Luke Storey: [00:00:02] 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.

Brian Richards, we're finally doing it, dude.

Brian Richards: [00:00:27] Thank you so much for having me here.

Luke Storey: [00:00:29] Yeah. I remember meeting you years ago. God, this must be five, six years ago at a conference in Pasadena. You were at your SaunaSpace booth, and you had all these laminated sort of slides in a book, and you were breaking down your knowledge on the light spectrum to me. And I was like, "Holy shit. I got to interview this guy." And then, we've seen each other, you know, over the years and hung out a bit. And I'm shocked that it's taken this long, but we're finally doing it.

Brian Richards: [00:01:01] Yeah. I think that was the Bulletproof Conference, and that was in the very early adopter stage of my company. I drove my Honda Element with my trade show booth, and my wife, and son to L.A. From Missouri. And, you know, I ran the whole booth by myself, set it all up. I made all those slides. So, yeah, that was very much in the formative stages when the product was still very early adopter, very conceptual, very bricolage.

But since then, the company has just really come into its own. It's kind of shocking, actually, I have to pinch myself sometimes. But it's 2022, I have, like, 42 employees. We have a huge manufacturing shop now. We have a new inventory warehouse. And, actually, a little showroom that's going to be opening pretty soon. That's in Columbia, Missouri, all of that. But the product ships worldwide.

It's an interesting concept that I stumbled upon initially because of my own health problems, really, and sort of seeking a solution that wasn't prescription drug-based, you know, something that really got to the root cause of things.

So, I had what you would call adrenal fatigue, I suppose. It's self-diagnosed, but I had weird acne on my torso, kind of around my kidneys, and I had insomnia, and mind racing, and fatigue. It was kind of lethargic and irascible. And yet I was really young. I mean, I'm not that old yet. But this was ten years ago or something. And so, it didn't make sense to me what's my problem. And if you met me on the street, you'd think, "Well, what's your problem, dude? You look fine. You look great. You know, you look healthy." But no, I wasn't. And then, all these things, I didn't feel good.

And so, at some point, I got recommended to take Accutane or something like that. It's pretty much been taken off the market. I understand now.

Luke Storey: [00:03:06] Oh, man. I hope so.

Brian Richards: [00:03:07] It's associated with liver cancer. That's a sort of a microcosm of the pharmaceutical world, right? And so, that really bothered me. And I said, "You know what? I'm going to figure out my own thing." And I did a lot of research online and I kept coming across sauna, this concept of purification of the body.

And, perhaps, one of the biggest contributing factors to diseases is environmental pollution, you know, pollution in our bodies. And we know chemical pollution is out there. But it turns out there's lots of types of pollution, electromagnetic pollution, for example, all these things.

So, this was in the early stages. I had no idea about EMFs, by the way, back then. I had no idea about red light back then, or photobiomodulation, or mitochondria, or anything like that. I am sort of classically trained in the sciences, and math and science. But from a physiological perspective, all that, I didn't care about any of that. I just was looking for something to make me feel better.

So, in any case, sauna. So, I was like, "Okay. I'll build my own sauna. You know, I can figure this out. I'm kind of a tinkerer." And and right before that, I kind of stumbled on what I do now, what is SaunaSpace now, and that is actually called the electric incandescent light bath. And it was invented by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in 1891.

So, incandescent light bulbs were invented in 1887. The modern version with the tungsten filament and the vacuum gas filled glass chamber, that was, like, 1887. And electricity kind of at the same time. And then, three years later, Dr. Kellogg looked at these and he's like, "These lamps, these bulbs, there's something special about this. Let's use these to power a sauna." He also invented the electric arc light bath. So, he had different types of incandescent bulbs. Arc lamps are much hotter. They're much more of a blue ultraviolet spectrum.

But he was trying these different things. Essentially, in short, in his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, he set up his electric incandescent light baths. And over a period of years, in the first decade of the 20th Century, he ran, like, 50,000 invalids through it, which is a word that we used to use for sick people, people with disease. And he healed everything he came up against. And he has a whole protocol that he built down. And he discusses this hundreds of thousands of sauna sessions that each one he was observing and his team was recording.

And he wrote about all of it in a book called Light Therapeutics, published in 1910 by Dr. Kellogg. And you're like, "Whoa. Light therapy, 1910?" Man made light therapy, too, based on the incandescence of the sun and nature. And then, the concept was kind of lost and forgotten in time, along with many other things, actually.

You know, we know that with the rise of the American Medical Association, essentially, you had a lot of alternative therapies that kind of ran out of town. You know, they used to have cancer spas and sanitariums of different types, little sanitarium hospitals, where you'd go and heal all across the U.S. And all of those were kind of stamped out by the late '30s, '40s, and '50s and disappeared. Chiropractic, for example, disappeared. It came back, finally, in the '70s.

There's also the work of Dr. Arthur Denshaw and others. There's some really famous guys who dug deep into this life therapy stuff. The fact that we're plants, we can absorb light, not just for energy, but for repair and recuperation and so many other things. And they understood this, Luke, like 120 years ago.

So, what I do now, what SaunaSpace does now, first of all, it's the first electric sauna that was ever invented from a technological perspective. And it being the first, it has over 120 years of safe use. So, those of you who are skeptical out there about this concept of the incandescent sauna, what we do, it's proven itself time and time again.

And it's not just used as a sauna. Farmers use it to heat livestock. In the racehorse industry, you have these animals that are very expensive and if they get an injury or something, that's really problematic. So, they've been using these to heal wounds on racehorses for 50 years.

Luke Storey: [00:07:45] Really?

Brian Richards: [00:07:45] Yeah. Yeah. And the whole concept of the photon, the single lamp therapy that you use, not just the sauna with three or four or five lamps in an enclosed space to promote sweating, but the single lamp therapy, the targeted therapy concept, that dates back a long time. Many of us have grandparents who used to know about this. When you had a problem, they would just take a heat lamp and put it on that area. Now, you kind of see them in some bathrooms. But, again, the concept was kind of lost even though it was so fascinating and it was so effective

And so, you can look into all of that. There's a real famous light therapy kind of focused on the eyes and the skin, a research doctor named Alexander Wunsch.

Luke Storey: [00:08:35] Oh, yeah. I interviewed him.

Brian Richards: [00:08:36] Yeah. You've interviewed him. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:08:37] Fascinating guy.

Brian Richards: [00:08:39] And he has a presentation he did for, like, the Ophthalmology Society of America or something - I think it's still on Vimeo - where he shows these amazing records and photos of stuff of people. Like, these big arc lamps and people sitting under them in 1910 and 1905 and they're healing lupus vulgaris. So, lupus used to kill people back in the day. And so, even before electricity, they understood about light therapy. Our ancestors understood a lot about light therapy.

And I'm not talking about thousands of years ago. I'm talking about just pre-electricity. If you had lupus and you had some other skin conditions, they would use red stained glass and put that on the window. So, you'd sit in front of a window that had a red stained glass. And you'd sit and you'd absorb the rays of the sun. And the red stained glass filters out almost all of the ultraviolet and blue. And so, what comes through, it's this healing component that we call infrared, near-infrared particularly. And so, they were healing 100 percent these diseases, like lupus, that you could die from using an informed understanding of light, how we're healed by light.

In the scientific world, they call it photobiomodulation. So, that's light controlling biology. But for short, light therapy or, most people know nowadays, as red light therapy.

Anyway, so I built my electric incandescent light bath. This little bricolage, a little tent thing that I made, plumbing pipe, banana clips, chicken wire. It was pretty fugly. And, yet, I used it right before bed, and totally I slept amazing that night. I was like, "Huh." I used it again the next night, I slept even better. And, in fact, in just a few sessions, I felt like my insomnia had been cured. It was just gone. It wasn't an issue anymore.

Where before, I lay there in bed and my mind would be racing. I wasn't really, like, depressed or anxious or anything. I just sit there, I'd be thinking about all this stuff and couldn't fall asleep.

So, I was so intrigued at that point that it fixed this problem that I had, this inability to sleep well and go to sleep easily, that I began to use it every day, pretty much four or five days a week. Long sessions, you know, 35 minute sessions and even longer for many months, probably six months. And it was at the end of it that I realized, it was probably adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout. A lot of people have it. Just you're basically toxic, and you're low energy, and your adrenals don't respond well to the hormonal signals anymore, and you're just kind of worn out. You know, you're worn out like a worn out rag. You need a reboot and a reset.

So, my acne was gone. My skin looked a lot better, you know, better than ever. And then, the things that I didn't know were a problem. You know, when the car is dirty and you throw a little more mud on it, you don't notice, you don't see anything. But once the car is clean and polished and looking awesome, your self-awareness, your sensitivity to yourself, and where you're at physiologically, mentally, and so forth, that it gets better.

And so, I didn't realize that I had brain fog, and I did. And all of a sudden, my energy levels were really high. I didn't have any lethargy anymore. I was more patient, you know, even with my mom. This sort of irascibility that I had, this bitchiness, that totally went away. And I was just like, "Wow." I kind of achieved what I think everybody wants, you know, whether you're a man or a woman, whoever you are, everybody just wants to look and feel better. It's a simple thing.

And so, the question is like, how do you get there? So, for me, this was my aha. I was like, "Wow. This thing works really well." And that led to sort of making a few for friends and family. And then, I eventually got asked by this doctor to start making him, sort of. And at this time, I had moved to Columbia, Missouri. I grew up in Montana, so I grew up in the cold. But I had a wanderlust period for many years, traveled abroad, and eventually came back. And then, I had my story where I built the sauna and stuff shortly before I moved to Columbia, Missouri.

Well, at the end of Montana in Bozeman, then I lived in Urbana, Illinois, for years, kind of a strange place called Shambhala, for my wife's yoga instruction. She was into a really famous teacher there. Anyway, this was right after the crash in 2008. Do you remember that with the houses? And so, we moved to Columbia and I was like, "Real estate, that's a sound investment." And everything was crashed so we bought a couple of houses - my father and I - and I was going to fix them up. I was the sweat equity. He was the capital.

And I was sitting there fixing them up, and then this sauna thing came up. And unlike being a landlord and fixing up houses and stuff where you have to deal with people, I didn't really have the emotional constitution to be a landlord, like the people and the rent and all that. I'm just kind of a nice guy. And so, on the side here, there's this sauna thing. It was so different. Instead of rent collection and trying to fix up things - and I love to fix up things really beautifully - only to see them summarily, like, totally trashed by the one bad tenant out of many good tenants. And that's just the way that business is, right?

Anyway, so with the sauna, I would send it out, and they were, again, very simplistic in design and build quality and stuff. And people would call me up and they would so grateful and they'd be crying like, "You changed my life." And so, I would get paid up front and send this out. And then, I just experienced such incredible gratitude from these people I was helping. I was like, "I am not doing the housing stuff anymore. I'm going to go into this. I'm going to like double, triple down into this thing."

So, in the beginning, you know, I had a little PayPal email, you had to email me on Dr. Freeland's website. And then, we would talk by email and then I would send you a little PayPal invoice, and then I would send it out for you. In the beginning, I would go to the dumpster of the downtown appliance center, where, outside, they have their beautiful refrigerator boxes, the huge cardboard box. And I'd take those, and painstakingly slice them inside out and make my own custom box. So, like, a little trick when I sent it out. So, I build it all myself.

I hooked up with a local upholsterer, who's now my design partner, Rusty - who's really an awesome guy. I've been working with him forever - who would sew the covers. In the beginning, though, the covers were two painter's cloths from Home Depot, and banana clips, an PVC pipe, and just regular heat lamps from the store. And I built it myself and send it all out.

And it was a thing that slowly grew and slowly grew, such that in 2014, I got my first small business loan. I actually got approved for a small business export loan. Those of you who don't know this, if you export any of your product - I had sent, like, two or three saunas to England. The volumes were not that big or anything at that point. But because of that, I was qualified for a small business export loan, which means the government underwrites 95 percent of it instead of 80 percent of it. So, the bank was very happy to give that to me.

But I got the first small business export loan that any company in Missouri had gotten in, like, 20 years, because who makes anything anymore in America? Who exports it? So, that was my journey in the beginning. I got the loan and then I bought this wood cutting robot, this huge CNC machine that cuts wood and it's computer controlled, and I got a laser engraver, and I hired my first employee. And, you know, that did not work out very well. I let him go after six weeks or something.

But slowly, continually just held on to the good, wasn't satisfied with what I had, kind of clawed my way forward. I ended up getting three business loans over a period of, you know, the last six or seven years. We almost went bankrupt, like, two times. One time I had to borrow, like, $10,000 from my mother. It was super, super humbling - humiliating, actually. But I did what I had to. We slowly improved the quality of the product and we got some endorsements, some pretty cool ones. Dr. Mercola was a big one. Jack Dorsey was using it, and he was talking about it at Ben Greenfield's podcast at one point.

So, somehow we crossed the chasm. I've read that book, where we kind of transitioned from early adopter in branding and quality and all that stuff to more of a mainstream product. Like right now, I was just recently at the South by Southwest Wellness Expo. They have a Wellness Expo component, and we have a huge booth, it's, like, 24 by 20 foot. And I've got my team there. And I'm actually able to afford to pay people to come, versus me driving myself in my little tiny Honda.

It's been an incredible ride to get to this point. It's really been a dream come true. It's been a lot of tough moments and a few grey hairs, certainly. But for those of you out there who think you can't build something, or you can't make things, or the only successful companies are software or something like that, it's not true. It takes a little bit of grit.

There's this book called The E-Myth, so just wearing those three hats of technician, manager, and entrepreneur for a long time it took, and now I'm here. I'm here with you. I'm in Austin. And we have many challenges ahead. During the COVID era, the supply chain issues have been really frustrating because we're a tangible good. I've got over 200 items on the bill of materials, you know, the ingredient list to make the product. And the vast majority of it is all custom made, you know, from the light guards to just all the different parts, all custom made.

I mean, the difference between the SaunaSpace Sauna and Dr. Kellogg's Electric Incandescent Light Bath is one of user design, really, more than anything. His was a huge Victorian style cabinet, like the size of half of this room and it had 30 or 40 different lightbulbs surrounding it and you would stand in it. It was just this big thing. And I was like, "Well, this is really awesome. You know, this research says sauna is amazing. Photobiomodulation, super amazing. It's doing so many things. It's so strongly supported in the literature."

But people think sauna is a luxury, like it's too expensive, it's too heavy, it takes up too much space. And then, for folks, it's invalid to some degree, whether they have autoimmune or they have physical impairment or what. For many other reasons, they can't use a regular finite sauna that's 180 degrees, it's wet, it's hot, there's no light therapy, there may be EMF issues, or whatever.

So, I wanted to make a sauna for everybody, that was the old tagline back in the day. And so, I immediately was thinking portability in the beginning. And that's kind of what we have today. it's, basically, a portable red light therapy sauna tent.

Luke Storey: [00:21:07] Well, I'll tell you what, we've been in a temporary living situation for the past year since moving here. Hopefully, knock on wood, that's about to end. But I only had room for a couple of things in this place in terms of, you know, tools that I like to use on a regular basis. And I have your sauna in the second bedroom. It's a very small room and it takes up probably one-fourth of the room. But, like, out of the hyperbaric chamber or any number of things I could have put in there that I like to use on a regular basis, that was an easy decision. And, actually, I used it last night, so I thank you.

And I wasn't expecting to kind of explore the journey of getting here from where you started. But I think it's really important for people, especially right now where so many people have lost their vocation, or are kind of starting over, rethinking their lives, and their sense of purpose, and what they want to do with themselves, and I love the story of someone with an idea that starts with nothing.

Just this etheric idea and seeing a need in their own lives, fulfilling that need and going, "Huh. Wow. I just fulfilled a need I had." There must be other people with this same need and putting in the perseverance and, as you said, grit to actuate that and put it out in the world. So, thank you for sharing that. I think it's a really inspiring story.

