The moral imperative to crush scammers

I do not mince words. Several years ago, I pointed out how Joovv was blatantly lying to their customers about the power of their devices, and how the median customer interested in red light was bizarrely not smart enough to plug in a $10-15 power meter to figure this out. This really turned me off to the industry because how I am going to build and sell a more powerful product if people are too lazy to be discerning customers, and that is really what it is — intellectual laziness. It is simple to say people are retarded, and they are, but it is a sort of general apathy that is responsible for this, not a true handicap of raw intelligence. In fact, raw intelligence is very rarely the limiting factor, and amidst certain incentive structures, there appears to emerge what I like to call functional retardation.

When observing grifters of any variety, there is a temptation to ask, “does this person know that he is a grifter, that his works are a sham, meant to deceive and defraud, or is he simply a hapless fool, a true believer of his own nonsense?” I have asked this question myself many times, but as with science, engineering, or product development, asking good questions is of utmost importance and I no longer think this is one. If a tiger leaps at you and is in mid air, you do not ask if it is acting morally, or if of course there is nothing immoral because it is simply operating within its nature, you do not ask if it is “good” or “bad” to be eaten by a tiger, you simply shoot it then and there without making a fuss and move one with your life, perhaps a bit stirred from the adrenaline. It is similar to the common trope in zombie movies where the friend is bitten and they have not quite transformed yet and you have to go, “sorry, buddy, but I guess we have to shoot you in the head too now” and when they hesitate too much, others get bitten. Compassion for evil is cruelty to everyone.

The 8-9 year journey to the Chroma Skylight

Here are a couple early low-res images of the Chroma Skylight prototype we have been working on. We have a bunch of nicer photos that we are still putting together.

If you just want to go ahead pre-order it before learning more about it, here’s a link:

Pre-Order Chroma Skylight

Like many nerds out there, I figured out a long time ago that it is far too dim in indoor environments, with even a brightly lit area with many lights or windows still only being on the order 1% as bright as direct sunlight, and closer to 0.1% in an indoor area that is not so brightly lit. I made a number of janky setups over the year. I had 5 5000k 18 watt Vivid+ Soraa bulbs connected to a WiFi controllable outlet as a light alarm clock, which was rather jarring. I had a number of lights at my desk shining down at me year before Chroma or the Sky Portal, and I had a bunch of halogen bulbs over the conference room table at my first startup, which annoyed half the team.

The original Sky Portal came from the reluctant acceptance that it is really quite impractical to try to compensate 100x over existing lighting solutions, or even 10x to get closer to sunlight. There were many companies replicating the shape or timing of a solar spectrum, but not the intensity, which is a bit like that video of some kids making a full size replica Bugatti out of mud in a developing country, which actually looks remarkable, but does not even match a Honda Civic on driving. The Sky Portal solved the intensity problem by deciding to only achieve that level of intensity directly on a single person in one small region of a room as a desk light. Moreover, early versions of Sky Portal had a pure light blue cyan channel to concentrate a limited amount of LED power into the wavelengths that have the strongest circadian response i.e. maximizing melanopic lux (the idea of 10,000 lux for SAD lights actually precedes the discovery of the cell in the human eye that has peak sensitivity to cyan so it is rather foolish to continue referencing lux, which relates to perceptual brightness and peaks in the middle of the green range, right in the center of the visible spectrum while cyan is about 25% of the entire visible spectrum left of that).

As early experiments when I was getting Chroma set up proved, you really just can’t get enough power if you are illuminating an entire space — or you could, but you would just use a ridiculous amount of LEDs, and have enough of a power draw that the electricity cost would become prohibitive.

The Sky Portal is a one-trick pony

A year and a half ago I decided to move out of my van and into a home as I wanted a space I could use as a workshop as I was thinking about getting back into some aerospace / advanced materials stuff. Like every home, the lighting was trash, and although I had Sky Portals, I was not always at my desk, and the existing lights were rather obnoxious. I tried screwing in some custom LED bulbs I had made into the existing sockets, but that did nothing because all the installed infrastructure is meant to be super underpowered, and from a business perspective, there is no way to transform the way buildings are constructed. Even new buildings that have higher LED power are incredibly lousy, in addition to the spectrum, now with glare, as small LED downlights are incredibly obnoxious since everywhere in an indoor space you will catch them in the corner of your eye.

I had a few round studio panel style lights, simply with ordinary white LEDs that blend together to form any color temperature within a wide range, and I pointed them upward at the ceiling. It turned out this was pretty much the best interim solution. In my living room I had a large panel on a 6 ft tall stand, and in my office I had a smaller panel on the back of my desk pointing up and back (alongside Sky Portals). This made my space way more pleasant, but it could not replace the Sky Portal because it was still vastly underpowered. It sort of took me out of the darkness, but it did not really bring me into the light. The larger panel in the living room was 200 watts, it had fans on it and was about 20 inches in diameter. Not enough!

Then I saw a landing page a friend shared with me, which looked like it might be vaporware, showing a lamp in the exact same configuration I had independently come up with, except it claimed to be 400 watts. I immediately laughed because looking at the photo, it was totally obvious they would not be able to drive 400 watts into it without it getting way too hot and burning out the LEDs. It was just a landing page mockup so the power being an estimate that turned out to be a bit off was not a big deal. The bigger thing that stood out to me though was the total lack of comments on anything pertaining to spectrum, harmful blue light, the cyan gap, lack of r9, and so forth — in fact, due to the mention of CRI and nothing else, an obsolete metric mostly used to mislead, I was 90% confident that if this was a real product being built, it would have the same lousy deep blue rich blue LED phosphor pumps that make modern lighting terrible for human health, even if within that category the CRI was pushed up to not make it quite as harmful. I realized then that I ought to make the product properly to avoid people getting the toxic product due to it being the only option and better than nothing, but there was still the power problem, and the fact that 400 watts seemed sort of ridiculous.

But then it hit me — the energy optimizations I was thinking through were actually vestigial memes from the residue of my leftist brainwashing I had grown up with in California, and energy consumption is actually good, and I had left the suicide cult that despises the existence of human life quite a few years ago. I suddenly found myself asking, what would I want to make and use, if I stopped considering energy and cost, and the reality of it is human life is worth expending as much energy on as possible in ways that consumers desire, in fact, this is the fundamental basis of what it means to be alive. I realized if we did make it that powerful, and in fact, more powerful, say 500 watts in total, we could actually transform the nature of the indoor environments.

I let go of the concern of reflective losses, and suddenly the tall, roof-facing light, extreme diffusion, and zero glare due to it being impossible to make direct eye contact with the emitter was the only sensible option.

I let go of mass efficiency, and a total silent, 10x heavier, massive block aluminum heat sink that we CNC machined for the prototype seemed quite sensible.

I let go of concerns of electric bills and imagined how beautiful a home might look, and all the objects inside a home, if one of these lamps were in every room.

What I did not let go of, however, was my situational awareness of the world at large and the values that exist throughout the world today as they pertain to health, performance, and efficiency — not in terms of energy, but as it pertains to the efficiency with which excellence is achieved, which ironically, is the true form of energy efficiency if one understands what life is. That means that only operating in a limited part time capacity, I did not give the project the attention it needed to proceed at full speed. I instead went off climbing, decided to co-found a defense startup with a guy who discovered something quite profound, and wrote a 45,000 word treatise/prospectus/manifesto for a non-profit research institution to advance the foundations of energy and aerospace via new types of materials & manufacturing technologies — my bitcoin billionaire connections are limited, so hard to say if that will go forward anytime soon, but I am confident it will at some point as there isn’t really anyone else remotely in my position.

With only a single full time person, split between many priorities, it could only move forward so quickly. Now we are recently at 3 full time people (myself not among those) and several part time people, which will allow us to execute far faster. It has however been long enough that we have an excellent prototype and were only 2-3 months from having a launch with some inventory, but we decided to pre-launch ahead of time because the thing that might of been vaporware is also pre-launched and we know that if we don’t pre-launch, a lot of people who maybe didn’t know about us or this product are going to be kicking themselves.

The Chroma Skylight features

There are a number of different things that go into making the Skylight an incredible product and most of them are hard to share in ordinary marketing materials because a lot of it is minutiae — the same sort of “minutiae” that means you can buy a $200 million private jet, and look forward to lousy LEDs inside of it, or walk into the restroom of a Starbucks, a $100b company, under a lousy LED where you will dry your hands with an air dryer — in those 30 seconds you are being told: “Your life is worthless. Your time is worthless. We save one penny, while you lose a part of your life, and we laugh in your face. We are parasites running the world who hate life, and we are forcing you to undergo this humiliation ritual so you do not ever forget it.” Yeah, that was about 30 seconds. Anyway, I am just going to try to list all/many of them here in no particular order:

1. Violet phosphor pump instead of blue phospor pump. This is the core of making a high fidelity light instead of a shit fidelity light. 95+ CRI with blue phosphor pump is still junk with a toxic dark blue (~440nm) spike.

2. Custom tuning on the violet phosphor pump, adjusting the violet peak, making sure we are hitting the neuropsin (opsin-5) receptor that is integral to the dopaminergic response of sunlight in the POMC pathway at the foundations of metabolism.

3. Taking a ~5000k high fidelity white light and making it even higher fidelity, optimizing for real metrics instead of peak lumens per watt, which would be maxed out with a monochromatic green. Hitting a fidelity index of 98, the metric that is based on 99 reflectance curves instead of CRI’s 8. A gammut index of 100.6 to allow everything illuminated to be vivid in terms of proper color saturation rather than dull and washed out. A boost in r9, around the 97 mark, the first reflectance curve CRI ignores, which is all about red light, and its absence is responsible for making your skin look less flattering given the criticality of red light to human skin tones.

4. Taking something that solves the massive cyan gap of a typical high CRI blue pump LED, and noticing the ever so slight cyan dip that remains, adding 2-3% pure cyan to totally smooth things out, even though it makes less of a difference than just making the whole thing 20% more or less powerful.

5. Having a YAG phosphor LED for an amber channel that simultaneously has deep red, the YAG enabling ZERO blue light, whereas a typical 1650k amber white LED with a blue phosphor pump still has a tiny blue spike on it.

