[00:00:00] Luke Storey:  I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion - designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist Podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you.

[00:00:28] Welcome to the show, Alexander.

[00:00:29]Alexander Wunsch:  Hi, Luke.

[00:00:30]Luke Storey:  All the way from Germany.

[00:00:32]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[00:00:32]Luke Storey:  So, you're from Germany, I'm from LA, and here we are in London. And we're about to make magic.

[00:00:37]Alexander Wunsch:  Fantastic.

[00:00:38]Luke Storey:  I'm really excited to talk to you, A. B, I'm super pissed because when you gave your talk, I was running around with other responsibilities and interviewing other people. And then, I came in at the very end, and it was like the last five minutes just blew my mind. So, I'm very thankful to have this opportunity with you, but I'll be going back to watch the videos from the conference because it was life-changing information. Very cool stuff. So, let's start off with explaining to people what photobiology is.

[00:01:06]Alexander Wunsch:  Photobiology is the science of light acting upon biological organisms.

[00:01:14]Luke Storey:  Wow. That was profoundly simple. I want to start off with talking about our circadian rhythm and the way that light affects that, something that I've covered a lot on the show is the issues with blue light and also mitigating that through different types of temperatures of light, and wearing the glasses, and all of this kind of stuff, but perhaps you could give us some framework for why our circadian biology matters as it pertains to light.

[00:01:42]Alexander Wunsch:  Chronobiology or circadian rhythms are all about being prepared.

[00:01:49] So, the plant which is prepared to the upcoming sunlight will perform much better compared to a plant waiting there. "Let's see if the sun will shine today. And if so, maybe I will get up, and maybe I will open my blossoms, and maybe I will do some photosynthesis. The prepared plant, it's just planning what to do next. And so, even the first bacteria, the algae and cyanobacteria, they had to attune their metabolic rhythms to this permanently repeating stimulus, which is caused by sunlight.

[00:02:45] So, from the very, very beginning of life, the sunlight played the paramount role in controlling all the antiparticle events in biological systems. And it started 3.5 billion years ago, chronobiology. And we, nowadays, just are attuned in a very, very subtle manner to our environmental lighting conditions. The problem is that the lighting conditions are not following a logical pattern anymore as long as we do not live in nature, as long as we are exposed to artificial light.

[00:03:32] The problem is that we are the ones who decide if we switch the lights on or off, and when we will switch the lights on or off, and the industry decides which kind of light is available to us. And this is a kind of very strange combination of random events because sometimes, I think the industry is not really aware of the importance of lighting, lighting quality and light quality. So, we are offered junk light in many, many cases instead of the delicate light and the natural light our bodies and organisms have been attuned to since billions of years.

[00:04:25]Luke Storey:  So, it's one of those kinds of things where using our intellect, mankind has played God and we've decided, I don't want it to be night, I'm going to make it daytime, so I can walk around my hut or whatever. I guess by the time we had light bulbs, we were out of huts, but we moved indoors. We started sort of domesticating ourselves. We came up with incandescent indoor lighting. And then, we can make it be whatever time we want, right? And then, it's one of those things that is like many times, when humans try to alter nature, we don't notice the effects of it perhaps right away.

[00:05:00] It's the best invention ever, we're so excited, and then later on, like traveling into space and the physical things that go wrong with human beings being that far out of the magnetic field and all the other issues, it's great. Wow, we can reach space, but then what happens to the human body? And it's one of those things. So, it's a blessing and a curse. And it seems now that we've moved into the different types of lighting, which I want to discuss with you.

[00:05:27] Fluorescent lights and, of course, LED lighting that it's gotten exponentially worse due to the fact that at least the original incandescent bulbs had more of a warm color tone that wasn't as alien to us if we use them after dark. So, what would you have to say about then the color spectrum of light and the times that were unnaturally seeing those color spectrum? As you indicated during the daytime, we'd be exposed to sunlight, obviously. Can you tell us a bit about the color spectrum that exists in daylight versus the artificial lighting options that are available that we're commonly exposed to at night?

[00:06:10]Alexander Wunsch:  When we look at the color changes in the skies, then it starts during sunrise with the spectrum which pretty much resembles the spectrum of fire or an incandescent lamp. And the higher the sun angle becomes, the more the color temperature shifts into the bluish part of the spectrum. So, this increase and decrease in the blue content is the main signal our organism grasps from the color shifts in the sky. And in nature, we have just two types of light sources.

[00:07:03] One is a light source, sunlight with the color temperature of 6,500 or 5,700 Kelvin, which means it's a hot, glowing body, but at a much, much higher temperature than the temperatures we can achieve, for example, in the filament of an incandescent lamp or compared to the temperatures we can achieve in fire. So, the fire with 2,300 Kelvin or the incandescent lamp was 2,700 Kelvin, they represent hot bodies as well. And every hot body emits electromagnetic radiation.

[00:07:49] And the level of heat defines which kinds of wavelengths are contained in the spectrum. And what matters most for the biological organisms are the short wavelengths. So, everything which has shorter wavelengths than green light, so turquoise light, blue light, indigo light, violet light, and also the ultraviolet invisible part of the spectrum. These short wavelengths, they have the highest impact on biological processes because they induce reactive oxygen species, which are aggressive molecules, which disturb the cellular metabolism in a massive way.

[00:08:42] And so, from the very beginning, it was important for all lifeforms to detect if there is ultraviolet radiation outside. And the more ultraviolet radiation is in the environment, the higher the metabolic stress will be occurring in the cell. And this metabolic stress, reactive oxygen species, they just act like bastards, just oxidizing everything they know they can get hold on, so they are damaging all the delicate molecules which have been built up during the course of evolution.

[00:09:30] And if an organism knows that there is UV light or short wavelength light in the environment, this organism can start preventive mechanisms to counteract the deleterious effects of these reactive oxygen species. And for us, as humans, we are not able to directly detect ultraviolet radiation, which is the most aggressive one, but we benefit from the fact that in nature, the blue light or the short wavelength, the visible light is linked and interconnected to the degree of ultraviolet light. So, if the light in our environment changes into the blue, our organism can extrapolate from that detection that there must also be a high level of ultraviolet radiation.

[00:10:36]Luke Storey:  So, when we're exposed to any light other than light that's the color of, say, fire, which we would have evolved to obviously be around after dark for a long, long time, what actually happens to us that's negative? What's the downside of this great gift that we have even with an incandescent bulb, like not even moving into the junk light of fluorescent and LED, which we'll cover. But what is it that happens to us that's a mixed signal when we have really bright lights on, even incandescent bulbs at night inside our home, or car, or wherever we might be?

[00:11:14]Alexander Wunsch:  Systematically speaking, we can say there are two issues. One issue is the irregularity of any artificial light source. The incandescent lamp produces the natural spectrum. So, this is a spectrum we are attuned to since many hundreds of thousands of years. Here, the problem is that we can make daylight conditions during the nighttime, and this interacts with our circadian rhythmicity. So, this is part one. We can disturb the rhythm just by using the light at the wrong time.

[00:11:57] But with the blue light under ultraviolet light, there is something in addition which happens. And the ultraviolet light induces sunburn if it's overdosed. And if it's massively overdosed, this can even lead to dreadful, deadly situation. And be prepared is again the key word here. Our body is able to counteract many of the symptoms of sunburn, like erythema, which is the reddening of the skin coming from the increase of blood circulation, from the widening of the capillary vessels.

[00:12:44] So, in order to counteract erythema, it's good to have a good amount of vasoactive substances like adrenaline or noradrenaline in the blood, stress hormones. Cortisol, for example, reduces the light-induced inflammation, which comes also from ultraviolet light. So, the overdosage signs of a sunburn can be treated with cardiovascular really stabilizing agents like adrenaline and noradrenaline. And the light inflammation can be treated with cortisol.

[00:13:24] So, the body produces itself the remedies it needs to treat the condition of a sunburn. And in order to be prepared, our organism already starts to produce these remedies before it's too late. So, as soon as the content of blue increases in our environment lighting, the body starts producing excessive amounts of stress hormones. And in nature, this is perfect. This is how it should be. But when you're sitting in the office or you are in a manufacturing hall, and your employer has decided to set up some high color temperature, fluorescents or LED lamps in order to increase your productivity, it doesn't make sense anymore except to the employer because you will, under the influence of stress hormones, increased stress hormones, you will be prepared for higher activity levels.

