Latest / Sunlight Matters / Surviving Winter with Sunlight – A Conversation on Light, Health, and Infrared Science with Glen Jeffery, Bob Fosbury and Scott Zimmerman

Transcript

Surviving Winter with Sunlight – A Conversation on Light, Health, and Infrared Science with Glen Jeffery, Bob Fosbury and Scott Zimmerman · Sunlight Matters

• 0:00
  Bob Fosbury: We find the concept of infrared very difficult to deal with because you can't see it.
• 0:03
  Bob Fosbury: We think of chlorophyll as being green, but if our eyes saw a little bit further into the infrared, the the chlorophyll would be brilliant red.
• 0:11
  Bob Fosbury: In the summer, when we're surrounded by vegetation, we're bathed in huge amounts of near infrared radiation from the plants around us.
• 0:19
  Bob Fosbury: Infrared radiation, which is uh extremely good for metabolic health.
• 0:23
  Glen Jeffery: We know mitochondria talk to one another across the body.
• 0:26
  Glen Jeffery: They're very, very underestimated.
• 0:28
  Glen Jeffery: They're doing it all the time.
• 0:29
  Glen Jeffery: I don't know what they're saying, but they're doing it all the time.
• 0:31
  Glen Jeffery: Most of the things that are consumed in your cell are going to be consumed by mitochondria.
• 0:37
  Glen Jeffery: They've got unbelievable appetites.
• 0:39
  Glen Jeffery: Your body temperature is partly because the heat that mitochondria run hot.
• 0:44
  Scott Zimmerman: The problem is that the government is getting involved in this process of science and they're putting restrictions in place.
• 0:54
  Scott Zimmerman: In 2028, this light bulb will not be uh able to be sold in the United States because the DOE is putting certain restrictions on.
• 1:03
  Scott Zimmerman: We're we're trying to do the science to convince the government to do something that they shouldn't be involved in in the first place.
• 1:10
  Bob Fosbury: We we've been told to improve energy efficiency in lighting, and incandescent bulbs are a waste of energy because they just radiate everything in the infrared, and that's of no value to the fish.
• 1:21
  Bob Fosbury: And so we've introduced white LEDs.
• 1:24
  Bob Fosbury: Now, that wasn't to make lighting more efficient and and spend less less energy, less money on lighting.
• 1:30
  Bob Fosbury: White LEDs were so energy efficient that people put them everywhere on the planet all the time.
• 1:36
  Bob Fosbury: We're using much more energy on lighting now than we were using when we had incandescence in in people's buildings and houses.
• 1:43
  Bob Fosbury: Because everybody's gone crazy lighting the outside and shining all this energy off into space.
• 1:49
  Bob Fosbury: We're we're not saving energy with white LEDs, we're doing quite the opposite.
• 1:53
  Glen Jeffery: We're all saying get an incandescent light bulb or the equivalent.
• 2:02
  Speaker: Welcome to Sunlight Matters, the podcast that reconnects us with the sun.
• 2:07
  Speaker: Join us as we explore the power and influence of our star, the force at the heart of everything.
• 2:13
  Speaker: Each episode, we speak with leading experts to uncover the ways sunlight shapes our world.
• 2:19
  Dave Wallace: Welcome to today's episode.
• 2:21
  Dave Wallace: Today I'm joined by three incredible guests, and we are gonna tackle a topic which is very personal to me, and that's how do you survive winter?
• 2:33
  Dave Wallace: So I suffer from sad or seasonal affective disorder, and it is one of the reasons that I've ended up doing uh the work I'm doing and investigating more about sunlight.
• 2:45
  Dave Wallace: So I'd like to welcome Professor Glenn Jeffrey, Scott Zimmerman, and Bob Fosbury to the show.
• 2:54
  Dave Wallace: So welcome, gentlemen.
• 2:56
  Dave Wallace: Um I'm not sure we need massive introductions, but maybe we could have sort of a word or two from each of you, and then we'll get started.
• 3:05
  Glen Jeffery: I'm Glenn, I'm Professor of Visual Neuroscience at University College London.
• 3:12
  Scott Zimmerman: I'm Scott Zimmerman, I'm an optical engineer.
• 3:14
  Scott Zimmerman: I've been working with uh two great guys for a while there.
• 3:18
  Bob Fosbury: And I'm Bob Fosbury, I'm actually an astrophysicist, but I've been working with Glenn Jeffrey at UCL for nearly a decade now.
• 3:26
  Bob Fosbury: Uh so I have an honorary position at UCL for this work.
• 3:30
  Dave Wallace: So I guess I guess the background to this is you you, the three of you, have been really looking quite deeply at the impact of light and sunlight in particular on the way life functions.
• 3:43
  Dave Wallace: And, you know, obviously for us who live in the northern hemisphere, there is a difference between the summer and the winter.
• 3:50
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, in the UK, we've been blessed with a fantastic spring and summer, and I think we've had wall-to-wall sunshine.
• 3:57
  Dave Wallace: But as we head into shorter days, I can already feel my my sort of mood um getting worse, to be honest with you.
• 4:06
  Dave Wallace: And I can actually feel almost a kind of pain inside me when I think about those those long kind of winter days.
• 4:12
  Dave Wallace: So what can you sort of give any thoughts as to what might be going on in terms of um I guess the physiology and the psychology as we sort of head towards the winter months and those shorter days?
• 4:26
  Dave Wallace: So uh yeah, um any of you just uh just jump in.
• 4:34
  Glen Jeffery: Well, I I I definitely suffer from uh suffer from uh feeling just generally under the weather as as as we approach this period.
• 4:45
  Glen Jeffery: Yesterday I was doing some calculations for a manuscript we were about to submit, and I I just had to go over the weather scenarios in London, and in last year in December, it was about 92% cloud cover.
• 5:00
  Glen Jeffery: 92% of the time it was grey, and even worse, 100% of the time I was cycling home and it was dark.
• 5:10
  Glen Jeffery: Right.
• 5:11
  Glen Jeffery: So it's it's not surprising for an animal that has evolved on the equator in Africa, um, that this is not the right place to be.
• 5:21
  Glen Jeffery: Definitely.
• 5:22
  Glen Jeffery: Um, and um it makes it worse probably when we what we then we huddle into buildings, you know, we huddle into buildings where lit whatever little daylight there is outside is is locked away.
• 5:35
  Glen Jeffery: So I think it's very, very common.
• 5:37
  Glen Jeffery: I don't know what you you you two guys feel about this time of year.
• 5:42
  Scott Zimmerman: Well, I guess one of the things I'd bring up is I did a paper a long time uh quite a while ago on seasonality, and I think that there is the sad part of the the whole equation, but it has a bigger impact, even bigger impact on the fact that we get sick more.
• 5:59
  Scott Zimmerman: We have all these problems associated with during the winter.
• 6:04
  Scott Zimmerman: And there was this really interesting statement right before COVID that I found when I was working on some of the COVID stuff, is is that uh uh they the head of the CDC, one of the CDC uh researchers said that if we ever understood why flu season, why flu disappears in the summer, it'd be more effective than any uh influenza vaccine that we could ever develop.
• 6:28
  Scott Zimmerman: So it's a big issue, you know, wrapped around.
• 6:32
  Scott Zimmerman: I understand the sad part, but it's also a big issue uh associated with mortality.
• 6:37
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, the all-cause mortalities always spike at the in the northern hemispheres.
• 6:42
  Scott Zimmerman: And so when you start looking at that optically, there's a lot of things that we can do.
• 6:47
  Scott Zimmerman: And, you know, for us, my wife has SADs just like you do, and we have a little enclosure that has thin plastic, clear plastic walls that you just go to watch a football game or whatever in.
• 7:01
  Scott Zimmerman: And we'll take and set that out there with a sheepskin in the bottom and a rocker, and she'll sit out there and read a book for on a on a sunny day, and she doesn't do it every day.
• 7:11
  Scott Zimmerman: Whether when the sun comes out, she goes out there, and I always say my grandsons will come to the visit and they'll curl up in the corner under on the sheepskin and fall asleep.
• 7:20
  Scott Zimmerman: You see the same thing with animal behavior.
• 7:23
  Scott Zimmerman: There's always this intent to get as much of the sun into that time period as possible.
• 7:29
  Scott Zimmerman: And my concern is that we've created these indoor spaces that are exactly the opposite.
• 7:35
  Scott Zimmerman: We're blocking all the infrared content, the light sources have no infrared, we're spending our time exposed to things like this, you know, to a TV, watching TV at night.
• 7:45
  Scott Zimmerman: We also always have a fire going in our fireplace when during the winter, because it's a great thing.
• 7:52
  Scott Zimmerman: So that's my perspective, that it's kind of like, well, you want to f under have pay people be happy, you also need to do it to keep from getting sick.
• 8:01
  Bob Fosbury: So yeah, I think that that evidence for getting sick in the winter is absolutely overwhelming.
• 8:07
  Bob Fosbury: And you know, one of our collaborators, uh Roger Schwelt in the US, has uh has a lot of evidence, along with Glenn with his studies of lighting in in in in in in in buildings, in offices, and so on.
• 8:21
  Bob Fosbury: So I'm I'm very aware of this as a um as a person having to survive the winter.
• 8:29
  Bob Fosbury: So I'm I I'm now very, very strongly convinced we understand pretty much why this is the case and why the absence of uh outdoor light is always important, but it's especially important in the winter.
• 8:47
  Bob Fosbury: And that is because we're we're realizing that the way um the way your body your body energetics works, the way you metabolize food into energy to keep you keep you alive, um if you're in the darkness or in in in a in a building which doesn't have infrared transmitting glass and only has white LEDs, as far as the body is concerned, you're in essentially complete darkness.
• 9:14
  Bob Fosbury: And in darkness, you can live, you can survive for probably quite a long time, but you won't have very much energy.
• 9:24
  Bob Fosbury: You you you you have what's called the basal metabolic rate, which means the food you eat only goes towards keeping you alive, and it doesn't actually allow you to generate energy, much energy to do anything like think or walk around or run around.
• 9:42
  Bob Fosbury: And um we realize by by by calculating this stuff that in sunlight there's always extra energy going into your metabolic process that will allow you to rise your raise your metabolic rate above its base level.
• 10:03
  Bob Fosbury: Because the energy from the sunlight is allowing you to speed up your metabolic process and just metabolize your food more efficiently and faster.
• 10:14
  Bob Fosbury: The sunlight is not directly giving you energy in this case, it's actually allowing you to m metabolize.
• 10:20
  Bob Fosbury: The energy is still coming from the food, uh, but you metabolize it much more efficiently.