6. Having a 3rd channel that is pure deep red for evening use to go below 1000k color temperature, though pure red is not actually white light, it is similar enough to think about it in terms of color temperature. Prototype has two channels, but we are adding the 3rd channel in first version because it will be really nice to get that deep red instead of orange later in the evening.

7. Having a Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supply instead of silicon, which means you get a more stable output, you definitely do not have the buzzing that people get concerned about with certain silicon power supplies, and it is just all around better. The entire world is switching to GaN and SiC, but if you’re in LEDs, you’ll still be given silicon unless you go out of your way to make it GaN, which we did. It is also lighter, though the lamp is gonna be around 60 lbs so that won’t matter much.

8. Constant current reduction (CCR) because everything you see about flickerless or flicker free is usually a lie. A fluourescent light at 60 hertz (i.e. on and off 60 times a second) is truly awful and flickerless LEDs usually means PWM (pulse width modulation). They just think that if it flickers thousands of times per second to the point most people cannot perceive it, then it is ok. PWM is how dimming is usually done because LEDs like being driven at full power, but you don’t have to. CCR is a way to have a steady state, reduced output and that it is what we do.

9. Fully manual controls with no WiFi because every smart device and remote control seems to always not work as well and have HIGHER LATENCY. I just want to be able to use a knob, because it’s faster. Maybe I’m old fashioned and it’s like wanting to drive a manual, and I don’t do that, so I get that people will insist for “smart” connections and that they don’t care about WiFi (tbh, I like telecommunications a lot more than I am concerned about them, but I get that others find a different balance there). So probably we will have something smart a lot later, but core functions must come first.

10. A custom made heat sink because if you message the suppliers that make the standard ones, you find that the actual power is not quite what they say it is. But that’s not enough. Our prototype is pretty chonky (and a bit prettier than other stuff), but it’s not big enough. 500 watts with an 18 inch diameter is not quite enough if you have a massive living room with high ceilings in a $10-30m mansion. So we are pushing that up to 24 inches before we finalize molds for production, which will allow us to very comfortably reach 750 watts total power (600 watts 5000k white channel + 100 watts amber/red + 50 watts deepest red), but we will push the actual number up as high as possible within thermal constraints. I would love to hit 900 watts.

The scammer approach to products

So that other company I alluded to, well, they are making an actual hardware product so perhaps your reaction would be that I am using too strong of a word, or that it is bad form to be calling out a “competitor” like this, but let me explain: the founder of this company is a bad person — now, he is not, let’s say, running a child sex trafficking ring, or anything quite so terrible, but he exists within the category that does transgress into actual evil.

This man behind the brand Brighter, Simon Berens, is something that in the technical field of the art, is known as a shitcoiner. This man does not hide that fact, he actually presents it gladly, suggesting he falls more on the retard side of the retard vs sociopath question for shitcoiners, but as I suggested earlier, it is a silly exercise to try to tease out the difference. You might now be thinking, what is a shitcoiner and why is it at all relevant to some lamp, even if lamps and light are related to health… but let me cook. Just like you choose not to be intellectually lazy on health and light, you can do so here as well.

There you have it, working at a venture capital funded startup that works on the scam that is Ethereum, one of the world’s most popular shitcoins. Those venture capital dollars really representing government employees wasting government funds rather than private industry as this is ultimately state pension money, including the pensions of teachers and firefighters that get funneled to scammers like this.

Oh, also, the other main guy on the team also doesn’t list Better lamp on their LinkedIn and says he is Open To Work. And it says "he/him,” lol. I guess he didn’t get the memo the whole woke thing is over.

Ethereum is a bitcoin affinity scam i.e. the scam is premised on taking something valuable and suggesting some likeness to it, an attempt to sow confusion, which is quite easy here as the number of the people who really have a clue what bitcoin is, is practically a rounding error to zero. There is a good chance you have never met someone in person who actually has a decent understanding of bitcoin.

I don’t have time to explain it to you here, but I did put together a website if you want to learn about bitcoin. https://theofficialbitcoinwebsite.org The key thing is that there is only bitcoin, it is not “technology”, and it actually us fundamentally impossible for other “coins/blockchains” to have value, and I don’t have time to explain to you why all those things are the case.

The more important thing to understand is the meme that bitcoin fixes everything. So when you think, “lighting in the world is lousy” or “why are healthcare and medical institutions such obscene failures” or “there is a better way to do this, and no one even gains anything from it being done poorly” these are all observations that are downstream from the money being broken. It is not a problem of where the money is, but the actual properties of the money itself and how it shapes behavior. The money you know today will go to zero, almost certainly in your lifetime if you are under the age of 50, and when only bitcoin remains, the dynamics of how things get done will fundamentally be changed. So this obviously is not utopia at the flip of a switch, but you can think about this as the things that ought to get done get done faster.

Someone who is too lazy to figure out all these things of course will be too lazy to go beyond “make it brighter.” Moreover, looking at the new heat sink, I remain highly skeptical the hardware that can hit 400 watts. Not a zero chance, but 200-300 watts seems a lot more believable with how thin the heat sink is. Very likely standard PWM dimming and silicon power supply. Finally, the tiny base looks like it is ready to crush a puppy or small child when it gets bumped over since these are heavy.

The thing about evil is there is multiplier effect — even if one says “screw all the victims, it’s their own fault they are retarded” there is still the matter of global destruction and devastation, which that human attention and time is finite, so retards being retarded, with access to a money printer, are able to suck out oxygen from the room, impeding productive people from getting on with whatever real thing it is they are doing.

The reality is the retards are not intellectually handicapped. This guy worked at Facebook and I am sure his code compiles. But he is too retarded, and in fact, we all are too retarded, to operate intelligently when the fundamental incentive structures are broken and stolen through a monetary system in which a small group of people can conjure new monetary units at whim for themselves and their friends, and this guy doesn’t realize it, but he is part of that communist cartel, albeit, a low ranking member, as are the various familiar face on Twitter he has roped into endorsing the product — really, if you don’t know how good things can be it actually isn’t a horrible product, I mean, it’s the same roughly as the janky thing I was doing when I didn’t have a better option.

So are these shitcoiners as bad as the migrant gangs raping children throughout Europe? Directly, know, but there actions perpetuate a world where those things happen, and arguably, compared to those animals, the silicon valley shitcoiner / VC grifter (most are grifters who are paid above market rates for delivering below market performance) has greater culpability in that they should know better. If you tolerate evil, you allow it to grow, so I do so a moral duty to call it out, and a moral duty to destroy evil wherever possible. Now imagine everyone cancelled their Indiegogo order and switched to us, sure, that’s a drop in the bucket, but it would build mimetic momentum for us, and it would build mimetic momentum for those customers, rippling out across other actions they take and throughout the world.

Escaping the shackles of engineered incentives

When Pablo Escobar recruited people, he gave them a choice, plata o plomo, meaning they could get paid off, or they could get a bullet to the head. Not a hard choice. But it is problematic in that you might say “well, really, I would prefer not to become a murderous thug at all if I could have that option!”

For many people in the modern era, it is far more subtle that one is being put into that sort of position, with the illusion of choice, but incentives that impose a sort of enslavement. For instance, consider a founder of a company that achieves some level of success. A large company might come to them and offer to buy the company, and the incentives suggest a sale is the more favorable outcome: why? — well, the buyer, being larger has more access to “free” money from the money printer that the smaller company does not have, and they do not face much of a cost in spending this money that they got for free. Moreover, the smaller player must consider the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, which indicates that he must discount the upside of further wealth, and operates in a way that is more tied to loss aversion. He must do this in a world that lacks sound money because market volatility means the exposure an individual has to the market is non-ergodic i.e. his outcomes over time do not match the outcomes of the average market participant at some moment. In practice, that means small players cannot capture the aggregate returns of the market (which are quite small to begin with after one adjusts for real inflation rates), and even billionaires are “small players” compared to the market. Only a sound money (i.e. a thing that only bitcoin can do with its 21 million supply cap) can act as an index for the growth of everything and achieve ergodicity, and that is an escape valve!

This is one of many examples, but the underlying point is that by simply going with “the default” mode of operation in various domains means operating within the constrains of a subtle incentive structure, which someone else may be exploiting to their perceived advantage, and possibly to the detriment of the entire world if ones endeavors relate to fixing things that are in fact problems. So fixing everything is really a shorthand to mean that the people who would naturally go and fix things are free to do so without contrived encumbrance.

I remain highly skeptical of whether any such thing might happen in human health & wellness, but I like to be open-minded, and I have a perpetual optimism, despite the repeated failures (of others, which impact me, haha). My thinking is that predictability is the center of control. It is legibility and invasion of privacy that are the core of the tyranny and violence, whether exerted by private cartels or by a tyrannical nation state. Air Force pilot and famed military strategist, John Boyd, came up with the idea of the OODA loop: Observe Orient Decide Act, and his premise was that in a dogfight, whoever can get inside the other’s OODA loop first, wins.

Today, RFK Jr. was finally nominated as the Human Health & Services director, and there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, but I do not believe sufficient change will come top down while the fundamental building blocks of the world that guide incentives are themselves broken. In all likelihood, Chroma will not be a global force in shaping the wellness of the world, but the more I look at things, the more I get the sense that “no one else is going to do it” — that was what \@ beautyon_ told me when I had the great fortune to run into him at an airport where we both had a layover from El Salvador. That was in reference to a bitcoin startup, and given there is still no one else talking about composite currencies as the core part of the transition, it looks more and more like he was right each month. Could it really be that no one else will make the right lights, the right consumer oils, figure out which oils are actually scalable rather than forming a niche lifestyle brand focused on luxury — while still having its affluent LA customer base subject to high linoleic acid in restaurants we are told are “high end” — compared to what? Why are standards and status relative? Will no one else set an absolute standard and strive toward that? Will no one tire of this apathetic approach to life.