[00:14:38] You will be more productive. But this is just one part of the story. On the other hand, increased stress hormones, they contribute to the major problem we have. And the World Health Organization says that the stress associated to diseases, that chronic stress is the major epidemic in the 21st century. So, we don't have the problem in our society that we have not enough stress. The problem for most of us is that we, anyway, have too much stress. And if we put the artificial lighting effects caused by blue light on top of this, it just makes things worse and worse.

[00:15:32]Luke Storey:  That's so interesting. So, it's a stress response from the human body when it's exposed to this temperature of light. And when you look at, say, schools, factories, office buildings, hospitals, and even big box stores, as we call them, your IKEA and Target, and those types of stores, I've always wondered if there's some nefarious reason that they've started putting that kind of lighting in there or if it was just to save money on energy bills because if you have a huge square footage building being lit by incandescent bulbs, it's not energy efficient, can be quite expensive. Do you think it's a combination of both or is there is there anything to indicate that in the factory model or factory worker, that we want them in a heightened stress state to increase productivity, et cetera?

[00:16:26]Alexander Wunsch:  So, light sells, this is the reason why you have it in stores, why you have these increased levels of light. But we are here in London and industrialization started in England in the 18th century, I guess. And about 120 years ago or 130 years ago, it was already a topic for the stock markets, how the weather the next day will be because the productivity changed and shifted with the weather. If you had enough sunlight during the daytime, the productivity of the companies was much higher compared to the days with low light levels.

[00:17:22] And so, this connection already had been known since decades. And if the employer installs bright lights in the company rooms, the idea, in fact, is to increase productivity. And if in warehouses, you have higher illumination levels because you cannot run away, so you buy a lot. So, light sells, light increases productivity in the short-term view, but we suffer from these conditions in the long-term view, for sure.

[00:18:11]Luke Storey:  Has there been a study or any kind of graph available? I'm picturing like a sort of a flow chart or a wave model that shows the advent of incandescent lighting as it pertains to overall human health and disease. Is there anything that indicates that when we became industrialized and started lighting our interior environment with light sources that weren't natural at unnatural times, that that was a huge curve in degenerative disease or anything related to the stress that's caused by doing something so unnatural? Have you ever seen anything like that? Like we started getting more cancer, diabetes, et cetera, when we moved indoors and started lighting it at night.

[00:18:58]Alexander Wunsch:  I heard many years ago that with the advent of electricity, the number of heart failures, myocardial, in fact, did raise by a factor of three or four, but I could not find any proof in the scientific literature. The problem is that we have no comparison groups anymore. You won't find significant numbers of subjects who are not exposed to electricity or who are not exposed to artificial lighting. And since we are now in the year 10,after the banning of the incandescent bulb, so in a few years, you will not find anyone who still exposes himself or herself to incandescent lighting.

[00:20:03] So, the problem in terms of being scientifically correct is that we don't have control groups. We would need hundreds of thousands of subjects. We don't have them. We just have the summitry effects we can look at. And what we can say that our modern lifestyle, which had been enabled by the use of artificial light, the incandescent lamp in 1879 invented by Edison or marketed by Edison was a kind of cut regarding our social life conditions because before these days, night shift was not thinkable.

[00:21:13] The incandescent lamp was the door opener to this 24/7 lifestyle we are attached to in the meantime. And it became worse, and worse, and worse. So, the breaking of the rhythms can be accounted to the incandescent lamp. But the light doping and manipulation of endocrine functions of humans has to be accounted to or attributed to the cold light sources because the incandescent lamps still have a built-in warning sign. As soon as the light becomes too hot, you will easily understand that there is too much light. And this was the natural limit, the heat. And with-

[00:22:12]Luke Storey:  Oh, in terms of how bright it can be?

[00:22:14]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[00:22:14]Luke Storey:  Oh, okay.

[00:22:15]Alexander Wunsch:  And when you remove the heat from the light, which was possible with the fluorescent lamps and even more with the LEDs, this natural limitation has gone. So, you can increase the light even more without sensing it, for example, via the temperature.

[00:22:35]Luke Storey:  Oh, that's interesting.

[00:22:36]Alexander Wunsch:  So, this was the precondition to produce lux levels of 2,000 and 3,000 lux. In a production hall, for example, the workers, the employees just need 500 or 800 lux for optimal vision. If you exceed the optimal illumination level, it does not improve vision, but it changes the metabolic and endocrine state in the person who is exposed to it. And so, the door opener was the incandescent lamp to our modern lifestyle, but the maintenance and the exaggerators, they are found in the fluorescent lamps and LED lamp types. And we have many examples of lighting situations where we have to state that there is an over-stimulation, over-lighting, over-illumination going on.

[00:23:51]Luke Storey:  So, it's not only the color temperature of a really unnatural spectrum of light in the case of moving out of the more warm, incandescent, and moving into this very bright blue, the color spectrum being completely foreign, but also the ability to have just such bright light at weird hours, too. I mean, obviously, like still the brightest fluorescent or LED light is going to come nowhere near what you would experience outside in daylight, the sun, but it's still far beyond what our brains and eyes are capable of comprehending indoors, especially after dark.

[00:24:28]Alexander Wunsch:  Here, we are coming back in a way to something you mentioned previously. This photobiology, modern photobiology is also dealing with the idea that we can do it better than nature and that we can eliminate things, we think of them that they are useless, like temperature, for example, or UV light for indoor illumination. And you cannot compare 3,000 lux from an LED general lighting appliance with the 10,000 or 100,000 lux level of natural daylight or sunlight because in one case, we are talking about just a fraction of the full spectrum, and daylight always provides the full spectrum. And this is the major difference.

[00:25:33] As long as we have the full spectrum from day or sunlight, we can be sure that our organism is able to fully adapt to it. But when you only have a fraction, and probably you just did remove things our body is waiting for. So, the consequence will be a maladaptation. And this is what we can show, and coming back to your question, are there studies? And what happened since we changed to the 24/7 lifestyle? Just look at the statistical data, at the epidemiological data, people did not become healthier. With modern medicine, we become sicker and sicker in a way. We live longer, but we are not healthier. So, many diseases which are, for example, stress-related, they are still skyrocketing. Cardiovascular diseases, cancer, autoimmune system disorders, they are all stress-related and the numbers are increasing.

[00:27:00]Luke Storey:  I wonder if the stats that you mentioned earlier on heart disease in the advent of the electrical grid, I wonder how much of that had to do with EMF exposure? You have like in the states, we have 60 hertz just running through your house and it goes three to six feet out from the wall where the wiring is. I'm sure in the more primitive versions, it was even worse. People were probably right next to the wires all the time, under their bed, and God knows what else. I wonder if that had something to do with it. And then, you add a few years later, the light bulb to the equation, and we probably see that steadily going down in terms of general health and the rise of disease.

[00:27:37]Alexander Wunsch:  It's even worse because electricity, the light bulb was the diplomat which brought electricity to the houses. Light bulbs and electricity had a parallel development because this was the only reason why people would want to have electricity in their house.

[00:28:02]Luke Storey:  Oh, yeah. We didn't have computers.

[00:28:04]Alexander Wunsch:  And it makes things even worse when you try to sort out the reasons for the melodies and disorders we have to cope with nowadays. And this is the problem with statistics anyway. If you only have epidemiological data, you never can tell that one or the other factor is the reason for a certain development. And I'm not saying that light is the only culprit. Bad artificial light and malillumination is not the only culprit, but for several parameters, it's the kind of catalyst.

[00:28:53] It amplifies certain effects regarding our lifestyle. For example, it enables shift working and things like that. And on the other hand, it has direct influence upon our physiology. And the problem is that the lighting industry always can say, "Dr. Wunsch, what you are proposing or what you're claiming cannot be proven by any experimental setting or so." But as humans, we exist on many different levels. We are composed of atoms, and atoms form molecules, and the molecules form biomolecules.

[00:29:56] And these biomolecules are assembled together in cells, and the cells form organs, and the organs form the organism, and the organism forms our mental being, and our soul, and everything. So, we have a lot of different levels. And I think the deleterious effects of certain qualities of light can be proven on the cellular level, on the atomic level, on the molecular level, on the organic level, but it cannot be proven for the whole body in terms of evidence-based medicine. And we just take out this only argument that we cannot prove it on one plane or level of our whole existence, and sometimes ignore that it already has been proven on all the other different levels.

[00:30:55]Luke Storey:  Right. Right. So, you have to kind of break down the negative effects rather than create the sum of the whole, which is saying, "Well, we can prove unequivocally that this is just downright bad for people, but we can't say it's bad for the different systems that make people."