And not that everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit either. I mean, I think some people like having a job because there's a sense of security in that. In other words, working for someone else. I see the value in that and I've done that. But as someone who has a difficult time having a boss, I always identify with the entrepreneur. I'm like, "Just invent something. Think of something." So, that's very cool that you shared that.

Going back to the light, because I think what's unique is that you've obviously created something that gives you heat, and sweating, and the traditional benefits of sauna. But your understanding of light is super keen, and I'm obsessed with light. 

But going back to some of the historical points, I remember interviewing early on, it probably was in my first ten interviews, Nadine Artemis. And she was telling me how there used to be these hospitals that practiced, I think, it was Heliotherapy, where - I forget if it was MS or whatever it was, maybe it was rickets or something. I forget the actual pathologies that they were dealing with - literally, these hospitals were just sunbeds and they just roll everyone outside and put them in the sun and that would heal them. And for some reason that stuck with me as someone who I just feel so good, you know, I don't tend to burn, but I always like to say safe sun exposure.

I know some people are more fair or they haven't built up that solar callus, but I've noticed how much just getting a natural light has benefited me, that it's become really like a therapy. And, also, in that observation is thinking about when most people go on vacation, with the exception of going somewhere to ski or snowboard or something, where do we go? We tend to gravitate toward the equator, where there's more sun, higher UV index, and we want to be around water. You know, it's like the water and light thing. There's something innate in our biology that drives us there when we want to rest and restore and also just be happier. So, I think there's so much medicine in exploring light.

So, within that, based on your understanding of the different spectrums of light, maybe a place to start would be, what sun exposure does for us and some of the qualities of true natural light, not what we think of natural light like a room like this with windows, but your body being exposed to natural sunlight. And, also, this ancient practice of sun gazing where you're actually utilizing the red light spectrum of the sun.

Brian Richards: [00:25:21] Yeah. The light eater cults too. In modernity, particularly in the Western civilization, and particularly in the last hundred years, with the scientific revolutions, and now the technology revolutions, and now the information revolution of the internet, and all that, we, as humans, not you, not me, but in general, we've developed an arrogance. Because there are so many technologies that have improved a lot in life, you know, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, these brilliant things that are helping us to live longer and more healthy in many ways, we presume that all of technology and all of technological advancements are beneficial.

But that doesn't square with our biology, which is ancient. This body is a million years old or whatever, 30,000 years old, our biology has not evolved really at all in the last hundred years or really much in the last thousand years, maybe a little bit. But we are still programmed from the holistic level in our whole body, but also in the cellular level, in our mitochondria, in the quantum level, even below that. We're programmed to get what our ancestors got 1,000 years ago. And I would argue even before that, even pre-agricultural based diets that we have nowadays. That's what we ideally are programmed for.

But particularly if you look at the last hundred years, you know, we have a billion, billion times more microwave signal in the world. That's all manmade, what's called non-native EMF. It's not the native electromagnetism of the earth that we're programmed to get. And the long story short is, the synthetic world we've created that we live in is, unfortunately, very deleterious to our health. It's very toxic. But, unfortunately, here we are. We have to work for a living. I, myself, am included in that. I work in front of two huge 27-inch screens for many hours a day. And yet that's not what we're supposed to get.

So, what we're supposed to get is the sun, the sunlight, many hours a day. And those of us who have a genetic predisposition to get more sun exposure are darker skinned. So, someone who is of African-American descent needs three or four times the amount of sun because they have so much more pigmentation in their skin. That is really a defense mechanism from the killer wavelengths of the sun, ultraviolet and blue. But, nonetheless, that's the case.

So, you saw that with the COVID era, that folks with African-American descent were more inclined, appeared to be more immunocompromised more easily. Particularly because those who live in the U.S. are living in the same western synthetic world where we live indoors all day long, under blue fluorescent LED light, it's all this toxic junk light.

But back to your question to the sun, like, why does the sun help us so much? Most people think it's vitamin D, which comes from the ultraviolet light, which is ionizing radiation. The truth is, when it's in the winter, people get more sick, they're more indoors, vitamin D levels are down. And that's true. And vitamin D is great. We know people will supplement vitamin D when they get sick, when they have illness, or whatever. It's very successful.

But what else is going on? Because ultraviolet light forms a very small percentage of sunlight and blue light as well, which ultraviolet light and blue light are right next to each other. Ultraviolet light is - whatever - 200 to 400 nanometers or so. And then, you have the visible light spectrum and that's ROYGBIV backwards, so blue is right next to ultraviolet. It's not quite ionizing radiation, so it doesn't damage your DNA directly.

But now we know that's why people wear blue light blockers and such, blue light causes free radical formation. Even in the very mainstream world, they call it high energy visible light. Which, I understand you have your own really sick glasses now.

Luke Storey: [00:29:49] I do. Gilded. The blue blockers, Gilded. Yeah. It's funny, when we were going to do this interview, I was like, "Oh, I should bring my glasses because we're having a little show and tell." And for those watching the video, we're going to be testing some of the spectrums of light, and light flicker, and stuff like that. But, yeah, I took it upon myself to make some blue blockers that I thought were cool looking and scientifically valid.

Brian Richards: [00:30:09] Yeah. More power to you. Because it's not optimal to be in front of blue only light, and so let's get into that. So, with the sun, a very small percentage is ultraviolet and blue. What happens to form the largest plurality of sunlight? Near-infrared light. So, actually, if we go back to the spectrum, we have from high frequency going to low energy, low frequency, longer wavelength. We have, like, gamma rays and x-rays and that crazy stuff. And then, ultraviolet light, blue light, visible light spectrum, which the lowest frequency, the lowest energy is red.

And then, we get into what's called the infrared spectrum. The first chunk of that is called near-infrared. And near-infrared, it's referred to as near because it's next to red. And, of course, these names and these bands are a bit arbitrarily defined by us human scientists. But, nonetheless, the fact of the matter remains. If you look at the sun spectrum, it's this big bell curve with this long tail and infrared, and it peaks in the visible range. And 41 percent of sunlight is in the near-infrared band. And if you add red light to that, which is, like, 11, 12, 13 percent, or something like that, you have the majority of sunlight is either red light or near-infrared light. That, I think is its own statement.

If you look at the nutrifying power of the sun, the sun nourishes all life on earth. There wouldn't be anything without the sun. What's the biggest component of sunlight? It's near-infrared. Some red, but mostly actually near-infrared, so high energy infrared. And there's also certainly a fair amount of the mid-infrared and the far-infrared. So, if we look at the sun, it's okay. In the winter, we're low vitamin D, we're not getting enough of that.

But it's not so much the ultraviolet and blue, all those are important and dose dependent. Blue light is important for building up melatonin production in the pineal gland during the day. So, we are designed to get some ultraviolet and blue light, but it doesn't really promote all this regeneration, and healing, and repair, and recuperation as does the near-infrared and red light via the mitochondrial activation systems, which are, really, in every cell of the body.

So, basically, the biggest chunk of sunlight just so happens to, number one, stimulate mitochondrial responses in the body, and we'll go into that. There's mitochondria in every cell of the body except red blood cells. But also the same narrow band of near-infrared, particularly the 700 to 1,000 nanometer infrared, is the deepest penetrating of wavelengths into biological tissue.

So, if we talk about doing light therapy in the brain, what's the brain protected by? The skull, the thickest bone tissue in the body. Red light doesn't penetrate bone tissue. It doesn't really penetrate more than skin deep. It's the near-infrared wavelengths that, due to what's called the optical window of the human body, they penetrate much deeper, four or five inches into the body.

So, if we're talking about doing light therapy into the guts, you know, the deep regions of the body into inside of the bone tissue within which you have mitochondria inside of the brain, it's not really red light that does that. It's near-infrared, which is, again, the biggest chunk of sunlight.

So, what we get from the sun in terms of the most powerful component of it, is this complement of wavelengths that are red and near-infrared that form together in the majority of the sun's emission. And if we're naked underneath them, we're not covering ourselves with clothing, it's promoting an incredibly wide array of healing effects, immune activation effects, anti-aging effects, inflammation reduction effects, all these things that some of those are the biggest contributing factors to disease.

And here we have this built-in brilliant system that doesn't take drugs. It doesn't take anything else. It takes light. So, it turns out we're plants, we eat light. And so, you have these light eater cults, and you have the sun gazers, and all this stuff. And a lot of that's kind of been suppressed in the modern era, like put your sunscreen on, when you're in pain, take a pill. When, in fact, you can go outside and you can activate all this stuff just by being formed by this understanding that there's this healing component of the sun.

But then, it's more complicated than that, of course. There's definitely a synergy to the sunlight. And there's a certain way we're supposed to experience it. The ratio of red-near-infrared to blue ultraviolet changes throughout the day. And Dr. Wunsch has a great slide that he shows that in one of his presentations. The highest concentration or the highest percentage of red-near-infrared during the day is guess what, in the morning, sunrise, and in the evening during sunset.

So, the best sunlight to get, regardless of your skin type or your ethnicity, is that morning light up until like 10:30, 11:00 a.m. Once the sun starts to rise in the sky and it reaches its zenith of midday, you have the maximum amount of blue and ultraviolet. And it starts beating down on us and it wears us out, and that's why we rest under the shade of the tree during the day. Of course, nowadays people sit at the beach at 1:00 p.m. and cook themselves and they put sunscreen on and all that. But our ancestors understood, "Oh, the best, most healing stuff is in the morning and kind of in the evening. We kind of need to hide and rest during the day."

And at the same time, you know, look at our bodies, we're hairless or we only have a little bit of hair on our nether regions and on the top of our head. So, the hair on our head protects us from the zenith of the ultraviolet light exposure a little bit. But, otherwise, we're beings of photobiomodulation. We're supposed to eat light into all of our pores and every single cell of the body is really craving and crying out for this light. And so, our ancestors understood this.

But nowadays, modern observation scientific studies, with all of their limitations, are buttressing the ancient wisdom. Yes, this stuff does work. We have mitochondria. The mitochondria has the cytochrome c, a light receptor protein that has absorption bands only for red and near-infrared wavelengths of light. And when you shine the special wavelength of light on it with a very minimal dose, by the way - by the way, you can get a biologically impactful photobiomodulation dose from a fireplace, from a bonfire.

And our ancestors understood this too. Like, they lived with the cycle of the sun, the proper circadian rhythm, they didn't have a blue light after dark, but they did have light after dark. It just wasn't blue light. It was the campfire. And so, we have 30,000 years or more of a relationship with making our own fire and it was always down low after dark.

Luke Storey: [00:37:54] That's a really interesting point with, not only the temperature of light, but the location of the light. And before I forget to mention it, because we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, you guys can find the show notes at lukestorey.com/saunaspace. lukestorey.com/saunaspace for all the geeky stuff that we're covering here. We'll put links to everything that we talk about and, hopefully, some graphics and stuff.

But back to the Alexander Wunch interview, which we'll link to in the show notes - I don't remember the number offhand - he told me something really interesting in regard to the placement of light. And it speaks to your point that we were sitting parallel or slightly above maybe, you know, a fire light. And I was talking to him about what is the future of home design if we really were to fine tune our lighting environment, not only with temperature but location?

And he said, the worst possible place to have lights inside a domicile is overhead lights. He's like, that only happens at solar noon for a couple of minutes in nature. Again, going back to evolution. It's like that bright light is rarely ever there. But sunrise, sunset, it's kind of on the horizon, sort of -

Brian Richards: [00:39:08] And I think also we have a gut feeling of this because if you walk into a room and they have, like, sconce lighting on the wall or low light, there's a romantic ambiance, it feels good.

Luke Storey: [00:39:18] Yeah. That's true.

Brian Richards: [00:39:19] The overhead light is like, "Oh, that's weird."

Luke Storey: [00:39:21] That's so true. Yeah. And I noticed that after he mentioned it. I was like, "Goddamn, he's right." When you walk in a room, especially if they're bright LED lights - that's why in the studio, those are always turned off. Plus, I learned that they'll flicker, which we can hopefully test here today. But, anyway, I thought that was really interesting is, you know, the temperature of the light and actually where they are in our height of vision too. But that's really interesting. I never thought about that. We're actually getting the infrared therapy from fire too.

Brian Richards: [00:39:59] Yeah. So, we should explain that too. Like, the sun, we're talking about the sun. The sun is an incandescent light source and so is the incandescent bulb, that's why we call it the incandescent bulb. And so is the candle and so is the fireplace. And so, all of these are examples in science what they call incandescents, which is a very simple concept, really. It's that in nature, if you heat up a material hot enough - like, think of an iron rod, you heat it up in the oven, it glows red. That's incandescent.

So, you heat up a material hot enough in nature and it emits light. It emits light naturally. And it does so according to this fancy physics law called Planck's Law. And so, you can actually use the integral form of Planck's Law, if you know the actual temperature of the light source, you can predict the emission of the light. And so, they've done that for the sun, which is 5,500 to 6,000 Kelvin. You know, that's 5,000 or 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever. And when you measure every single wavelength on the sun and you graph that on a power curve, it perfectly matches the predicted Planck's Law curve.

And so, you can do that with any light source, whatever the temperature is. In terms of incandescent light sources, whatever the temperature is, you can predict the spectrum. So, if you look at the sun spectrum, it's really hot, 6,000 or 5,000 Kelvin. So, it's peak of its power curve, which is, again, this is what we call broad spectrum light. Full spectrum light, they call it.

Full spectrum light means the sun is emitting all of these wavelengths simultaneously. It's not like LED light, where you have a very monochromatic peak of light, a very focused light. Or fluorescent light also, it's looks like digital light in the spectrum. It's very stepwise.

The light of nature is incandescent light, which is analog, which means broad curve, and all of these wavelengths together in this sort of, again, long curve. So, the sun peaks in the visible range because it's at 5,500 Kelvin. My thermal light bulb, basically custom designed - that was a four-and-a-half year project, by the way - custom tuning the filament to deliver more light therapy than a standard heat lamp.

Luke Storey: [00:42:24] Oh, really? So, this bulb's different - and I'm not trying to bust your balls - than if I went to, like, a feed store and I wanted to keep my chickens warm at night?

Brian Richards: [00:42:34] Yeah. Yeah. With SaunaSpace, that's what we sold you when you bought the sauna until 2018. And I was working secretly, confidentially, on this project, and I just couldn't get it right. So, it's mouth-blown, hand-rolled glass. So, it's a beautiful artisan glass that stained red instead of dyed red. But that's just, like, quality and maybe some bougie features of the bulb.

The unique nature of the thermal light bulb is that I redesigned the film inside or kind of optimized it to be near-infrared centric. So, this delivers from a wattage perspective two to four times the photobiomodulation wattage of a regular heat lamp. And you can feel them side by side. There's definitely more heating wavelengths as well. So, it's just optimally designed for human therapeutic use. So, this is 2,400 Kelvin, it's half the temperature of the sun.

So, that curve, instead of peaking the visible range, it peaks in the near-infrared and it's a little bit flatter. And then, with the glass that's red, the tiny amount of blue light that's still emitted by the tungsten film, that's 2,400 Kelvin, is filtered out by the glass. So, there's no blue light at all. And you can see this on my website, sauna.space, kind of just on the learn page, you can see the sun spectrum and the thermal light spectrum and how we figured out how to make it really near-infrared centric.

But back to the fireplace and the candle, those are not as hot as this bulb. And the candle is less hot than the bonfire or the fireplace. But what happens to that curve is it just gets flatter and the tail gets longer into infrared. So, you have less and less visible light, less and less ultraviolet and blue, but you still have some near-infrared that's there.