I really did screw myself by stumbling my way into the world’s highest performance structural aerospace parts, and then on top of that, transforming the capabilities of the world’s most advanced weapons systems because that high water mark is hard to come anywhere close to. I do not claim to be better than others or intellectually superior, I just happened to make a few good choices that had unexpectedly outsized outcomes. Perhaps it is the chicken and egg problem that people cannot stop their degeneracy that keeps them from using the tools to escape degeneracy, because they would have to already be using them in order to have that incentive structure, and in fact, even today, the world is on the fiat standard & incentives even amongst people who chose to use bitcoin!

Setting my own standards

Anyway, a few weeks ago I awoke in Valencia, Spain (it’s close to an incredible rock climbing location) and decided enough was enough, this whole red light therapy consumer product thing with obscene price markups is ridiculous. It is not really too out of line with various other consumer products, but it’s too high for where it should be if it looked like we were on a trajectory where the world is going to be transformed in any sort of meaningful way at lease within this area, and I suppose all of health branches out of that. I spent the next hours writing a long thread on twitter in which I described my decision to slash prices 30%, with 30-50% additional price drops to be phased in over the following 6 months. This link is pinned at the top of our profile.

Chroma X (i.e. Twitter)

The reality is that I am not sure if it will work, and in fact, despite all the reasoning, I am not sure I truly know why I did it, but I did feel that I had to do it. But that’s a feature, not a bug — if I don’t know why I did it, and everyone is telling me it’s insane and irrational, you can be damn sure it was not all that predictable, and being unpredictable is the core of becoming ungovernable, unsteerable, and if we can not be so easily curtailed, it is not so easy for narratives to be shaped. For instance, people paid by pharma might start jumping in the blue blocking, the red light, and all the other trends while oh so conveniently never broaching the topic of “vaaaxzin3s” and the role they may have in surging cancer rates among young people or other devastating effects.

I’ll be honest, I felt a bit clownish about our prior pricing approach. Yes, we built unique products, and yes, from a value perspective, many people were getting 10x the value of the prices we were charging, but it was unnatural and there should have been more competition, and without any serious competitors, we have to play both sides and be our own — we need to act as if we live in the world that is coming, the world in which things are swiftly fixed, and capitalism exists, with ruthless competition from all sides. Just because we can keep playing on easy mode does not mean we should.

But I am going to flip that feeling around on everyone else operating in this space, often making products that are highly derivative of mine, and offering incredibly lousy value even compared to our prior pricing. By systematically and aggressively crushing our own margins, we will make it impossible for anyone else to be taken seriously, because we are still going to make the best products. Making better products here is not actually more expensive — the biggest input is my time, really, anyone who wants to be truly thoughtful, and the variation in raw hardware costs are not that big, especially as a percent of price given the markups in this industry, as well as in eyewear. Take Andrew Huberman for instance, who ignored the advice of Jack Kruse after going on a podcast with him (I too have made the mistake of ignoring Jack before) — he launched a brand of blue blockers, but his product is incredibly lousy, letting in lots of green light — this influencer, and yes, that’s what these medical doctors are, slightly higher IQ than the median influencers (recall the affinity scam concept? — that’s largely all Stanford or Harvard are good for these days, and that’s the same reason I built stuff relevant to hypersonic weapons, while the Stanford PhDs in materials science did not) have been able to get away with this shtick because the consumers fail to be sufficiently discerning when it comes to price.

Now that I am curtailing pricing while pushing performance, there is no choice, but to talk about our products (and even if we don’t pay you), or make yourself out to be a total clown. Enough of the paying FB ads and influencers, with everyone doing teaser gradual drops across an industry — we are defecting. You will support us and thrive, or become irrelevant and not be taken seriously by serious people. Of course, this only works if we reach critical mass organically from enough discerning people. I suppose it is a bet on the density of the people who actually want to be serious… but if it is the wrong bet, what’s the point? So I will take the bet.

For people trying to run a lifestyle business in this space, whether the peak cringe like Joovv, Kineon, Novothor, or Swanwick, or the more basic boring ones like EMR-Tek, Ra Optics, or Hooga, time to find a new line of work!

I am still going to be focused on defense, the area I know has a critical mass of serious people. The bitcoin OGs may not be quite ready to inherit the Earth, but I realized, there are several hundred of them, and only one of me, so when they are ready to become active participants in human civilization rather than passive ones, when their own mortality hits them (at 31 I feel close to death given how cognizant I am especially in the past 4-8 years how much I have been slowed down) but perhaps other people do not feel the same looming sense of mortality I do, perhaps it is because they are aimless and not really trying to do anything for which the idea of time running out is even intelligible. Defense is the area where people are serious, and in particular, the exquisite side i.e. the shit that really matters if push comes to shove, not just the dinky drones, regardless of the pace at which their relevance is growing and the amount of mindshare they have amongst the masses. Because in the drone level stuff, you get the revolving door effect more than the domains where if you have it, there is no other option. It will be nice when that can bridge more into energy and aerospace more broadly, as the foundational technologies are related, but perhaps today is not yet that day.

As always, I look forward to contributing in areas where my contributions actually materialize into something, and these days, Chroma has been increasingly “a real thing.” Heck, Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador will be wearing my Nightshade glasses in a week or two — well, I know they will be handed to him and one of his brothers will love them, can’t say for sure if Nayib will actually wear them (though he does love blue blockers and the style was made with him in mind).

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This is the unoptimized newsletter where I simply share whatever I want. I used to work on making new materials and manufacturing processes that are on the roadmap for some of the world’s most advanced weapons systems, and this has paid the bills since then since a bank will not print a fiat loan against “well, if you talk to the right people in the Pentagon (and I no longer even know who), they can give you a sense of just how much money will be going to that company as certain programs I don’t know about ramp up…” It looks like I’m finally going to be getting back into interesting stuff in aerospace & defense after being out for 6 years, but we’re gonna keep doing this Chroma thing as it’s finally picking up enough steam to be interesting in its own right.

Newsletter Archives

Hiring:

We have been growing at breakneck speed as more people realize we make the best stuff, and need to go beyond 1.5 people to really manage the growth effectively. These are the two roles we envision, but if you are interested in helping in a different capacity, please feel free to suggest your own job description. Email matt [at] getchroma.co if you are interested. If you refer us to someone we hire full time, we will give you $1,500 in Chroma store credit. If you refer us to someone we hire part time, we will give you $300 in Chroma store credit. Both of these positions can have cash compensation based on qualifications, or part of compensation based on sales.

Startup Operations Generalist (actual title tbd):

• Can get stuff done across a wide range of tasks, without necessarily having a team of people available for each subtasks.

• Support supply chain, communicate with manufactures, help resolve issues in design or production. Utilize software and finance tools to accurately forecast demand and sure we maintain correct inventory levels.

• Product management: support the development of novel designs, understand the user experience, and how to communicate product capabilities to users, including websites and other brand digital assets. Work effectively with contractors.

• Support internal business operations, including building or utilizing software tools that allow us to make better decisions based on quantitative data. Knowledge of finance/accounting also useful.

• Take initiative and be self-directed rather than expecting someone else to manage your work — be willing to have meta-cognition about what needs to get done.

Biz Dev & B2B Sales Director (actual title tbd):

• Sell Chroma devices to corporations, employee wellness and performance

• Establish partnerships with high value tastemakers and real influencers, not just random instagram/youtube generic fitness influencers or models

• Build brand awareness and support PR efforts, including collaborate with ordained university researchers to have studies done with our products

• Engage with DoD, write & win proposals, and manage those programs

• Engage with nations states e.g. tell Japan & South Korea that we may be able to help fix their ultra-low-fertility problems

• Expand sales channels beyond DTC e.g. integrating into schools and hospitals in El Salvador.

• Expand beyond DTC for food/oils e.g. breaking into restaurant industry and managing distribution

• Coming up with and executing on non-obvious growth opportunities.

Our monstrous 2025 Product Roadmap:

• Chroma Ironforge Pro device: We figured out how to double the power of the Ironforge with some thermal & materials tweaks!

• Chroma “IronLaser” device (actual name TBD)… you might not want to hold out on this if comparing to the Ironforge Pro, it will be in the $6-10k range.

• Chroma “Sky Lamp” (actual name TBD): an entirely new approach to solve the indoor illumination problem once and for all, our first illumination device.

• Chroma Nightshades 2.0 Launch: it was actually a request from the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, relayed to us from one of his brothers, that inspired us to get this done.

• Chroma “Beautyforge” (actual name TBD): Sort of like a mini-Ironforge, but red focused — this will blow away every facemask on the market

• Ironforge, D-Light, and Lux Vital mini devices: lower-cost, more portable, but still far more powerful than our flashlight, which is also coming back

• Chroma Trinity: Ironforge + D-Light + Lux Vital 3 in 1 — everyone keeps asking us which one to get so we are making it easier to not have too choose

• Chroma Trinity Ultimate: Ironforge + D-Light + Lux Vital 3 in 1, but bigger

• Chroma Basic Bitch Bundle: People really want low cost products that look the same as everything else rather than purpose-built devices, so we are going to throw a bunch of those together and get them to you at a great price, and we’ll have a face mask in the bundle to. It will probably be under $500 and it will be perfect for recommending to friends.

• Promethean Portal Refinement: even more power, and adding enclosure

• LoLa Oil Macadamia + Coconut Oil Blend: new brand with oil product that is at a minimum, a much better option than avocado oil

• LoLa Oil Olive Oils: we will also have select varieties of olive oils that have particularly low levels of linoleic acid, the thing that makes seed oils harmful

• Chipiros Potato and Tortilla Chips: we will use coconut oil instead of beef tallow to have a healthier chip option than avocado or seed oil chips, while being able to offer less extravagant pricing because we actually want to eventually solve this problem in its totality, not just serve the top 1% of the 1%.

As these products are released, I will be writing newsletter posts explaining the thinking behind them, as well as sharing info on our Twitter as well as on our Instagram. This product list is a good reminder that when you buy red light therapy devices from anyone else, it achieves nothing beyond getting you that product in that moment. When you buy from Chroma, you are getting the product, and also shifting the world toward one that you might find is more to your liking. If enough people thought about things like this, we might find the world is in fact ductile.