[00:31:12]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[00:31:12]Luke Storey:  So, you talked about the incandescent bulb. And I remember I think it was during the Obama administration, and I wasn't aware of lighting then, I knew that I really felt uncomfortable if I walked in Target or IKEA, a store like that, I didn't know why, though. Now, I know why. And we'll talk about flicker in a minute, too. But I remember there was this buzz I heard in the media about the environment, and global warming, and energy savings, and all this kind of stuff, and that the incandescent light bulb was going away. And I had known about full spectrum lighting.

[00:31:47] So, I had, at that time, incandescent bulbs that had a wider spectrum, not just a narrow spectrum of blue. And I used them during the day, in the winter, and things like that so that it wasn't depressing and sad inside. It was nice and bright. And the light felt very comfortable and natural. It's just kind of an intuitive thing. I just like the natural lighting. So, I knew that the sun out there was full spectrum. Speaking of lighting, I forgot to turn the lights on in here. If you can jump over there and turn them on, go for it. At least we have some outdoor light coming in to combat these horrendous lights. Anyway, I started using full-spectrum incandescent lights, then I heard during the Obama-

[00:32:25]Alexander Wunsch:  You really want to switch on the fluorescent lights if you'd like to sit on the mercury photons.

[00:32:34]Luke Storey:  Well, it's because of the video. That's why. We're talking about how this light, let's see when we turn them on.

[00:32:42]Alexander Wunsch:  This is the problem, that we make hierarchical structures. The video is more important than our well-being.

[00:32:51]Luke Storey:  Right. Well, that's true.

[00:32:54]Alexander Wunsch:  Okay. I have to accept this. You are the boss.

[00:32:57]Luke Storey:  Well, look at it like this, is that the thousands of people, tens of thousands of people that will hear this, though, perhaps lobby for different alternative options commercially in terms of available lighting, and also realize that if they have a kid, they're raising kids in the house, and they're exposing them to these shit lights that the kids are going to grow up and be biologically compromised. And so, I look at it like you and I are taking one for the team for the greater good. But that said, if it really bothers you, we could totally turn it off.

[00:33:29]Alexander Wunsch:  It's okay.

[00:33:30]Luke Storey:  But back to the incandescent bulb in the Obama administration, okay, we're outline incandescent bulbs, then I got really scared because I'm not going to be able to get my great full-spectrum bulbs. And I figured out a workaround for that. And in the US, at least, you can still buy what they call like party lights or decorative lighting that are still totally incandescent, not LED, not fluorescent, but you have to search around a little bit. So, I found some really great amber, old style, like antique style, they call them, incandescent bulbs on Amazon.

[00:34:01] Actually, for those of you listening, I linked to them on my website. I think it's under bedroom and sleep. I don't make any money except an Amazon link, which is two cents or something, but they're just really hard to find, and you've got to really search, so I put the link on there. And knowing that at some point, they could become totally obsolete, I stockpiled them kind of like a doomsday prepper, the doomsday of light. So, I'm curious. Is that a worldwide thing or did the EU also, around the same time, make incandescent bulbs relatively unavailable or illegal or?

[00:34:33]Alexander Wunsch:  In the EU, it started in 2007 or 2008, and the EU enacted the banning of the bulb on September 1, 2009. So, we were kind of ahead of what happened in the United States.

[00:34:52]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting. And what did you do at that time knowing what you know about light? Did you find a source for incandescent bulbs and find a loophole like I was able to find over here?

[00:35:04]Alexander Wunsch:  My garage is stuffed with incandescent bulbs, in different shapes and types. Yeah, I have a pretty good stock of incandescent.

[00:35:18]Luke Storey:  Oh, cool. Okay. So, on that note, Dave Asprey mentioned something to me yesterday about, and this is a word that I've rarely said on my podcast, maybe we should just say the T word for the-

[00:35:29]Alexander Wunsch:  I heard you say the T word. I I noticed this last week. It was in the German news as well that the team just reversed the banning of the bulb in the United States or he at least intends to reverse it.

[00:35:50]Luke Storey:  Yeah. And I think our country is experiencing what I consider a large cognitive dissonance politically. People, when there's a huge change, when people are oppressed, and controlled, and there's a change in the controller, it's very confusing to people. And I think we're experiencing a lot of that. But I have a very zoomed out sort of point of view, and I look at the good and the bad, and I think that's really, really good news because now, I don't have to squirrel away.

[00:36:17] Perhaps if he follows through, that I don't have to squirrel away a bunch of bulbs because I travel with them. Recently, I had an interesting experience. I went on a trip to Spain. So, I always bring my incandescent bulbs with me. Now, I get to the hotel room, my girlfriend thinks I'm insane, but I changed all the bulbs in the room, and then it gets dark that night. We checked in during the day, it gets dark that night. I flipped on the light, we're hanging out, and all of a sudden, we hear kaboom, and it's a huge explosion. I didn't realize there's different wattage on the bulbs over here than there are in the states.

[00:36:48]Alexander Wunsch:  And the current, yeah.

[00:36:49]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Yeah. And the current, yeah. So, word to the wise, if you travel with your own red amber bulbs and you're from a different country, please be mindful. So, when I came over here, I actually looked it up and the UK is also on 220 or whatever, so my bulbs wouldn't work. So, I got a red flashlight and I have my red stickers I put on things, and it's a much more pleasurable experience. Anyway, I digressed a bit, but we can be hopeful that perhaps people start to realize. I'm sure Mr. T's reasoning had something to do with the economy, and manufacturing, or something like that, or he just hates the environment, who knows? But is it a viable argument for climate change and this kind of stuff that it was necessary to get rid of those bulbs in terms of energy consumption, et cetera? Is that going to make an impact at all?

[00:37:42]Alexander Wunsch:  I would give you an example from Germany, the country I come from. We have these city tanks driving around. I call it city tanks, you would call it SUV. We are moving tons of weights on four wheels using 250, 350 horsepower, toys that consume a lot of fossil energy. I think it's just a matter of interest. If you want to be responsible for the planet, you can always switch an incandescent lamp off when you don't need it.

[00:38:36]Luke Storey:  That's a novel idea.

[00:38:39]Alexander Wunsch:  And the history showed that each time when lighting became cheaper, for example, because it was more energy-efficient, that it did not end up in saving in the end, but in an increase of the lighting levels. So, we do not use the energy-efficient light to be really energy-efficient in lighting, we just use it to produce higher illumination levels. So, this is how it unfortunately goes.

[00:39:22] And there are so many ways to save energy that we don't have to use junk lighting, which is a threat to our health because we will not save in the end. In total, we will not have any savings left when we take into account what it costs to bring someone who suffers from age-related macular degeneration to the next clinic, for example. You will need a lot of additional energy to cure all the negative effects or to repair all the negative effects which result from malillumination and bad lighting.

[00:40:14]Luke Storey:  That's a very long view way of approaching that, and I would have to agree. I mean, if you look at the medical cost of millions, if not billions of people becoming ill partially, and in fact, due to using this type of lighting, that the eventual cost of that by far surpasses what we might be spending on energy and using other ways. I mean, I know in my house, I just have a habit, maybe I learned it when I was a kid, but I have only incandescent amber bulbs in the entire house. And I'm very conscious because those bulbs are valuable to me, and I just don't like wasting energy.

[00:40:47] Every time I leave a room, I don't leave the light on anywhere. And so, that's one way. But also, like you said, with driving around a big SUV or a city tank, as you called it, I mean, having your air conditioning running for eight hours is probably the equivalent of having like your whole block having incandescent bulbs on for that eight hours or more, you know what I mean? Like the amount of energy. So, it's an interesting and compelling thing to look at. And I'm a big proponent of incandescent lighting. And I think if we want to use it, we can definitely find other ways to eliminate some of our energy use in other areas.

[00:41:23]Alexander Wunsch:  For sure.

[00:41:23]Luke Storey:  It's a very logical argument. And as you said, the downside to it is horrific in many cases. So, let's get a little more into the negative biological effects of blue light as pertained to cortisol, adrenaline, how those relate to melatonin, and eventually to sleep, and the role of melatonin in general in our body, whatever you happen to know about that because I think a lot of people just think, oh, it makes you sleep. My understanding, it has a much larger role in our general biology. And the blue light at night specifically, it's really disruptive to its production.

[00:41:57]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah. The first organisms, thin bacteria, so they just don't need any detectors or any signaling for the cell, which tells the organelles in the cell if it's bright or dark outside. And with the development of complex organisms, it happened that the thickness of the tissue, of the organism itself exceeded a certain size so that the inner cells would need to get the information if it's bright daylight outside or if it's pitch dark night outside.