And I forget the article, it's by Dr. Michael Hamblin. It was sort of a summarizing article. Friend or Foe, I think it was called, where he goes into this, and he cites one piece of research wherein 0.1 watts of near-infrared light still promotes a mitochondrial response, like very small amounts. And so, yeah, when you sit in front of the fireplace and the bonfire, it's not just the heat that makes you feel good. It's the photobiomodulation. You're energizing your cells and promoting this healing and inflammation reduction and all these things that are just like "Ah," in the brain cells.

Photobiomodulation causes release of serotonin and dopamine, so it makes you happier. Also, the near-infrared light, for example, which is the only way to stimulate this mitochondrial response in the brain, because that's the only wavelength that gets in there, it does a couple of things. It's not just stimulating this healing and structuring the water, of course, and correcting the bioavailability and the functioning of the water for its own purposes in the cells and in between the cells.

It's also been shown, for example, to promote Mesenchymal stem cells release from the bone tissue in the skull. And then, those stem cells go into the brain cells and work with the photobiomodulation to break up amyloid plaque, which is related to Alzheimer's. Really crazy, right?

So, there's that and then, also, you may have talked with Dr. Wunsch about the near-infrared light, aside from the mitochondrial responses, it makes water nutrient delivery more effective. I think that has to do with structure in the water. I'm not sure.

But all that to say that, for example, the photoreceptor cells in the retina don't have direct blood supply. They 100 percent rely on water to bring all their nutrients. And they're very hungry molecules. They use a lot of oxygen. They're working really hard all the time. And so, when you shine near-infrared light into the eyes, people ask us all the time, "Well, do I have to wear eye protection? Is this bad for my eyes? Because the sun can damage the eyes, blah, blah, blah." And the answer is no.

I mean, if you're getting ancestral levels of exposure, so these are not laser beams and they're not LED, they're broadband, they're lower power, then they're just more or less what you would get from a near-infrared perspective from the sun. It actually is quite beneficial for the eyes. This is one of the things that makes sure that lots of nutrients and enough nutrients get to the most hungry, hard working cells in the body that don't have that direct blood supply due to the evolutionary design of the eyes. So, those are just like little microcosm examples.

And there's so much research out there that says we need near-infrared light every day. We really need it in every cell of our body. And then, if you couple that with the heat - which we should get into, we can talk about the sauna a little bit. But let's talk more about it just from the light perspective, because I think that's maybe less well understood. I think a lot of people understand sauna is good, saunas are great - with the light in nature, again, it's all incandescent light. The light of nature is analog incandescent light. You never got photobiomodulation, red light, or near-infrared light therapy without getting the heating wavelengths at the same time.

So, here's another example. There's a heat gated ion channel in the cells. So, ions in and out of the cell and it's triggered by heat. But near-infrared light can structure water in the cell, and then a structured water molecule can sit on top of this gate and upregulate the gate. So, that's just one example of how clearly, clearly our biology is programmed to get heat absorbed wavelengths and mitochondrial stimulating light wavelengths at the same time.

Luke Storey: [00:48:39] That's super interesting.

Brian Richards: [00:48:41] Yeah. It's super interesting.

Luke Storey: [00:48:42] I'm thinking about the thing I was referencing earlier where, intuitively, when we have leisure time, we like to go where there's bright sun. And, also, to the point of the campfire, we go camping when we want to get away from our day to day life. We don't maybe realize it but sitting in front of T.V.s and devices and things like that, we want to get out into the woods. So, that's another type of vacation, right? You go to Cancun and stay at a hotel and go lay on the beach. Or you go to the woods and you go camping. And that's got to be one of the reasons that we love to do that so much.

I mean, can you imagine going camping and pitching a tent. You're like, "Guys, let's not light a fire. It's kind of outdated." You know, it's like everyone can't wait to sit around the fire. There's an ancestral sort of innate desire to be near that fire and near fire in communion, whether it's a formal ceremony or just sitting around and telling stories and jokes or whatever with your friends and family. But there's there's something that draws us near other than just wanting to be warm at night. There's something that we know is healing and restorative about that fire, about that spectrum of light, as you said, combined with the heat. It's just like the best thing ever. It's really interesting.

Brian Richards: [00:50:06] Yeah. Well, we've really convinced ourselves that we know better and we're indoors and we live these synthetic indoor lifestyles now. And there are so many more things that are going on here, it's not just light. We used to have intermittent access to food. Now, we have constant access to food. We used to experience lots of temperature changes, not just heat, and we love heat. But the human body is also programmed to get really cold and deal with that. It's really resilient. And yet, nowadays, we live under these perfectly climate controlled conditions all day long indoors.

And so, all of these things, it's kind of this concept of homeostasis. When you build a habit for something, you get stuck into something, or physiologically from a homeostasis perspective, or just habitually from a habit perspective, you convince yourself that this is the norm, this is okay. And this is the norm nowadays, but it's not normal for humans. It's just been normalized just living indoors.

Brian Richards: [00:51:09] And so, I think, yeah, we're not even conscious of it, how much we crave that ancestral environment that has sunlight, that has light, that has heat, that doesn't have all this crazy toxic blue light, that doesn't have EMF all the time. And then, also, it's cold outside. You know how good it feels to go camping and it's really cold out and you're by the fire and it's warm on your face. But behind you, it's cold. You have these variances in temperature and so forth that is so perfectly controlled in our modern environment that we miss that.

So, yeah, I think you're definitely on to something there. For me, I was like, "Okay. Well, you can go on vacation -" most people go on vacation maybe a couple of times a year "- but what the hell do you do the rest of the time?" And so, for me, especially with this photon product that wasn't originally available, that came much later -

Luke Storey: [00:52:13] Referring to the single light.

Brian Richards: [00:52:15] The single light. Not just the full sauna. But what we call the photon therapy light. So, it's a single thermal light bulb and a fixture that's safe to use and stuff. And the idea is that, we recognize our indoor environments are super artificial, they're super synthetic. How can we make them more naturalistic? How do we bring that naturalism back into the modern world? And so, this is a big part of it, and we'll show that here in a little bit with the meters.

You don't have to become a hermit and reject all the creature comforts of modernity and technology, and go live somewhere to be a biohacker, and to live this ancestral lifestyle. I'm all about, like, integrating the two together. And so, bringing things like the photon into your room and correcting the light that you have indoors has a huge impact on, not just your health, but your mood and the ambience of the area.

Basically, what is biohacking? People think hacking is cheating or something. That's sort of the pejorative meaning of it. But the good part of it is, we're really trying to trick our body into thinking it's in its natural environment.

Luke Storey: [00:53:39] That's exactly the way I think about it.

Brian Richards: [00:53:41] And so, that's what we're doing. And so, whatever we can do, whatever we can do, whether it's EMF shielding, or it's correcting the lighting environment, or from a real food, food is medicine perspective - and there's so many awesome products out there to help re-optimize our lives - that's all we're doing, is, our bodies are crying out for that ancestral space, that ancestral environment.

Luke Storey: [00:54:06] I always say, you know, none of these supplements or technologies like yours or any of the other ones would have been necessary 16,000 years ago. You know what I mean? You'd be eating, you know, organ meats. You'd be getting lots of natural light. You'd get hot, you'd get cold, you'd be drinking spring water.

Brian Richards: [00:54:24] You go to sleep after dark.

Luke Storey: [00:54:26] Yeah. Like, there's nothing really to do once it goes dark. Your circadian rhythm would be regulated. I mean, not to say that people didn't get injured or ill, but I see the whole human condition of pathology is so simply reduced to the fact that we domesticated ourselves and we live indoors. Like, pretty much anything that goes wrong with us can be traced, at some point, if you go back far enough to our disconnection from our natural hunter gatherer lifeways.

But as you said, I mean, going back is impossible because that world doesn't exist anymore. Try going out and living in a federal park, they'll come kick you out. You know what I mean? It's pretty difficult to do that. And, also, there's EMF everywhere. Like, the world that we knew then is no longer here. So, I think the fun strategy and the one that makes the most sense is, like, how can we reintroduce some of the things that we've lost from nature?

And so, for me, that's saunas, ice baths, red light blocking, blue light, dealing with the EMF, eating as close as I can to food that came out of the ground or was eaten by an animal that runs on the ground, you know, and just simplifying things. I think we love complexity, so when people want to start working on their health, we get so caught up in all of the available options. When, really, all they're doing is just kind of actually narrowing the path of simplicity back to what's been lost. So, I love that perspective.

Brian Richards: [00:56:00] You're hitting the nail on the head. It's the ancestral wisdom and the health and such. The practices of our ancestors were very simple.

Luke Storey: [00:56:12] And movement too. I always forget about that because I'm not a big mover. I have to really push myself to move my body. But think about as a hunter gatherer person, I mean, there are a few intact - very few, unfortunately - hunter gatherer peoples. And they're sitting around, and chilling, and resting, and carving spears, and opening nuts they gathered, or whatever, but a lot of the time they're on the move. They're pursuing food or they're moving their encampments. They're constantly moving around and interfacing with the environment and lifting some heavy stuff. And hauling logs to the fire or whatever.

Brian Richards: [00:56:49] And they have no disease of civilization. Those who don't die of exposure or trauma, those who reach a robust age of 60, 70, 80 years old, they're out there in the fields, like, bending over, picking up things. They have zero cardiovascular disease, zero cancer, zero arthritis. How can that be?

Luke Storey: [00:57:12] They can do a perfect squat all day long. I remember going to I think it was like Thailand and Cambodia, you know, and just observing these old dudes, they sit around in a squat, and they sit there and smoke cigarettes, and just chill and play cards or whatever they're doing. And I watch them going, "How are their hips not getting sore? He's been sitting there for 30 minutes." They're having coffee somewhere and I'm going like, "Wow." That's what a normal human moves like. If I try to sit like that for five minutes, I'd be like, "Oh, my hips." And I was probably 40 at the time or something. So, we've lost so much.

But back to the light, because I want to geek out on this, and then definitely, obviously, get into the different types of saunas that are available and things like that. Because I'm a fan of your sauna, for sure, but I like other ones, too, for different kind of uses and scenarios.

But I did want to cover, it's kind of in the blue light realm. Here in the studio, we've got these great big windows. And if you walked in here with a realtor checking it out, they'd be like, "The room has a lot of natural light." That's what we think of as natural light. But we can see from the spectrometer or just an understanding of glass that we're actually creating, like, a fake blue light if we're behind glass in our car, in an airplane, in an office, in our home, or wearing glasses - we're both wearing glasses right now - or contact lenses and, of course, with sunscreen.

Now, my understanding is - and correct me if I'm wrong, because I often get this wrong - by going behind glass or glasses, contacts, et cetera, we're eliminating - is it the UVB that gets cut out or the UVA? I always forget which one. Or do you even know?

Brian Richards: [00:58:52] So, the low-e glass and the modern window glass - low-e, it's called energy efficient - it's blocking both. It has means of blocking ultraviolet light that causes your leather couch to fade over time. But ultraviolet light doesn't really substantially cause substantial thermal heat transfer effects. It's infrared that does that. And so, they are blocking ultraviolet light, but in terms of energy efficiency perspective, 100 percent, it's designed to block infrared, which includes what we're talking about, the healing component of infrared.

Luke Storey: [00:59:32] And then, what about just a clear piece of glass in terms of UVA, B, and C, like, isn't that glass? Just take the low-e thing and the infrared piece away. But isn't that giving us this spiked, narrow, kind of toxic blue light, like an LED or fluorescent light would?

Brian Richards: [00:59:50] No. Not what they call clear glass, sometimes they call a greenhouse glass. So, there's definitely a little bit of loss of transmissibility, I think it's called. So, not 100 percent of the light goes through no matter what. Also, with the thermal light bulb, what we use, it's a little bit less than 100 percent that comes through.

But clear glass, greenhouse glass is just that. Like, plants, they need the full spectrum. And you can fake it a little bit. Like, at the show, they have these little lettuce pod things where it's just a row of white and blue LEDs. But you can see there's some reds mixed in with them. And so, you can simulate it from artificial light perspective and kind of get there just like you can do with humans.

And so, with blue light, blue light is a sympathetic stressor, so it gets us all jacked up. The entertainment and the consumer industry understands this. That's why when you go to the casino, all the windows are blacked out and the LED lights are super bright. They've understood this for a long time. That's why the shift to blue light only, which is essentially LED and fluorescent-based, more energy efficient light sources, was not at all only because it's more energy efficient. It uses a little less electricity. It was absolutely from a consumerist mindset designed to leverage the power of blue light to convince people to get excited, and to buy things, and to be interested in things, and to catch people's interest.

Luke Storey: [01:01:20] I've always thought about that, because if you walk into - I don't mean everyone - Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, the lighting makes me feel crazy because I'm susceptible to the flicker and that narrow spectrum of blue light. But I find it to be very agitating to the point - I normally don't really wear blue blockers, like my Gilded, glasses during the day - if I go in a store like that, if I have them, I'll wear them so I can just calm down. But perhaps it's that agitated state that that flicker and blue light puts you in that just keeps you kind of filling up your card or something. Really, I don't know, I'm always thinking to the furthest realm of conspiracy.

But you would think if I owned a retail establishment, I would have your lights in there. I would want it to be super relaxing, and chill, and have people feel just at home, and create a vibe, which is what I try to do in my home, for example, when I have people over. But, yeah, it seems like the lighting that we're exposed to in schools and hospitals, big box stores, wherever there's large buildings, is very irritating light. And I've always wondered if there's some nefarious purpose behind that.

Brian Richards: [01:02:34] There kind of is, yeah. It gets you jacked up. It's a blue light. It's a sympathetic stressor. So, it puts you into what's called fight or flight mode. The nervous system has the fight or flight and then the rest and digest mode. And ancestral humans, we're 90 percent of the day in rest and digest, which should really be called rest and digest and heal, what's called parasympathetic nervous state. And, nowadays, in the modern era, we're flipped on that. We're 90 percent fight or flight.

Luke Storey: [01:03:00] I definitely am right now.

Brian Richards: [01:03:03] And, unfortunately, in health, although it's very important to exercise, there's too much focus on just exercise as a means of achieving health and not enough on this idea of purification and recuperation and rest. Which is not just sauna, although sauna, I think, is the best for purification, there's also sleep. Sleep is so important. And the two are really intertwined. And we're very dependent on light. We're beings of light. We're light eaters, I keep saying that. 

We're so much less biochemical than we are bioelectric and electromagnetic at the quantum level. We literally absorb light at the cellular level. It causes all this healing stuff. We have voltage gates in the cells, like the voltage gated calcium ion channels that are very sensitive to manmade electric fields, like the microwave signals. We have all these different systems in the bodies that are electric. And it's totally to our detriment that we are exposed to all these electromagnetism again that's not that of nature, what's called native EMF. So, people mix the two together and they think, "Oh, EMF's are all bad."

Well, the sunlight is EMF. It's electromagnetism. The Schumann frequency of the earth is, like 7.83 hertz. That's a really long wavelength, but that's, like, right in the brain wavelength bands. The beta and the theta and all the brainwaves, that's all - whatever - 4 or 5 hertz to 20 or 30 hertz. These really long wavelengths, those are the brainwaves. So, we're very subject to all this.

Luke Storey: [01:04:45] God, that's crazy to think about that versus EMF in the megahertz and gigahertz range.

Brian Richards: [01:04:51] So, it wasn't much of the megahertz and the gigahertz range. And, of course, now with 5G, there's so much that wasn't before.

Luke Storey: [01:04:55] Yeah. That's crazy.

Brian Richards: [01:04:56] And some of the stuff, the more we learn about this, we can either use it for good, I think, or we can use it for evil. I did a report on that actually when I was in college on brain entrainment. And they have that, like the whole CIA mind control stuff of the conspiracy theories is really, really not so conspiratorial.