• 10:26
  Bob Fosbury: And so, you know, if you're not getting any sunlight in the winter, if you're not getting any daylight, it doesn't have to be direct sunlight.
• 10:33
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, there's a lot of infrared coming down in from the clouds and so on.
• 10:37
  Bob Fosbury: A clear blue sky is quite dark, but clouds are still bright in the infrared in in in the daytime in the winter.
• 10:44
  Bob Fosbury: In fact, clouds are your best bet because as you mentioned uh a while ago, the uh the the tree leaves uh can't give you very much infrared because there are few tree leaves around in the winter.
• 10:56
  Bob Fosbury: So the the the infrared you get is often coming from the clouds.
• 11:00
  Bob Fosbury: And that's much, much, much more than you would ever get inside in an LED lit room.
• 11:07
  Scott Zimmerman: I mean I think the other thing you don't understand is that um the ground itself is about 50% reflective throughout from the infrared clear out to almost five microns.
• 11:19
  Scott Zimmerman: So you get you do are even though it's not the same as the leaves, it's got there's there's a a component in the ground reflectance that you can't ignore either.
• 11:31
  Glen Jeffery: So So wrapping this wrapping these bits together, one point that people should perhaps pay attention to is even though it's pretty inclement out there and you don't it's not very appealing, walking outside in winter is a positive event.
• 11:48
  Glen Jeffery: You know, you you may have to wrap up fairly well for it, but if we think that um a lot of our metabolism may be regulated by infrared light, well, don't think just because it's overcast there's no infrared there.
• 12:02
  Glen Jeffery: There's actually a lot of infrared out there, and you should just go for a walk, even though it's not quite as appealing.
• 12:12
  Dave Wallace: So and and that's I mean, to me is fascinating because you know, I I guess I would have thought that going out on a clear blue sky day, you know, where the sun's out, you you would probably be getting more infrared or more sort of from the sun.
• 12:29
  Dave Wallace: But it sounds like because of what happens from a cloud cover point of view, that that that you're you're gonna be getting plenty, well, not plenty, but you're gonna be getting uh from the clouds as well, which is sort of to me is kind of a new insight.
• 12:44
  Dave Wallace: Um, because I think you know it kind of goes against what people would probably generally have in their head.
• 12:51
  Dave Wallace: Um but uh again, one of the things I'm learning is that you know we have to probably unlearn an awful lot of what we've learned anyway, um, in in order to kind of make sense of all of this.
• 13:05
  Glen Jeffery: Yeah.
• 13:05
  Glen Jeffery: You know, the other thing to the the we we we we find the concept of infrared very difficult to deal with because you can't see it.
• 13:12
  Glen Jeffery: Yeah, it's very important.
• 13:13
  Glen Jeffery: The other thing about infrared, which is you know really quite unusual, is that uh okay, when it comes down from the sky, um, where does it go?
• 13:21
  Glen Jeffery: Well, in actual fact, there's very little that's actually absorbing infrared.
• 13:26
  Glen Jeffery: One of my biggest problems in some of the science I do is it's bouncing round everywhere.
• 13:32
  Glen Jeffery: So, you know, it might be a cloudy day and you might have your nose stuck up against a brick wall, but there will be infrared light bouncing off that brick wall.
• 13:43
  Glen Jeffery: And I've said this a number of times before.
• 13:45
  Glen Jeffery: In some of my experiments where I need to control the amount of light in a room, I've actually had to wrap people's bodies in in aluminium foil.
• 13:56
  Glen Jeffery: Because it's all over the place.
• 13:59
  Glen Jeffery: It's it's if we if we could have an eye that saw infrared looking out there, it would be very, very bright.
• 14:08
  Glen Jeffery: And so because there are no absorbers, even if you're walking along um and the grass has gone and the trees have got no leaves on them, the infrared is bouncing around you.
• 14:20
  Bob Fosbury: There's a very good reason for this, which is well known to astronomers, and we call it the chlorophyll red edge.
• 14:25
  Bob Fosbury: And uh this became very fashionable after uh Carl Sagan um got the uh the Galileo spacecraft to look at the Earth from a distance.
• 14:38
  Bob Fosbury: Um quite a long time ago now.
• 14:40
  Bob Fosbury: There was a paper in Nature about it, uh more than a decade ago.
• 14:45
  Bob Fosbury: Um and uh it was clear that the earth is covered in bright infrared patches, really bright infrared patches when seen from space.
• 14:56
  Bob Fosbury: And those are the forests.
• 14:59
  Bob Fosbury: Because because chlorophyll is transparent uh in the near infrared, and we think of chlorophyll as being green, but if our eyes saw a little bit further into the infrared, the the chlorophyll would be brilliant red because uh it uh it it lets the red light scatter around inside leaves and come out again, and uh that's a that's an incredibly powerful reflector.
• 15:27
  Bob Fosbury: We call it a reflector, we should really call it a scatterer of infrared light.
• 15:31
  Bob Fosbury: So in the summer, when we're surrounded by vegetation, we're bathed in huge amounts of near-infrared radiation from the plants around us.
• 15:40
  Bob Fosbury: And in a way, this is a kind of collaboration between the plants and the animals because the plants don't need that infrared.
• 15:47
  Bob Fosbury: It would be damaging to them because it would heat their leaves up and make them lose water.
• 15:52
  Bob Fosbury: Uh so they they export their infrared as quickly and efficiently as they can.
• 15:58
  Bob Fosbury: And when they do this in a forest, they bathe the forest floor in large quantities of infrared radiation, which they uh let through their canopy and then scatter down onto all the life forms living in the forest.
• 16:14
  Bob Fosbury: And we know that in a rainforest, for instance, the the life is incredibly rich and diverse.
• 16:20
  Bob Fosbury: And that's because they're continuously bathed in infrared radiation, which is for extremely good for metabolic health.
• 16:27
  Bob Fosbury: So, you know, we are, under certain circumstances, in a very, very positive uh beneficial environment.
• 16:36
  Bob Fosbury: And, you know, you think about forest bathing in in Japan.
• 16:40
  Bob Fosbury: They know this is beneficial.
• 16:42
  Bob Fosbury: They possibly don't realize why, but it's beneficial because you are bathed in large quantities of uh infrared radiation.
• 16:50
  Bob Fosbury: And if you look at a tree, Glenn mentioned looking at the walls around him, the walls are relatively poor infrared reflectors compared to a tree and compared to grass.
• 17:01
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it's it it's interesting because I mean I guess leaves drop in the summer in the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere.
• 17:08
  Dave Wallace: Mainly, yeah, the northern hemisphere.
• 17:10
  Dave Wallace: Um because the trees there there isn't the UV that they need, so there's excess energy there.
• 17:18
  Dave Wallace: I mean, uh and I could be talking out tern, but I guess um so they drop the leaves, therefore you don't get that infrared um effect from the leaves.
• 17:28
  Dave Wallace: But I guess the the plus side is without the leaves there, you know, living creatures then have more access directly to to the UV because they're not being shielded by the trees.
• 17:42
  Dave Wallace: Um so I I just sort of wonder if there's a sort of slightly different thing going on in terms of our relationship as as sort of uh creatures in in in the winter because of the way that the trees have changed because they've well, yeah.
• 17:57
  Bob Fosbury: The I mean the the reason that is good is because if you're living outside and all the leaves have gone, and leaves are very good at giving you infrared, but the sun is even better at giving you in infrared.
• 18:10
  Bob Fosbury: So if you see the sky and especially if the sky's got clouds in it, you'll see a lot of infrared coming from the sun uh via the clouds.
• 18:20
  Bob Fosbury: And so yes, just being outside in the winter is a an advantage in in some way, losing the leaves in some way compensates for their beneficial effects in the summer.
• 18:33
  Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, and and again, like I said, dirt itself is not uh absorb a hundred percent absorbing.
• 18:39
  Scott Zimmerman: And in fact, you know, ourselves, we ourselves are reflective like leaves.
• 18:45
  Scott Zimmerman: We have about diffuse reflectance on the order of uh, you know, somewhere up eight even to fifty percent.
• 18:51
  Scott Zimmerman: That is the skin, our skin itself.
• 18:54
  Scott Zimmerman: And yet what's been interesting is we've been going through this process where people looked at light, sunlight, and first said, Well, it's here what I can see with my eye.
• 19:05
  Scott Zimmerman: That was our first detector, basically.
• 19:07
  Scott Zimmerman: Now we're starting to get people are starting to get detectors that go out uh readily available that go out to a thousand nanometers.
• 19:15
  Scott Zimmerman: Well, that lets you see a little bit of the near infrared.
• 19:18
  Scott Zimmerman: Now we're finding that if all of us here, even though we're very white-skinned, we have very beyond a thousand nanometers out to six thousand nanometers, which sun provides, we are dark skinned with white hair.
• 19:33
  Scott Zimmerman: There's no difference because it's all water absorption.
• 19:36
  Scott Zimmerman: So as you go through that, we're kind of almost going through a process of expanding our view of the world, or at least sunlight.
• 19:43
  Scott Zimmerman: And the farther out we go, we're finding all these different things.
• 19:47
  Scott Zimmerman: And eventually we're radiating, we're setting our the body up to radiate into the back into space.
• 19:54
  Scott Zimmerman: So, as Bob's shown very well, is that you have sunlight coming in, you eventually have to get it back out.
• 20:01
  Scott Zimmerman: If you don't get it back out, it's just as bad as if you don't get it in.
• 20:04
  Scott Zimmerman: So it's a kind of complex interaction.
• 20:07
  Scott Zimmerman: But we're like I say, I had my two-year-old grandson out yesterday, and I had took the meter and I looked at him, and he was white as white.
• 20:16
  Scott Zimmerman: I mean, he was uh a child is uh like a a white, he he's whiter than a leaf is.
• 20:21
  Scott Zimmerman: It's uh in the near infrared.
• 20:23
  Scott Zimmerman: But if you go out in longer wavelengths, he's black as black.
• 20:27
  Scott Zimmerman: So it's it's not so simple sometimes, I guess, is what I'd say.
• 20:32
  Bob Fosbury: I think I'd I'd make the point, um, Dave, that you know, the reason we're all studying this is the fact that the lighting changed uh over the last few decades from the mid mid-20th century to the beginning of this century when we all had uh white LEDs for indoor lighting.
• 20:52
  Bob Fosbury: And you know, that gradual erosion, well, very rapid erosion of access to the full spectrum of sunlight, uh has caused uh a crisis in metabolic health.
• 21:04
  Bob Fosbury: And it's this crisis which has actually triggered all of us to do this research.
• 21:10
  Bob Fosbury: And it's become very obvious to us that you know the life has evolved on Earth over four four and a half billion years, which is a long time.