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Our 2025 Business/Strategy Roadmap:

• Expand team

• Improving creative media generation pace: we have a lot of products, with a lot of use cases, and we want to make sure people better understand how to get the most out of the hardware

• Grow clinic sales, including sports teams: we make the best stuff, and we are going to be making more of a push to get it to the best people and those who are working on services that can support the highest performance machines

• Grow enterprise sales for high value organizations: every human is more valuable when they are healthier, so we are going to get Chroma products into every company that is serious about the performance of their employees

• Begin sales into the defense industry: the DoD is in dire need of Chroma devices and to explore to what extent this may be able to help with concussion and traumatic brain injuries. Preliminary Air Force and Pentagon conversations indicate there is demand, but we do not have the bandwidth to go after these high touch customers. Moreover, it would be great if we could help reduce PTSD and veteran suicides. We extend a 30% discount to all US veterans as is, just send us an email.

• Establish higher tier partnerships: we love all the health and fitness enthusiasts, but we need to massively level up the conversation. Big pharma and other power players own the entire conversation now. Andrew Huberman for instance is totally pwned by the establishment and now shills glasses that block green, but let in blue light. I was close to a decade ahead of him — he should be embarrassed, but he isn’t, because the entire world gives him a pass and does not enforce standards. Beyond simply brand partnerships or endorsements, we must raise the level of our hardware to the point it strains ones credibility to not endorse us even without affiliation. …but that’s slow, so we need to give it a bit of a nudge.

• Becoming established in fertility: women have been reaching out to us about fertility, not just due to the Purple Wand, but using the Ironforge externally under the premise that it is so powerful, it is able to reach the ovaries. It certainly is better than other red lights available to reach organs and this requirement is part of why we are now working on a laser device. Fertility rates are collapsing across the West, as well as other developed countries such as Japan and South Korea. We won’t solve the fertility issue even if this has a transformational impact, but maybe we can make a small dent.

• Becoming established in brain focused red light: with a laser product, we can look more into what is possible with the brain. If researchers have access to capabilities in excess of 6-figure priced legacy medical equipment for 4-figures, I think they’ll come up with some interesting observations.

• Becoming established in heart and lung focused red light: there was a study showing that near infrared light of a similar amount and intensity as what an Ironforge delivers basically cured a severe case of COVID — it would be interesting to see what is possible, especially with a laser device for lungs, and also when there is cardiovascular damage as now incredibly widespread with the harmful “vaccine” MRNa treatments that much of the world was coerced into taking.

• Making devices available to oncological researchers: we are adding 1270nm light to our laser device, which should have some interest effects, but the cancer treatments that are really interesting rely on a photosensitive dye that is inhaled, injected, or ingested into the body. It would be great if someone actually started researching how to treat/cure cancers with the trivial hardware that exists in the world. Of course, it would be highly illegal to have anything too effective because it would be too cheap compared to the drug monopolies that rely on murdering competition (this is what “intellectual property” is btw, it is a nonsensical justification for violent theft and murder, which regulation in general is). Perhaps someone will figure out how to offer services in El Salvador instead of there is something there, but I wouldn’t count on it.

  If you really want things to be different, all you can do is buy and hold bitcoin. If you want to buy something from our store feel free to do so, but for every dollar you spend with us, but at least $5 of bitcoin too.

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Anyway, we are now at the stage where our current team is getting overloaded with all the recent growth (as you may have noticed with the various backlogs we have had this year while trying to ramp up production… sorry about that, almost everything is back in stock and shipping now though). So we are looking to hire people to help manage and optimize that growth. Part time for now, but could become full time later.

The ideal candidate is a self-motivated and driven individual who excels in a dynamic environment where responsibilities are fluid and evolving. They should have strong technical proficiency and be capable of handling customer support inquiries. This role involves overseeing social media management, coordinating photo and video shoots, and supporting various marketing initiatives. Additionally, the candidate will manage the coordination, scheduling, and logistics for in-person events including conferences, ensuring smooth execution of all related tasks.

Send an email to matt@getchroma.co if you are interested, and please pass this along if you know other people who you think would be a good match.

In addition to needing help with Chroma, I am also working on launching an ingredient/cooking oil business where we could use 1 more person to help manage things as we approach launch. LoLa Oil is the company that will actually solve the seed oil problem because we are the only company that is interested in scalable solutions that transform the entire world. I will accept nothing less than being able to walk into a grocery store or restaurant anywhere in a country and knowing that all ingredients have <15% linoleic acid (bare minimum) without having to look at an ingredient label, look at an app and think about which menu items are acceptable, or have a conversation with a server where they are forced to inquire with the kitchen. The first product there will be consumer facing, and it’s a blend of 70% macadamia oil and 30% coconut oil in beautiful black glass bottles with 0 light transmission. Will be shipping in a matter of weeks…

Get notified of launch signing up with your email on the LoLa landing page

Follow LoLa oil on Twitter to get all the latest updates.

Chroma Product Updates: Better Electronics

I am thrilled to announce that we are finally using Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supplies across almost all of our devices! All the D-Lights, Lux Vitals, and Ironforges are shipping today with the new GaN power supplies, and the backordered Purple Wands that are just about ready to ship to us from our manufacturing partner are also now using GaN. The current Sky Portals are still running on traditional silicon power supplies.

What the heck is GaN and why does it matter?

Like silicon, GaN is a semiconductor that can be used in a power supply, a component that takes your alternating current (AC) from a wall plug and turns it into direct current (DC) at whatever voltage you need. Historically, everything has been silicon, and SiC and GaN have recently been growing at a tremendous rate now that it has become economically viable to manufacture. Different industries have been adapting it at different rates e.g. if you have noticed in recent years that your phone or laptop charger is quite a bit smaller and lighter, yet charges at a rather fast rate, it is probably using GaN. Overall, you get higher quality electricity, much lower thermal losses (more of the power goes into your device rather than being wasted, about 5-10% more). Here are a couple good articles that dive into the technical details and other factors.

https://epc-co.com/epc/gallium-nitride/what-is-gan

https://eepower.com/technical-articles/gan-vs-silicon-smackdown/

For LEDs, these were not readily available, and I was actually trying to get these last December, and then that was too early and caused some delays. We finally figured it out though, and I imagine it will be a while before anyone else switches over. These do cost more, but not too much more, and as production continues to grow, it seems possible that at some point silicon may stop being used entirely in power electronics. Other red light therapy companies don’t do this because they get generic panels that they slap their logo on, while we actually control more customized products where we are working directly across multiple lower tier component suppliers for quality control and other requirements. With the smaller power supplies, we have also resized cases on Lux Vital, D-Light, and Ironforge, along with a slight improvement on all the cables.

(Additionally, the new power supplies offer greatly improved AC-DC isolation, which means we now have the best in class “low non-native EMFs” for those who care about such things, as everyone else has their power supplies all together in a vented aluminum box, whereas our lights have a hermetically sealed aluminum enclosure and a long cable separating the LEDs and power supply.)

Game-changing new product inbound…

A few months ago we tweeted about the idea of making a new sort of floor lamp that would absolutely flood your home with an absurd amount of light…

(follow the Chroma Twitter account here)

Well, now we are getting an absolutely giant heatsink custom CNC machined as we work on our first production prototype. You know those giant UFO lamps in overhead warehouses? Pretty bright, right? Those are typically 200 watts. We are doing double that just in the white channel, and you will be able to run 100 watts in the amber channel at the same time! Turns out even the large oversized lamp bodies cannot handle it so we will need to have custom molds made to die-cast the aluminum heat sinks in production. This thing is going to be an absolute beast.

Moreover, I initially wanted to have a simple on/off switch for each channel, possibly with an intermediate mode, just to have absolutely no dimming, since dimming is almost always PWM (pulse width modulation), which means you rapidly turn the light on and off. LEDs can do this tens of thousands of times per second to be imperceptible in theory, unlike hideous fluorescent lights, but in practice, this might still have some biological effect. From a naive engineering perspective, PWM makes sense — it optimizes the longevity (which is very high in LEDs regardless), and ensures consistent color output.

When you dim an LED by driving it with less power, rather than full power for some fraction of the time, you actually get a slight shift in the spectrum… which is funny, because the spectrum of most LEDs suck, and on top of that, there is a biological perceptual effect where dimmer lights appear more blue shifted. This is the reason a not-that-bright 5000k color temperature bulb might feel too blue and cold indoors, but outdoor midday sunlight is around 5600k and you perceive it as warm!

Anyway, we are diving into the sub-components, and are going to have constant-current-reduction on this lamp, with two dimming wheels so the white and amber channels can be independently controlled. There will be no bluetooth, WiFi, or any “smart” features. Smart appliances usually suck. LED power draw is highly sensitive to small changes in voltage, so we control the current. This is real flickerless, zero flicker, whereas most lights you buy that use those terms really just mean “PWM at a high enough frequency you won’t consciously notice it.”

This lamp will transform your home. I never considered this product before because I was focused on getting LOTS OF POWER to actually be hitting your face for circadian rhythm optimization, hence, the Chroma Sky Portal. It was obvious that matching the Sky Portal’s intensity across an entire room would require an obscene amount of power draw. Moreover, given the principle-agent problem in building construction, there has never been a good way to integrate better lighting into buildings since no one wants to deal with retro-fitting. But an upward facing floor lamp is actually a superior form factor than a fully custom build because there is actually no other way to get light this diffuse (though in principal you could also make a ceiling mounted reflected light luminaire), and I have noticed in recent years an increasing number of establishments that have LED spotlights, and the glare from these is horrendously unpleasant, on top of the lousy, harmful spectrum that comes with the blue phosphor pump. Absolutely ridiculous. No one takes pride in their work and actually creating delightful experiences. From what I hear about Japan, maybe that is the only place where craft and thoughtfulness commands a sufficient degree of respect.