In fact, there's a lot of robust science behind it. You can stimulate a human brain with a brainwave, like, in the 15 hertz range or 20 hertz range. And you can achieve what's called resonance, wherein when the two frequencies match each other, they resonate with each other, and then the destination frequency. So, in the brain, the brainwave, once you change the stimulus wave, it will track it. So, you can shoot, basically, brainwave frequencies at the brain and then you can change the frequency and the brain will follow.

And this whole idea of creating a voice in people's mind and all that, it's very well documented. You can do this, man, because we're subject to all this electricity for -

Luke Storey: [01:06:15] This is why someone needs to invent a proper tinfoil hat. That's the purpose of tinfoil hat, just to stop that stuff. Yeah, it's very interesting. And I could go on that shit forever. But, actually, you can look at these military grade weapons that use millimeter waves, you know, up in the gigahertz. I mean, they can use them for crowd control, right? Make everyone start burning and itching and going crazy and run in the other direction. I mean, it's not like totally -

Brian Richards: [01:06:43] And guess what the body scanners are at the airports, that's millimeter wave technology.

Luke Storey: [01:06:47] I do not walk through those.

Brian Richards: [01:06:49] And guess what the new 5G, 27 to 30 gigahertz band is, that's millimeter wave technology. It's called millimeter wave because the actual wavelength is about a millimeter long. So, now, the body scanner technology that's at the Air Force is flying through the air. And we're not even far away, maybe 6G or 7G, we're going to have wireless power, wireless charging. So, you won't even have a charging port anymore. You'll just walk down the street and it'll be charging it. And, of course, what does it doing to our biology?

Luke Storey: [01:07:20] This is why I need to move to another planet with normal, smart people. I'm classifying myself as normal and smart. I want to ask you something, though, going back to the artificial indoor light. And then, I want to play around with some of the lighting here. Hopefully, we can catch it on video. So, I've got this light. What do you call this one right here? The single - 

Brian Richards: [01:07:40] The photon.

Luke Storey: [01:07:40] Okay. The photon. So, I've got a couple of these around. I have one in my sauna that's kind of down below the little stool.

Brian Richards: [01:07:48] You have the Sauna Supreme.

Luke Storey: [01:07:49] Yeah, It's next level.

Brian Richards: [01:07:52] The biohacker. A little more heat, a little more light, a little more intense.

Luke Storey: [01:07:54] But I've been using this thing just in rooms in the daytime and nighttime to balance the light. So, this one's yours that you brought because it's got the new cool little cage that's, I think, a bit more tricked out. But the one over there on my desk, I mean, the first thing I do when I walk in here is turn on that red light. Because if I have the overhead lighting in here, it flickers, it's gnarly, blue light.

Brian Richards: [01:08:17] Blue only.

Luke Storey: [01:08:18] Yeah. The studio light I have, now that one is made for video so I don't think it flickers. We can test it. But it's a super gnarly blue spectrum. And I just feel better when I'm working in here and I have this red light next to me on my desk. It just feels like the light is more balanced. I'm kind of hacking the lack of full spectrum light. And these are low-e windows so I'm not getting that red or near-infrared light because that's energy efficient. This is outside, but we're cutting it off with the glass.

So, aside from the healing elements of the sauna, and sweating, and getting this light close to your skin, how can people use this as just like a light balancing tool in their home to mitigate blue light and flicker and things like that?

Brian Richards: [01:09:03] So, first of all, just in trying to mimic the sun spectrum and bring that full spectrum back into doors, like you said, all of our indoor lighting now is all blue only. There's none of this near-infrared. We've already talked about not just how important it is, but how ubiquitous it is in our world and being outdoors. So, with the low-e glass, we've blocked all the infrared. There's zero infrared in here at all. There's particularly no photobiomodulation infrared, the near-infrared.

Photobiomodulation is defined as using red or near-infrared to heal damaged or dying tissue or degenerate tissue and also to optimize healthy tissue. And so, what we're doing with this photon is we're just replacing that missing spectrum, that missing piece of the pie that you get from the sun, we're putting that back into your indoor environment. And first of all, you're adding back in something that you're missing that your body craves, and it's really important.

But beyond that, it really has some intriguing - and we're going to show you right now - effect of canceling out the measurable blue light and canceling out - what you keep saying- flicker. So, flicker is pulsing light. And pulsing light doesn't exist really in nature, Brian Hoyer told me that, of Shielded Healing. The only time the ancestral humans experienced flickering light was if they were running really fast in the jungle and the starlight flickering. But, really, essentially, everything in nature is DC, direct current. So, it's not a pulsed frequency where there's stoppages of the stimulus of the light. It's just constant light that doesn't flicker.

But modern lighting and even low wattage incandescent lighting actually flickers because of the source of the electricity that we use for most everything is alternating current. And alternating current, it's great for carrying electricity over long distances with very little resistance and very little loss efficiency-wise. But it's really quite terrible for our human biology.

So, alternating current in America is 60 hertz. Electricity, which is 120 volt is standard voltage and it's a 60 hertz frequency. So, what that means is 120 times a second, the current changes direction, alternating current. And when it changes direction, there's a very brief period where the source of the electricity stops, like in terms of powering devices.

So, with LED lights, they flicker much worse typically than fluorescent lights, even, because a fluorescent light on alternating current will go from 100 percent power emission of wattage of light to, like, 30 percent or 40 percent, so it's going like this. But the LED is going from 100 percent wattage emission to zero percent 120 times a second. So, it's literally a strobe light. You know, it's strobing you. And you certainly wouldn't put a strobe light in front of a person who is autistic or someone who has light sensitivities. But yet we do this. This is our primary source of light everywhere. It's increasingly more LED than it is fluorescent.

You know, interesting, too, the original fluorescent bulbs were at, like, 120 and 200 frequency, the hertz, the ballast in there that produces the frequency. And they realized that people were getting a lot of headaches and stuff because the frequency was too low. And so, the newer fluorescent ballasts run at, like, 400, 600, 800 hertz, 1,000 hertz, anyway. So, once the frequency was increased a lot, the noticeable flicker to the human being is reduced a little bit. And so, it's less aggravating to you.

But we are not using that knowledge and appreciating that with the production of LEDs. And LED is not incandescent light. LED is basically a computer chip that you run electricity through and it begins to fluoresce. It emits light through fluorescence. And a typical LED, what you have in most places and what you have on screens, has a big blue light peak. Instead of it being this nice little curve of light, it has this huge blue spike. And then, they add in other compounds and they use different little computer chip technology tricks to make it fluoresce in the yellow or the red.

So, you can buy LEDs now that are tungsten colored. And the color temperature is more more yellow. You know, it's more tungsten, but it's hiding this very high concentration of blue light. But then, on top of that, it's flickering. And flickering light is associated with migraines, and headaches, and insomnia, and depression, and so many other things. You know, there's some part of us that's aggravated, maybe not hate, but we're aggravated by working in front of the computer all day. It sucks, right?

Luke Storey: [01:14:18] Totally. I mean, that's the thing of walking into the big box stores. And people listening, I think I say this, one of our sponsors is BLUblox, and they make a really great red LED bulb that doesn't flicker. And so, I always instruct people, if you're wondering if the light in your office or home or wherever flickers, is, you can just take a slow motion video with your iPhone of the light, and then watch it back and you'll see it on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off. It's like a really easy way to test that.

And I think about it in terms of how your pupil, that's the black part right?

Brian Richards: [01:14:55] Behind. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:14:55] ... how your pupil adjusts to the size of it to let more or less light in. And I imagine that as your eyes are exposed to a flickering light, that your eye is trying to adjust in 60 hertz electricity, home or building, it's trying to adjust 120 times a second to less or more light.

And, in fact, and I could be imagining this, but it's one of those memories you think you had, but I'm not 100 percent, but I think I saw video at some point that was a slow motion video of somebody's pupil going open, close, open, close, open, close, open, close under flickering light. In other words, the eye trying to adjust to the unperceivable fluctuation of dark, light, dark, light.

Brian Richards: [01:15:41] It's there even though maybe consciously we're not quite aware of it. Plus, Luke, it's not just our eyes are light receptors. We have blue light receptors in our brain, in our gut, in our skin, actually everywhere. So, we're very susceptible to the light around us and, definitely, particularly the blue light. Just as we also have light receptors for red and near-infrared at the mitochondrial level, really in every cell of the body.

So, it's really interesting how dependent we are on light. You know, near-infrared light through the mitochondrial stimulation and the production of ATP cellular energy, it can actually satisfy our caloric requirement part during the day.

Luke Storey: [01:16:27] The Breatharians. This is what they figured out, the sun gazing Breatharians.

Brian Richards: [01:16:32] The light eaters, right. They sit there and just sit under the sun. They wouldn't eat anything. They wouldn't drink very much water. And they'd be fine. You know, they weren't starving. And so, I find that personally in the summer, you know, when it's really hot out, I'm outside a lot under the sun. I'm not packing in big meals. I'm not as hungry as much. Whereas, in the winter, I'm definitely pushing more towards lots of homemade tacos, and lots of arm roasts, and meat, and stuff. But in the summer, the sun is satisfying some of our cells need to feed and so we don't need as much.

And then, even more than that, it does so many other things. The more we learn about it, it's so fascinating how quickly we shrivel when we don't get this light, but how quickly we can bounce back too. There's this idea - what's called - mitochondrial melatonin. And this is really new for me, Luke. I didn't even understand this. I always thought melatonin, "Oh, it's in the pineal gland." Blue light stimulus during the day, promotes production of melatonin. And then, after dark, the ending of the blue light stimulus leads to the release of melatonin from the pineal gland to the brain clock. And it changes our hormonal cycle and kind of gets us ready for sleep.

Well, it turns out that, like, 94 percent of the body's melatonin is not in the pineal gland and not in the heart and lungs. It's not anywhere else but in the mitochondria. And actually there's a whole very much separate system of melatonin that's all sort of isolated and separated in the mitochondria.

This is what I understand anyway. If you take melatonin supplements - a lot of people do - it doesn't penetrate the mitochondria. It's not accessing the system. And so, the release of that melatonin that can go into the blood and get into the bloodstream move around in the body, that's only really used at the cellular level if you don't have enough of this mitochondrial melatonin running around.

So, first of all, melatonin is the number one antioxidant agent in the body. Number one. It's there to heal and deal with dying tissue and repair or reconstruct. It fights oxidants. It fights free radicals and all these things that cause us to age and cause disease in the cells. Number one actor.

Luke Storey: [01:18:59] Number one anti-cancer nutrient in the body, too.

Brian Richards: [01:19:04] Yeah. And so, guess what? Guess what stimulates the production of mitochondrial melatonin, which is 94 percent of the body's melatonin?

Luke Storey: [01:19:12] Let me guess, near-infrared light.

Brian Richards: [01:19:16] Near-infrared light. It's unbelievable. It's so trippy.

Luke Storey: [01:19:18] It's so cool. Did you see the study speaking of the body as a giant solar panel, essentially, or these photoreceptors we have in our skin. There was a study when I first started geeking out on blue light and they were trying to see if it was also the case as is when you get, you know, blue light in your eyes at night, it shuts down melatonin production for a number of hours, whatever it is, two, three, four hours afterward.

So, they covered someone's eyes with - I'm assuming - blue blockers or something, and then just shined blue light on the back of their knees. And it also shut down the melatonin production just like it did getting it in your eyes. Like, even getting bright white or blue light on your skin also shunts melatonin production. Did you see that?

Brian Richards: [01:20:04] I've heard of that. It's so interesting.

Luke Storey: [01:20:05] In fact, this one I'm not imagining because I remember reading the study. I mean, they conducted the study in a lab and it's a thing, you know. So, of course, then afterward I got all paranoid because I would have blue blockers on and then I'm like, "Oh, man. I walked in the kitchen without my shirt on and there's that fucking LED light." So then, I get all paranoid.

Brian Richards: [01:20:22] It would be a new product line for Gilded, blue light -

Luke Storey: [01:20:26] Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I think with all of this, it's nuanced. I don't know, it's a balance, right? Psychologically, if one gets too paranoid and caught up in this, you're putting yourself in a sympathetic nervous system, cortisol, adrenalized, stress state, worrying about all this shit. Which is probably worse for you than just being under the blue light and being relaxed and just handling it.

So, I'm always trying to find, you know, the balance and my goal with talking to people like you is sharing information with people. So, at least you're armed with some fundamental facts in terms of our biology and how we respond to our environment or not. But then, also, finding solutions that are practical and not too crazy and inconvenient.

And knowing when there's just some things that are just outside of our control and you just kind of have to live your life and enjoy it. And there's not necessarily a question or answer in there, but just as a blanket statement, mostly speaking to myself, because I tend to get really neurotic about this shit and try to be perfect about everything.

But I think there are some tools, like what I mentioned, having this light in my office, and then also I took the one from our house, and so now I don't have that. But I was also using this in our temporary kitchen because I can't change the light bulbs and the fixture, it's just there. So, if I go in there at night and I need a lot of light, it's going to be blue light. So, I flip this on, you know, to just balance the light.

And, for me, I just become habituated where I become less paranoid and uptight about it. It's just like, "Oh yeah. If I'm going to walk in that room, I'm going to hit this certain light switch," or I have a pair of my blue blockers there and I throw them on, and I just kind of build it into my day-to-day life so I don't have to spend so much time and energy worrying about it, which is probably also not good for you.

Brian Richards: [01:22:16] I love that. We do, we get into the weeds of these things and we become, like, hypochondriacs about everything. And, yet, I feel like what you're saying is really important and that would be the message that I would also promote, is one of hope. You can talk forever about all the problems of society, and all the problems of modern health, and our toxic exposure, and all these things, and how we're really in a bad way, and we have so much stress in our lives, and there's 6G and 8G and 10G, and all that. And, yet, the solutions are really simple.

And what I love about these things, particularly what I do, sort of the biohacking stuff in general, is that the solutions are incredibly simple. And particularly like sauna and light, what I love about sauna in general, also with my sauna, is that you just sit there on your lazy butt and you don't do anything, and yet there's so many different things going on.

With the SaunaSpace on or the Faraday on - like what you have - you have the light therapy and the photobiomodulation, the melatonin, the mitochondrial stuff, you have the purification of the body. Sauna reduces your risk of dying of all things the more you use it. So, that's pretty amazing for so many things. But you're also doing grounding therapy in there. The sensory deprivation that you have. The break from all the fight or flight stimulus you're overwhelmed with.

Luke Storey: [01:23:41] You know, what's funny about your Faraday sauna - and I don't want you to explain that for people that don't know what it is - because I don't get cell service in there, it makes me not listen to podcasts and stuff. I mean, sometimes I got to admit I'll have one pre-downloaded and I'll go in and listen to it. But it's encouraging me more to go in there and just have a moment of solitude and get rid of the electrostatic noise of all the EMF and the environment. And actually just be with myself and do some breathwork and just calm down.

So, I actually like that feature that it makes it easier to divorce yourself from your phone, for those of us that are quite addicted to our phones, because you go in there and it doesn't work. You're like, "Ah. No signal," because you're in a Faraday cage. So, it kind of knocks out two birds with one stone.

Brian Richards: [01:24:27] You know, more than anything else, if you're already in there and you're already doing this sweating and this healing and you're doing all this stuff, we also forget to take some time to ourselves. Ancestral humans were alone. They had long periods of solitude where they weren't talking to anybody and nothing was going on. They weren't stimulated by anything. That's so rare nowadays.

You know, those of us who live in the West, we have families, we have children. I run all day long at work. When I get home, I got my two boys and my wife and we're hanging out. And I'm always stimulated by something. I'm always talking about something. I'm always trying to multitask. And so, to be in there, the Faraday especially, and to be by yourself, it's such a rarity. It's such a luxury.