• 21:21
  Bob Fosbury: It's a third of the age of the universe.
• 21:23
  Bob Fosbury: And all that time, the origin of life and the and the flourishing of life has all happened under a source like the sun, which we call a thermal source, it radiates because it's hot, and that has a broad spectrum, which is well understood by by physicists, it's a Planck spectrum, and uh the sun spectrum extends from all the way from the ultraviolet through to the mid and far infrared.
• 21:50
  Bob Fosbury: And it it it's strongest in the in the visible near-infrared region in the middle.
• 21:56
  Bob Fosbury: And uh that means that life has evolved to use all of this radiation for a whole range of functions.
• 22:05
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, not just metabolism.
• 22:06
  Bob Fosbury: Metabolism may be the really um important core one, but you know, we use the UV for synthesizing vitamin D.
• 22:13
  Bob Fosbury: Uh we probably use the longer wavelength infrared for protecting our body against pathogens.
• 22:21
  Bob Fosbury: And all of these things in between.
• 22:22
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, they're too too numerous to list, but we're focusing on the metabolism.
• 22:27
  Bob Fosbury: But um, so we're we're all accustomed to having to being illuminated what we call thermal sources.
• 22:35
  Bob Fosbury: Well, you can list thermal sources.
• 22:37
  Bob Fosbury: It's the sun, it's the moon reflecting sunlight, it's the fires, camp fires, forest fires, burning wood in your grate.
• 22:47
  Bob Fosbury: That's a thermal source.
• 22:49
  Bob Fosbury: A gas mantle is a thermal source, an oil lamp is a thermal source, a candle is a thermal source, a tungsten filament light bulb is a is a thermal source.
• 22:59
  Bob Fosbury: An LED is not a thermal source.
• 23:02
  Bob Fosbury: It's what we call a non-thermal source.
• 23:05
  Bob Fosbury: And they've have been developed to only emit visible light.
• 23:09
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, that's the whole raison d'etre for for LEDs to fit to emit only visible light for maximum efficiency at emitting visible light, which is great if you're just interested in seeing.
• 23:23
  Bob Fosbury: But if you haven't, unusually to be interested in living as well, it's a disaster.
• 23:28
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• 23:35
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• 23:49
  Dave Wallace: It's quite frankly a disaster.
• 23:53
  Dave Wallace: Which is it it's so like I I I've I hear this and I understand it myself, but it seems so like a LED light seems so innocuous.
• 24:06
  Dave Wallace: Like the whole thing seems so innocuous.
• 24:08
  Dave Wallace: And I think this is why what you're doing, the all of you from a research point of view is so important, because it's sort of reconnecting us.
• 24:17
  Dave Wallace: So I guess one of the questions I've got is if we go back a hundred years, was there SAD because we had these thermal light sources, i you know, we had fires and oil lamps and candles.
• 24:31
  Dave Wallace: You know, I I don't know, I haven't looked, but I probably asked Chat GPT after this.
• 24:36
  Bob Fosbury: Did all you have to do, Dave, is look at pictures of people, you know, just at the public in the in the early part of the 20th century.
• 24:46
  Bob Fosbury: They're all walking around and doing stuff, and then ask yourself the question how many of them had type 2 diabetes?
• 24:54
  Bob Fosbury: How many of them were obese?
• 24:56
  Bob Fosbury: And a whole list of questions.
• 24:59
  Bob Fosbury: And Glenn can describe, you know, these diseases of aging that that that are dependent on the way you metabolize.
• 25:08
  Glen Jeffery: Very very dependent on light.
• 25:10
  Glen Jeffery: I mean, quite simply.
• 25:12
  Glen Jeffery: Most disease, most metabolic diseases kick off in winter.
• 25:20
  Glen Jeffery: You know, it's it's it's the data are all out there, the stories are all there.
• 25:25
  Glen Jeffery: Um that it is an absence of light that is associated with uh initiation of disease and other diseases may actually suddenly turn up in spring, and you think, oh well, hang on, this is this this disease has turned up in spring.
• 25:40
  Glen Jeffery: No, it was initiated it it was initiated in winter.
• 25:44
  Glen Jeffery: And a fundamental kind of point which I grumble about continually is we shouldn't be here.
• 25:49
  Glen Jeffery: You know, we should be back on the equator.
• 25:52
  Glen Jeffery: Why, in God's name, do I live in Archway in North London?
• 25:56
  Glen Jeffery: I shouldn't be here.
• 25:57
  Glen Jeffery: I should be somewhere with a 12, 12 light, dark cycle, and it'd be relatively warm all the time.
• 26:04
  Glen Jeffery: Our migration patterns have just taken us to inappropriate places, and we think, well, you know, we've been here for a long time.
• 26:10
  Glen Jeffery: Well, in terms of human evolution, whether it's four or three or whatever million years, my move to archway in North London is a very, very small percentage of that.
• 26:22
  Glen Jeffery: And in many senses, my the evolution of my body has not got ready for archway.
• 26:27
  Glen Jeffery: Nice.
• 26:27
  Glen Jeffery: You know, it's still it still thinks it's somewhere in Ethiopia.
• 26:31
  Dave Wallace: I and you you know, I guess it's even shorter the time from sort of incandescent to LEDs.
• 26:36
  Dave Wallace: So we're talking about the last 10, 10, 20 years and I sorry, sorry.
• 26:44
  Scott Zimmerman: And I guess I'd put make the point that based on Glenn's work, it doesn't take a lot of change based on the amount of energy that we need to input in on a regular basis.
• 26:57
  Scott Zimmerman: The problem is how do you get it in there on a regular basis?
• 27:01
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, it the body seems to be able to adapt to a higher light environment, and for a couple days it's okay, maybe five days, sometimes longer.
• 27:13
  Scott Zimmerman: We have this problem of inconsistency of getting the right spectrum.
• 27:20
  Scott Zimmerman: It's and I think there's a lot of people will poo foo what we're doing from the standpoint of saying that, well, you're never going to bring the intensity level of outdoors indoors.
• 27:30
  Scott Zimmerman: Well, that's true, but we are literally, and Glenn's literally showing that very low levels of exposure, if done improperly, throws off the balance of the body.
• 27:43
  Scott Zimmerman: The body is adapted, assuming that it is exposed, as Bob says, to a broadband thermal emitter that covers it.
• 27:50
  Scott Zimmerman: And every time we look at a different part of the solar spectrum that's been ignored, it's doing something and affecting our ability to essentially thrive.
• 28:03
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 28:03
  Glen Jeffery: I think the important point there is you don't need much to have a significant improvement.
• 28:10
  Glen Jeffery: You know.
• 28:11
  Scott Zimmerman: I don't want Glenn to have to move to Ethiopia right now.
• 28:14
  Scott Zimmerman: Come on.
• 28:17
  Dave Wallace: It's a very beautiful country, I have to say.
• 28:19
  Bob Fosbury: So um You don't need much because zero is very little.
• 28:23
  Bob Fosbury: And if you're starting from zero, a liturgy is a lot.
• 28:27
  Bob Fosbury: Well, Glenn is a lot.
• 28:30
  Dave Wallace: You'll you'll be pleased to know that um I packed off after our last chat, I packed off my son to university, and my parting gift was uh an incandescent bulb, which uh and I said, look, you're probably not gonna see the sun for the next three years, but you know, at least get this.
• 28:49
  Dave Wallace: So he's dutifully put that into his uh his Angle Poise lamp.
• 28:53
  Glen Jeffery: So I give I I gave a load away last Christmas to my relatives.
• 28:58
  Glen Jeffery: I gave them, you know, presents.
• 29:00
  Glen Jeffery: Everyone got an incandescent light bulb.
• 29:03
  Scott Zimmerman: That's really interesting.
• 29:04
  Scott Zimmerman: And I and I and I have a company that uh that does incandescent light bulbs and LEDs combined for exactly this reason.
• 29:13
  Bob Fosbury: So if you if you can't find one of these, because you can't buy incandescent bulbs easily these days, this is a lamp that goes in your oven.
• 29:22
  Bob Fosbury: And you can't put an LED in an oven because it gets too hot.
• 29:26
  Bob Fosbury: So you still have to have an incandescent bulb in an oven.
• 29:29
  Bob Fosbury: So you can buy these, they're 40 watts.
• 29:31
  Bob Fosbury: They cost about two pounds.
• 29:34
  Bob Fosbury: And I use this all the time.
• 29:36
  Bob Fosbury: I use it for my bedside lighting, I use it for my study lighting.
• 29:40
  Bob Fosbury: It's 40 watts, and I run it dimmed uh to make the filament last longer.
• 29:45
  Bob Fosbury: If you if you dim it slightly with a with a rear stat, the filament will last forever.
• 29:50
  Bob Fosbury: And it costs nothing.
• 29:53
  Bob Fosbury: And the the beneficial effects of these are enormous.
• 29:56
  Bob Fosbury: I use them to heal sores on my legs.
• 29:59
  Bob Fosbury: Just You know, the total cost of the whole system is two pounds for the lamp, nine pounds for a dimmer, and an old angle poise lamp, and that's all it costs.
• 30:10
  Bob Fosbury: You don't have to spend six thousand pounds on some fancy LED light, red light, in order to to survive.
• 30:17
  Bob Fosbury: You know, I the the important principle here is we use energy for environmental purposes in buildings.
• 30:29
  Bob Fosbury: We use energy for heating buildings and we use energy for lighting buildings.
• 30:34
  Bob Fosbury: Now heating is a complex problem because if you you know if you've got a glass building in the summer, you get too much heat in it, and you have to keep the heat out in order to keep the environment in the building reasonable.
• 30:46
  Bob Fosbury: And this is why glass manufacturers uh produce infrared rejecting glass.
• 30:53
  Bob Fosbury: It both heat keeps the heat in in the winter and keeps it out in the summer, which is the these are laudable design goals.
• 31:01
  Bob Fosbury: But the trouble is if you keep the infrared out of the buildings, the the buildings are infrared dark.
• 31:08
  Bob Fosbury: And what if you're if you're trying to maintain the environment in a building, I think the the the protocol is very simple.
• 31:18
  Bob Fosbury: If you fill it with incandescent light bulbs, people are going to complain that you're using too much energy for lighting, and that's true in a sense.
• 31:29
  Bob Fosbury: So use perfectly okay to use white LEDs in in places where you just need to walk through, like corridors, stairwells, um, freezer, freezer compartments in in buildings and so on.
• 31:43
  Bob Fosbury: Uh, anywhere where you don't have people residing for long periods of time, using these white LEDs is fine for vision, just to enable you to see.
• 31:53
  Bob Fosbury: If you're working in a building or living a long time in in a space, then you need infrared uh an infrared component.