[00:42:50] And melatonin is the biochemical signal, is the hormone of darkness. And it's a very old molecule, an old hormone you can find, for example, also in turtles, in creatures with a building plan or with the system which had been created 250 million years ago. And even older organisms, they use the melatonin as a signaling substance. And in rodents, which are nocturnal creatures, melatonin is as well the signal for darkness, but it does not induce sleep.

[00:43:41]Luke Storey:  Oh, wow.

[00:43:42]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah, of course.

[00:43:43]Luke Storey:  Interesting.

[00:43:44]Alexander Wunsch:  So, it's just you have the same substances for stress, for relaxation, for repair for the daytime or nighttime tasks. The substances are the same, but they are wired differently in nocturnals and diurnal creatures. And so, we have to be careful with all attributions to these hormones. If we learned about their effects from rodents, we might get a different idea compared to experiments we would perform with diurnal creatures like turtles. Anyway, the body has to switch between fight and flight or sympathetic activities, stress-related activities, which are in diurnals occurring during the daytime.

[00:44:42]Luke Storey:  Is diurnal the opposite of nocturnal?

[00:44:45]Alexander Wunsch:  Nocturnal.

[00:44:45]Luke Storey:  Okay. Got it.

[00:44:47]Alexander Wunsch:  Daytime activity.

[00:44:48]Luke Storey:  Got it.

[00:44:49]Alexander Wunsch:  And we can tell that humans are planned as diurnal creatures by, for example, the fact that we have rather potent strategies to protect ourselves from sunlight, and we see colors. And that nocturnal creatures like rodents, they are color blind.

[00:45:15]Luke Storey:  Oh, wow.

[00:45:15]Alexander Wunsch:  They don't have to see color because during the nighttime, there is not an adequate illumination level to provide color vision.

[00:45:25]Luke Storey:  That's crazy. So, they don't need the signaling that comes from the different spectrums of light, the different color spectrums of light.

[00:45:31]Alexander Wunsch:  They need some signaling, but they don't need this discrimination signaling, which we can get from colors because it's not only about the content of blue colors have much more potential to give us signals. For example, what kind of food composition can be found in the fruit of a certain color. So, this is linked if you have more carbohydrates, or more proteins, or so, can be color-coded, and so on, and so on. For us, the color coding via the skin, for example, is very important for our social functioning.

[00:46:16] Coming back to the lighting conditions, if it gets dark, the body needs to not fight and flight, but repair and digest. So, this is mainly the parasympathetic part of our autonomous system. Autonomous vegetative system has two arms. One is the sympathetic, the stress arm. And one is the parasympathetic, the relaxation and repair arm. And in order to time the correct tasks, the body needs signaling, which can be performed via nerve impulses, but also the body has a second communication channel, which is based on a chemical signaling via the hormones.

[00:47:17] And while we have the stress hormones at a higher concentration in our bloodstream during the day, we have a higher concentration of melatonin, which switches our body cells into the night mode, into the repair and digest mode. And melatonin is produced, for example, mainly in the pineal gland, but there are other sides in the body where direct melatonin production occurs, especially within the eyes. The retina produces its own melatonin.

[00:48:01] So, if we stare into a blue-enhanced screen during the nighttime, there is the signaling via the pineal gland, which suppresses the melatonin in the body. And in the eye, the melatonin will also be suppressed, which has an impact on the regeneration phases of our retinal structures, the rods and cones. And so, we should take care that we have—sometimes, I say it kind of contrasted as long as we see colors after sunset, we are in a in an environment which is too bright for our body to perform repair and regeneration.

[00:48:57]Luke Storey:  Oh, really?

[00:49:00]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[00:49:01]Luke Storey:  So, if you're in a room and you can see there's some books on the shelf and something over here, you can differentiate in a meaningful way the different colors that there's too much light.

[00:49:09]Alexander Wunsch:  When you have a clear color discrimination, then it's too bright, for example, the retina to regenerate the cones, which are responsible for color vision. And going one step further, when we have induced by artificial lighting, we have a cut down of the total time of melatonin predominance in our bloodstream of probably depending on the season, three, four, or even five hours. And this, if we have less repair and regeneration, which normally would be signaled via the melatonin mainly, then all the degenerative disorders can develop in a stronger way. So-

[00:50:22]Luke Storey:  With melatonin, I've heard that it's the number one cancer fighting compound in the human body. Have you heard or read anything to support that?

[00:50:32]Alexander Wunsch:  It is a signaling molecule. It acts depending on the dose which is present in the body. It acts as a scavenger taking away or buffering reactive oxygen species, molecules. It is an antioxidant which, again, counteracts some effects of reactive oxygen species. It is an antagonist for cortisol. Cortisol, as a stress hormone, increases, for example, the blood sugar level and decreases the activity of the immune system.

[00:51:15] And if you want your immune system be actively fighting cancer cells in your body, you would not want your immune system being depressed by cortisol. So, melatonin is an antagonist for cortisol. So, if you have enough melatonin, cortisol will be suppressed. And in consequence, for example, T lymphocytes can become more active. So, yes, in consequence, good melatonin level during the nighttime, it's favoring the immune activities, which are counteracting cancerous developments.

[00:52:15]Luke Storey:  Right.

[00:52:18]Alexander Wunsch:  For example, with regards to breast cancer, there are other mechanisms involved, such as the aromatase. Aromatase is a substance which converts cholesterol-like substances into estrogen, and melatonin lowers the activity of the aromatase enzyme. So, if you have high levels of melatonin, there will be a lower level of estrogen, especially in menopausal women. So, estrogen is, in some cases, responsible for the development of breast cancer. And if you lower the estrogen level, then you lower the risk for the breast cancer.

[00:53:18] And melatonin is responsible for lowering the estrogen level via aromatase. And then, there is another effect of melatonin which is also beneficial. It has to do with the mitochondria. Melatonin shifts gears in mitochondria to produce less ATP. And if this happens during the night, during nighttime, it leads directly to a decrease in body temperature, and your body just needs less energy for maintaining a certain temperature level during the nighttime, which saves a lot of energy, and gives you a good starting condition for the following day.

[00:54:11]Luke Storey:  That's cool. So, you actually preserve that ATP for when you really need it in your waking state.

[00:54:17]Alexander Wunsch:  No, you don't preserve it. Yeah. Yeah, the cells just pile up the building blocks for ATP because the mitochondrial activities are just limited and lowered during nighttime, which can be directly measured by the shift in the body temperature.

[00:54:40]Luke Storey:  Wow. That's really cool. I had no idea. I'm learning so much. This is super fascinating. I was like, I knew I wasn't going to get basic answers from you, but I'm like, whoa, this is way deeper than I even realized. So, okay. So, we could can summarize that by saying, okay, blue light is really bad for you at night. So, some of the different sources of this unnatural, too bright spectrum of light, as you said, the computer screens, phone screens, LED lights, fluorescent lights, headlights, lights in the store, basically, any artificial light at night that doesn't look yellow, orange, or red?

[00:55:15]Alexander Wunsch:  Exactly.

[00:55:16]Luke Storey:  Okay. So, how long after we've been exposed to said blue light, say I turn on my computer screen while I'm lying in bed, and I've got a fully lit, fully blue LED light shining in my face off my computer monitor, how long after that does it produce the stress hormones and stop melatonin production? Do we know that?

[00:55:42]Alexander Wunsch:  I have no generally applicable data on this because this is subject to individual reactions, but I would say, at least, take care one or two hours before you go to bed that you eliminate all the stimulating blue-enriched light sources around you.

[00:56:07]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[00:56:08]Alexander Wunsch:  And it is good after sunset to definitely lower the brightness of the light sources, and also to extinguish light sources which come from above because in nature, light, artificial light came from the ground or from eye level, between eye level and the ground, but never from the skies, bright light sources. So, except the moon, but the moon is not really a bright light source during nighttime, but all the other light sources come from beyond eye level.

[00:56:54]Luke Storey:  Do you get blue light exposure on a full moon? I mean, should you not look at a full moon? Will it shut down your melatonin and have those negative effects?

[00:57:01]Alexander Wunsch:  The question is if the moon is not another timekeeper, like the sun is the timekeeper for the circadian rhythm. The moon might be timekeeper for a ultradian rhythm, which are all the rhythms longer than a day. And there are rhythmic occurrences in the human body, especially in women, which resemble the moon face rhythm pretty much precisely exact.

[00:57:37]Luke Storey:  Oh, right. Right.

[00:57:38]Alexander Wunsch:  And so, the natural condition is that we have this kind of brightness and tides and also during the night, so when we were not hidden in our caves, we were exposed to changing light levels during the nighttime. But we are talking about less than 1 lux and less.