With these lamps, you have so much power draw relative to your existing lights, it negates the sunk cost fallacy you run into there! I realized that there is a spiritual battle going on in the world where this lamp fits in. Everyone knows evil has been growing as of late, and those who value human life are finding fewer and fewer allies. Beauty and health are being portrayed as threats, and they are threats to those who impose tyranny upon us, for living a beautiful life is its own shining city upon a hill and it as the most rigorous proof that one can strive for more and refuse to be crushed by evil. That is what I hope to bring with this lamp, so I have flipped my “concerns about inefficiency” to being thrilled about how much energy it consumes — we have figured out how to channel way more energy into improving the experience of life itself and that is a glorious thing! Oh, how the communists will howl in pain at the beauty of this light. Let them scurry away like the rats in a bucket of degeneration they are… while perhaps a stray ray will draw some of them away from their evil ways and into the light.

I am thinking this lamp will need to be such a focal point we will need to spin out an entirely separate brand to focus on it and connect with the many people who might not be on the frontiers of health enough to have taken an interest in red light therapy or think explicitly in terms such as “circadian optimization.” If this lamp transforms the home the way I think it can, it will represent one of the first major transformations to the nature of the modern human dwelling, an area that some have bemoaned has seen insufficient “innovation” over the last decade. I would love for it become an iconic product like the Herman Miller Eames chair, and why shouldn’t it? — anyone can buy a chair that they know is comfortable, but not everyone will buy these lamps right away. Yet, they will be far more visually striking for guests who enter into your home, they will add far more value to your life and the comfort of your guests, and they will signal that you actually do know something interesting before it becomes common knowledge, and ultimately, the best flexes boil down to this, for knowing novel things is greatly superior to unchecked consumption for the pure sake of signaling ability to consume — the marginal value will always diminish rapidly in this way if it is not well thought out. This is why I would say you can purchase a $100m home, and some regions will be rather pleasant because of the windows, but I assure you the lighting will be lousier than what one should expect in this year for any home at a fraction of that price!

Anyway here you will have your “innovation” to the dwelling. I sort of hate that word. I do not feel innovative, or that I am some sort of inventor, I even shudder a bit at the thought. I am simply an intolerant man who takes certain things very seriously that others may consider frivolous, and I do not wish capitulate! If you are serious about things, the answer appears plainly in front of you. I do not wish to glorify this process as innovative, for it creates an artificial separation between innovator and non-innovator, a totally absurd concept that serves no other purpose than to discourage people from doing useful things. Anyone can do useful things if they so choose. And if you cannot do useful things, you can always simply be a discerning consumer, which directs more resources to those who build a world that is nicer to live in more quickly:

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Some promising new ventures in oil to finally end toxic seed oils and fix nutrition are also now underway (looking for people to help on this front), which is the next most important thing after light and heat/cold. I am also looking at possibly working with El Salvador in some of their health initiatives, which I will touch on as well.

New Chroma Products:

Promethean Portal: I have wanted this for a while and have written in previous posts about a whole body system. I realized we didn’t need to get to crazy and can just do it as a DIY Ikea style kit. Right now, the guy I’m working with didn’t take down all the Amazon URLs I sent him for extension cables, power strips, cable ties, and the wire rack, but he will get something together at some point, or you can just figure it out yourself. It’s just a bundle of 6 Ironforges and 6 Lux Vitals, and packs a bigger+better punch than a Novothor bed at about a tenth of the price. Anyone who buys a Novothor is a moron, such an embarrassment of a company, though I suppose most companies are. As I have previously shown, you can’t really match sunlight with most devices, but at least in terms of power, this is what you need to get there.

Lux Vital: This might be the most important product we have ever built and I am thrilled to be able to report that it feels amazing too. The Lux Vital represents a culmination of almost everything I have learned about light and I am proud to have this as our flagship device — there is absolutely nothing else on the market like it. I can guarantee you, even if the pricing seems high, you would be paying 100x more if any mainstream health institution caught up with us and offered it. You know what, screw it, I am going to tell you something that is probably really gonna piss off the people I work with (…I have a bad habit of doing that) — it doesn’t actually cost us any more to make this device than the Ironforge and we are applying value pricing. As I have repeatedly stated, I am not a marketing person — if you want commodity pricing, you will need to make the entire world understand the importance of light, as I am not interested in convincing people of anything.

I prefer aerospace, materials, and advanced engineering where the things I build exist in meaningful ways regardless of whether consumers believe in them or not. I like things where I can walk into a room and feel intellectually intimidated (e.g. when I walked into DARPA at age 23, or when I gave an ITAR presentation in Cocoa Beach 5 years ago). In fact, the only reason I even am finally getting around to putting together this newsletter is a roundabout plan to get funding, which I don’t need to go into, but on the topic of the extreme malinvestment from authoritarian, collectivist intermediation of free association and theft of private property impeding technological advanced, have you bought bitcoin yet? If you hold bitcoin, our prices go down, everything goes down eventually in terms of bitcoin, and it goes down a lot. A “successful” small business selling lights would be happy to impact 1% of the world, but in aerospace and materials, I can build things that will eventually be part of every single aircraft of the world. Dr. Jack Kruse keeps telling me the world is finally in a place where this sort of saturation may be achievable. Hmmm, now after writing all of this, I don’t really feel like explaining the product. If you check out the pinned tweet we have, you can see the biology underpinnings of this device. It triggers the pro-opiomelanocortin pathway i.e. main part of sunlight that triggers euphoria.

tl;dr Ironforge + UVA + cyan (two devices in middle are new Ironforges)

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? Because UVA generates nitric oxide, which near-IR already does, so I stopped looking. Having an answer, especially a correct one, can be a very dangerous thing if it gets you to stop looking. Answering questions is relatively easy, it is asking good questions that is hard. Though some people are remarkably bad at both and are incapable of understanding answers even when they are provided on a silver platter.

Sky Portal Mini: We finally have a small portable light that combines our high fidelity violet-phosphor pump white LEDs, with a 660nm red LED in the 2nd channel for a travel-friendly device. Excellent for re-setting your circadian rhythms when moving across time zones. You can also get a strap and wrap it around your body to hold it in place. It is nowhere near as powerful as the Ironforge, but for a highly localized need, if you have a convenient way to hold it there for 10 minutes, that will work pretty well. That’s the good — the bad is that the clips that were supposed to make it easy to clip to the top of your laptop somehow disappeared, but we will send those to you for free later on and we will get those in later batches, just may be a while. The other thing is we didn’t have time to find straps to hold in place so you will have to figure that out on your own.

Purple Wand: This product has been pretty slow to finally launch since I never really took it seriously. Originally called the TightLight, this is actually one of the most complex/customized products we have ever made. We had a custom mold machined for the outer polycarbonate casing since the thicker glass we previously went with could still break if dropped on concrete, and the thickness made the diameter larger than some customers wanted. This also the first product where we ever combined 4 separate LED chips within each individual SMD (each little square you see light coming out of): dual deep violets (405nm and 420nm, which stimulates the same opsin the Lux Vital was built around) and dual red wavelengths (660nm and 760nm). I would have just done 405+850, but then it would be very dim, whereas this gives you a really cool magenta hue.

Overall, this can work as a general purpose light device, and it actually has a bit more power than the Chromatorch (near IR flashlight), but it was originally designed as a dildo upon a customer request — the customer was actually more interested in prostate cancer risk, and when combined with a photosensitive dye, photo-immuno therapy is a highly promising, emerging oncology treatment. Alas, we are only in the wellness space, so we went in a slight different direction. Importantly, a dildo is a far more humorous product to build. It is even funnier when we found out there is actually a bunch of compelling data suggesting it is rather useful for women’s health in relation to fertility, post-pregnancy, etc. The funniest thing though, and something that could be straight out of a Douglas Adams book is that I am the one making it.

Other Products and Roadmap: The “Nightshade” glasses will be making their way back, this time with a silver mirror quoting, which may better achieve my original goal of glasses that are stylish for wearing out. For those who do not remember the Nightshades, they don’t block all the light, but instead let in violet light on the left side of the melanopic curve, leading to a non-linear increase in the color space that is visible to you per the melanopic stimulus i.e. it only is something like 80% as effective, but it is many times more pleasant when out and about, trying to see your environment, watch a movie, or even be able to read text and recognize contrast in apps — the reality is most people are not living in caves and will want to do various things in the evening, and the alternative is not 100%, but 0%, in practice.

You may notice the price on the new Sky Portals have come down quite a bit… haven’t gotten around to making something good enough to have a Pro version just quite yet, but hopefully that will get made before next winter.

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Actually Destroying Toxic Seed Oils

If you want to stay apprised of the play to end seed oils, follow on Twitter, and be sure to get on the mailing list. tl;dr there is a drop-in replacement to toxic seed oils, which is high oleic seed oils that bring linoleic acid levels (the PUFAs, the thing that makes seed oils terrible for you) from 20-70% down to 5-20%, with a simple switch in plant variety, including ones made by breeding without genetic modification, not that I really care about that all that much. LARPers will complain it isn’t butter or tallow — meanwhile, people who aren’t idiotic assholes, will understand that 8 billion people cannot afford their lifestyle and will not condemn them to death for falling short of their ideals — these are not serious people. Anyway, this will happen regardless for a number of reasons, but I have found a way to make it happen much much faster. In order to do that, I am looking for people interested in helping out with sales that are optimized for obtaining LOIs rather than actual purchase orders. This is a common trick for turning on the money printer through venture capitalists who love imaginary sales more than anything else in the world (though in this case, they’d convert). Already have a couple people on this, and if you might be interested in joining (part time, minimal time commitment needed), please reply to this email.

There is quite a bit happening in El Salvador on the health frontier. Both Chroma and this oil play may end up working with El Salvador. Watch closely, but don’t wait too long to get on the Ark. If you will be in El Salvador in March, there is a health summit I will be speaking at in a few weeks you might want to check out: Age of Light.

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[Sidenote: the recent uptick in sales probably was part of the necessary (though not sufficient) conditions that led to where we are now — as I have implored my readers before, every sale to Chroma is at least 100x more impactful than sales anywhere else because it seems I might singlehandedly advance these fields on the product side more than the rest of the world combined (since 2016 when I pioneered the red-lens blue-blocking glasses with Carbonshade to move away from the ugly orange designs, without which, all the copycats that are available today might not exist).]