• 32:02
  Bob Fosbury: And the point is, people will complain that the infrared component is using is wasting energy.
• 32:09
  Bob Fosbury: If you use an incandescent light bulb, it's wasting energy because it produces very little visible light and lots of infrared light.
• 32:16
  Bob Fosbury: But it's keeping you alive.
• 32:18
  Bob Fosbury: So it's not a waste of energy.
• 32:20
  Bob Fosbury: And take the money, goodness sake, take the money out of the heating budget.
• 32:24
  Bob Fosbury: Use the incandescent bulb to heat the building.
• 32:29
  Bob Fosbury: Not completely heat the building, but it's a heat input to the building.
• 32:33
  Bob Fosbury: So any heat you're using to drive an incandescent bulb is serving the positive function of keeping people healthy.
• 32:41
  Bob Fosbury: It's also contributing to the heating of the building.
• 32:45
  Bob Fosbury: So in the winter, especially, use incandescent bulbs wherever you can where you have people.
• 32:51
  Bob Fosbury: So you shine the light through the people, the people will excrete the heat back into the building and heat the building.
• 32:58
  Bob Fosbury: So but you're passing part of your heating through the body.
• 33:02
  Bob Fosbury: And when that infrared light progresses through your body, it dissipates and it keeps you alive.
• 33:08
  Bob Fosbury: That's what keeps you alive.
• 33:10
  Bob Fosbury: So always always associate, always associate the infrared emitters in a building with the people.
• 33:18
  Bob Fosbury: Don't bother where there are no people, but get the lights to follow the people.
• 33:24
  Dave Wallace: So I guess if you're in an open plan, oh sorry, Bob, I was just gonna say you're in an cost out of the heating budget.
• 33:30
  Dave Wallace: It's very simple, straightforward.
• 33:33
  Dave Wallace: But if you're in an open plan office, like, you know, and they don't have incandescence, then just buy a cheap and you're worried, just buy a cheap angle poise lamp, take an incandescent bulb in with you, and pop it on your desk, you know.
• 33:48
  Dave Wallace: Yeah.
• 33:49
  Glen Jeffery: You know, you got three guys here who you introduced us as experts.
• 33:54
  Glen Jeffery: Um my mum says things like that.
• 33:57
  Glen Jeffery: Not many other people do.
• 33:59
  Glen Jeffery: But you've got three people here who spend a lot of time probably not agreeing with one another.
• 34:03
  Glen Jeffery: I you know I you know, I kind of find something out about metabolism, and Bob comes in and says, Oh, that's because there's a pulsar somewhere in a distant planet, and that's doing everything, and and and even worse, he walks out of the room and said, We all knew that.
• 34:19
  Glen Jeffery: But you've got three people here who are all actually singing the same tune, as far as anyone that listens to us.
• 34:28
  Glen Jeffery: We're all saying, get an incandescent light bulb or the equivalent.
• 34:35
  Glen Jeffery: Okay?
• 34:35
  Glen Jeffery: Scott's manufacturing something which does that.
• 34:40
  Glen Jeffery: The light, this light is coming from a window.
• 34:43
  Glen Jeffery: This light coming from this side is from an incandescent light bulb turned down incredibly low with a dimmer switch, exactly what Bob said.
• 34:51
  Glen Jeffery: So if you've got people listening to this podcast, and these we've got these those three experts, they they are all actually saying the same thing.
• 35:01
  Glen Jeffery: Go and buy, go and get a light bulb.
• 35:03
  Glen Jeffery: Certainly in the UK, you can get them very easily.
• 35:06
  Glen Jeffery: And Bob's got a mega one that's been on steel.
• 35:09
  Bob Fosbury: Well, the thing is, that this is interesting as well.
• 35:11
  Bob Fosbury: This is an old-fashioned heat lamp.
• 35:13
  Bob Fosbury: You know, you used to be able to buy these.
• 35:14
  Bob Fosbury: You still can actually in the market.
• 35:16
  Bob Fosbury: You can still buy these.
• 35:17
  Bob Fosbury: So they're an incandescent bulb, which have a red filter over the front to make them look red.
• 35:21
  Bob Fosbury: But forget the red filter, it doesn't matter.
• 35:24
  Bob Fosbury: I use this in my study in the winter, struck or or clamped onto my my desk over here, and I run it at very low voltage.
• 35:34
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, if you turn this thing on full, it'll it'll it'll fry you because, you know, it uses a it uses a couple of hundred watts and it will fry you.
• 35:43
  Bob Fosbury: But you don't need all that.
• 35:44
  Bob Fosbury: You just turn it right down with a rear stat.
• 35:47
  Bob Fosbury: So it just glows slightly, and it heats my room.
• 35:50
  Bob Fosbury: I have the radiator off in my office because it's on the back of my thermostat.
• 35:54
  Bob Fosbury: If I have my radiator on, the rest of the house freezes, so I have to turn my radiator off.
• 35:59
  Bob Fosbury: So in the winter I use this in my office, just shining on my body from behind.
• 36:04
  Bob Fosbury: It doesn't glow very bright, it just looks at uh a red filament.
• 36:08
  Bob Fosbury: And there's heaps and heaps of infrared radiation coming from this, and it's perfect for uh Yeah.
• 36:15
  Dave Wallace: Well, when you said you don't need the red filter on top.
• 36:19
  Dave Wallace: It's the more the the incandescent well, the temperature.
• 36:22
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:23
  Bob Fosbury: I mean I mean the red the red filter on there is just for show.
• 36:27
  Bob Fosbury: Right, okay.
• 36:28
  Bob Fosbury: It serves no purpose other than warming warming the bulb up because you're absorbing the visible light.
• 36:34
  Bob Fosbury: But it's it it's no function there.
• 36:36
  Bob Fosbury: It's a heat lamp.
• 36:37
  Bob Fosbury: And and you, you know, it's a it's a very powerful filament, but you don't have to run it anything like full power.
• 36:44
  Bob Fosbury: You just run, you know, trickle, trickle the energy into it.
• 36:47
  Bob Fosbury: It's probably uh I probably only use it for 40 or 50 watts or something like that.
• 36:51
  Bob Fosbury: Still more than an LED, but it's keeping me alive, yeah.
• 36:54
  Bob Fosbury: If that's an advantage.
• 36:56
  Scott Zimmerman: So still one of the frustrations about this whole thing is that you know, I'm in the in the lighting industry.
• 37:03
  Scott Zimmerman: The lighting industry has all the technology necessary to solve this problem.
• 37:08
  Scott Zimmerman: But what's getting in the way is things like they pass this rule change that you have to have X number of lumens for watt, that, and so that and take it all away.
• 37:18
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, so like in our particular case, there's our incandescents and there's our LEDs, because in reality, if I truly want to match sunlight, an incandescent has too much infrared and not enough visible, and an LED has too much visible and not enough infrared.
• 37:38
  Scott Zimmerman: So you do a hybrid, so that way you know what you're getting when you have the thing.
• 37:42
  Scott Zimmerman: It doesn't mean that any of the other approaches aren't good to do.
• 37:45
  Scott Zimmerman: You go get an incandescent.
• 37:47
  Scott Zimmerman: The problem is that the government is getting involved in this process of science and they're putting restrictions in place.
• 37:58
  Scott Zimmerman: In 2028, this light bulb will not be able to be sold in the United States because the DOE is putting certain restrictions on.
• 38:08
  Scott Zimmerman: And I think the real problem is that there's these silos in the governments that all we care about is doing it this way with the hybrid approach, it's a closer match to sunlight, and it gets five times more efficiency in lumens per watt than just an incandescent.
• 38:27
  Scott Zimmerman: But it works just as well to put an incandescent in.
• 38:31
  Scott Zimmerman: You'll get a variation, but it'll bounce around and all that other stuff.
• 38:35
  Scott Zimmerman: But you know, unfortunately, the science, we're we're trying to do the science to convince the government to do something that they shouldn't be involved in in the first place.
• 38:47
  Scott Zimmerman: So yeah.
• 38:49
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, so and they I mean again, we've got, like I guess in the UK, this whole thing around net zero, wars, LED light here.
• 38:57
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, I mean, it's it's it's not just the UK, it's across Europe and you know, well, literally every and Glenn and Bob have been talking to architects left and right from the standpoint of the architects understand this, but they're stuck because of lead requirements and all these energy requirements.
• 39:15
  Scott Zimmerman: That near infrared blocking glass is part and parcel of how they get the efficiency numbers they want.
• 39:23
  Scott Zimmerman: But they don't ever include the health negative health benefit costs associated with what they're forcing the the architects and the uh the industry to do.
• 39:35
  Bob Fosbury: Dave, just a point about the um the energy efficiency thing.
• 39:40
  Bob Fosbury: We we've been told to improve energy efficiency in lighting, and incandescent bulbs are a waste of energy because they just radiate everything in the in the infrared, and that's of no value for vision.
• 39:52
  Bob Fosbury: And so we've introduced white LEDs.
• 39:55
  Bob Fosbury: Now, that was a the idea of introducing white LEDs was to make lighting more efficient and and spend less less energy, less money on lighting.
• 40:04
  Bob Fosbury: What did we do?
• 40:06
  Bob Fosbury: White LEDs were so energy efficient that people put them everywhere on the planet all the time.
• 40:12
  Bob Fosbury: And so we're lighting the outside of the planet, outside buildings, incredibly brightly all the time.
• 40:21
  Bob Fosbury: We're using much more energy on lighting now than we were using when we had incandescence in in people's buildings and houses.
• 40:28
  Bob Fosbury: Because everybody's gone crazy, lighting the outside and shining all this energy off into space.
• 40:34
  Bob Fosbury: All you have to do is to control outdoor lighting, use outdoor outdoor lighting sensibly.
• 40:40
  Bob Fosbury: You're much better off for security if you have low-level lighting outside.
• 40:45
  Bob Fosbury: Because if you blind everyone with these bright uh white LEDs, enormous power, you create these huge shadows that, you know, people, bad people can can can move around in.
• 40:58
  Bob Fosbury: It's been well demonstrated in many cases that the security is better under low-level outdoor lighting.
• 41:05
  Bob Fosbury: So, you know, we're we're not saving energy with white LEDs, we're doing quite the opposite.
• 41:11
  Dave Wallace: And I guess going back to the you know, I'm trying to kind of close this off because, you know, I guess we could go on and on about this because it I mean it fascinates, the whole thing is fascinating.
• 41:23
  Dave Wallace: But I I shared some research yesterday that they did um using Apple Watch detectors.
• 41:30
  Dave Wallace: So basically people the Apple Watch can say how much daylight you've been exposed to.