And for many people, initially, it's really quite shocking. And they're like, "Well, I got to download something. I got to listen to a podcast or something. Or I got to bring my book in there or something." And I'm also like that. I love reading.

Luke Storey: [01:25:21] Yeah. And it's the high performance sort of attitude too. I've been meditating for a long time. I love quiet. I love being by myself. But I battle more so, I think, with just like, "Well, I could be getting something done." It's like this addiction to productivity. Like, even preparing for my interview with you, I was in the sauna last night. I was listening to a pre-downloaded interview that you had done with someone else to just brush up on your body of knowledge and stuff. I'm like, "I need this time right now. I'm going to use it to do something productive, which will help facilitate a successful interview tomorrow."

I think some of us just have a hard time unplugging and knowing that life will go on, the things will get done, you can get away for 20 or 30 minutes from doing something, and probably even make yourself more productive when you do go to reengage. Because you've lowered just the static in your field to the point where, once you rejoin activity, be more focused and more deliberate about what it is you're spending your energy on. Instead of just kind of diffusing your energy all the time and always being activated or engaged in something to take that time and kind of consolidate your attention so you can use it when you really need it.

Brian Richards: [01:26:42] You do. And I never understood that in the beginning. I was always like, get in there and get that therapy done. And then, I'm going to be improved and doing better and improving my health. Then, I'll be better on all these other things. What I didn't understand in the beginning, and eventually led to the EMF shielding that I started to incorporate in the design, and eventually the Faraday, was that, when you're in there with nothing, no phone or anything, no book, you are actually multitasking from a biological perspective. You're doing all of this healing.

And, again, we get back to the biochemical and the physiological, "Oh, I'm getting the mercury out, and I'm fixing this melatonin system, and all that." And, really, we're beings of energy. We're on an energetic level. And if you can appreciate that, just give yourself a little bit of time for that, you'll find that you're getting more value minute per minute out of that session than you could possibly get doing anything else that you could possibly incorporate in there.

And then, when you get out, your brain works better, your mind works better. And I feel energetically and karmically. You're more powerful. The more you fully commit to that really short period of 20 minutes of just being by yourself. It's not a selfish thing. For me, particularly mentally, it makes me so much more just relaxed and able to deal with the crazy crap that comes my way all the time as soon as I get out.

And so, it's an interesting thing where we've been trained in our lives. We don't have any moments of solitude. And yet when they're in there, it's like quite shocking. Like, "Where's my podcast? Where's my book?" But then, you get in there and it's really quiet to the senses in here and it feels really good.

Luke Storey: [01:28:35] Especially with the EMF shielding. I think most people on the planet, unless you live very remote, don't ever experience even for 20 minutes not being bombarded with non-native EMF. I mean there's very few places you can go where you're not getting hammered all the time, you know, in a sub-perceptual way.

Brian Richards: [01:28:58] And that's only a thing in the last, like, two generations. That's a very new thing. Even when we were really young and kids, you could go out and there was no cell phone signal, you know, camping.

Luke Storey: [01:29:11] Dude, I didn't get my first cell phone until I was, like, 27 or something. I remember seeing them in the movies, those big giant phones that those rich guys had. But, yeah, it was not a thing at all. Of course, you had, like, radio waves and T.V. stations and military radar and aviation radar by the airport and stuff, but you weren't getting inundated like you are now.

And the thing about it that's even crazier, I think, that we don't quite realize yet is the unknown harmonics that are being created in our atmosphere. So, it's not just like you're getting, you know, 2,400 megahertz from Verizon on that cell tower. It's like you're getting this wide band of non-native frequencies. But what happens on a physics level - and I have no idea, but it can't be good - when those all intersect and are now creating harmonics, it's like if you hit every key on the piano at once, it doesn't sound very good. It's discordant.

Again, not to be paranoid and make everyone worried because we can't control it. It's out of our control. But getting a brief period of refuge from that is incredibly healing. And so, I'm going to tell myself, "Luke, next time you get in the SaunaSpace, don't do shit. Just chill. Do a little breathing." I love doing breath work in your sauna, it's great.

Brian Richards: [01:30:33] Yeah. That's something that I highly recommend, especially folks who are, like, meditation, "How the hell do I do that? Like, what is that?" It starts out with just simple breath work and there's so many great ways and really wise people you can follow to figure out how to do that. But just simple breathwork is breathing through the nose, activating the nitric oxide, just doing that.

I did actually a breathwork exercise on our Instagram Live recently with a breathwork specialist, and it's so cool how it takes, like, five or ten minutes, and then all of a sudden you enter this sort of deeper reality and you get more centered, you get into your body. And so, yeah, I would highly recommend that to anybody.

And, again, back to the message of hope, we're not stuck with all this. We don't have to be paranoid and negative and like, "Oh, this world's gone to hell." If we take care of our bodies, we take that break from the EMF, and we sweat, and we purify, and we re-dose up with near-infrared light and trigger all these healing things. And then, we recognize, not too much blue light after dark, food is medicine, real food. And a few other simple intermittent fasting, I'm also a huge fan of, by the way. These things make us strong and make us resilient.

The human body has incredible constitution. It can go so much. It can take so much. So, if we just take these time to recharge using these ancestral wisdom practices, I feel like there's no problem going out in this high EMF world with the toxicity. And you're out of the restaurant and you're drinking the tap water and the foods, it doesn't matter because I have a physical, and mental, and spiritual, and energetic practice that sustains me and regenerates me pretty much every day.

And so, you know, we can thrive in this modern world. We don't have to escape it. But we need to understand these things. You can't avoid this biological imperative that we all have.

Luke Storey: [01:32:33] Amen, brother. I want to remind people the show notes for this episode can be found at lukestorey.com/saunaspace. And, also, for those of you interested in checking out Brian's technology, you can do that at sauna.space - I like your URL, by the way - sauna.space, and you can get five percent off, too, with the code LUKE5. So, sauna.space, and the code is LUKE5, and five percent doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're talking about outfitting yourself with a sauna, that's meaningful, so thank you for that discount.

I would be remiss if we didn't play around with a little of the technology. So, those of you listening, this might not be as interesting as those watching. You can find this video on YouTube. But Brian's got what we call the C camera over here. And so, hey, C camera editors. We're going to see if we can get some of this light spectrum and flicker testing actually on camera. So, I think as you do it, if you just kind of hold up what you're finding to your camera over here, we should probably be able to make some sense of it.

Brian Richards: [01:33:40] Yeah. So, what I have here is called the Hopoo or the Hopoo. It's a spectrometer and a flickering light meter, and it measures light from 380 to about 1,100 nanometers or so, so that's visible light and this near-infrared light that we keep talking about, the two most relevant spectrums, more or less that we have. And so, it's really cool because we can compare and contrast different sources of light and what do they do. And then, we can match them to the sun to see, is this harmonizing with our biology or is it discordant. And, also, the photon, how we're adding in that near-infrared spectrum back in. So, I'll try to do it the best I can.

Luke Storey: [01:34:33] So, let me turn your light off. And then, I want to turn on the nasty flickering overhead LEDs above us so that we can see what that looks like on a flicker level and the spectrum of light.

Brian Richards: [01:34:48] Perfect. Yeah, turn those on and I can snapshot this and then pause it so we can show it on the screen.

Luke Storey: [01:34:53] Okay. Cool. All right. So, we just turned on the, like, office building overhead lighting that I never turn on. Although, it is nice, I got to say, to have some brighter light in here.

Brian Richards: [01:35:05] It is. So, I just snapshot of it there. And so, you see there's a big spike of blue light. And I can show everybody this over here. So, you see the big blue spike of blue, and then there's visible light. And then, look at the valley, there's absolutely no near-infrared at all. There is none from this fluorescent light. And a bit of this measurement is contaminated by some of the natural light from the sun that's coming in.

Luke Storey: [01:35:36] So, if it was nighttime and we just had that light on, you would get a more true read.

Brian Richards: [01:35:40] Well, the spectrum would be more spiky. You wouldn't have this fill in of the visible light. But in all cases, you know you have low-e glass because there's no infrared light at all coming in. And, of course, we have our SaunaSpace light off.

So, the other thing that you see here, Luke, is, we see what's called flicker frequency and fluctuation depth. So, I'm going to flick over to this and try to show it to you guys. Again, it's maybe not ideal. So, you see this sort of waveform, so that's showing you the depth of the flicker, the degree of the flicker. So, first of all, what we read on this is 120 hertz. This is what we were talking about before, twice the electrical signal frequency.

So, we see we have a flickering 120 times a second. And the fluctuation depth of the flicker is 20 percent. So, that's rather large. It's a more severe flicker than maybe like a five percent or ten percent flicker. So, that's pretty bad. We don't want that. The sun, of course, won't read any flicker frequency at all. And, also, the fluctuation depth will just, basically, be flatlined. You know what? I'm not sure if this is fluorescent. I think this might be tubular LED.

Luke Storey: [01:37:04] Okay. Yeah, probably.

Brian Richards: [01:37:05] I think so. Because fluorescent light - and you can see that on my website or on some of my blog articles, blog.sauna.space - fluorescent light is really weird and spiky, not necessarily only in blue, but also in green and yellow. It's very weird and shocking looking. The classic LED light is what we just showed you. So, again, you have that big blue spike and then you've got some filler here of visible light, but none of the healing therapeutic infrared. So, I think these are definitely LED, actually.

Luke Storey: [01:37:40] Okay. Yeah.

Brian Richards: [01:37:41] So, we can show, like, the phone screen and the T.V. screen. I don't know what you want.

Luke Storey: [01:37:47] Yeah, yeah. Well, let's see what happens to our light spectrum when we put on your photon light in here. So, let's just say, like, I'm stuck with these overhead lights and I need the actual light just for visibility. How is this going to improve the temperature and/or flicker at all?

Brian Richards: [01:38:05] So, imagine that this is Luke right here, the little light sensor, and we're kind of hanging around next to it. So, you see, when you bring the photon in, all of a sudden, yes, there's still some blue light, but that huge spike is a lot shorter now. And, also, we filled in the infrared. So, we've added back in that spectrum, but we've also reduced the measurable amount of the blue light from above. So, that's like the corrective effect, where we're not just filling in the piece of pie we're missing. We're ameliorating and minimizing the damaging effect of the blue light itself.

And so, it's not just your overhead lighting, it's also your every digital screen. They're all LED, all of them, the phones, your IMAX, your televisions, for example.

Luke Storey: [01:38:59] The T.V. in our temporary spot flickers like crazy. I did the slow-mo iPhone video and I'm like, "Oh, my God." But you think about sitting and watching a two hour movie, and not only is the flickers in the room, you're actually staring at the flickering light. It's like staring at a strobe light.

Brian Richards: [01:39:16] I think projector screens are so much better for that reason. You don't have that drag blue dagger stabbing.

Luke Storey: [01:39:23] Right. Right.

Brian Richards: [01:39:24] But another thing I do is, also, when I watch T.V., I put this on. It's kind of strange the first time you do it, like, why would you want that much ambient light when you're trying to black it out? But you'll find, sitting down - movies are long - watching a two hour movie, it's really nice, again, for the same effect, to have that next to you.

Luke Storey: [01:39:41] Does having this incandescent bulb of yours present while there's flicker do anything to minimize the flicker? And does it, like, kind of overpower the flicker? Is that flicker up there still just as prevalent with this year?

Brian Richards: [01:39:55] No. It has the same minimizing effect. So, certainly, it's not 100 percent eliminating it. You know, you are still subject to this light above you. But it's kind of hard to show here on the screen, but it typically reduces the degree of flicker by between 40 and 80 percent, like a lot. So, anything you could do, again, to minimize it, is really super important because we're not programmed to get blue only light. There's these research where you shine blue light on worms and they crawl to the ends of the earth to escape the blue light. And we're just like them.

So, we've removed all the good infrared from our indoor synthetic environment. We've added in a ton of this blue. And it comes with this pulsing, flickering effect that is just terrible for us. And it's ubiquitous. Especially in this post-COVID era, who doesn't have to work at the computer anymore? I mean, it's almost everybody and everything, and increasingly as we continue to evolve, I think it's just part and parcel of work and of life in general, screens everywhere.

Luke Storey: [01:41:05] For screen solutions, one thing I've done for the blue light is got this program called Iris, which is like a couple of dollars a month or something. You've heard of Iris, I'm assuming?

Brian Richards: [01:41:18] No. But I think it's like F.lux.

Luke Storey: [01:41:20] It's a little more badass.

Brian Richards: [01:41:22] There's a little more badass. Okay. Cool.

Luke Storey: [01:41:22] Iris has much more adjustability. Like, you can turn your screen red to where you can't barely tell what's going on. So, you can adjust the level of blue and also the level of brightness manually or you can set it to day/night. And the inventor, I think he's Hungarian or something, he claims that you can turn down the brightness using Iris and it doesn't increase the flicker.

Because, if I'm not mistaken, if you just take a standard, say, Apple Computer, and you want to turn down the brightness on your screen, you're essentially using a dimmer switch on the LED that's illuminating your screen. You're going to get more flicker off your screen if you dim your screen than having it fully illuminated.

Brian Richards: [01:42:07] I agree with that. Although, there are some newer technologies that help minimize the degree of flicker from LEDs. Like, you can buy computer screens that are low eye fatigue, so-called low eye fatigue certified or low eyestrain certified. And they're, essentially, using direct current drivers to try to provide more of a stable delivery of the electricity to the LEDs so it's not pulsing, even though it's alternating current. So, I've actually tested a lot of screens, and my iMac is one of the better ones that I've tested.

Luke Storey: [01:42:48] Good. That's what I use.

Brian Richards: [01:42:49] It actually is pretty good. And so, depending on the technology, yes, I think when you reduce the visible light, there's a little bit of, maybe, flicker issue that gets more severe. But all of those programs really help a lot with the blue light. And I think I can show that pretty well with my phone. So, that's cool. I've never heard of Iris, so I'm going to check that.

Luke Storey: [01:43:14] Yeah. It's great. It's great.

Brian Richards: [01:43:14] But, certainly, the mainstream market has understood finally this, and, like, with iPhones, you have the night shift mode. But, for me, I turn that all day long and on my computer screens I actually use that. And another filtering program so my screen looks really brown, basically. But I can show you right now with the meter how effective that is with and without night shift, and even without night shift and light mode versus dark mode, and sort of the brightness.

Luke Storey: [01:43:48] Did you set your iPhone where you can triple click and turn the whole thing dark?

Brian Richards: [01:43:51] Yes. That's my top secret. Well, it's no longer very secret, but you can turn your red color filter on and you just see the blue spike drop even more. So, I'd like to actually show that.

Luke Storey: [01:44:02] Should I turn off this flickering LED?

Brian Richards: [01:44:04] Yeah. Turn that off so we can get a more pure measurement here of kind of what's going on, on the screen. So, first of all, I have night mode off, and I have true tone off, and I have dark mode off.

Luke Storey: [01:44:19] And for those listening, these are just settings on the main menu of your iPhone.

Brian Richards: [01:44:22] Yeah. In your iPhone, if you go to sort of the light menu, the brightness controller, you could turn off these color filters in these true shifts. And then, of course, I also have the triple tap red thing that I have that will kind of keep that off here for a second.

So, this is the way the average iPhone user uses their phone, full brightness all day long and none of these special modes. And then, also, I'm on a screen here that is a bright screen. I'm not on a website that's dark mode. Which, actually, we just came out with dark mode on my website.

Luke Storey: [01:44:57] Oh, no way. That's cool.

Brian Richards: [01:44:59] And it really is way less toxic. And, now, I force dark mode basically on everything. It's just really nice for your eyes. But, anyway, so you can see that we have a very tall blue spike. It's like at the top of the graph here, basically, and that's on full blue everything from the phone.