At this stage, I am not yet ready to announce all the details of what I am working on, but I am looking for feedback on a few specific aspects. To give you a bit of a teaser, here is the chart with the curve I have neglected to consider until now. ;) Also, note that the D-Light (safer UVB for vitamin D) is now heavily discounted.

I must give thanks to Dr. Jack Kruse and the recent podcast he did with Rick Rubin (famous music producer) and Dr. Andrew Huberman (Stanford doc with quite a bit of mainstream press). Dr. Kruse actually gave me a shout-out for the ColdBed Pillow we released a couple months ago when Dr. Huberman brought up the importance of a cold sleep environment, and how it would be nice to be able to do that without a complex WiFi based system. Dr. Kruse mentioned that he had told me to make a particular sort of light over a year ago (he had), but now it has finally clicked for me why it matters. But that is not the area where I am looking for feedback…

Sky Portal Re-Design in the Works

When the Sky Portal came out it was an incredible product, and it still is today, but it is not any better than it was when it launched. I have figured out how to improve the performance quite a bit on multiple fronts, but there is a question that still remains. The new version will likely come in a single variety to reduce confusion (now we have a cyan + white Sky Portal and a cyan + near IR Sky Portal). I have been reading some research papers on color theory, and it turns out, we do not actually have a color theory that correctly maps to reality. To be less abstract while we are talking about light and color, here is an image so you can visualize an RGB color space.

This triangle captures the gamut of colors that can be generated with combinations of three colors located in the corners of the triangle by mixing them in different proportions, with the center point of white representing a fairly even blend.

As you may already know, color is a perceptual phenomena, it is not actually describing any sort of physical reality. With 3 pixels, there is only one way to make a certain color, but when you add more, there are a number of different combinations of intensities at different wavelengths that will make the same color — just imagine two lines that go across different points on the outer edges, say 500nm and 600nm and 460nm and 540nm — it is clear that there is a point where those intersect so different ratios of those wavelengths can make the same exact same color with rather different wavelengths.

Now here’s the problem: you can apply this mathematical model of color theory and expect to get certain outcomes and for various things to behave a certain way, but they don’t. Thornton demonstrated several decades ago (before we even knew all these non-image-forming cells existed in the eye!) that a number of bizzare effects occur. For instance, he found that sometime taking a light that has 3 main spectral components and then removing one of them, which substantially drops the luminosity (whether you measure it by the radiant intensity, photopic luminosity, scotopic luminosity, or any other measure), yet the perceieved brightness substantially jumps up. Color theory says that should never happen. There are also various cases where the perceived colors based on how much each of the red, green, and blue cones of the eye are stimulated are not matching even though color theory says they should match — these effects are persistently found in a number of cases regardless of brightness, indicating that it is not rods that are responsible for the interference.

Anyway, neither color theorists or light designers typically consider the biological effects of the non-image-forming cells in the eyes, which now have well-established biological functions, though of course the pharmaceutical marketing department that sometimes is described by the misnomer of “healthcare & medical industry” neglects how important these effects are. At the research level, all of this is well established.

I am working on the next version of the Sky Portal based on all this information, and as might be clear by now, color has a degree of independence from the wavelengths, and it is the wavelengths that determine the biological response in the factors we care about such as sleep, wakefulness, mood, focus, eye health (or risk of fatigue/damage), and so on. Within the new design, I have flexibility on the color, but to simplify the product, this will not be user-adjustable. We will be dropping the fixation on having a light that excels at illumination from a videography/photography perspective (i.e dropping the ultra high fidelity index we currently have — my sense is not that many people care about this feature, though please hit reply and let me know if it is something that matters to you), which gives us a lot more design flexibility and certain advantages in removing certain spectral components that subtract rather than add value other than for their reflective fidelity. Rather than a chromatic cyan, we will have either a white or near-white appearance. As the RGB color space above shows, moving slightly away from the white point can easily bring us to a very lightly cyan/blue hue, or in another direction, into a very lightly magenta hue (we are not consider any sort of yellow/orange off-white), which brings us to the key question I want user input on (feel free to reply with any additional thoughts, questions, or ideas you have).

Lets Re-Engineer Every Computer Monitor?

Finally, to make the newsletter a bit more interesting, I want to share an idea I have been toying with for the past week, which is the possibility of adding a 4th sub-pixel to displays instead of relying on RGB. Eight years ago someone wrote a nice article arguing for a 4th sub-pixel to expand the color gamut, and this concept should make sense now: you only are able to produce the colos inside the space your pixels enclose.

But all of these people are thinking about it purely from a color perspective, and we know that is not enough. For instance, nightshift software looks terrible if it sufficiently suppresses the blue pixel (and the green one too, which you need if you want to properly block melanopic light as our Carbonshade glasses do) since you basically turn your color space into a narrow sliver of yellow-orange-red, which makes it very difficult to use and navigate a device, or enjoy visual content. With a 4th sub-pixel deep into the violet range instead, and a cyan pixel as well, mostly or completely turning of the cyan pixel still leaves you with a large triangular color space with a wide gamut full of sufficient contrast, all while cutting out a large chunk of the melanopic range that has a half-width going from 440nm to 530nm.

Of course, there are many reasons to not do this. As I previously mentioned, color theory does not quite work, and it just so happens that when you use violet and cyan, it especially does not work — so it is not just 4 sub-pixels, but 4 sub-pixels on hard mode, but that’s the only way I think it can cross the chasm. As the article I linked mentions, you do not have content that is generated for such a large color space, and anything that displays with hyper-saturation, will then deviate from what the creator intended. You only get to properly enjoy it from a color perspective when movies, apps, and tv are made to take advantage of it, and possibly even when cameras have new 4-channel bayer filters instead of just RGB that causes a loss in spectral data about the real world (which as we know from our color theory errors, means you are actually losing color information / fidelity). But if you can get a ton of biological benefits, it is worth doing today, and then the ultra-rich, more pleasant colors just become a bonus.

I think that if I can get some displays like this made, it will cause such a significant “wow” factor in everyone viewing the display (there is data to suggest that chromatic purity of colors is pleasing/exciting, among other factors to the proposed spectrum…) that people will feel compelled to see it move forward. I am engaging with traditional display manufacturers, color theorists, electrical engineers, projector manufacturers, microLED manufacturers to see about getting some of these prototyped. However, I anticipate this might be well outside my budget. If any investors who subscribed to my newsletter want to chat more about this, please reply to this newsletter directly (goes to my email, which is michael at our domain). Given the unique set of factors, challenges, and rationale, I actually have extremely strong IP protection on what I am trying to do here, which means there would be a good opportunity for a partnership / acquisition with major players in this space e.g. a company such as Apple, which likes being ahead of the curve on display tech and would have their thunder stolen when it comes to being the ultimate solution for creatives if we were able to launch something like a 24” 4k monitor using this approach.

Stay tuned — exciting announcements coming over the next few months. I haven’t been this excited about new LED/light products since originally developing the Carbonshades, Sky Portal, and Ironforge years ago!

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I think it was maybe close to a year ago that I saw some posts on Facebook from some red light therapy marketing company claiming that some devices were too powerful, and that the idea of more bang-for-your-buck was actually a flawed concept, alluding to the well-known biphasic response of red, which can look something like this:

LEDs are not rocket science. These are remarkably simple products to build, and several years in, apparently rather than making better devices, companies are capitulating to having a low power, overpriced product, but trying to pretend this is a feature. There were a few recent Facebook posts with people explicitly calling out our products, which is surprising given how small we are — I guess competitors recognize, Chroma sets the standard. Joovv even decided to borrow my style of writing to do “cautionary” articles around claims of devices that are “most powerful” and the like, which is of course nonsense. Power is just the amount of electricity being consumed per unit time; the most powerful system is just the one where you buy 100 of the thing and plug them all in at the same time. The Ironforge uniquely takes a rather large amount of power, and crams it into a small package based on the simple fact that you can use a small powerful thing across your entire body, but you can’t use a big powerful thing to deliver power to a small spot where you really want to focus. It’s not that complicated. Though I suppose if you are a marketer, no matter how easy the hardware, it is easier still to simply change your marketing when you can count on customers to not run the numbers themselves.

…I’m imagining what it might be like in aerospace, where I focus: “no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong — I know you thought you wanted better materials to withstand the thermal environment for hypersonic missiles, but we have a balsa wood missile meant to go at subsonic speeds — no one will see it coming, and they’ll just laugh until it’s too late.” Obviously, that doesn’t work with the DoD, but it seems to work in niche consumer products.

Now, aside from the fact that all devices are underpowered if you actually run the (real) numbers on dose response (INCLUDING THE IRONFORGE!!! — why do you think I want a chamber with 30 or so of them when I can afford it???), here is why the lower power concept is flawed: there is massive attenuation (i.e. reduction in power) as you enter the tissue. Yes, near-infrared light is great at penetrating tissue, but that is a relative comparison to wavelengths where basically all the light bounces right off. You are still getting a massive reduction in power density with every centimeter of depth, especially if you are looking at applications such as the brain where you have a huge dropoff when passing through the skull. This means that all the numbers you were working with (assuming you remembered to cut your power by 3 for the red/NIR relative power error on 50:50 lights compared to Ironforge being 80% deeply penetrating NIR, knocked off 10% for fans, and another 10% for silicon power supply loss, and knocked off 50% off everything for LED efficiency) are a MASSIVE overestimate of the dose for anything other than your skin. Good skin health is certainly worthwhile, but I built the Ironforge first and foremost because I had issues with connective tissue, so I need the right level of power inside my body, in my muscles, in my bones, in my finger pulleys, in my Achilles tendon, in my brain, etc… and I don’t really care if my skin has more than the “optimal” dose in getting it.

Our manufacturing partners are great… they have put up with our tiny order volumes for longer than I would have expected, but recently, we had to get a larger batch, so the Ironforge is in stock, and will be for a while. Grab one now if you don’t have one. All units use our upgraded mil-spec power cables (I went overboard on correcting a prior cable issue to make sure it would never be a problem) and these cables end up being a bit more slender in addition to being way strong. Or, you know, find someone else to sell you something more expensive with less power if that’s what you’re into.