[00:58:08]Luke Storey:  Interesting. So, less than 1 lux would be a full moon then. So, it's not even that bright. Interesting. Okay. So, like if I have a huge LED light in my garage and I'm working there or something like that, what would be the lux be on that as compared to the moon?

[00:58:25]Alexander Wunsch:  What you have in your garage could have a lux level of 50 or 100 or even more. In former times, it just made sense that we had times in the month where it was brighter at night. And so, hunting, finding sleeping animals and hunting them could be quite advantageous. So, you had half of the months where you could hunt at night or let's say at least one week and three weeks with much, much lower illumination levels, which provided time for full regeneration then.

[00:59:12]Luke Storey:  That's interesting. So, in addition to building this awareness about how we want to avoid blue light at night, light from above light, light that's too bright, say we're wearing some really dark red, blue-blocking glasses. And the minute the sun goes down, we've got our glasses on, we've not been exposed to any light, and then we take them off and someone in the bathroom turns some bright blue lights on, how long do we have to be exposed to have that stress response and that melatonin shut down? Is it like two seconds, if I see the blue light, I'm screwed or is it going to take me five, 10, 30 minutes of being in that light to kind of disrupt the biology again?

[00:59:53]Alexander Wunsch:  It will throw you back for several minutes or probably half-an-hour or so, but we are talking about dynamic events, and we know that even a few seconds can be enough to suppress the melatonin production. But after exposure, after a few minutes or so, the melatonin production will start again, but it will have an impact. And if it happens once, no problem. If it happens on a regular basis, yeah.

[01:00:35]Luke Storey:  Right. Okay. Cool. I always wondered that. And then, when we're talking about junk lighting, and this is something that's really important to me and I just love spreading awareness about this, earlier, we turned on these lights in here, which were so heinous, but as I said, I want to see the video as other people do, too, I find when I get in a room with fluorescent lights or LED lights, that my brain starts getting scrambled, especially if it's really bright. And I've been mentioning a couple times like walking into a big box store and I get disoriented. Same thing happens in airports, and hospitals, and places where there's just a complete absence of natural light of any kind. So, tell us a little bit about why LED lights are so bad for us, eyes and brain, and also fluorescent bulbs, and kind of what the difference between the two is.

[01:01:25]Alexander Wunsch:  We can produce very high color temperatures using these cold light sources up to 16,000 Kelvin, which resembles just the blue sky, not the sunlight, but the blue sky, but it's on a much higher intensity level, what we experience outside. So, we have up to 100,000 lux in sunlight and we probably only have 2,000 or 3,000 lux in these over-illuminated areas. And our body immediately feels discomfort if there is something incoherent going on. So, in the cave, we expect low illumination levels.

[01:02:23] And the lower the illumination levels are, the lower the color temperature should be. And it's not just an arbitrary thing that we have blue lights in traffic for alarming purposes. It's scary. Normally, you would have not punctual light sources in intense blue and you would not have bright bluish white light in a cave, which does not exceed 3,000 lux. We expect it outside, but we don't expect it inside. And so, the illumination level and the content of blue does not match our expectation. And this makes us think or feel that something is not okay with it. Yeah.

[01:03:28]Luke Storey:  Okay. Yeah. That's kind of what I figured. And then, what about the issue with flicker? Sometimes, I'll test lighting and I'll put my phone on slow motion, and I'll film a light source. Pretty much anywhere you go, in our modern world, that's not lit with incandescent lighting, which is barely anywhere. When you look at that light on slow motion, it goes boom, boom, boom, boom, on and off, and it pulses. And so, I started looking into this aspect of flicker, and I found a video online showing a close-up of a human pupil in the eyeball, opening and closing, opening and closing over and over again when exposed to the light flicker. So, what negative impacts, in addition to the color spectrum and the brightness, does the actual flicker effect of those two types of bulbs have on us?

[01:04:18]Alexander Wunsch:  So, we have two types of flicker. One is clearly visible. For example, the illumination level change in fire when we look at it. So, this is not really the problem. In fire, we love it because it's a random change in illumination levels.

[01:04:41]Luke Storey:  And the light in a fire never completely turns off.

[01:04:43]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[01:04:44]Luke Storey:  Right? It's kind of a sparkle, whereas the flicker in a light bulb is turning on, off, on, off, on, off, right?

[01:04:50]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah. There are different types of light modulation. On off, on, off is one extreme, and the constant level is the other extreme, and you can have everything in between. And I'm talking about modulation depths, which means if you have just higher, lower, higher, lower, higher, lower, this is what the AC-driven incandescent lamp would perform. And if you have on, off, on, off, incandescent has 3% to 5% modulation depth, and on, off, on, off like stroboscopic light is 100% modulation depth.

[01:05:29] And as long as you are aware of the frequency of the flicker, you can avoid it or if you experience headache, for example, or migraine attacks, you can associate them with the stimulus, but problematic setting is when the flicker occurs on frequencies which are invisible, directly invisible to the human eye. So, we are talking about frequencies of 50, 100, 200 hertz, and you would not be able to discriminate the 120 hertz flicker of an incandescent lamp, but you easily can discriminate 250 hertz flicker in an LED as long as it's 100% modulation depth flicker. We know from experience that the cathode ray tubes from old TV sets, they also did flicker massively.

[01:06:39]Luke Storey:  Oh, right, right.

[01:06:40]Alexander Wunsch:  Our computer screens, the tube screens as well, but we became adapted to it. So, our body, our brain is able to do something comparable to what the camera of your phone is able to do. And this is to shift the shutter frequency. So, our brain is able to eliminate the flicker from becoming conscious. So, the brain can, by software reasons, suppress the flicker so that you don't realize that it's there, but the brain has to work a lot and to spend a lot of energy for this procedure. And by the way, the camera, even if you are in slow mo.

[01:07:41]Luke Storey:  So, I just took a video here while he's talking, and you can see the lights flashing, but you don't see it, as you said, with the naked eyes.

[01:07:49]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:07:49]Luke Storey:  So, I'm using brain power so that it's not terribly confusing to me to sit in this room. My brain's like adjusting so that to the naked eye, can't see the flicker.

[01:07:59]Alexander Wunsch:  So, you need more brain power in this room compared to situation outside where there is no flicker.

[01:08:07]Luke Storey:  Sure.

[01:08:08]Alexander Wunsch:  And I just have to warn you that the better the cameras are in the smartphones, the higher the probability that they work on algorithms which eliminate the flicker in the same way your brain does.

[01:08:21]Luke Storey:  Oh, wow. So, they're not at all an accurate measure of the flicker rate?

[01:08:24]Alexander Wunsch:  No, not at all.

[01:08:25]Luke Storey:  Right. What are those devices called that you can use to accurately measure the flicker?

[01:08:30]Alexander Wunsch:  Flicker meters.

[01:08:31]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[01:08:32]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:08:32]Luke Storey:  Matt Maruca who I think you met today, he came to my house and had one of those and a spectrometer, I think, to measure the color temperatures. And we spent like hours geeking out on the flicker and the color temperature in the house, and like, oh, God. It wasn't that bad because I have incandescent bulbs. So, essentially, the more flicker there is, the more work our brain has to do, and this causes damage in what way? I know that I get headaches.

[01:09:02]Alexander Wunsch:  It again increases stress.

[01:09:04]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[01:09:06]Alexander Wunsch:  And flicker is a stressor, and our body reacts with the stress reaction. Some people have experienced increased numbers of migraines attacks, eyestrain, concentration loss, headache. For example, the habitual change in the way you are moving your eyes because when you are moving your eyes swift and fast without moving the head, you will see punctual flicker much more intensely compared to moving your eyes slowly via the head movement. And so, if people unconsciously change their vision habits, they might give an overload to their neck muscles just by moving the eyes via the head instead of moving the eyes as they should be used and moved.

[01:10:18]Luke Storey:  Interesting.

[01:10:19]Alexander Wunsch:  So, flicker changes a whole lot of things. And, for example, decreases productivity by around 20%.

[01:10:29]Luke Storey:  20% productivity?

[01:10:31]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[01:10:32]Luke Storey:  Oh, my God. So, if I'm doing something that's sort of detail-oriented, some detail work that requires a lot of concentration, and I'm under some fluorescent or LED bulbs that are flickering like crazy, I'm losing 20% of-

[01:10:45]Alexander Wunsch:  At least.

[01:10:46]Luke Storey:  ... at least 20% of my capacity.

[01:10:47]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:10:47]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[01:10:48]Alexander Wunsch:  And you lose vision comfort and you lose your natural postural behavior.