• 41:35
  Dave Wallace: They looked at 53,000 people in the US.
• 41:39
  Dave Wallace: And I think the average time in sort of January that people were outside was like 20 minutes or something like that.
• 41:46
  Dave Wallace: So that means the rest of the time they were inside probably under LED light.
• 41:52
  Dave Wallace: So to your point around all of the the the mitochondrial and metabolic, I mean, this is why this is so problematic, isn't it?
• 42:02
  Dave Wallace: So you know, I mean, again, listening to you today, like I I genuinely had no understanding that it was cloudy, that you can get access to infrared.
• 42:13
  Dave Wallace: Um, you know, I was puzzled why my mum and dad were saying, you know, let's go for a Sunday walk or something like that.
• 42:19
  Dave Wallace: But, you know, intuitively they they knew that was the right thing to be doing in winter.
• 42:24
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, just getting people outside a lot more in winter is is kind of super critical.
• 42:30
  Dave Wallace: But if you are inside, it's that you know, thinking about mixing up your lighting with incandescence.
• 42:39
  Bob Fosbury: I'd make another remark about the winter.
• 42:41
  Bob Fosbury: It's often thought that, you know, we we have to take vitamin D supplements in the winter because we don't get any from the sky, from the sun.
• 42:49
  Bob Fosbury: Now I mean in in a sense that's true, but not for the reasons people think.
• 42:55
  Bob Fosbury: Uh in the winter we don't get very much the ultraviolet for uh the vitamin D wavelengths in the winter when the because the sun never gets high enough in the sky.
• 43:09
  Bob Fosbury: So the direct path from the sun to you doesn't give you ultraviolet.
• 43:14
  Bob Fosbury: But on the other hand, the path of sunlight to the higher atmosphere and the clouds, the high clouds and so on, and the upper atmosphere can scatter UV radiation down on you from above, which is a supplementary path for getting UV to you in the winter.
• 43:32
  Bob Fosbury: And you do get significant amounts that way in the winter.
• 43:35
  Bob Fosbury: Right.
• 43:36
  Bob Fosbury: In fact, you get something like it with with a with a normal sun high enough to give you some UV, you're getting about half the UV directly from the sun, and you're getting the other half from the sky, mostly directly above you.
• 43:49
  Bob Fosbury: So the fact that you need vitamin D supplements in the winter is not so much that you don't get ultraviolet in the winter, it's the fact you cover set cover yourself up in the winter, obviously, with clothes.
• 44:01
  Bob Fosbury: And the clothes are opaque to ultraviolet.
• 44:04
  Bob Fosbury: And I should mention, having said that, that clothes are transparent to the infrared.
• 44:10
  Bob Fosbury: Right.
• 44:10
  Bob Fosbury: So if you want to get infrared from the sky, you don't have to disrobe, uh, you know, wearing normal light clothing.
• 44:16
  Bob Fosbury: You get the you get the infrared going straight through.
• 44:19
  Bob Fosbury: So infrared, clothes are nothing to infrared.
• 44:23
  Bob Fosbury: In fact, Sony stopped selling infrared cameras in the early 2000s because they realized that clothes were transparent and it didn't do much for their reputation.
• 44:33
  Bob Fosbury: They were afraid of being sued.
• 44:39
  Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, but I think you have to start separating out somewhat what you're getting from the benefits of outdoors and what you're getting from uh what we're putting people into now in their indoor environment.
• 44:51
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, what is it, five minutes a month outdoors for someone in a nursing home or whatever.
• 44:56
  Scott Zimmerman: But what you're taking them into is something that's not good.
• 45:00
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, it takes very little exposure to LEDs to start seeing some negative effects, just like Lens showing, add a little bit of infrared back in, and all of a sudden the ATP process increases its efficiency, CO2 levels increase.
• 45:19
  Scott Zimmerman: So part of the problem has been that there's been this isolation of what are the downsides to LED because it's not just sitting there that you know it's passive, it's actually creating a problem because it's throwing off this imbalance.
• 45:36
  Scott Zimmerman: Because every one of the processes in the body are essentially under the understanding that you're exposed to something that emits from 280 nanometers out to six microns.
• 45:49
  Scott Zimmerman: And you start playing games with that, you start messing, you can have a negative impact on on what uh you know our health.
• 45:58
  Scott Zimmerman: And that's what I think Glenn shows so well with some of his tests that he's been running.
• 46:04
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it feels like there's a there's an urgency around this from a message point of view, because our older people are going into homes.
• 46:13
  Dave Wallace: You know, I've I've seen it with uh you know my parents and uh my grandparents, you know, going in.
• 46:20
  Dave Wallace: You know, so there's that, then you know, I guess there's things like schools as well.
• 46:25
  Dave Wallace: So schools are you know, you go into a school and they're gonna be lit by LED, you know, maybe that's impacting people's ability to learn.
• 46:35
  Dave Wallace: You know, I think Glenn, we talked about hospitals are particularly um terrible places for kind of uh for for LED lighting as well.
• 46:44
  Dave Wallace: So the very place where you want people to be finding sort of therapeutic uh benefits from light are the very places where where they're kind of not getting it.
• 46:54
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, I think again there's an urgency, and I if winter can kind of help focus that, because as you uh Bob, you said that the higher case mortality in winter is the the stats are there, then that's kind of a uh it's a good thing that we're kind of really looking to get this this promoted out.
• 47:15
  Bob Fosbury: There are there are two I think there are two metabolic problems facing the planet at the moment, and they're both serious.
• 47:22
  Bob Fosbury: One is ultra-processed foods, and there's a lot of discussion about this.
• 47:26
  Bob Fosbury: This is very much in the public eye, you know, the the disbenefits of uh of ultra-processed food.
• 47:33
  Bob Fosbury: And I think, you know, while that's a complex problem, the the the the what it's doing is very simple, uh, and that is, you know, your food, you're eating food to keep yourself alive.
• 47:46
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, the fact that you're using the food to give you energy to do stuff is is is true as well, but that's incidental.
• 47:53
  Bob Fosbury: The process of eating is to keep you alive, it's to keep you from uh becoming the same temperature as your surroundings, and I uh uh in other words, being dead.
• 48:03
  Bob Fosbury: And uh and and so if you're eating food which you cannot metabolize, you're not keeping yourself alive.
• 48:14
  Bob Fosbury: And the problems with ultra-processed foods, I I mean I I'm wary of saying this in public, but I I think it uh it's absolutely true.
• 48:23
  Bob Fosbury: Ultra-processed foods don't contain what you need to stay alive, and that's highly ordered foods.
• 48:31
  Bob Fosbury: You're you you you you have to eat high-quality foods that are highly structured and also have a high energy content, but are structured in such a way that you metabolize them at the right place in your gut.
• 48:44
  Bob Fosbury: And ultra-processed food is almost completely disordered.
• 48:48
  Bob Fosbury: It doesn't have any order in it at all.
• 48:50
  Bob Fosbury: All the order's been taken.
• 48:52
  Bob Fosbury: We call them maximum entropy food.
• 48:54
  Bob Fosbury: They're maximally disordered.
• 48:56
  Bob Fosbury: And so ultra-processed foods on their own are essentially of no nutritional value.
• 49:01
  Bob Fosbury: They're not what you need to keep your body working properly and alive.
• 49:08
  Bob Fosbury: And, you know, the the consequence of doing this is you, of course, you you run into type 2 diabetes, obesity, and all of these things.
• 49:16
  Bob Fosbury: Now, the other aspect is what we've been talking about, is the light.
• 49:20
  Bob Fosbury: And this is very closely related to the food.
• 49:24
  Bob Fosbury: It's not unrelated to the food.
• 49:25
  Bob Fosbury: These two factors, they're working together as a perfect storm.
• 49:29
  Bob Fosbury: Because the light, the absence of the light does not allow us to metabolize properly.
• 49:36
  Bob Fosbury: Well, I mean, in a way And the food will not metabolized the ultra-processed food will not metabolize properly.
• 49:43
  Bob Fosbury: So we're we're giving ourselves a double whammy.
• 49:45
  Bob Fosbury: We're stopping ourselves uh metabolizing properly in two different ways simultaneously.
• 49:52
  Dave Wallace: I mean, in a in a way, we're using ultra-processed light, aren't we?
• 49:56
  Dave Wallace: That's the problem.
• 49:57
  Dave Wallace: So you've got food and light, which are both ultra-processed, and the the the the two of them together are a heady combination, but you know, nothing good comes of it, does it?
• 50:08
  Bob Fosbury: Exactly, exactly.
• 50:09
  Bob Fosbury: And I think that's the point to make.
• 50:11
  Bob Fosbury: Because if you if you look at the ultra-processed food issue, it's in the public eye all the time, especially in this country.
• 50:17
  Bob Fosbury: I don't know so much about other countries.
• 50:18
  Bob Fosbury: It's in the public eye.
• 50:20
  Bob Fosbury: All the nutritionists talk about ultra-processed food.
• 50:23
  Bob Fosbury: As far as I'm aware, none of the nutritionists talk about light.
• 50:27
  Bob Fosbury: Light is the more fundamental of these two things, I think.
• 50:30
  Bob Fosbury: It's you know, it's the thing which is is really designed to drive our metabolism.
• 50:36
  Bob Fosbury: It's it we've evolved to use light to metabolize.
• 50:40
  Bob Fosbury: And so, in a sense, this this metabolic pathway using light to metabolize is sits right there alongside photosynthesis.
• 50:49
  Bob Fosbury: Photosynthesis uses photons of sunlight to make the food that we eat.
• 50:54
  Bob Fosbury: The food that we eat is metabolized properly using uh infrared radiation from sunlight.
• 51:01
  Bob Fosbury: The photosynthesis uses the visible spectrum, the metabolism uses the infrared spectrum.
• 51:07
  Bob Fosbury: And these are parallel paths, they're in some sense mirrors of one another.
• 51:11
  Bob Fosbury: And so if we don't have both these paths working properly, we're in bad shape.
• 51:17
  Dave Wallace: No, it's it's very interesting.
• 51:19
  Dave Wallace: Very interesting.
• 51:20
  Dave Wallace: So Glenn, I had a question which is, I mean, you may or may not be able to answer it, but it's just something which I I've been pondering.
• 51:28
  Dave Wallace: Well I was born in the tropics.
• 51:32
  Dave Wallace: Uh so you know, my first experiences as a child were sort of equatorial, basically.
• 51:38
  Dave Wallace: So I was born pretty much bang smack on the equator, and then lived for a time in the tropics in Fiji when I was growing up as well.
• 51:47
  Dave Wallace: So my early years were all very much dominated by uh 12 hours of sunshine, 12 hours of dark.