Get an Ironforge

I don’t really remember most of what we talked about in the podcast other than the critical depth attenuation concept, and honestly, I rarely ever listen to podcasts, but a lot of people seem to be into them so knock yourself out. If, however, you are more like me, I will leave you with a short, whimsical 17 second video you may enjoy on the subject of less being more from guitarist Yngwie Malmsteem:

Last summer I was living in Squamish, British Columbia, a world class town for outdoor recreation. British Columbia in general has some the world’s most advanced mountain biking terrain, and Squamish in particular ratchets up a bit from what one can expect in Vancouver. But the trail I was riding on September 24th was not a particularly difficult double black diamond trail. Pleasure Trail is exactly as its name suggests quite a pleasure to ride and on that day I had an absolutely splendid ride for the majority of the trail, but alas, in my adrenaline-induced state of edge, I was caught off-guard and found myself flying over the handlebars off the edge of the trail in a high consequence area where after a full revolution I had not hit the ground, and as I tried to arrest my fail, viewing the semi-vertical terrain that followed, I landed with all my weight on a rock with my right foot, and without any support for my ankle, fully ruptured my Achilles. Perhaps if my foot had been 6 inches back it would have fallen into the slot where my ankle dropped, and I might have had a compound fracture and other injuries.

Crash came out of nowhere… could I have just as easily fallen off Portal in Moab?

I had 6 months of recovery after surgery with extensive rehab to re-learn how to walk (though I was in a boot for the first couple months — was rather miserable and depressing being debilitated for so long and certainly made me more mindful of my mortality), and even after various cocktails of self-administered peptides and anabolic steroids, it still isn’t right. I am told by multiple people it will fully recover and that the full recovery takes about a year so hopefully that turns out to be correct since at the moment I cannot safely boulder anything even moderately high since I don’t feel comfortable taking hard landings on both legs.

Interlude

It was in the early stages of my recovery that I finished coming to accept the reality that bitcoiners are equally foolish to the great many people I despise in venture capital and the traditional finance/fiat world in general; equally contemptible lack of curiosity; equally non-serious individuals for the most part. The world advances despite fiat and lies from tech-illiterate luddites (e.g. Peter Thiel) about a great stagnation (run the numbers: civilizationmetrics.org) — similarly, Bitcoin shall fix things in spite of bitcoiners, not because of them. Bitcoin fixes things via negativa, by forcing those who lack the humility to STFU economically when they have nothing of actual value to contribute by making them poor — but this is a dynamic process that requires iterations and time to make a decent chunk of progress, even after fiat dies (even optical measurement faces speed of light delays). Useful (valuable things are simply an ever-present force of nature that emerges within sincere things within humans, and all that is required for anything to be fixed is the reduction of the great many obstructions introduced over the past 109 years, but I digress. In November, I made the decision to finally shutdown operations on my in-situ futures market SaaS product for stabilizing the destabilizing relational contracts such as labor and supply chains with an automated sweep to X amount USD auto-rebalancing bitcoin (and equities) brokerage on the side (“bitcoin startup”).

Having built the world’s most advanced / strongest structural aerospace parts, helped develop technical solutions to challenges of the uptmost importance to the security of my nation, solved the “pandemic” my planet faced and nearly getting the solution deployed at scale, which would have suppressed much of the tyranny (bitcoin did very little to suppress COVID tyranny all things considered), and then figuring out the nature of non-equilibrium monetary economics through the lens of the properly expanded four-functions of money model, enabling the most expeditious transition, only to be forced to bear witness again to the repeated, pathetic failures of this planet, I realized there was nothing left for me to do. My Kafkaesque environment was akin to a person attempting to communicate with and advance a civilization comprising a herd of goats, a rather silly endeavor. My appreciation for the true nature of fiat deepened, and I was able to shed a few more delusions, for I have this pernicious cognitive bias of overestimating the intelligence and capabilities of others that has repeatedly gotten me into trouble.

Postlude

I had to accept there really was no choice for me, but to retire, and at the start of April, I finally got the all-clear from my surgeon and was able to start going back outside. I started sport climbing and mountain biking, which was nice, but I was rudely interrupted a couple weeks into being retired with the realization that something that had evanescently crossed my mind 6 or 7 years prior, was now likely not only possible, but perhaps inevitable, itself a grand thing that may also hold the key to that which I must have that I had anticipated not beginning work on for another decade.

Getting back into it…

Anyway, I figured something out less than two weeks in and now it’s back to bleeding edge aerospace and defense materials for me. It is somewhat obnoxious that this will certainly interfere with the amount of climbing I can do, but I simply must pursue it, for it is more captivating than the most aesthetic of mountains. Nature abhors a vacuum, and though I think of myself as free, I accept that I am a force of nature so I flow where I must.

In addition to self-funding the initial R&D, I will be obtaining capital from the only source out there actually interested in or capable of understanding advanced technology: federal agencies — primarily, DoD, but also NSF, DOE, and/or NASA. There is something about war that acts as a forcing function for basic competency. I know that route will work, I just hadn’t had anything that made it worth the hassle it is since it can be a bit of a slow grind. I’m also not waiting for them and am self-funding R&D, effectively already starting. Might have a bit of a delay over optimal speed since as I communicate with key suppliers to get everything lined up I will continue climbing and making my way toward the Canadian Rockies for the summer before getting a small industrial space somewhere back in the US.

That being said, I could get going quite a bit faster with more capital, and most of the funding opportunities come with about a 6-month delay (and that’s if I get them the first go-around), so I am now more interested in selling Chroma. If you are interested, feel free to reply directly to this email or forward to anyone you think might be interested.

• Takes up very little time: I have someone else running it who handles web management, social media, logistics, and customer service.

• Consistent revenues with substantial upside given proven markets, superior products, and very little time/capital ever spent on properly marketing.

• Customer base includes a co-founder of a company that peaked at over a trillion dollar market cap, and various professional athletes (non-sponsored).

• Broad range of unique products that are easily scalable to massive quantities: includes Ironforge, D-Light, Sky Portal (all versions), NIR Flashlight, Carbonshade glasses (patented), and (currently unlisted) Chroma glasses with a unique (patented) band-pass filter. (Does not include other consumer hardware products on separate sites such as the AuroraWand, ColdBed pillow, or giant chamber I want to build as those are all very early stage and hard to reasonably value in a way that is likely to work for both of us.)

• Scalable within DTC, and also could be sold enterprise, DoD, or even regulated healthcare channels if you want to go that route with it. Imagine if you could have health insurance companies paying for the Sky Portal as a first line of defense, an Ironforge in lieu of an unnecessary orthopedic surgery, or a D-Light in lieu of monoclonal antibodies and excess days in a hospital. Of course, healthcare is far too communist and scammy of an industry for my taste so I have never looked much into those options, though I imagine it would be extremely lucrative if you can pull it off.

• Includes transition support and up to 1 monthly sparring session with me for up to 90 minutes for the first 18 months. I still like this stuff, I just prefer building things, chatting with engineers, seeing the glimmer in someone’s eye when they realize what we have made possible, feeling the glimmer in my own eye when someone shows me an application I hadn’t considered — I like things that look like this — I do not like consumers.

  

I have two separate teams of technology leaders within the Air Force that are interested in meeting me in person in a couple weeks, among other things. The thing they are interested in meeting with me about is actually not the thing that has me excited enough that I decided to come back to aerospace, so try to extrapolate from that little nugget what sort of magnitude thing it is is that could have possibly gotten me to come back. Just don’t bother trying to ask me what it is. ;)

I have always wanted more powerful systems. In fact, more energy is the foundation of all human desires and demands, even if the path to that may meander and transform through complex layers of production. The nature of energy, life, production, coordination, and technology, the more abstract concepts, are the core of my other newsletter (recently renamed, Heaviside) so I won’t get into that too much here. Needless to say, with red and near-infrared light therapy, the need for more power is rather straightforward. Power is actually a rather simple concept: it is the rate at which energy is being used — the more power, the faster you deliver energy. A watt is 1 joule per second, and for consumer electronics, power can be measured rather easily with a $15 watt-meter that goes in between your power outlet and the plug of your device. This captures the total energy since it all passes through that capable — the only people measuring the power of a red or near-infrared light device based on the light output, something that is rather hard to measure, especially given that the light goes everywhere in a bunch of directions, is something that is only done by two types of people: idiots and sociopaths. Now lets be nice and assume they’re mostly idiots and only slightly evil — still not great for you as a consumer.

To this day, I am baffled by most people’s inability to shop based on simple numbers, and identify that anyone spouting power outputs that exceed power inputs are obviously lying to you. LEDs, properly used, for a particular wavelength, have a very narrow range of efficiencies, so knowing the exact input power, lets you know the actual output power rather accurately. It is about 50% efficiency, and you have a 10% knockdown on your silicon power transformer that goes from (sidenote: this is why GaN and SiC power supplies that are rapidly growing are exciting; they are far more efficient and underpin your “super chargers” for phones that are coming onto the market — we want to get GaN power supplies for the Ironforge and D-Light as this will cut down quite a bit on weight and bulk, but there is a pretty steep upfront cost now so that is probably over a year out.) so about 40% of what your watt-meter says is the radiant flux that is actually coming out of your device, of which less than 100% will actually hit your body, depending on where you position your device. If you don’t have an Ironforge, we just got more of those in stock this week!