[01:10:55]Luke Storey:  What about actual damage to the eyes from both non-native blue light and the flicker effect? Is there a relation to macular degeneration or does the eyestrain eventually lead to myopia or any of this kind of stuff?

[01:11:11]Alexander Wunsch:  Myopia is another interesting topic. Maybe we can touch it just for two or three minutes. The blue light increases the risk for age-related macular generation. Certain frequencies of flickering light can have an impact on the vessels in your retina. So, even can have a metabolic impact. But I'm not aware of long-term consequences of flickering light besides the reduction of productivity, besides all the stress-associated changes in the organism. But bluish flickering light is even worse than only flickering, only blue-enhanced.

[01:12:12] So, technology can make it even worse. And the myopia, there was the idea that the amount of blue might have an impact on the development of myopia, especially in children. But since almost two years, there is a study available from the University of Tubingen, where the researchers found out that contrast distribution plays a significant role for the development of myopia. And if children have to read black letters from a white paper, this significantly increases the risk of developing myopia.

[01:13:03] And if you just change the contrast relation with white letters on black background, what you would call dark mode in computer displays, this has no impact on the risk of developing myopia. So, having a good e-reader in inverse mode or dark mode decreases not only the amount of light which meets the eye because you have just 5% display of the light which is available, which would be used for displaying the white piece of paper or resembling a white piece of paper. So, you need less light when you only have the letters in white, and the contrast ratio between the letters and the background is positive so that the risk of developing myopia is significantly decreased.

[01:14:13]Luke Storey:  That is very cool because I have a bit of that. I need glasses now to see far away, which is really annoying because I can't stand wearing glasses.

[01:14:22]Alexander Wunsch:  So, when you are setting an Amazon link, you can also integrate the link for the Amazon or Oasis reader. Because this is the latest one, you can change the color temperature, so you can have kind of amber-colored backlight.

[01:14:43]Luke Storey:  Well, I've been using a program called Iris. I don't know if you're familiar with Iris, where yeah, you turn your screen red or you can use the dark mode. And the inventor, I believe he's from Romania, Russia, or something like that, I meant to interview him, but at some point, this guy, Daniel, said that he's also figured out a way, too, I don't know if totally eliminate, but definitely reduce the amount of flicker. Are you familiar with this program? Do you approve of it, in your opinion?

[01:15:08]Alexander Wunsch:  If the back lighting is flickering by itself, you cannot influence it by software.

[01:15:22]Luke Storey:  So, that would be a hardware thing in order to do that.

[01:15:24]Alexander Wunsch:  It's a hardware. It can be a hardware and it can be a software thing, but if the hardware flickers, you can do whatever you want with the software, it will not work.

[01:15:35]Luke Storey:  Right.

[01:15:36]Alexander Wunsch:  And the Oasis e-book reader, it does not really flicker. And especially, it does not flicker in frequencies where I would say you should be concerned of. And you can change the color temperature and you can invert, you can use the dark mode.

[01:15:55]Luke Storey:  So, is the Oasis reader an actual device, it's not like an app?

[01:15:58]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:15:58]Luke Storey:  Oh, okay. I got it.

[01:16:01]Alexander Wunsch:  No, it's the Kindle e-book reader.

[01:16:04]Luke Storey:  That's smart. Wow.

[01:16:05]Alexander Wunsch:  And this is where they did really a good job.

[01:16:07]Luke Storey:  That's very cool. That's very cool because I never read digital books because of that reason. I want the less time staring at my computer.

[01:16:16]Alexander Wunsch:  We were talking about children reading and what could you do good to your to your children, and for the eye, it's better to have a good e-book reader in dark mode compared to a normal book because the pages of a physical book still will cause the same problems with the contrast and myopia.

[01:16:47]Luke Storey:  It's interesting that you say that because when I read now, and maybe I'm just getting older, just because I'm just generally more sensitive to my environment, but when I read a white paper book with black ink, and the font is very small, it's very strenuous for my eyes.

[01:17:02]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:17:02]Luke Storey:  And it's not just because the font is small, it's confusing-looking to my eye. It's hard to make out the letters, and the shapes, and it's just it's tiring. Are you familiar with the work of the Irlen Institute?

[01:17:14]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:17:15]Luke Storey:  And these color filters and things like that?

[01:17:17]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:17:17]Luke Storey:  I went there a number of years ago.

[01:17:19]Alexander Wunsch:  I'm not a specialist, but I'm aware of them.

[01:17:21]Luke Storey:  You're certainly aware of it?

[01:17:22]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:17:22]Luke Storey:  Well, you go there and you do some sort of test, I did it a few years ago, and they determined, they use these colored gels on screens and things you read and they determine like kind of what your personal color preference is in terms of not only reading, but just the glasses that you would wear all the time that are tinted violet, or yellow, or orange, or even in some cases, blue. And so, I went and did the testing, there's kind of two different modules that you go through of the testing to determine what your color is, and then you can order these prescription glasses to use for reading and things like that.

[01:17:54] And I swear, we finally figured out my color was kind of a light blue, and they gave me these gels, and if I put that over the page of a book with a white page, it's so much more relaxing to read. And I never got around to finishing the project, but I thought that was so interesting, and I didn't really understand it, but it was definitely a quantifiable difference. I just would have to take a gel every time I change the page, and so I kind of abandoned the idea and went back to just reading less because it's annoying.

[01:18:17] So, that's very interesting. In terms of the exposure to flicker and blue light, let's say I'm in a room like this, well, it's a great example, the room we're in, we have these super shitty fluorescent bulbs, CFL bulbs. There's four of them above us, those tube ones. But then, we have a window here that's got some diffused light coming through the glass and some natural light where the window is totally open. So, how much benefit do we get from sort of diluting the crap junk lighting in here with some unfiltered and some filtered natural light coming into the room? Does that matter? Is it helping or does it still totally suck in here?

[01:18:57]Alexander Wunsch:  I don't like this quantitative approach because it gives people a chance to escape.

[01:19:11]Luke Storey:  You know what I'm looking for.

[01:19:12]Alexander Wunsch:  So, questions like what is the critical threshold limit for flicker or what is the problematic frequency we should not exceed or whatever for flicker or—yeah. I think it is very important that we have a direct connection to the outside, that we are aware of the things which are going on in real life. So, we know that even a small bull's eye in the facade, which gives you access to the outside is beneficial. And I would say the more daylight you can get, the better.

[01:20:00] And in the context of window glass, it's, I think, also important to make people aware of the fact that the best daylight will be turned into crap light when it passes through a window because the window glass filters out important parts of the spectrum like the near infrared, which is plainly provided by incandescent lamps, for example, and it makes about more than 40% of the total solar energy or light energy outside. More than 40% is found in the near infrared part of the spectrum. And the windows normally take out all the near infrared. They eliminate the ultraviolet B, but they let pass the ultraviolet A through.

[01:21:02] So, they have rather high transmission in the UVA, which is responsible for skin aging and even skin cancer. So, if you're sitting behind the window and the sun is shining in, it will increase your risk of experiencing skin cancer because you have no limitation for exposure because ultraviolet B does not cause a sunburn. So, it could happen that you sit three or four hours in the sun behind the window, and so you get almost three hours of UVA exposure without noticing that there's something adverse going on. And in addition, the repair information coming from near infrared is also missing. So, it makes UVA even worse. So, be careful with windows because they turn good light into crap light.

[01:22:08]Luke Storey:  That's crazy. So, I'm picturing riding in a car, and I was somewhat aware of this, I didn't know the depths of it as you just described, but picture so many people riding around in their cars all day, probably thinking like, wow, I'm getting a lot of great natural light or when you go look at a flat, right? You're going to buy a house or something, oh, this house has tons of natural light. No, it doesn't. Not unless the window is open, it's not natural light. You can have a million skylights if it's coming through plastic or glass, we're now getting like alien, non-native blue light, essentially. So, does it do any good? Kind of like I want to find a cheat for this.

[01:22:44] When I went home in LA, thankfully, it's always sunny and I'm like an Egyptian sun worshipper, I love sunshine. It's probably why I stay there despite it being kind of a crappy city. No offense, LA. But when I drive around in my car, I always keep the sunroof cracked a bit or keep the windows cracked a bit because I sense that I just feel better when I'm at least getting some peeks of that natural light. Is that worth doing? Is that helping me at all? They get some pops of sun coming through an open window, even though the windows are largely rolled out due to noise and pollution and whatnot.