• 51:56
  Dave Wallace: And I do sometimes wonder whether that early experience sort of tuned my body up.
• 52:03
  Dave Wallace: So when I get sad, it's a very profound, very, you know, really visceral experience.
• 52:10
  Dave Wallace: I I sort of wonder if my mitochondria might re remember that.
• 52:15
  Dave Wallace: So I, you know, I don't know, maybe that's just a daft question, but because you're here, I it it is it's not daft at all.
• 52:22
  Glen Jeffery: I'm beginning to think quite seriously that mitochondria have got really good memories.
• 52:26
  Glen Jeffery: We know mitochondria talk to one another across the body, they're very, very underestimated.
• 52:31
  Glen Jeffery: Now, the one bit of science that I bring to that situation is a very unusual piece of science, and that's that children that are born in the Arctic in winter months grow up with very different colour vision than those that are born at other times of the year.
• 52:56
  Glen Jeffery: Now, colour vision is highly dependent on mitochondria.
• 52:59
  Glen Jeffery: A vision uses more mitochondria than any other part of our body, it's got the highest metabolic rate, ages fast, etc.
• 53:07
  Glen Jeffery: And that paper came out, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago.
• 53:11
  Glen Jeffery: We all sat down and we read it, and we went, God, this is this is a solid bit of science.
• 53:16
  Glen Jeffery: It's a really solid bit of science.
• 53:18
  Glen Jeffery: What the hell's going on?
• 53:20
  Glen Jeffery: Okay, what is going on?
• 53:23
  Glen Jeffery: So I would say to you that that is a bit of evidence that is very solid that is saying to you something is remembering where you were born.
• 53:36
  Glen Jeffery: Okay, so Arctic in winter, extreme reductions in light.
• 53:42
  Glen Jeffery: Okay, and also it's not just dark, it's very, very deep blue.
• 53:48
  Glen Jeffery: Right?
• 53:49
  Glen Jeffery: So maybe mitochondria have got memories.
• 53:53
  Glen Jeffery: You know?
• 53:54
  Glen Jeffery: I think it's an absolutely fascinating idea.
• 53:58
  Glen Jeffery: The more we find out about mitochondria, the more we realise that they're running circles around us intellectually.
• 54:04
  Dave Wallace: No, I I I mean it I and so the other the other one was my my mother was half Italian, um, my father was sort of English-Scottish, but my mother was half Italian.
• 54:16
  Dave Wallace: And I I I believe you inherit your mitochondria from your mother, don't you?
• 54:21
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 54:21
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, my my my mitochondria are sort of half Italian, where the the rest of me, you know.
• 54:28
  Dave Wallace: So I I wonder if there's a sort of genetic imprint into mitochondria as well, which is so but you you know, you're you're a highly complex individual born in Fiji with an Italian mother, a British father.
• 54:43
  Glen Jeffery: I mean, you know I mean, born in Fiji, fantastic for you.
• 54:47
  Glen Jeffery: Um but humans, I mean they're they're so diverse, they're so different.
• 54:52
  Glen Jeffery: It's why people work on mice that are all the same.
• 54:55
  Glen Jeffery: Um, I don't know, but the idea that mitochondria have got memories, yeah, you know, but there's a lot of people that are gonna are gonna really dislike that idea.
• 55:05
  Glen Jeffery: But there again, there'll be lots of people not very long ago that would say to you, mitochondria never talk to one another.
• 55:11
  Glen Jeffery: And they're doing it all the time.
• 55:13
  Glen Jeffery: I don't know what they're saying, but they're doing it all the time.
• 55:16
  Glen Jeffery: I thought upset them in your finger here, your toe knows about it the following morning.
• 55:23
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, no.
• 55:24
  Dave Wallace: I I'm um way as well as reading scale that Bob suggested, I'm also reading uh quantum biology by by Jeffrey Guy, which I'm finding fascinating, but you know, the more I read it, the more I think we really do live in a magical world, you know.
• 55:39
  Dave Wallace: I don't even know how you would describe it.
• 55:47
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, to me, mitochondria having memory is, you know, perfectly would make perfect sense.
• 55:53
  Dave Wallace: So I I love the fact, and I'll look up that paper around uh the coloured eyes, because I it's sort of that's fascinating.
• 56:02
  Bob Fosbury: Of course, the the of course the mitochondria were at least the the mechanisms in the mitochondria, the the things that produce the energy evolved very early in life, much earlier than people thought before.
• 56:16
  Bob Fosbury: The recent understanding is that these uh these this enzyme that produces uh ATP, the energy uh the energy for the cells, was around long before multicellular life started.
• 56:32
  Bob Fosbury: They were around during uh the very early um unicellular uh uh population of the earth.
• 56:40
  Bob Fosbury: Probably going right back to very close to the beginning.
• 56:43
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, I had no idea how something so exquisitely complicated to have evolved so early, but it's it's an amazing, it's an amazing story.
• 56:52
  Bob Fosbury: So this is all, I I have to say, all of what we're talking about, offices and lighting and incandescence and so on, is much more locate uh much more um concerned with um the much bigger picture of how the universe has evolved.
• 57:10
  Bob Fosbury: My recent talk, but I I've I've learned this very recently, but there's a much closer connection between the whole uh history of the universe and the role of life within that.
• 57:22
  Bob Fosbury: And life is not a freak occurrence, I don't think.
• 57:25
  Bob Fosbury: Life is an an inbuilt potential in in in throughout the universe through a very straightforward, simple physical process.
• 57:36
  Dave Wallace: So there's a I've found a really interesting new card before I'll forward it on to you, which sort of builds on that idea.
• 57:46
  Dave Wallace: So I I wanted to go back to surviving winter because um what one uh one way that I cope is with saunas.
• 57:57
  Dave Wallace: I I'm sort of fascinated by saunas in in their own right.
• 58:02
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, I do a lot of swimming and I'm lucky because the local Lido has a nice sauna, and I found saunas are a really good way of kind of improving my mood in winter.
• 58:12
  Dave Wallace: Um is that because of the infrared that you get from a sauna?
• 58:18
  Dave Wallace: Is that sort of helping with things?
• 58:20
  Dave Wallace: Um, I just wondered if you've got any thoughts about what's going on.
• 58:24
  Dave Wallace: And then the other thing is culturally, I guess in northern the northern hemisphere, uh saunas have been things which are very popular and particularly sort of used in winter.
• 58:37
  Dave Wallace: So I just wondered if there's any thoughts that you uh any of you may have around the idea of saunas at all.
• 58:44
  Glen Jeffery: They um well, they say uh that's there's there's a a very interesting chap called Jonathan Stone in Australia.
• 58:52
  Glen Jeffery: Uh he's very eminent and he always comes out with ideas that are different from anybody else, and you find out they're true afterwards.
• 58:59
  Glen Jeffery: And he said um, you know, that the killer in life is the pulse, the pulse of your heart as you get older, because your blood vessels are stiff, and and um one of the things that you know he points out is saunas, which dilate your blood vessels.
• 59:18
  Glen Jeffery: You know, why is it that, you know, people that take saunas on a regular basis actually tend to have rather good outcomes in terms of life?
• 59:27
  Glen Jeffery: So we can think about mitochondria, but also when you dilate your blood vessels, you're getting more nutrients to the cell, and most of the things that are consumed in your cell are going to be consumed by mitochondria.
• 59:41
  Glen Jeffery: They've got unbelievable appetites.
• 59:44
  Glen Jeffery: You know, you you your body temperature is partly because the heat that my mitochondria run hot.
• 59:50
  Glen Jeffery: Well, now we don't know how hot they run, but they're certainly more than 37 degrees, and some people out there are saying it could be close to 50 degrees.
• 59:58
  Glen Jeffery: They are Yeah, yeah, they are hot.
• 1:00:01
  Glen Jeffery: So the pulse, the dilation of blood vessels, saunas certainly seem to be s associated with longevity.
• 1:00:11
  Glen Jeffery: Um and keeping your blood vessels flexible so that they can contract and expand.
• 1:00:18
  Dave Wallace: So I mean, going back to the whole point of that Bob made around lubrication of the metabolic process from light, it sounds like something the sauna themselves because of sort of vasodilation, sort of forcing things into Yeah, and then and then jumping naked into ice pools.
• 1:00:38
  Glen Jeffery: You know, it sounds it sounds absolutely bloody horrendous.
• 1:00:41
  Glen Jeffery: However, from a term from your physiology, I'm sure it's doing you a lot of good.
• 1:00:46
  Glen Jeffery: I I'm not going to do it myself, but it sounds, it sounds that they probably are.
• 1:00:50
  Scott Zimmerman: Well, I think also that you have to understand that when you look at a sauna, when you go into a sauna, you're getting, you know, we have sunlight that's 58,800 Kelvin.
• 1:01:03
  Scott Zimmerman: You got a sauna that's at least some part of it is heating up and providing infrared component into this whole equation, too.
• 1:01:11
  Scott Zimmerman: So that I I'm working on a paper where sunlight and saunas meet.
• 1:01:16
  Scott Zimmerman: Um, because it's in the longer wavelengths, you know.
• 1:01:20
  Scott Zimmerman: If you look at it, uh so one of the arguments is or one of the things I found was that for every one degree of fever that your body uh generates, it's a 10% increase in your metabolic rate.
• 1:01:35
  Scott Zimmerman: So when you go into a sauna, you're essentially providing a high level of not only uh of these longer wavelengths in the infrared where you're clearly absorbing.
• 1:01:48
  Scott Zimmerman: And so I would argue that that the optically there is a benefit associated with extending or bringing that extra longer wavelength component into.
• 1:02:00
  Scott Zimmerman: And like I say, I keep on we keep on moving further and further into our understanding of what wavelength range sunlight provides.
• 1:02:11
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, for a long time people just said, oh, there's nothing going on beyond a thousand nanometers.
• 1:02:17
  Scott Zimmerman: And if you look at a standard spectrum that's used in watts per meter squared per nanometer, you see everything peaks up, and then you see this little tail.
• 1:02:27
  Scott Zimmerman: What Bob and I have been working on is basically saying, but wait a minute, if we truly are a solar collector, you need to put it in terms of electron volts.
• 1:02:35
  Scott Zimmerman: When you do that, all of a sudden these longer wavelengths become much more important looking.
• 1:02:42
  Scott Zimmerman: And, you know, we're catching a lot of flack because of saying that this is a way to look at it.
• 1:02:48
  Scott Zimmerman: But the reality is that those longer wavelengths, the highest density of photons in the body occur in those longer wavelengths because of the way they're absorbed in the outer part of the skin.
• 1:03:01
  Scott Zimmerman: I told you the skin is black from 1,000 out to 6,000 nanometers.
