD and we, we break those down.

1:43:50

Actually people can get continue medical education.

We have our YouTube channel where we go over a lot of these things that we talked about today in terms of light and the benefits of those things and new start.

I actually interestingly just sat down with James Markham, who's a cardiologist and we've just authored a book that just got released a couple of weeks ago.

1:44:08

It's called the Creator's Code and that's on Amazon now.

And, and basically it talks a little bit about new start and it, it combines exactly what we've talked about here, Daniel, which is the, the, the, the appropriate diets, exercise, and also sunlight.

1:44:24

We talked about sunlight into into one book and that's now available on Amazon.

I'm sort of a, a contributing author, James Dr. Markham is, is the, is the lead author on that book.

But yeah, I'm also on X if you want to look me up there just at Roger Schweltz and we talked about these issues.

1:44:41

I I post on there regularly.

Wow, Doctor Roger, thank you so much for your time today.

I appreciate you talking to us from the hospital.

I know that it's probably not easy to squeeze that in, so this has been absolutely wonderful.

Really appreciate your time.

Thanks so much, Daniel.

Appreciate it.