So, now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on night shift, which is the Apple software's built-in color filter. And what that's doing is it's supposedly making it nicer on the eyes. It's called night shift because you're supposed to use it after dark. So, let's see what it does to the spectrum. Oh, yeah. So, you can see as soon as I turn night shift mode, look how short the blue light peak is. It's a third of the height.

And, in fact, relative to the red orange light, it's much shorter. The red orange light now, that peak is the tallest peak. And you've got to think about this as, like, the area under the curve, the percentage of the emission of the light. So, now, the blue light before was probably 50 percent or more of the light emitted from the screen of the iPhone. And, now, it's probably - I don't know - 25 percent or something. So, we've reduced it in half or more, probably even more than that.

Luke Storey: [01:46:30] That's crazy to think that probably billions of people are laying in bed at night, like, with their phone on full blue, full brightness right in front of their face and then going, "Why do I have insomnia?"

Brian Richards: [01:46:44] "Why is my eyesight worsening?" There's a cool study out there that just came out, it's the second one of its kind, another one came out two years ago, wherein, if you get near-infrared light in the eyes before noon and you're over 40 years old, it prevents worsening of the eyesight. And they had just another study recently. So, that's how the near-infrared light amongst all these other tissues of the body is helpful for the eyes.

But the flip side of that is blue light. Blue light causes little holes in your retina over time. So, if you look at the retina of someone who's constantly working with LED and blue light all day long, they have, like, thousands of tiny little pinprick holes in their retina. And there's various manifestations of that, it could be floaters, it could be macular degeneration, so many other things.

But this worsening of the eyesight that folks who were born with perfect eyesight and eventually need reading glasses is now starting to occur when folks are, like, 25, 30 years old instead of when they're 50 years old. And blue light from LEDs is so toxic to our eyes. Forget about the rest of the stuff we're talking about, just for damage to the eyes themselves.

The French Occupational Safety Institution, it's called ANSI, it's like the OSHA of the United States. They, in 2015, put out a memorandum saying do not use LED lighting for home and office environments. It should only be used for industrial lighting purposes because it's so damaging to our eyes, just like all day long. And that's what it does, it's very damaging. So, being like this after dark, it's not just messing with your sleep cycle and stuff, it's blinding you, you know, slowly but surely. And it's a very cumulative thing.

And then, combine that with the fact that you're not doing any healing, you're not adding infrared maybe back into your life, and it can cause damage pretty quickly to your eyes. 

And, again, from a consumer perspective, these companies are like, "Well, we want people to use our devices even longer, so maybe we'll dial down the blue a little bit." And so, you have night shift built-in. But even that's not enough.

So, I'm going to show you one more time, what I'm going to do is - and you can turn this on in your settings. Let me tell you, it's in the Settings. And the Android phones have a similar thing that you can do. You can look it up. But in the Settings, it's under Accessibility, and then if you go to Display and Text size, it's called a Color filter. And you can come in here and you can hotkey it with my side button that I have.

But if you just come to the Settings, you can click Color Filters, and you can pick color, and if you want to make it really red, you can, and then you can make it really, really intense. So, that is probably a little bit too intense unless I was in bed per se. But even if I turn it to this - and by the way, if I'm not outside in the sun, I have it with my red color filter on all day long indoors. It's set so it's just enough that I can comfortably read it. But I'm dialing that down. It's only really outside do I ever turn that off, because in the bright sun you really need that to even the screen.

So, now, I have it on, again the red color filter, and I'm going to go back to the same screen I was on. I was in Google Maps here. And we're going to do one more test and see what this spectrum looks like. So, now, if you look at the spectrum, you see the blue light is basically gone. It's basically flat line. You know, there's a little bit of a hump there. But look at the emission of the light, it's pretty much all orange red. And that's the way it appears to the eye. It's very orangey red with some brown in it. And we've basically reduced the blue light exposure to a very, very minimum. 

And like I showed you before, if you take this now and we continuously measure it, even with that little amount of blue light - or maybe we'll see something more dramatic if we turn off our color filter and add a little blue light in. And then, I'm in front of the blue light. But if I add in the photon, now look at the spectrum. So, you see, not only have I removed the blue and I've really flatlined it. I've added in so much infrared that if we measure the area under the curve and measure the percentage of blue light, it's all gone completely.

Luke Storey: [01:51:24] That's so cool.

Brian Richards: [01:51:25] And all we did was we brought in this specially designed light bulb and all that, but it's this big, huge, 250 watt incandescent bulb that adds in this amazing spectrum that we're all craving. And people don't understand why.

When I go to a show, they'll sit in the sauna - and the shows are really toxic. Lots of EMF, lots of fluorescent LED light, lots of stress, everybody's on their phones - and people will go inside the sauna, and we always have the Faraday sauna, so they'll go inside the Faraday sauna. I'm like, "Don't take your phone in there, and your Apple Watch, and your Oura Ring." And people are stripping down, like, all this gear that they have right on them.

And they get inside and they'll typically sit in between one and four or five minutes just to try it out, you know, they're at the show. And the most common reaction when they get out is, they get out and they're smiling and they're glowing. They feel great. And it's indescribable for them. They're getting out like, "I feel good. I don't know why. And it feels so toxic out here."

And it's hard for people to appreciate how can this light do all these things? How could photobiomodulation across 8,000 peer reviewed studies do all this healing, do all this amazing stuff to our bodies? Because it's just light, bro. You know, it's just light. And yet you'll find that it does work. It just takes a little bit of time.

So, you use it and you're like, "Wow. I felt good." And then, you'll use it the next and you're like, "All right. I feel good." And then, all of a sudden you're like, "Wow. My gut feels good. And I had a bowel movement. And I have more energy and stuff." So, it's both really powerful and subtle this effect of having natural light in our lives.

And so, also, if you put that filter on, your Iris or whatever program you're using, the first time you use it you're like, "It's really brown, you know." And then, if you use that for three or four days, you get habituated to it, and you cannot work without it. In fact, with this, I cannot work for long periods of time without this.

Just like I have AirPods, you know, AirPods Max or whatever, and I use them once in a while, but I use them infrequently only for convenience. And I just can't do a phone call more than, like, 10 or 15 minutes with it. It's really aggravating to me. So, I finally found these plug-in headphones, which are not easy to find anymore, actually. And any time I'm doing any routine calls at work, it's always just through the computer, you know, the smartphone and the computer. And I cannot do phone calls like this anymore not for long periods of time now that I've got used to more of a healthy lifestyle.

Luke Storey: [01:54:11] Yeah. You do habituate yourself. Like, every once in a while, I'll accidentally at night take the red filter off my phone, you know, clicking around. I'm like, "Ah," it's so strong. And even the Iris on my computer, I mean, I just have it on there all the time. Sometimes I take it off in here because if it's, like, bright sun coming through in the studio because I can't see it when it's red. But, yeah, you do get so used to it that then something cool happens.

And then, when you go back to the standard or kind of the default settings of bright blue tons of flicker, it's super annoying. But you don't know that it is until you live the other way for a ways.

I wanted to ask you one last thing about this, and I know we've been here a while, I appreciate your generosity of time. This is, like, the shit I geek out on, obviously, so I could do it all day. Hopefully, the listeners feel the same way. For those, again, just listening and all the stuff we just did, you're like, "Wait. What was that?" You can find a link to the video at lukestorey.com/saunaspace.

One thing I wanted to ask you about this, and I don't know if this has any legitimacy or if I just like it, but if I have any sore spots on my body, I'll take this single bulb, because it's always on my desk, and I'll just, like, hold it on my back or my hip or I'll set it down next to my chair and expose my lower back to it. And I feel like it helps with spot treating pain.

And then, also, if I ever feel like I'm getting a sore throat or feeling a little funky, I'll actually just hold it up or lean up against it quite close on kind of my - what is it? - thyroid and this kind of whole upper chest and throat area, and I find it to be extremely useful for that. Am I imagining that or is there anything to that?

Brian Richards: [01:56:04] No. Absolutely not.

Luke Storey: [01:56:05] Like, elbow pain. It's just weird stuff. It's like painkiller.

Brian Richards: [01:56:08] We kind of geeked out on this. You can use this photon for indoor environmental light therapy, so you're making the indoor synthetic light more naturalistic, cancelling out blue light and flicker light. So, we call that using the photon to beat screen fatigue. So, that's one use of it. Also, for blue light free, flicker light free light after dark, this is really optimal nocturnal lighting. It's literally a mobile fireplace. It's a mobile campfire. So, those are ways to correct your lighting environment indoors. And you can also put in your sauna, like you have, and really amp it up to make it super, super awesome.

But that's not the classic use of it. The classic use of the photon is what we refer to in the beginning as single lamp therapy, and that's been used for, like, 120 years. Just as the SaunaSpace Sauna is the full body therapy, this is the targeted spot therapy. So, whatever problem you have in a targeted area of the body, all you do is you emphasize that area with this light, 18 to 24 inches away or so, on the naked tissue. And there's a lot of things that happen.

Of course, I'm not a health care provider and I can't make any medical claims. But, certainly, if we look at, not just our customer reports, but we look at the science, you get immediate inflammation reduction as a result of stimulating the mitochondria with this near-infrared light. So, that obviously reduces pain, you know, immediately if you have joint pain, gut pain, if you got a hangover, and so forth.

But if you feel bad, if you're sick, you feel down, you can use it on the head. We limit our exposure to ten minutes per hour on the head or the throat. But other parts of the body, you can do 20, 30, 40 minutes, or more of a single session. And you can repeat those sessions on the head or on the other parts of the body up to ten times a day.

So, for me, all day long I have this next to my computer for beating scream fatigue. It's not targeted therapy. It's just kind of in the environment, kind of pointing up. It's not directly targeted at me. First of all, when I travel, it's a very high EMF everywhere. It's stress-y. So, I use that in the morning to kind of wake up. I put it in my face for ten minutes. Before bed, you can put it on the back of the head to promote parasympathetic relaxation and lymphatic drainage to kind of promote the sleep safe for the body.

For those who have neuropsychiatric issues, totally, use it on the gut and use on the head, the gut-brain connection. You know, a lot of us have so much leaky gut and inflammation in the gut that is very directly affecting our neuropsychiatric state. Also, people in the winter, they get this thing that the doctors call SADs, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Luke Storey: [01:58:59] Oh, right. Usually, think about using blue light or full spectrum light for that.

Brian Richards: [01:59:05] Back to what we talked about in the beginning, so they're concerned with vitamin D, and so the conventional medical recommendation is a flickering LED blue light lamp that's so many foot candles, you know, it's a ton of light. Where, in fact, the red-near-infrared is just as helpful, probably more so, and that's my opinion. But if you look at the photobiomodulation, the other research, there's a ton of beneficial neuropsychiatric effects to the brain, to the mood, to our conscious, our attitude, our outlook by using near-infrared light. They're using it for neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and things like that. We also have our customer reports having incredible results with that.

But, also, that whole serotonin and dopamine release thing. And the flip side of that, again, with the blue light and the EMF is all that stuff makes us psycho. It makes us depressed and anxious and psycho. So, our customers, for what it's worth, and a lot of people out there are now using this to just enhance mood. Which, again, don't get into the weeds. Go back to the basics. Wouldn't you love sitting by the campfire and doesn't that make you feel good? That vibe. It's that light. It's that experience that it works. We all crave it. We all need it.

And so, fundamentally, the single lamp therapy, it is the most widespread use of it, although it's becoming increasingly popular to use it for screen fatigue. That just, I've got a problem with my knee, I've got a problem down here, I'm diabetic, I've got edema in my foot, or I've got a wound that doesn't heal, near-infrared light therapy, photobiomodulation, that's one of the most well-understood uses is inflammation reduction and wound healing. That's been used for a long time for that. And so, we have the biological physiological wounds, and we have the mental spiritual wounds, and traumas, and sauna as well are great for that.

But those of you who are skeptical of this concept, you're like, "What? Light, this and that and the other?" It's not just more, you know, lower cost and easier to use. It's so passive. You don't have to get in the sauna and spend 20 minutes, shower afterwards. It's more of a time and space commitment, as it were, even though well worth it. So many people buy this now and they just have it next to them. And people call it their goofy light or their happy light or whatever. And people don't understand. And then, they're like, "Dude, I love that thing, and I have to have it. You know, I have it all the time."

And it gives people more appreciation and respect for this idea that we're beings of light and we're subject to light. And it's so powerful in it's healing effects. And, yeah, absolutely, we have a lot of athletes that use it for injury recovery, reducing dramatically your recovery time from, like, a quad tear or whatever things are. They're using it for recovery after surgery. They're using it for recovery after radiation therapy, actually, like breast radiation therapy and chemotherapy and so forth to basically re- purify, and re-cleanse, and rebuild after all these super, super invasive toxic therapies the conventional medicine offers.

Maybe prudent or inappropriate for certain circumstances, but they always come back to the light and heat to normalize things and fix things, and to deal with all the side effects. And anyone can use this stuff, by the way. So, that's important point to make. There is not really any contraindication for any of this other than, you know, small children need to be supervised, of course. And pregnant women, usually we try to avoid any sort of excessive heating of the fetus because we don't want to promote any inflammation to the developing nervous system of the fetus.

But beyond that, any age group, male, female, any sort of body condition that you have, whatever you're dealing with, you can use this stuff and you can use it a lot. And it's very safe. And that's what I love about biohacking and natural wellness, in general. And, also, what I love about you and your podcast and all the stuff that you talk about is, this natural stuff is from a cost benefit analysis. It's high value, low risk. Or it's high benefit, low risk. And that equates to a better value.

So, instead of this alternative medicine and this goofy light stuff being a last recourse after all conventional medical approaches are exhausted, this should be the first recourse. It's not only more effective, I would argue, and lower risk, it's also really more affordable in an age where one of the number one causes of bankruptcy is due to medical expenses and people get really sick. 

And so, that's sort of the paradigm that we're trying to shift. You use all this consumer logic when you go buy a car, and when you buy a case for your iPhone, you read all the reviews on Amazon, you compare, you ask your friends, you ask your mom, you do all this analysis. And it seems really odd that we don't do that with our health care products and services. We suspend that logic. We put it aside. We rely on the external expertise of these modern priests and white frocks that we call physicians and doctors and all that stuff. 

And we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't want to talk too much trash on them because for trauma care, they're lovely. Like, if I cut my finger off, I'm going to go to the hospital and get it sewn back up. And that's really awesome.

Luke Storey: [02:05:01] You're not going to put some B vitamins on it and hope for the best.

Brian Richards: [02:05:05] But for the diseases of civilization, for care of diseases, I would consider the conventional approaches to be very much failures for the most part. And, unfortunately, that's the paradigm we've got to shift. When you look at things and you're buying stuff out there for your health, compare and contrast. What is the benefit? What are the side effects? What are the risks? And you know what's right for me? And just apply that same rigorous analysis that you do to buy other stuff.

And I think people would be a lot better off and appreciate more how amazing natural health is, even though, you look it up on Wikipedia and it's quackery and cookery and all that. But that's not true. Like, if you just listen out there, listen to amazing podcasts like what you're doing, all this incredible education that's out there, there's incredible studies out there with light therapy, with sauna, with real food is medicine, thousands and thousands of studies on humans. And this stuff works. Mainstream media is not going to tell you that. And your doctor may not even be aware of it.

Luke Storey: [02:06:20] Yeah. I mean, you got to look at who's funding whom too. That's the thing. I get pissed at the mainstream media and then I realize, well, who's putting them on T.V.? They have a vested interest in disempowering people. It's a bottom line kind of thing.

I want to touch on the sauna, and the first thing I want to say is that dog over there, Cookie, she's on the higher dose infrared mat now. That's one of her favorite tools. But if I go in your sauna, which I do quite often, it's going to be a number of seconds before the dog follows. (A) She likes to be around me because we got a bond, but she loves being in that sauna. She really digs it.