[01:23:22]Alexander Wunsch:  I prefer the controlled exposure to sunlight, which means not arbitrarily or randomly, not when I'm sitting in the car. In the car, when it's sunny outside, I even close the shading from my panorama roof because I don't want to—yeah, it's not always so comfortable just in terms of temperature and so on. And I am a sun worshipper as well, but I prefer to expose myself in a controlled way and not occasionally. But whatever feels good for you, go ahead.

[01:24:15]Luke Storey:  So, what I'm saying is even in a house or even right here, okay, so we have a lot of sun coming through this window, which is turning into junk light as it gets filtered through the unnatural glass that we would have never evolved to see sun through. Is it not as bad because I got the window cracked and some real light is also getting mixed with the fake light?

[01:24:35]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah. The more natural light we have, I think, the better. And I'm not against daylight. And also filtered daylight has certain advantages compared to the artificial junk light, but I just want to express that there is definitely a difference between natural—when I'm talking about natural daylight, I'm talking about unfiltered natural daylight.

[01:25:09]Luke Storey:  Outdoors.

[01:25:09]Alexander Wunsch:  Outdoors.

[01:25:10]Luke Storey:  Yes, for sure.

[01:25:12]Alexander Wunsch:  I'm not sitting behind the window.

[01:25:14]Luke Storey:  Right. Okay. Man, I'm all for that. I do everything I possibly can outside, which is great when you live in a warm place. It's much easier to do so. And I think that's a great testament to why so many people travel and move to areas where there's more sun exposure unlike the city that we're in. So, what about what about being in a car like mine? I've got a German car. You guys make great cars, by the way.

[01:25:37]Alexander Wunsch:  Thanks.

[01:25:37]Luke Storey:  I have all of my windows tinted illegally dark. I mean, even the front windshield, which in the states, it's illegal to tint that. Don't tell anyone, listeners, but I've got that tinted. It's barely visible, but it is tinted. It cools the car off and it's just less harsh. It's much more calming to drive around in a car that's very dark inside. And then, I have limo tint on all four windows, which I, every once in a while, get pulled over for. If the lighting inside a car or in your house, for that matter, your office building is going to be junk anyway, wouldn't it service to at least dim that light and just tint the hell out of everything if we're already ruining the light anyway on the way in?

[01:26:17]Alexander Wunsch:  So, personally, I dim the lights inside my car because during nighttime, I have access to all visible information, even in the lowest setting position. And during daytime, it depends on the situation. Maybe you have seen photos from truck drivers who have one half of the face quite young, without any wrinkles and the other side of the face, fully wrinkled because they got the sunlight through the window glass for many years. So, these are visible examples of what glass in the car situation can do. And I was mentoring a master thesis two years ago at the University of ISMA, where the student did exactly evaluate the radiation conditions in cars. And we compared cabriolets with limousines. And so, it's kind of science on its own what the radiation situation is in the car.

[01:27:46]Luke Storey:  So, it's safe to say if we have really dark tint that we're getting substantially less radiation and negative effects like sunspots and this kind of thing.

[01:27:55]Alexander Wunsch:  I would say measure, take a spectrometer and have it tested, measure it, then you know because no one who is not involved in the matter would expect that the car industry uses different types of glass for the window shield or the side glass. So, the side glass is highly transmissive for UVA radiation, which does not apply for the windshield and so on. So, you cannot give general recipes, you have to measure because they are so inventive, they distribute the ships wherever they can, and you'll not realize it.

[01:28:41]Luke Storey:  This is the advantage of interviewing someone who is not only a scientist as you are, but a German one that pays attention to detail, and goes by data, and not hyperbole and, well, I think it probably works, I go off half that and have intuition. So, my intuition in the car is like make it as dark as possible, and then keep something cracked, so I can get some sunlight. And it seems to be working. But I like the idea of actually going in and testing because I do like to see the empirical evidence for things too.

[01:29:06] It helps me with discipline and compliance in different practices. So, the more I learn and test something about lighting, the more willing I am to go the extra mile and put my little goofy orange glasses on and change the lighting because I know that it's real, it's not just in my head. Speaking of something else that's real, when I turn these crazy light bulbs on in here, you mentioned something about mercury photon. So, I'm sensing there's something even more evil about fluorescent bulbs than your average LED or something. What were you alluding to in that moment?

[01:29:43]Alexander Wunsch:  The light from fluorescent lamps is emitted by mercury atoms. So, they have very specific information which directly refers to the source. Years ago, I coined kind of mercury resonance hypothesis, which means, essentially, that we all have mercury in our bodies from vaccines or whatever, from exposure to city and so on. And the light coming from fluorescents has peaks where the energy is very sharp and very intense. And these peaks, for example, in the indigo 436 nanometers, this is a mercury photon wavelength. So, fluorescent lamps emit mercury photons which have exactly the energy to activate mercury atoms in your body.

[01:31:07]Luke Storey:  Oh, my God.

[01:31:11]Alexander Wunsch:  And it is just simple chemical physics that if you have, for example, a sodium atom and chlorine a atom, the sodium atom has just one electron in the outer shell. And the chlorine atom has seven of them and wants to have eight, and the sodium wants to get rid of this one electron. And if you want to remove the electron of the sodium, you have to increase the distance to the nucleus, increase it-.

[01:31:53]Luke Storey:  The physical proximity?

[01:31:57]Alexander Wunsch:  The physical proximity and the orbit, the easier it will be for another atom to get hold on this electron. And how do you kick out electrons out of an atom? You need exactly the wavelength. The photon would emit when it jumps back from an outer orbit, which is in the case of sodium, let's say, yellow light. So, if you shine yellow light onto the sodium electron, it will absorb this and will jump out. And this is the moment where the chlorine grasps the electron and they form sodium chloride, one without and the other with an additional electron.

[01:32:46] So, starting a chemical reaction in many, many cases involves the absorption and emission of photons. And once you have mercury in your system, it will be less problematic as long as it's not activated. But when you start to put an influence or impact on the electron distribution of this mercury atom in terms of mercury absorbs mercury wavelengths, the electron jumps out, mercury will become more reactive, chemically wise. So, maybe, the use of mercury light aggravates the negative effects of this toxic heavy metal.

[01:33:41]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[01:33:42]Alexander Wunsch:  And we definitely can say that Mercury is photo chemically active. For example, when the sun shines onto a lake, you can, after a certain while, measure increased concentrations of mercury atoms in the air over the water because it's kind of driven out of the water by the light. So, it's just a hypothesis and it's just my kind of thinking. I'm not claiming that this must be correct, but from my gut feeling, there is something to think about.

[01:34:20]Luke Storey:  That's very interesting, especially thinking about the proximity. I notice now in a lot of hotel rooms, they'll use the CFL bulbs, those curly, heinous lighting bulbs on the nightstands on either side of the bed, so your head's about two, three feet away from those bulbs. And if we've had mercury in our amalgam fillings, and are being poisoned through our bloodstream, and you have that mercury cut in our tissue and whatnot, if your hypothesis is valid, which it sounds pretty plainly that it is, that could be problematic, something you want to avoid.

[01:34:55] So, that brings me to one of my top questions I couldn't wait to ask you because I have my own thoughts on this and I think you're going to overturn them. In the hierarchy of indoor lighting, given that, of course, natural outdoor lighting is number one, that's our favorite, in terms of artificial lighting, what is the hierarchy from worst to best? Like if you had to put bulbs in your room, what are the worst ones to the second worst to the third, on and on, et cetera?

[01:35:23]Alexander Wunsch:  So, the worst are cold lighting appliances or lamps, producing cold light, cold light like fluorescents and LED, especially when they provide a high-color temperature.

[01:35:40]Luke Storey:  Would you say fluorescents based on the mercury connection would be worse than LED? If you had to pick two bulbs that were both very cool and color temperature, would you pick an LED before a fluorescent?

[01:35:53]Alexander Wunsch:  It depends.

[01:35:54]Luke Storey:  There are other variables?

[01:35:55]Alexander Wunsch:  Depends on the variables like the electronic ballast, for example, the specific emission spectrum because there are LEDs which are even reduced in the content of blue. The problem even with the warm-appearing LEDs with so-called warm light, which is still cold light, but the warm LED colors, light colors in many cases carry still pretty much high amounts of blue, which is masked by even higher amounts of orange, for example, so we won't see it with our naked eye, but we only can discover it when we use a spectrometer. So, when you see warm light from an incandescent lamp, you exactly know how the spectral distribution will be.