• 1:03:07
  Scott Zimmerman: So there's a lot of things going on optically, and when you're going into a sauna, you're essentially doing exactly the opposite of what you're doing when you're walking into a room with near infrared blocking glass and uh LED lighting.
• 1:03:22
  Scott Zimmerman: So I think there's a real reason that saunas have a benefit.
• 1:03:27
  Scott Zimmerman: And the other thing you have to take into account, you were talking about your your background with uh where you grew up.
• 1:03:35
  Scott Zimmerman: Imagine the people that had moved with dark skin up to higher latitudes.
• 1:03:40
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, during COVID, a black African American was 40 times more likely to die of COVID than a sub-Saharan African.
• 1:03:48
  Scott Zimmerman: So these are big issues that we're trying to deal with and understand because it's affecting basic health.
• 1:03:56
  Scott Zimmerman: I mean, Glenn does his experiments.
• 1:03:58
  Scott Zimmerman: It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that it took Glenn after all these years, as far as I know, he's the first that actually compared an LED to an incandescent on anything.
• 1:04:11
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, as far as the biological markers.
• 1:04:14
  Scott Zimmerman: And that's why I think they're so important what he's showing.
• 1:04:17
  Scott Zimmerman: And it's clear that the longer wavelengths that we got rid of, because we got rid of 90% of the spectrum, as such, it's having a negative effect on our health, is my opinion.
• 1:04:30
  Dave Wallace: I think it's I mean, it is mind-boggling that you know this is this is uh a new area of research.
• 1:04:38
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it is absolutely I can't quite get my head round it.
• 1:04:42
  Dave Wallace: Um but I think you know, so often in in sort of history, people have been looking the wrong way when things have been going on.
• 1:04:50
  Dave Wallace: So you know, like the the the story of Scurvy's fat, you know, it took them they kind of knew what was going on, but it took them a long time with scurvy.
• 1:04:59
  Bob Fosbury: Hundred years.
• 1:05:00
  Bob Fosbury: Hundred years before the Navy fixed it.
• 1:05:02
  Bob Fosbury: Yeah.
• 1:05:03
  Dave Wallace: So I I I mean again, I've this is a another uh sort of crazy thing to ponder.
• 1:05:09
  Dave Wallace: But one one of the other things about being in northern latitudes is snow cover.
• 1:05:14
  Dave Wallace: And you know, Bob Scott, I don't I don't know have you sort of thought about snow cover at all in terms of you know what it does from a from a a kind of light point of view?
• 1:05:28
  Dave Wallace: And I guess the reason uh like it's a slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I I've I've sort of often wondered why one of the reasons that that the British set sail in the first place is our weather's so lousy here, because it's like neither one thing or the other.
• 1:05:45
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, why not go off and find other places in the world where the sun shines brightly?
• 1:05:50
  Dave Wallace: Um but if you go north and you get snow cover, and you know, do you do you see any difference in things like all cause mortality as you go further north?
• 1:06:00
  Dave Wallace: Or you you know doesn't matter.
• 1:06:02
  Scott Zimmerman: It definitely changes the spectrum.
• 1:06:04
  Scott Zimmerman: It does change the spectrum because uh snow tends not to be as reflective as uh it's more reflective in the visible than it is in the the infrared.
• 1:06:15
  Scott Zimmerman: But again, we're also still talking about a narrow band.
• 1:06:20
  Scott Zimmerman: There's longer wavelengths that we actually don't really have much information on.
• 1:06:24
  Scott Zimmerman: That's been one of the big problems for this whole thing.
• 1:06:28
  Scott Zimmerman: Most people can't measure, most labs can't measure.
• 1:06:33
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, when we did our bulb, we measured out to 3,000 nanometers.
• 1:06:37
  Scott Zimmerman: There was only one lab in the entire country that we could find that could measure out there.
• 1:06:41
  Scott Zimmerman: And it cost us like three grand to measure that spectrum.
• 1:06:45
  Scott Zimmerman: Now, you know, the astronomers, they know all this stuff left and right, but the lighting industry is kind of doesn't have the capability to even measure out in some of those places.
• 1:06:58
  Scott Zimmerman: So, you know, a lot of the questions that you're talking about are kind of fundamental that we don't have the answer to all of them.
• 1:07:06
  Dave Wallace: So interesting.
• 1:07:07
  Bob Fosbury: Interesting.
• 1:07:08
  Bob Fosbury: So I think I don't know how much longer you have, but there is one aspect about going to high latitudes, which I think is often overlooked.
• 1:07:16
  Bob Fosbury: And uh I think um uh Glenn went on about this a moment ago, about not wanting to be in high latitudes.
• 1:07:24
  Bob Fosbury: But actually, high latitudes offer do offer an advantage to animals which are metabolizing to produce energy.
• 1:07:32
  Bob Fosbury: And that's purely a thermodynamic advantage.
• 1:07:35
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, you're some of your audience will have heard of heat engines and the Carnot engine.
• 1:07:41
  Bob Fosbury: And there's uh something which is well known Nicano efficiency.
• 1:07:45
  Bob Fosbury: I mean, how how efficient a steam engine is or a heat engine and uh another kind of heat engine is.
• 1:07:51
  Bob Fosbury: If you move to high latitude from the equator, you're exposing your body to a much colder environment.
• 1:08:01
  Bob Fosbury: And the amount of useful energy you can produce by metabolizing your food is firmly limited by the temperature difference between your body, 37 degrees, and your surroundings.
• 1:08:15
  Bob Fosbury: You, I suspect, are sitting in a room which has a a a wall temperature of probably 21 or 22 degrees centigrade, and your body is at 37.
• 1:08:25
  Bob Fosbury: That's a relatively small difference.
• 1:08:27
  Bob Fosbury: And that means you cannot produce more than 5% of your metabolized food.
• 1:08:33
  Bob Fosbury: You cannot convert that into useful energy.
• 1:08:36
  Bob Fosbury: It's thermodynamically, it's the second law of thermodynamics, it's thermodynamically impossible for you to produce more than 5% of your of your 2,000 calories in terms of energy.
• 1:08:47
  Bob Fosbury: This is why it's so hard to get slim by doing exercise, because, you know, you you're using almost all of your metabolized food to stay alive, and you're using a tiny fraction of it uh to think and move around.
• 1:09:01
  Bob Fosbury: And if you go to high latitudes, you can expose at least the inside of your lungs, uh, breathing cold air, and the inside of your lung is what?
• 1:09:10
  Bob Fosbury: It's a surface area, roughly that of a tennis court.
• 1:09:14
  Bob Fosbury: So you're transferring an enormous amount of energy through uh inhaling and exhaling, even though you're wearing warm clothes.
• 1:09:22
  Bob Fosbury: And if you the Fuegian Indians who lived in Tierra del Fuego, they were running around naked in temperatures of ambient temperatures, say five degrees centigrade on average.
• 1:09:33
  Bob Fosbury: And they were, they had huge amounts of energy because they could metabolize more than twice as efficiently uh than we can sitting inside inside an office.
• 1:09:43
  Bob Fosbury: So there's a thermodynamic issue here, as well as the photon-driven metabolic issue we've been talking about, pure thermodynamics, very simple thermodynamics of human bodies.
• 1:09:55
  Bob Fosbury: This is why when you walk outside in the summer and you sit in the shadow of a tree surrounded by blue sky, which you can see, you've you've hidden the sun under the tree, behind the tree, but you're sitting surrounded by blue sky.
• 1:10:11
  Bob Fosbury: That blue sky is at minus 50 centigrade.
• 1:10:14
  Bob Fosbury: And it allows you to export your your waste heat much more efficiently, and it means you can produce more than twice as much useful energy in that environment than you can sitting inside an office at 20 degrees.
• 1:10:28
  Bob Fosbury: This is a huge effect, and this is why you feel so good when you go outside under a clear sky in the summer and you're in the shade.
• 1:10:37
  Bob Fosbury: Best place you can be.
• 1:10:39
  Dave Wallace: Very, very sorry, I I I spoke with someone last week who said that in winter, one of the things to do, he said, if you don't like the idea of coal plunging, which I'm I'm with Glenn, I can't stand the thought of it.
• 1:10:55
  Dave Wallace: Although I have been just been invited to do an ice swim in in Finland in 25 metres in which I I don't think I'll be doing.
• 1:11:04
  Dave Wallace: But he was saying just you know, if you can go outside in a t-shirt and shorts on a cold day and spend sort of five, ten minutes outside, um, you know, because he said that sort of will get your metabolism kind of kicked off and stuff like that.
• 1:11:20
  Dave Wallace: So look, it I mean, I don't but that's sort of a bit try, but it sounds almost along the lines of what you're talking about in terms of it is exactly exactly, and it's very, very simple.
• 1:11:32
  Bob Fosbury: It's a f it's the simplest mathematical equation you can think of.
• 1:11:35
  Bob Fosbury: It's one minus the temperature of your surroundings over the temperature of your body.
• 1:11:41
  Bob Fosbury: But you have to express those temperatures in absolute temperatures.
• 1:11:45
  Bob Fosbury: So your body is not 37 degrees, it's 310 Kelvins.
• 1:11:49
  Bob Fosbury: And similarly, the temperature of the surroundings is 200, uh 300 and whatever it is, 300 degrees.
• 1:11:58
  Bob Fosbury: So um now this is this is the simplest possible uh uh mathematics of thermodynamics, and it tells you this profound thing that you have much more useful energy available if you're in a cold environment.
• 1:12:14
  Bob Fosbury: So if you're an office worker, you should be in a cold office and wear a warm jacket.
• 1:12:19
  Bob Fosbury: You get much more work out of you.
• 1:12:22
  Scott Zimmerman: Well one of the one of the things that was has always been fascinating about this area of work is that you'd have thought that we'd have thought through this a little bit and we'd understand how light propagates into the body and you know where where it's going, where it's localized.
• 1:12:36
  Scott Zimmerman: And you know, when I first got involved with this stuff, it it was just amazed me that 99% of the literature says that infrared only goes a millimeter into the body or less.
• 1:12:46
  Scott Zimmerman: And what Bob shows is with his picture that it's going three inches, four inches, and then then you start looking at it a little further and you go to the longer wavelengths, and all of a sudden you see that the body's absorbing.
• 1:13:00
  Scott Zimmerman: You know, if you're wanting to, how many solar cells are white?
• 1:13:03
  Scott Zimmerman: They're not, they're black.
• 1:13:05
  Scott Zimmerman: So now it looks like that from a thousand nanometers out to six six thousand nanometers, the body is doing everything possible to absorb every photon it could get a hold of, and that happens to coincide with the metabolic with the electron volt characteristics of most of the activation processes in metabolism.