Brian Richards: [02:07:01] Animals also have the mitochondria.

Luke Storey: [02:07:04] Yeah. And I feel good when she's in there. I'm like, "Oh, right on." And then, after a little while, if she gets too hot, she knows. If she starts panting, she'll leave. But she can stay in there pretty much since sessions are about 20 minutes in your sauna. I tend to do, like, five minutes on each side. I do, like, a four turn, basically front, side, back, side, front kind of thing. And she'll usually stay for the whole time.

But on saunas, for people that are like, "Oh, I want a sauna or I have one," in the sauna industry, and I'm sure you've noticed this, being someone that manufactures and sells your own sauna, there's a lot of competitiveness and, like, shit slinging in the industry.

Brian Richards: [02:07:52] Also, in the red light therapy industry.

Luke Storey: [02:07:54] Yeah, for sure. Yeah. The red light people are very territorial. Sauna people, very territorial. Water filtration kind of the same way. There's a few things. And I'm like, "There's plenty of customers for everyone, guys. First, calm down." But when it comes to sauna, if somebody pressed me like, "What's the number one sauna?" I don't think I could answer that because it sort of depends on the purpose and kind of the setting.

So, I love barrel saunas outside. I haven't had one because it's the first time I bought a house. But I'm going to research. By the way, anyone listening or if you know this brand, I'm looking for the most badass barrel sauna for an outdoor scenario, so please shoot me a message if you think you've found one that's low EMF and meets all of the things. But barrel saunas are super cool because you can fit, like, six people in there. You can hang out at a barbecue and do ice baths.

Brian Richards: [02:08:45] That's the European sauna. It's very social.

Luke Storey: [02:08:49] It's cool. And there's issues with the EMF probably from the heating coil. There are some fire heated ones that you actually put wood in there, you know, wood burning, right? Those are cool. And they have the effect of heating the air, essentially. You get really hot air, 220 degree air, and that heats you up in a different way. And it feels good, like a Russian banya or a Finnish sauna kind of thing. 

And then, you have kind of the gym sauna, the box of rocks saunas, that are kind of similar to a barrel sauna. A bunch of people can sit in and it has an electric sort of heating element that heats up the air. Then, you have your classical infrared saunas that have heating panels that don't as much heat up the air, but heat up the tissues.

Brian Richards: [02:09:35] Far infrared sauna.

Luke Storey: [02:09:35] Far infrared sauna. Sorry. Then, you have your sauna, which is actually using hot lights to heat up the air and the body, which I love. Now, your sauna I love as a restorative, reclusive, single person experience. And I'm going to sit in there for a short period of time. And I'm not shitting on your technology, I'm just saying I like different ones for different reasons.

I also have a clear light sauna, which I like because I can lay down and just lounge in there. If you have a big enough one, you could do yoga in there. Whereas, yours, you're having your own experience for a few minutes. You can't fit six friends in there. I guess you could get a custom made one from you guys maybe or something.

But I like all different types of saunas. And beyond that, then you have the higher dose people make, the sauna blanket, which is awesome. Because yours is portable, easy to take apart and put together, and it's light enough. You could just literally move it from one room to another if it fit through the door. But the higher dose sauna blanket is super cool because you just wrap yourself up like a burrito and sweat your ass off in some cotton clothing and you could take it on a road trip.

So, I think all the different saunas in my life, whether I have them or used them, kind of have a purpose and have different benefits. And so, I don't think there's a right one. But one thing about them all that is troubling to me is the EMF issue. So, even, you know, my clear light sauna - I haven't tested it recently - very low in EMF. They don't say it's a zero EMF because it's not.

But when you plug in something into a wall, it's going to inevitably produce an electric field, a magnetic field, RF in some of the saunas, which annoys the shit out of me. They have the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity in them, so you can have your iPod wirelessly. Sauna makers, stop doing that or make it really easy to turn off, please. 

And then, they all kind of have issues with EMF, some to a lesser or greater degree. I've observed some saunas in the industry in the infrared space have been - how do I say it - dishonest about the levels of EMF in their saunas, like they'll claim no EMF, but they actually do.

Brian Richards: [02:11:49] Or they'll talk about magnetic field and electric field.

Luke Storey: [02:11:52] Yeah. So, I guess I don't know what the question is. Just kind of help people understand that you have a lot of options. And I'm a fan of all types of different saunas. But because you're getting in a sauna to heal, one of my points of contention, personally, is the EMF issue. And so, with other sauna companies that I've purchased from or worked with, I'm convinced that they are as low as they possibly can be, and I feel the benefits outweigh the detriment.

But I think what's super cool about what you've done is you've, not only eliminated the EMF as an issue, but created the Faraday Sauna on that model, at least. Where, not only is your technology not giving you EMF, it's blocking any EMF in your house or anywhere around. And even like with this little guy right here, if I got it right, I think you used a shielded or grounded power cable so that this thing is not even blasting you with EMF. So, maybe just break down your perspective of the EMF issues with saunas in general.

Brian Richards: [02:12:57] Yeah. So, first of all, I'm a free market guy. I think that you decide what's best for you and you go for it, man. I think all saunas, you know, when we talk about sauna reducing all cause mortality, reducing your risk of dying of all things, that is a function of you getting in there and raising core temperature three degrees, and then having some sweating going on for five or ten minutes. So, all saunas will do that. Actually, so will a hot tub and so will some other forms of heat therapy.

So then, for me, it became a question of, "Well, what is the heat source?" Is it, as you described, a fairly inefficient means of heating biological tissue of using hot air, which can also be oppressive for people. It's a hot temperature. Folks who have autoimmune and MS and other things, they just can't withstand those high air temperatures. It's too uncomfortable, maybe even claustrophobic for them.

So then, this is sort of the evolution of the sauna. If you set aside the forgotten secret history of the electric incandescent light bath, you had first the wood fired sauna, and then you came out with the hot rocks saunas. And they're cool and from a product development evolution perspective, they look like a wood fired sauna. But, now, it's something that you can you can use electricity. You don't have all that hassle of the fire and all the wood and all that stuff. And then, they're like, "Well, this uses a lot of electricity."

And so, in the 60s, they came out with the flame photometer, a long ceramic tube that emits this very low energy, long wavelength, infrared called far infrared. That's 3,000 and greater nanometers. So, it's not what we do really so much. Although, there is some far infrared emission here, we're primarily near. Anyway, so that was really cool. Not only is it dry now, so it's more cozy for people, less claustrophobic for a lot of people, it's a lot more energy efficient. You don't need a 30 amp hardwired electrical connection like the hot rock sauna. You now have something that uses maybe 20 amps or 15 amps. And it's something that's more plug and play.

And with the lower air temperature and the supposed use of infrared light to heat the body, you know, we have something that's more modern and more ideal. But they maintain that wood sauna look. All of them are these boxed saunas, sort of harkening back to the classic Finnish sauna and the banyas. But they had no concern of EMF back then. And even today, it's an argument, does this matter?

And, again, I go back to a general endorsement of all saunas, if you can get there and get a sweat on. Or even if you can't afford a sauna, you can pour the hottest water you can in your bath and get in there and just stay in there until it goes to lukewarm temperature. And you're doing a full body heat therapy of sorts. That's something anybody could do. You know, everybody has that at home. So, ultimately, that practice of passive, sweaty, not gym sweating and exercise sweating, this passive sauna style of sweating promotes all of these benefits for sure. And I would advocate that all of that is way better than not using any sauna.

And I also totally agree with you, all these natural health companies attacking each other. It's like, guys, we're on the same side here. It's conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical stuff, that's where the billions and trillions of dollars, and they have all the marketing money and they have all of the market share. And we're fighting over crumbs over here when we should be on the same side and realizing for lifestyle and other reasons, yeah, people want particular products.

For example, with saunas, back to the EMF issue, we didn't understand that manmade electromagnetism may be actually damaging to our health. And we do now. And we particularly do now because we have so much manmade EMF. Really, the cell phone technology is the most ubiquitous by far. And with 5G, absolutely. But 5G also resulted in the increase of the 4G frequency. So, we just have so much wattage now that it really is this ubiquitous thing that's all around.

But even before wireless EMF technology, wireless microwave signal, we had electricity, and that's an interesting history. We don't have probably much time left to talk about that, but the advent of electricity correlates with development of disease. That's really interesting.

Luke Storey: [02:17:18] Like, the Invisible Rainbow.

Brian Richards: [02:17:20] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly what I'm talking about.

Luke Storey: [02:17:21] People reference that all the time and I kind of get the basic tenets of it, but I've not read it admittedly.

Brian Richards: [02:17:28] Our sickness and our lack of wellness, our ill health, has really rose a lot when we started using electricity, which allowed us to be indoors more, avoiding the sun more. And, also, with electricity, we don't have to use fire anymore to heat our food, which is very convenient and very great.

But when we had fire in our food, we would take the ashes in the fire and put it in our garden, and everybody had their own personal home garden. And you grew that and you had a really rich mineral source that was giving you more nutrients. And, now, the food is less nutrifying than ever. It's empty of vitamin and nutrient and rare earth mineral content.

And so, these are all kind of subtle aspects of modernity and of advancing technology that are more and more stress, and more and more pressure on our health, and are removing more and more of the healthy aspects of our ancestral lives.

So, anyway, electricity also causes EMF stress. It's low frequency, 60 hertz voltage. And so, anything that's electrical produces an electric field. And then, the magnetic field is produced in a perpendicular direction in a cylinder around it. And it reduces dramatically as you get away from the electrical source. But if you're close to it, you're getting electric field stress and magnetic field stress.

So, first of all, when I realized all this and it was in beginning of the SaunaSpace, I was like, "Well, what do I do? How do I deal with that?" So, first of all, yeah, using shielded power cords is very helpful. So, we're basically trapping the micro-voltage that leaks out of a conductor that has electricity going through it, the power cable. And we're wrapping that in metal. And then, we're adding more grounding systems to drain out that leaky voltage just going all over the place and draining it out through the ground wire of the electrical device. That's the way shielded power cord works. 

But, additionally, there was a couple of tricky issues with this technology in terms of the EMF mitigation. One was internal shielding of the internal wiring. So, I have kind of a cool proprietary internal design to keep electric field and magnetic field from coming outward from the internal wiring. But then, I was like, "Okay. We figured all that out, but what about the filament itself?" Like, that's how the light is made. It has electricity running through this tungsten metal filament that's heating up really hot and emitting the incandescent light that we crave and that heals us.

But guess what? Electric field comes out, like, three feet off of that bulb. And so, you shielded all the cord, you shielded all the panel, all this, and you have this this electric field that's, like, jumping out and electrifying the user. And this is micro-voltage stuff. And those of you, by the way, who are skeptical of this, the American Cancer Association considers over 40 or 50 micro amps to be carcinogenic, and that's amperage.

You're getting a lot more of this stress than that from your average electricity all around your home. And it's absolutely even mainstream science and medicine understands that to be very damaging to our body. So, that led to the Faraday guard here that you see in front of you. And you have the first gen or the second gen over there.

Luke Storey: [02:20:49] This mesh that goes around it.

Brian Richards: [02:20:53] Yeah. So, you can show folks on the T.V.

Luke Storey: [02:20:54] For those watching, we're bringing it over to that camera there.

Brian Richards: [02:21:00] So, like I said, all the shielding and the power cord and take care of all the EMFs there, it didn't do anything for the bulb itself. So, I created this first generation of this cage had more a mesh on the front. It was more grill when it was open. You could stick your fingers in more. And that was just to protect the user from touching the bulb which is very hot. So, just a basic safety design stuff.

Luke Storey: [02:21:20] I've learned that the hard way.

Brian Richards: [02:21:22] And especially if you don't have this [inaudible] lamp or something.

Luke Storey: [02:21:24] I hit my knee up against one of them when I was getting out of your sauna one day. I mean, I didn't burn myself bad, but I was like, "Oh, don't keep your leg there for longer."

Brian Richards: [02:21:36] Yeah. And so, what I did is I made this a grounded Faraday cage, too, so that it actually traps the electric field that's coming off the filament and drains it out through the ground, so that you can sit in front of it and benefit from all this light, and there's no longer voltage stress coming out of this.

And I can measure this. I have on Instagram and stuff, you can use a body voltage meter. There's cheap ones out there that you can get. Like, Safe Living Technologies has a really cool kit. And then, you can use more expensive ones like what I have, and you can measure the body's voltage. And this is the key, like, what is the influence on the body and is it measurable?

For all these people who are like, "Oh, this is foo foo and all this stuff. There's no science behind. There's no empirical validation." Yes, absolutely there is. You measure the body's voltage inside and outside the Faraday, and you'll see it's a couple thousand volts per meter on the outside, and you go inside and the measurement of the body's voltage immediately drops to zero.

And, also, with this, if you test it in an environment, it doesn't have any other EMF in it, so you can isolate the signal and you measure just a regular bulb. You have voltage that comes out two or three feet. And then, if you measure, you know, what I have here with the photon with all these EMF mitigation technologies, there's no emission at all of electric field. And magnetic field emission only comes about two or three inches off the panel.

So, for the first time ever, the human is not under the influence of the undesirable voltage stress from the electrical device and gets the full benefit at the same time of this light and this heat. And so, I first dealt with the EMF mitigation in our technology itself. Like, SaunaSpace don't bring any EMF to the party anymore. But I felt like that wasn't enough.

And so, that's actually sort of part of my story of meeting Mr. Brian Hoyer of Shielded Healing. He was like, "Dude, you should make this a Faraday, the whole thing." And I was like, "Huh." And then, the first thing I did is I developed the bamboo mat inside the sauna that's actually a grounding mat. It has conductive shielding technology in it that's grounded electrically to the light panel. And there are several generations of that came out now. It's a lot more slick how it connects and stuff. I think you have the new design where it's just one little cable connects to the mat. Really simple.

And so, the grounding mat pretty much killed almost 100 percent of all the wired electric field stress you get from the wire electricity in all homes that we have that don't have shielded wiring. But then, I was like, "What if we could block it all out, dude? Make the whole thing a grounded Faraday cage."

Luke Storey: [02:24:27] Carry it to 11. Minus is 11.

Brian Richards: [02:24:29] This is the 33rd level right here. And so, the first generation, it was, like, three different fabrics that were combined together. It was really complicated and really expensive to make. It was a really pain in the butt, actually. But I got on the path of developing my own fabric, basically.

And so, now today, like what you have, the third or fourth generation Faraday, it's the world's only certified GOTS organic shielding fabric. And it's 35 percent silver by weight, so it's expensive. You know, it's got a lot of silver in it. It's 10 to 12 micro silver cabling that's woven with organic cotton. And it's washed, too, with a special pH neutral detergent. You can actually wash it. It's a machine washable organic shielding fabric, the world's first really.

And, also, the issue with the first generation Faraday - I'm kind of wandering here a little bit - was they're not blocking enough for 5G and 4G. You know, they're first gen shielding materials and they're just not up to snuff with regard to the modern wattages we have. So, that led me to, basically, put a lot of silver into the fabric that I eventually developed to an extent that it blocks out - and I have this I have third party lab testing, actually, on my website, on the blog, you can see that - not just 4G, which is really the most ubiquitous actually that we still have nowadays, but also it does pretty damn well in blocking out these new high frequency 5G signals that, as we discussed before, go up to 30 gigahertz.

So, essentially, the idea was, if you can have a grounded Faraday cage environment and then you can go in there, it's going to be a more therapeutic session, a more effective session, not because of all this high level, "Oh, it's an ancestral space and it's pre-technology in there. And you get to relax and you get to escape from things." It actually is a measurable thing. You know, you wouldn't meditate in a polluted space, right?