[01:36:54] If you see a warm light from an LED, you can just say the bartender, he found a good blend of mixing things to the blue so that you don't become aware of it anymore. But there are also LEDs which definitely emit very tiny amounts of blue light. So, depending on the phosphor, you can shift some of the blue energy into longer wavelengths by a phenomenon called fluorescence. This is the same technology which has been used by fluorescent lights. LEDs, white LEDs are fluorescent lamps as well, and depending on the specific distribution of phosphorescence. So, you can have a better or worse fluorescent spectrum. So, I would first measure, and then decide.

[01:37:57]Luke Storey:  Got it.

[01:37:58]Alexander Wunsch:  But cold light is, in any case, the last choice I would make. And it's better to have incandescent lamps. And incandescent lamps can be operated on alternating current. And some of them can be operated on direct current. The 12-volt, 24-volts, low-voltage incandescent lamps can be operated on direct current. And this is the way how you can eliminate flicker and electromagnetic dirty electricity completely.

[01:38:37]Luke Storey:  I was going to ask you about that.

[01:38:39]Alexander Wunsch:  So, my favorite artificial light would be halogen lamp.

[01:38:45]Luke Storey:  Really?

[01:38:46]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[01:38:47]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[01:38:47]Alexander Wunsch:  Twelve-volt halogen operated on a DC transformer which is ground-linked or earthed.

[01:38:56]Luke Storey:  Wow, dude. So, in your home, are you using mostly halogen lights?

[01:39:01]Alexander Wunsch:  Mm hmm.

[01:39:02]Luke Storey:  Yeah?

[01:39:02]Alexander Wunsch:  Mm hmm.

[01:39:03]Luke Storey:  If it's 12 volts, can you still get enough light out of them? I mean, can you have it well-lit if you need to see indoors?

[01:39:10]Alexander Wunsch:  Well, you can do or if you can get them with 50 watts. You can get them even with 100 watts.

[01:39:14]Luke Storey:  Okay. So, the voltage, all right, isn't the wattage. Okay. Got it.

[01:39:19]Alexander Wunsch:  The thing is the voltage and the wattage, they are linked in a way that especially when we are talking about dirty electricity, just take easy numbers, for the United States, I would say you have a 120-watt bulb which is operated on 120 volts.

[01:39:45]Luke Storey:  Right. Those are the incandescents I have at home.

[01:39:48]Alexander Wunsch:  So then, you need one ampere of electrical power to operate this.

[01:39:57]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[01:39:58]Alexander Wunsch:  If you take the same wattage, 120 watts with 12 volts, you would need ten times the power, which means 10 amperes. And the ampere is directly responsible for the amount of dirty electricity. So, if you are operating a low-voltage halogen lamp on alternating current, you have ten times more electromagnetic emanation in terms of dirty electricity compared to the high voltage, to the 120 volts type. But as soon as you are using the direct current transformer, you eliminate all the dirty electricity completely. So, the hierarchy is cold light, the lowest, the last choice; then incandescent low-voltage on alternative current; then high-voltage incandescent on alternate current; and then low-voltage incandescent on DC.

[01:41:21]Luke Storey:  That's amazing. Such a way cooler answer than I was expecting. In terms of the voltage, is this why dimmer switches cause so much dirty electricity? I had the dirty electricity measured in my house and it was horrific on any walls, the whole wall or any lighting fixtures that were on a dimmer. So, I had them all taken out of the whole house.

[01:41:44]Alexander Wunsch:  So, what makes the smooths sine wave amplitude dirtier is when you disrupt it at a certain point. So, what a dimmer does is just when the amplitude is rising, for example, it shuts down to zero. So, it makes a sawtooth out of a sine wave. And in music, you would easily be able to discriminate the violin sharp tone from the sawtooth wave form compared to the mellow tone of sine wave. And when you are using 12-volt direct current incandescents, halogen, you can even dim them by changing the voltage. For example, you can operate them on six or seven or eight or nine volts. So, you have clean dimming without any noises, without any dirty electricity, you just need the best transformer which can do the job, but they are existing, and this is what I have in my home.

[01:43:03]Luke Storey:  But now, I see why you have a garage full of different incandescent light bulbs.

[01:43:07]Alexander Wunsch:  For any purpose.

[01:43:07]Luke Storey:  I was like, he probably has a few different color temperatures. That makes sense. And it's like, oh, no, this gets very complex. Whoever's doing my show notes, they're going to have to really—you guys, listen to me right now, you're going to have to really get this down and send me the formula because my head's kind of spinning right now. Okay. So, there's much more to it than the color. And I find it interesting that the halogen lights are recommended, and then we're really looking at the voltage here. So, if somebody just doesn't have the wherewithal to go figure out all the voltage and stuff, would you recommend people just getting rid of all dimmer switches in their house because they're all going to-

[01:43:43]Alexander Wunsch:  As long as they are standard dimmer switches, yes.

[01:43:45]Luke Storey:  Yes. Okay.

[01:43:46]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[01:43:46]Luke Storey:  Okay, cool. Good to know. Very good to know. Wow. Fascinating information here. I think we're going to have to do, honestly, another interview at another point because I didn't even have the opportunity to get into sun, and then your whole other area of expertise with the chromotherapy and color therapy, which is absolutely fascinating. So, I don't know. I'm going to follow you around to conferences that are closer than Germany, and we're going to do it, and we'll cover the sun on the next one.

[01:44:16] And I've done shows previously about it, but I have a feeling you'll have some surprises for us. And I think we can probably call it a day at that and let you get out of here. I know it's been a long weekend for you. I really, really appreciate the dedication to your work and how you were able to present this stuff in a way that's relatively understandable. I think between me and you, the listener can probably gather that we really want to avoid junk lighting at all costs. And it's not neurotic and paranoid to have an understanding that this is really bad because I get accused sometimes of being too extreme and too hardcore.

[01:44:53] And it's like, to me, cancer is extreme, preventing it by going outside a lot, and getting natural light, and limiting the exposure to junk light, and at least changing the temperature of your indoor light is a lot less extreme than ending up in a hospital where they have to chop you apart and fill you full of whatever before they fill you full of formaldehyde later on. So, thank you for your dedication and your work and your expertise. I've learned a lot from you today. I'd like to know who have been three teachers or teachings that you might recommend that our listeners go to learn more about this topic.

[01:45:27]Alexander Wunsch:  So, I have a number of Vimeo presentations where you'll have, in addition to the spoken word, also some graphs and pictures. And this might make things easier in terms of increasing the understanding of the probably complex topic.

[01:45:49]Luke Storey:  Cool.

[01:45:49]Alexander Wunsch:  So, there is a recent presentation where I, for example, analyzed also the way the European Union handles the banning of the bulb and all the concerns, the health concerns we were talking about today, which is kind of amazing how the official bodies handle these delicate topics. Yeah. And I recently published a book, Die Kraft des Lichts, but as you can tell from the title, it's fully German, and it's not translated at the moment. Yeah. But there are tens of presentations which deal all with the topics we were addressing today.

[01:46:45]Luke Storey:  So, more of your work can be found on your Vimeo channel?

[01:46:48]Alexander Wunsch:  Yes.

[01:46:48]Luke Storey:  That's where we can take like a deep dive and really geek out.

[01:46:51]Alexander Wunsch:  And if you ask me for textbooks on photo biology, there are some. One is a book which has been published in the late 1970s from Professor Fritz Hollwich, what Americans probably say, it has been published again in recent years, so it's, again, available and I would definitely recommend this, The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Man and Animal. So, this is a very recommendable textbook if you want to dive deeper into the endocrine and-

[01:47:45]Luke Storey:  I'm glad that you just mentioned on animals because something I think many people probably don't consider is the effect of junk lighting on their pets, right?

[01:47:55]Alexander Wunsch:  Yeah.

[01:47:55]Luke Storey:  They have the same biology like they've evolved to also not see this insane, weird alien light all night either at the intensities that we do. So, interesting. A couple other experts or teachers you might be able to point us to?

[01:48:17]Alexander Wunsch:  I could probably give you a list after we ended this because-

[01:48:22]Luke Storey:  There's too many?

[01:48:25]Alexander Wunsch:  My brain is getting empty after the talk and it's the same as your batteries, too.

[01:48:35]Luke Storey:  It's only been an hour and 51 minutes. Man, listen, thank you so much for joining us. How about, in addition to your Vimeo, do you want to send us to your website if you got any links that would be useful for people to come learn from you?

[01:48:45]Alexander Wunsch:  I will look it up and I will provide what seems to be reasonable.

[01:48:49]Luke Storey:  Cool. I will put it in the show notes. But for now, send everyone to Vimeo to watch your videos and learn more about this stuff. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

[01:48:56]Alexander Wunsch:  Thank you very much, Luke.

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