• 1:13:26
  Scott Zimmerman: So there's so much here to understand, and how and every time you turn around, the body is doing not only something biochemically, but it's doing something optically to localize more infrared in your retina, to get uh certain wavelengths to the baby as it's developing, you know, and then as the pregnancy goes on, the skin stretches and expands the spectrum.
• 1:13:52
  Scott Zimmerman: And so there's all these things that we don't know anything about that is causing that I believe is causing everything from affecting our test.
• 1:14:02
  Scott Zimmerman: I'm doing a lot of work with these biosensors looking at sweat.
• 1:14:06
  Scott Zimmerman: And literally, you walk outdoors, your hormone levels shift, you start doing exercise, melatonin goes up just as much as cortisol goes up on very short timescales.
• 1:14:17
  Scott Zimmerman: So we're not only don't understand the processes, we're not even measuring on the right timescales for some of this stuff.
• 1:14:24
  Scott Zimmerman: So I think that's what's so cool about, you know, especially some of the stuff Glenn's doing, is that you're starting to see that literally exposing the uh some a body to changes of the metabolic rate in a matter of minutes, and that we don't take it, that transient response is kind of ignored by the all the circadian guys and all this other stuff.
• 1:14:48
  Scott Zimmerman: So there's a lot to learn.
• 1:14:49
  Scott Zimmerman: It's a great area.
• 1:14:50
  Bob Fosbury: If you if people here are having trouble understanding all this stuff, I think the only message that you really have to get to the to people who are trying to get their heads around this, if you are exposed to daylight and a proper dose of infrared radiation regularly, uh, it doesn't have to be very much, but regularly, you age more slowly.
• 1:15:15
  Dave Wallace: Very cool.
• 1:15:15
  Dave Wallace: Very cool.
• 1:15:17
  Dave Wallace: It's as simple, it's as simple as that.
• 1:15:25
  Bob Fosbury: They age rapidly.
• 1:15:26
  Bob Fosbury: And they when they get back to Earth, they rage.
• 1:15:30
  Bob Fosbury: This is not Einstein's relativity, it's the fact that their metabolism has not been working properly.
• 1:15:36
  Bob Fosbury: Look, if you if you want to if you want to age slowly, go and sit in the sun.
• 1:15:45
  Dave Wallace: I think it's amazing.
• 1:15:46
  Dave Wallace: Well look, I I think you you know we've we've we've covered a lot of ground.
• 1:15:50
  Dave Wallace: I'm walking away actually feel my sad lifting as as we sp as we've spoken, because I'm going to embrace cloudy days and not see them as as depressing because I know that I'm they're doing me good.
• 1:16:06
  Dave Wallace: So I think that's a real positive, but it means that I've got to get outside.
• 1:16:11
  Dave Wallace: You know, one of the things that I I have done, I think, is listen a lot more to myself and my natural rhythm.
• 1:16:20
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, I've started getting up a lot earlier.
• 1:16:23
  Dave Wallace: So it I thought that would kind of drop off in winter, like as the the mornings got darker, but it doesn't seem to be.
• 1:16:30
  Dave Wallace: So getting up, being productive, and then you know, finding I've got time in the morning to get the dogs out, which I never had before.
• 1:16:37
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, just a few like an hour in the morning just with the dogs, that's I've changed all our bowls for incandescent.
• 1:16:47
  Dave Wallace: Uh, we've got a fire, so we've had a fire going.
• 1:16:50
  Dave Wallace: You know, I I've sort of started trying to invest in um in the odd candle or two, non-scented, because I think scented things drive me mad, but you know, you can still occasionally buy church candles which are unscented.
• 1:17:05
  Dave Wallace: Um saunas, you know, it sounds like that's a good thing to be doing.
• 1:17:10
  Dave Wallace: Scott, I love your suggestion of you know, using a simple plastic tent in the garden.
• 1:17:17
  Dave Wallace: I think that that could work extremely well.
• 1:17:20
  Dave Wallace: You know, I I mean I've got a conservatory which has actually got very thin glass, so I'm I'm wondering if I'm getting quite a lot of infrared through that because I warm up very quickly in that.
• 1:17:32
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, and then obviously I I guess the final question is is is heading off to uh lovely places as well for a couple of weeks.
• 1:17:44
  Bob Fosbury: So if you go on if you if you're not careful, Dave, you'll outlive the hell out of the rest of us.
• 1:17:52
  Dave Wallace: But if if if I go on holiday to a sunny place for a couple of weeks in winter, is that you you know, is that a band-aid or does that help your uh metabol?
• 1:18:02
  Dave Wallace: I mean, it certainly helps my mood to be.
• 1:18:04
  Scott Zimmerman: When just ran the experiment.
• 1:18:06
  Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, well, there you go.
• 1:18:09
  Bob Fosbury: It's good for you, but it's bad for the planet.
• 1:18:11
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:18:12
  Dave Wallace: Well there's a balance to be had, isn't there?
• 1:18:15
  Dave Wallace: So no.
• 1:18:16
  Dave Wallace: But I think, you know, I think people will be sort of wondering if I go away for a couple of weeks and it does that do you get long-term impacts from m metabolism, or is the the sort of infrared relationship with metabolism a lot more kind of short-lived, or you you know, maybe that's an area that you don't know and or haven't thought about.
• 1:18:39
  Bob Fosbury: So uh I think you have to be careful there.
• 1:18:41
  Bob Fosbury: If you send people out to a really sunny place and they lie on a sunbed all day for a week and then come back home, their metabolism probably will not benefit enough to uh counteract the uh damages of lying in the sun unprotected for a long time.
• 1:18:58
  Dave Wallace: Okay.
• 1:18:58
  Glen Jeffery: To be honest, I don't care if I go to us to go.
• 1:19:01
  Glen Jeffery: I would I've just come back from the Aegean, and you know, to be honest, I really don't care if my metabolism's upset or not.
• 1:19:11
  Glen Jeffery: I I had a very good time, and I'm gonna try and squeeze as much of that in as I possibly can.
• 1:19:16
  Dave Wallace: Very cool.
• 1:19:17
  Dave Wallace: Very cool advice.
• 1:19:18
  Dave Wallace: Well, listen, thank you so much, all of you.
• 1:19:21
  Dave Wallace: I don't know if there's any sort of final words of wisdom that you've got, but I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 1:19:26
  Dave Wallace: What about one word?
• 1:19:27
  Dave Wallace: Incandescent.
• 1:19:28
  Dave Wallace: Incandescent, yeah.
• 1:19:30
  Scott Zimmerman: So uh my family are gonna be over the moon when they all get light bulbs this Christmas, but I think it's um it's I think it it one of the things that has to happen is we have to find some way to get enough momentum to get the government out of the the pri picture from the standpoint of what they're literally doing.
• 1:19:51
  Scott Zimmerman: There it's banned to have an incandescent in the US, other than the oven one that you're talking about.
• 1:19:57
  Scott Zimmerman: And uh that has rippling effects on everything because uh you know all those people are uh essentially exposed to what I consider harmful lighting.
• 1:20:10
  Scott Zimmerman: And uh, you know but the government the government makes it almost impossible for you to solve the problem, you know, in in the least in the long term.
• 1:20:22
  Dave Wallace: Yeah, no well I think I think to be honest with you, again, my I've been doing campaigning on clean water and actually the whole the whole involving government and things does slow things down, but it's a very necessary process.
• 1:20:39
  Dave Wallace: So you you know, one of the things I was gonna start asking Bob and Glenn about in the UK is how do I tackle my MP on lighting, you know.
• 1:20:49
  Dave Wallace: So uh are there letters that we can write?
• 1:20:53
  Dave Wallace: Um, you know, so I I guess it it i in the in the US you have a kind of bottom-up process that this can kind of all work to.
• 1:21:02
  Dave Wallace: But you know, it's a very important thing that this gets put back on the political agenda, isn't it?
• 1:21:08
  Scott Zimmerman: Well, we're we put in a petition to try and revoke some of the Biden-air uh rules rules in the DOE.
• 1:21:17
  Scott Zimmerman: But uh, you know, we've got the DLC, which is a non-governmental but monitoring process uh uh entity, and they're trying to force it even higher than what the EOE is doing.
• 1:21:29
  Scott Zimmerman: So what uh it's it's a very difficult process because everybody considers LEDs to be the green uh solution and they can see energy savings.
• 1:21:40
  Scott Zimmerman: That's why, practically speaking, it's gonna be very hard to get incandescence to come back.
• 1:21:46
  Scott Zimmerman: But if you do the hybrids approaches and get a little bit of, you know, we're doing 60, 70 lumens per watt compared to 10 lumens per watt on incandescent.
• 1:21:56
  Scott Zimmerman: But it's very even that will get banned in another three years.
• 1:22:01
  Dave Wallace: So something needs to change in in our understanding, and that's why I think it's so important what Glenn's been doing here lately, uh, especially you know, and I think it's important, you know, Glenn was uh I on the Huberman um he did a podcast with Rick Rubin and he talked about your work, Glenn, almost up front, and that has a big impact on people like Huberman talking about this and the work Roger's doing in terms of promoting it, the work you're all doing in terms or we're all doing it in terms of promoting it.
• 1:22:35
  Dave Wallace: But I think when when Andrew Huberman talks about it, then people will start listening.
• 1:22:41
  Dave Wallace: And I he's a route into government around all of this stuff.
• 1:22:45
  Dave Wallace: So, you know, Glenn, get on the Huberman show as fast as you can, because I think it's a is a great way of sort of short circuiting all of this stuff.
• 1:22:55
  Glen Jeffery: Well, hey, you know, let's forget about going on the Glenn getting Glenn on the Huberman uh program.
• 1:23:01
  Glen Jeffery: To get on the Huberman program, you've got to get to California, and I'm looking forward to some warmth in California, I can tell you.
• 1:23:08
  Dave Wallace: There you go.
• 1:23:09
  Dave Wallace: There you go.
• 1:23:10
  Dave Wallace: That's the main thing.
• 1:23:12
  Dave Wallace: Anyway, listen, thank you so much, all of you.
• 1:23:14
  Dave Wallace: I've really enjoyed it, and um I I look forward to uh spending time outside this winter.
• 1:23:20
  Dave Wallace: I'll let you know how I get on.
• 1:23:22
  Dave Wallace: Thanks for listening to Sunlight Matters, brought to you by Shadow Man, where we explore how sunlight influences the way we build, design, and live each day.
• 1:23:35
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• 1:23:42
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• 1:23:55
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• 1:24:06
  Dave Wallace: We appreciate you being part of the conversation, and we'll see you next time, where you can keep exploring the world through the lens of light.