And so, in the same vein, why would you want to do healing therapy in a therapeutic space? So, even though all saunas are good and, the most important thing, if you have any access to any, do it and use it and you're going to improve, dude, you're going to be better. But can we optimize that experience? Just from a therapeutic perspective. Maybe not an aesthetic or visual or social perspective, you know, in terms of sauna use and what you're looking for. Just purely biological, therapeutic, optimal effectiveness.

Ideally, we would be protected from any unnatural, synthetic, manmade environmental stress of any kind. And so, I'm a big believer that one of those is the voltage stress, the EMF stress that we have. But I also think it's blue light stress. So, you've got many saunas that are really luxurious and sexy looking and have glass windows. And you know, when I'm at my house -

Luke Storey: [02:27:43] Or tons of, like, they have the blue lights and stuff.

Brian Richards: [02:27:48] Right. They just add in those EMF causing things, the stereo speakers and all that crap. But, also, even without that, when you have glass doors and you're looking out into the stressful world, if you have a family, your kids are running around, the T.V. is going, it's not only letting blue light in, it's letting more sources of nervous stress in, EMF and the rest. So, it's stimulation of light, stimulation of sound, of course, EMF we've talked about. All that is just not an ideal ancestral space. The ancestral space is just quiet, not just to the eyes and the sound, but to the senses.

With EMF and with all those sources of psychological stress that you have that remind you of work, and remind you of the regrets you have, of the things you haven't done, and the anxieties you have for the things that are coming up in the future, I think that detracts to a certain degree from the effectiveness of the therapy. Kind of like, you know, three steps forward, one step back.

That's why I've sort of obsessed and driven my product design in this direction. And then, beyond that, for those of you who haven't tried saunas out there, I think very strongly that the light therapy, the photobiomodulation, adding that into the sauna in a biologically relevant way, not a tiny little LED bank of red lights, but full body, lots of photobiomodulation hitting every cell of the body in a very impactful, relevant way, it makes the sauna therapy and the detox therapy less stressful.

I mean, let's admit it, sauna therapy does cause stress to the body. You have these thing called healing reactions, where you're experiencing those symptoms of a toxin that you're detoxing. And you're always going forward. You're unlocking toxins out of the cells with this heat shock response. But invariably some of that toxin recirculates in the blood and can be reabsorbed to a certain degree. Some people get blotchy skin. Some people experience flu-like symptoms, detoxing pharmaceutical residues from their liver. Some people experience hallucinogenic episodes from prior LSD use.

Luke Storey: [02:30:00] I wish that would happen for me. Talk about a healing session.

Brian Richards: [02:30:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's a known thing. And in the addict world, it's called a detox reaction. You know, they know that in the world of addiction. But that applies to really any chemical stress, any chemical toxin you have in your body. But, also, there's psychological stress that's in there that's locked in. You have what are called limbic memories. Your middle brain, your mammalian brain is your limbic brain. And your most powerful emotional memories are called limbic memories.

There's this book called The Theory of Love, or whatever, it's really good. It talks about your memories are, like, these little patterns and they overlap each other. And you have limbic memories that are these powerful kind of like animal memories. And they're the emotional memories that can trigger other ones. Just like you smell something and it brings you back to your high school prom. Like, the two memories are not connected, but that this limbic memory, this mood, emotional memory, triggers some of these other memories.

It's the same thing with healing reactions, wherein you can be detoxing a toxin and you will experience memories and psychological traumas that are associated with that toxin coming into your body originally. So, some people just start crying all of a sudden. Some people get really tired. And some people just have these mental and spiritual physical releases through the sauna therapy, through the detoxification process. All of that is very stressful.

So, using red light and near-infrared light to support and facilitate that detox process and make it less stressful and more effective, we know kind of with all the cellular pathways, is, I think, a more effective way to do sauna. And then, on top of that, if you can block out everything, including all the EMFs with a Faraday concept, I think you have minute per minute the most effective therapy you could possibly do to your body. It's like very much a one-stop rejuvenation machine.

And then, on top of it being less stress-y versus other saunas, just from the experiential perspective, I think the only thing that works well for people who are really toxic, who have real, real big issues - like Dr. Wahls has been using my product for a long time. She's a famous internal medicine researcher, the founder of the Wahls Protocol, sort of in the world of progressive MS - those people in that world were very skeptical of this concept. They're often told by their conventional medical doctor, "You can't do heat therapy. It's too intense for you. You can't heat up your head," or whatever.

And I have people in that community, customers, who started out with the single light, this photon. Just using that on the gut, simulating a sauna experience just with one light in the living room and working up such that, after a year, they were able to actually get into the sauna with two lights and maybe the curtains open. And slowly building up to be able to get back to what you and I consider a normal session 20 minutes, four or five bulbs, and sweating like crazy.

So, I think in terms of access, for those of you out there who've been told, heard about the benefits of sauna, but you think it's too stressful for you or you're not in a mental or physical condition to do so, I beg to differ. I think that this is, you know, an option for you.

Having said that, you know, whatever works for you, man, whatever works for you, it's going to be better, I think, than taking petroleum-based chemicals to mask symptoms and that whole sort of conventional route for disease. Look, we're in a world here, set aside the the COVID, the viral respiratory disease world stuff, what are the number one and number two killers or causes of death in America?

Luke Storey: [02:33:59] Heart disease.

Brian Richards: [02:34:00] Heart disease.

Luke Storey: [02:34:01] Well, maybe this is number three to five, depending on what year of medical treatment.

Brian Richards: [02:34:06] Right. Iatrogenic death, you know, medical error. That's a little controversial, but that's really high up there. But officially, even according to the CDC, number one and number two causes of death are heart disease and cancer. And these are diseases of civilization. These are lifestyle diseases, really. And I'm not a health care provider. That's just my perspective as a curious man. But totally avoidable things. Totally avoidable if we understand there's different ways, there's tools to get over this.

So, I'm all about creating a sauna that everyone can use and it will be the most effective because, ultimately, people don't want another thing. Like, "Oh, I got to do this for my health now. And I got to work at it and all this." People are so stressed out, man, and they're so overwhelmed with their lives. And it's harder and harder to make money. And, you know, the world is just crazy right now.

And so, whatever you can do to make it accessible and easy is ultimately going to be more successful, you know, person to person. So, that's kind of my approach to the sauna and to the light therapy.

Luke Storey: [02:35:13] Thank you. Thank you for creating something so cool. Thank you for chatting with me for two-hours-and-39-minutes.

Brian Richards: [02:35:22] I can't believe it's been that long.

Luke Storey: [02:35:23] I knew we would.

Brian Richards: [02:35:24] This was fun.

Luke Storey: [02:35:25] Because every time I see you out in the world, like we drop in about the latest findings that we're discovering here in this realm. And I'm like, "Oh, man. I can't wait until we record." And I think we, literally, haven't checked back at my notes.

Brian Richards: [02:35:38] Did we miss anything?

Luke Storey: [02:35:39] Probably not. Let me check just to make sure, dah, dah, dah. No. No. Even, you covered some things without me even having to prompt you, like the Herxheimer reaction, that whole phenomenon was something I wanted to cover, but you did it. Well, can children know - we covered all the things.

Brian Richards: [02:36:01] With supervision and all that. A little bit about the SaunaSpace photon, for example, versus various LED light therapy things. You know, you've seen the Skymall hats, you put the red LED light hat on, and back to this competitive nature of the red light therapy world, there was actually a company that wrote an article disparaging the use of this type of incandescent light for light therapy, for photobiomodulation. And you can read about on my blog, blog.sauna.space.

And I eventually wrote a response where argued against it empirically, an empirical arm against it from a theoretical perspective. And then, using measurements, using an irradiance meter and using a spectrometer and stuff like that to argue against it. And so, yeah, it's really crazy. I feel like all of that was just such a silly waste of time because all of these things are great to fit into your life.

You know, LED light therapy can be quite effective and it's more of a targeted thing. It's more like vitamin C powder, you know, use it for ten minutes really up close, really effective. There's also the verso laser, it's a cold 732 nanometer laser. So, using a very high powered laser level power of near-infrared light in a targeted fashion in joints and stuff to promote great responses. People have great success with that.

Luke Storey: [02:37:32] Yeah. I have one of those lasers. Parametric laser - I forget - it's 800 something nanometers.

Brian Richards: [02:37:38] It's all using the same concept.

Luke Storey: [02:37:40] It will heal the shit out of a cut, like, four times as fast or something.

Brian Richards: [02:37:42] It will. And so, you use that in this, like, really targeted, really short term manner. And so, for me, again, it's like the vitamin C powder. The photon, what we do is the orange. In between those really targeted sessions, you go to your chiropractor, you get fixed up, you get these things. What do you do for your daily maintenance and you repair?

And so, for me, the broad spectrum light that you can use, use the SaunaSpace Sauna for 20 or 30 minutes. It's a little bit lower wattage than LED light therapy, but you're using it for three times the time. So, the overall dose you get is very similar and maybe better because it's more broad spectrum, more natural.

But, also, with the photon versus those LED panels, you can't use that LED panel all day. You use it for that intense treatment. And then, what do you use for the rest of the day? So, for this, it's just a different approach thing. And I think both of them can work well. You know, we have customers that have both and that's great. Like you, you have various things.

Luke Storey: [02:38:47] I have been using the [inaudible] for many years now. They've been one of our sponsors. I have them all over the place now. And I love them. I use them all the time. But it's a different experience too. And it has a different purpose.

Like, for example, I don't get hot in front of it. So, if it's hot in the summer in Texas, I might not have time to do a SaunaSpace session and get all sweaty and have to take a shower. In fact, usually when I use the dew panel, it'll be after I already took a shower, I'm just about to get dressed, and I'll stand in front of the light with the vibe played on under me. Stack it with my hydrogen inhaler while I'm doing it. Like, I'll do a few different things and it's a nice passive thing that I can kind of stack.

But I don't know that if I had to pick one, I even could. They both have different purpose. Or, like, if I'm working with methylene blue, then I want that specific, unnatural, limited bandwidth of 660 nanometers because that's the one that really reacts most powerfully with methylene blue.

Now, I'll do methylene blue and I know yours has some 660 in there because it's like a full red spectrum. And I'll put it up against my artery with methylene blue in my blood. It's a whole other podcast conversation. But, yeah, methylene blue and red light is this whole thing. It's really fascinating. But I like the red light panels because of that. Or I'll even put my skin right on it. I think there's a purpose for all of it, it kind of depends.

Brian Richards: [02:40:15] There is. And, ultimately, you need to try the stuff out and figure it out for yourself. That's why I've been really focused from day one on customer success. You know, I want people to be well taken care of. So, from day one, we've always ordered a long trial. And that's all I ask is, you know, try it out, see if it works for you.

Luke Storey: [02:40:35] I know we got a discount for our folks at sauna.space and then the LUKE5 code gives them five percent off. What's your deal with, like, warranty, return policy, all the nuts and bolts so people can check this stuff out?

Brian Richards: [02:40:49] Yeah. Well, I'll give you a little salesy thing here at the end. Honestly, if you don't like it and you don't want it, I don't want you to have it. So, we offer now 100-day home trial. So, you get three months to use it out. And if you don't like it, in the United States and Canada, you can return it for free. So, it's free shipping and free return, pickup, you know, kind of like those mattress company sort of thing.

Luke Storey: [02:41:16] You must not get very many returns because that would be expensive.

Brian Richards: [02:41:19] No. It's interesting, with the long, generous return period, there's less returns because they get time to try it out. For some people, it takes time to feel the benefit. But then, also, there's a confidence there. People are like, "Oh, you're willing to stand behind it?" "Well, yeah, I am." And those of you who don't like it, you return it and go try that LED panel and see if that works for you.

Whatever works for you and the thing that you're going to be inclined to use that's convenient fun for you to use and good feeling from, you know, that's what you want. So, for us, I give you a long time to try it out, the free shipping and stuff. And it's pretty much built to last forever. That's why I like stuff that's really purpose-riven design, that's really durable.

So, all of our products come with, like, a ten year warranty, almost all. The EMF shield and the Faraday is a five year warranty. But everything else, even the light bulbs themselves. So, you know, it is a light bulb but it does fail, so we guarantee those for two years of use if you buy it inside of our product. Our thermal light bulbs are included with all of them.

Luke Storey: [02:42:23] But I feel like the first thing I got from you before I had the sauna was just the four-light panel, and I still have it with the same bulbs. And I feel like that was three or four years ago. And I don't leave it on all day. In L.A., it was in my meditation room and it was often cold in there, too, so I would just set it in front of me and just blast myself with that light in the morning. And I used it pretty much every morning.

Brian Richards: [02:42:53] Yeah. They're rated for, like, 5,000 hours. So, for half-hour sauna sessions, I've got customers from 2015 that still have, not even the thermal light bulbs, just the regular bulbs. So, they last a long time. And that's the only replaceable kind of perishable part of it is the bulb itself.

So, yeah, that's what I'm all about. It's all handmade in my shop in Missouri, you know, the fly over state. And it comes with really robust warranty and you get to try it out for a long time. And, frankly, you're going to love it if you try it out.

And that's the thing that I see at the shows. You know, just recently we were at the South By shows that it's so gratifying for me, even in the short term, to see when people use this technology, this incandescent technology and all the things that we've talked about, all the design innovations make it this optimal experience. It's something where you can pretty immediately feel the benefit, you can feel the difference.

And then, over time, as you continue to use it, you do have these long term benefits that you see from the literature, the disease reduction, and all that. But it's cool to have something that it's not just the supplement I take that I've been told it's good. Like, you immediately and viscerally feel this is doing something good for me.

Luke Storey: [02:44:10] Yeah, that's very true. I think that's something that's challenging in terms of money that you spend on supplements. Because you don't really know if it's working, you know, especially because it takes some time. You might take something that's great for mitochondria or whatever it is, and I don't know, there's a lot of placebo in there too. Like, "Yeah. I'm taking this new thing. I think I have more energy." And so, you do have more energy, right?

But with something like this - and you're right, at the shows, it's fun to see people come in your booth and they get all lit up, no pun intended - it is something that you get a more immediate, subjective experience of. Are you going to be at Paleo f(x) this year?

Brian Richards: [02:44:50] Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if we're planning. I know we're going to the Biohacking Conference again. And there's the Biohacking Congress, which is different than the Congress.

Luke Storey: [02:45:00] Well, I asked because I'm going to be there. I don't know if this episode will come out before or after that. I forget on the calendar.

Brian Richards: [02:45:06] Are you speaking there?

Luke Storey: [02:45:08] Yeah. It's my fourth year there. They took a couple of years off because of all the things. But what I was going to say is, like, I want to encourage people, if they're at the Biohacking Conference or Paleo f(x), or wherever you are, come hang out in the booth. And every time I've seen you there, you explain some new part of it to me and then I get to try it out. Like, with something like this that has to be shipped and can be expensive, it's cool to be able to actually experience it. And go in that Faraday thing, leave your phone outside, and watch what happens to your nervous system when you are in the middle of a forest inside a conference.

Brian Richards: [02:45:44] Especially at a conference, it's so toxic. We're like this bubble of happy awesomeness.

Luke Storey: [02:45:50] It's very cool. It's a neat way to experience it. Yeah. So, hot. Damn, dude, I think we did it. Thank you so much for the time to come by.

Brian Richards: [02:45:54] Thank you for having me.

Luke Storey: [02:45:55] And thank you for making super cool stuff and sharing everything behind it. I don't know many people I could geek out in such a nuanced way about these topics, so thank you for indulging me. Thank you for making this.

Brian Richards: [02:46:08] Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Man, it's fascinating. I love it. And I love what you're doing, too, so thank you for having me.

Luke Storey: [02:46:14] Yes, sir.

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