Anyway, enough of my ranting — the point is, if you run the numbers, you will find that there is not a single device that is a match for the sun in a tropical area, ours included (for those curious, the ideal target dose is likely in 10 - 100 joule/cm^2 range — there is a biphasic response, but many people will sell you something saying “hey, too much power is actually not ideal”, meanwhile, their thing might give you 2 joules/cm^2, and only after using it for 20 minutes). That is why we focused exclusively on small devices that can get you enough power in the handful of spots you care most about — the Ironforge delivers about a tenth or more as much power as obscenely mispriced $100k+ full bed systems, and that’s comparing to the non-lousy ones. However, I think it’s finally time we start going after the full body system so we are working on building the Chroma Chamber, which will have a price point around $25k and include 30 individual Ironforges mounted within a double wide server rack enclosure, and with a large automotive radiator cooling fan at the top (we want to avoid cooking our customers…). We will ship these fully assembled to you. Here is a render of what we have in mind:

The Ironforges in the Chroma Chamber will each have the same LED boards, but we will drop driving power by 20%, which will increase radiative efficiency, and more power going into the light means less waste heat, which means we can use quieter fans so it doesn’t sound too much like an airplane taking off inside — this will be a serious industrial style system meant to deliver sufficient power for the entire body in 1-5 minutes, not a fluffy “relaxation” tool. This will be about 2.5x the power of a $120k Novothor bed. You will need a custom 220V outlet, or you can connect it to three separate outlets on three separate breakers with extension cords to bring in 5.4 kilowatts. If you want one of these (or know someone who might), and would be willing to put down a deposit in exchange for a discount, please reply to this email. We will not take deposits until we are confident we can get these all built, but gathering interest or feedback is critical to how quickly we can move forward on this project. Also, nothing is stopping you from just getting a bunch of Ironforges and making something like this yourself and some people have put 4 or so together on 1 stand. Get 12, and you are likely outperforming pretty much every whole body system.

ColdBed Pillows in Stock; Sleeping too hot problem solved!

I already introduced the ColdBed product in the prior issue of this newsletter, so I won’t spend much time beyond mentioning we finally have these in stock. Like the other products, it is simply energy physics: how many watts can get sucked into the pillow? Well, water has a huge heat capacity, so it will take forever to warm up, and the convection gives it excellent thermal conductivity so it can draw heat from your head and neck fast. You need both things, and this approach obviously is order of magnitudes better than anything else even to a sharp elementary school science student.

Sleeping hot is a major issue and most people don’t realize they have it since even what feels like “neutral” is likely hotter than ideal — if you are not sometimes on the verge of too cold, you are too hot, at least if you even remotely care about the performance, basic function, and longevity of the meat sack that is you. I’m finally back to shivering when I wake up and I love it. If you are subscribed to this newsletter you probably don’t need me to tell you all the benefits that come from cold exposure. I didn’t use the propane fireplace last night and it was a pleasant 40 degrees Fahrenheit or so when I woke up in my van (unfortunately, due to some logistical issues, I ended up in a location that is colder than I would have liked).

Since announcing the prototype, several other people have slept on it and said it’s amazing.

ColdBed Water Pillow

Pivoting TightLight Sex Toy to Aurora Wand Vaginal Red Light Therapy

You might remember from a couple newsletters ago when I mentioned a red + near-infrared dildo I was building. The main reasons I was working on this product is that it is incredibly funny. It has a Douglas Adam’s style of cosmic humor to it: guy develops world’s most advanced aerospace parts manufacturing capabilities, transforming the capabilities of their planet’s aviation and space machines — due to extreme levels of stupidity of this planet’s pre-difficulty-adjusted-proof-of-work-timestamped-hashchain post-shiny-rock Kafkaesque interregnum and disinterest among those with situational awareness and basic numeracy as to the basic economic calculus of non-equilibrium transitionary states, said dude is now a climber, mountain biker, ski bum who lives in a van and makes red light dildos to the pay the bills.

Surely this is peak comedy. It would be even funnier if it is wildly commercially successful, gets funded by “frontier tech” “serious” “hardware VC investors, and eventually gets acquired by some zombie ZIRP monstrosity of a pseudo-State entity corporation. Makes me think of Sarah Perry’s article on Venkatesh Rao’s blog (which has fallen off the past few years… we used to be mutuals on twitter and I actually met Venkat once for coffee. He probably thinks I have gone off the deep end, and our feelings our mutual, though the difference being I wouldn’t actually disagree with him, haha), On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke. Do I ruin the joke by telling you it is a joke? I don’t think so since obviously, anyone will say it doesn’t matter what I say, that it is ‘cope’, and that my revealed preferences in actually building and delivering the product are what matters.

To make the joke less on the nose, I am rebranding from TightLight, a sex toy for vaginal tightening to Aurora Wand, a vaginal red light therapy device for overall wellness to support a number of women’s health issues such as pelvic floor issues, excess painful tightness that interferes with sex (speculative application), fertility, pre-pregnancy, post-pregnancy, and pelvic floor strength for overall athleticism.

The TightLight is actually the most annoyingly complex piece of consumer hardware I have worked on to date because system integration is always the hard part and this thing has to integrate in a very particular way that presents a number of design and manufacturing constraints. It is of course far simpler than advanced materials & manufacturing, but I have a different set of expectations in that situation. There has been a ton of enthusiasm and positive feedback along the way, but alas, due to a number of setbacks in the prototype batches, we have a lot less user feedback than I would like. In a first batch, we had the LED lamps unscrewing themselves and not turning on (I hadn’t screwed them in particularly snugly since that caused the lamps to tilt askew in a way that looked odd, and the vibration from shipping unscrewed them), and since I had used marine-grade heat shrink tube to seal everything for safety as we had not yet removed the power supply from the device… to right at the wall plug where it should have been all along. Probably the sketchiest thing I’ve ever done so in retrospect, I am happy that pretty much no one actually used those.

Then the next prototype batch was built around a product I found that was marketed as an anal glass dildo so I figured it would be pretty robust, but after a colleague suggested getting nice boxes, we ended up having metal cases that caused that glass to break in shipping — to be clear, glass breaking upon impact because it has low toughness is completely different from breaking under pressure, especially uniformly applied pressure on a cylinder (glass is extremely strong when loaded in compression in this way). Still it had me a bit spooked, so I put the project aside for a couple months because I didn’t want to deal with getting custom glass manufactured. About 6 weeks ago, I decided I should see it through and reached out to a number of glass manufacturers that could meet our specs. I increased the wall thickness 2.5x up to 4mm, which is certainly overkill, but other than overall size, no reason not to just add a ridiculous safety factor. It is borosilicate, with a proper temper, some of them have been frosted to improve the aesthetics. Still a few weeks out from having the updated versions finalized and shipping (partly because we are also rebuilding the power supply with a custom switch to have a low, 30% power mode, since I prefer to overdo things than underdo them and customers were saying it could be a tad too much heat if used for a while), but you can still go ahead and order today:

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Ok, you made it through that? Great, couple more interesting topics to cover on some early stage concepts I’m working on. I sort of inserted the TightLight section to get some of the audience to stop reading as a troll — hah, suckers, you’re gonna miss some of the best parts I’ve been saving!

A Better Radiative Cooling Surface Concept than Water Walls

In the last issue, I mentioned the concept of direct cooling of walls with large quantities of water inspired by a walk in the woods by some large cool boulders, and that the whole notion of heating or cooling air to change the temperature of an indoor space given that air has 2000x less volumetric heat capacity than an indoor material like wood (similar problem with regular pillows) is absurd. You keep pumping in more and more hot/cold air and it takes forever for the physical building mass to change temperature. So your air temperature inevitably overcompensates and leads to discomfort.

Of course, huge quantities of water are rather impractical whether for production or prototypes, but I have come up with another approach after noticing an interest fact about human radiative heat transfer I didn’t mention last time: the human body radiates out 1000 watts continuously, which is an absurd amount and you are probably thinking that number must be off given net human losses are only around 100 watts. What happens is everything else also radiates heat out back at us, so most of that 1000 watts comes back. A neat thing about black body radiation is that the energy transfer rate is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, which means if you double the temperature, heat radiated jumps 16x. This is measured in Kelvin, with room temperature being about 293 K so it doesn’t get too crazy around human temperatures, but it means small-ish temperature changes can lead to fairly outsized shifts, and since we have that baseline 1000 watts, a small percentage change there is a 10x larger percentage change when looking at net loss.

Rather than water walls throughout a building, I can take a similar approach as with the Chroma Sky Portal, where the idea is that by applying light in a highly localized way in the desk environment, it is possible to achieve sufficient spectral intensity without an obscene quantity of LEDs and power consumption. I can build a roughly 1.5 by 2 meter cooling panel that will be positioned about arms length above my sleeping surface (perhaps with some sort of system to allow it to be pulled up vertically out of the way when not in use). Rather than water, I can use peltier coolers attached to an aluminum diffusion panel, and coated with black barbeque paint for high emissivity so that the radiative heat from my body is absorbed rather than reflected. The peltier coolers can also bring the surfaces down to much colder temperatures than could be easily achieved with water, and offer the simplicity of no plumbing, though at the expensive of some energy consumption at a 30-40% efficiency rate that is heating up the global room temperature (though this is likely more than offset by not needing as much AC).

I intend to build this for myself as soon as I am not van dwelling, but I do not intend to make a product out of it since making something this big and clunky that isn’t ugly to be consumer facing is not all that easy. If it can work at a bed, it can probably also work pretty well for a person sitting at a desk.

I looked into it, and sure enough, things like this have been done. There are some companies building radiative cooling walls for use in outdoor bus stops in hot cities such Singapore, and it seems they are rather effective!

The Ultimate Steak Searing and all-around Frying Pan

Throwing this in here because ruminant meat is the foundation of health and most people cook their meat, though I do enjoy raw beef from time to time (the Maillard reaction is nice, but I also enjoy the reaction of other people when I eat raw beef). I also saw a bunch of people on Bitcoin Twitter arguing about cast iron vs stainless steel pans and wondered if there would be a way to beat both.

This is a silicon carbide wafer, a disk, actually, as it is 5mm thick. Remember a few sections up when we were talking about power electronics and the semiconductor materials being used to improve the efficiency of power supplies that transform AC electricity to DC (or inverters, which do the reverse)? Yep, same sort of silicon carbide, and power supplies are the sort of thing this company usually manufactures this stuff for. SiC IGBT inverter modules are a core component of an electric vehicle and make up at least 7% (I saw other stats saying 10%, but cannot find those now) of the powertrain cost. It ain’t cheap. There’s a good reason no one makes SiC pans. My manufacturing costs exceed the pricing of almost every high end pan, and many high end pans are selling at something like a 10:1 price:cost ratio.

It turns out, electrical power is not the only thing silicon carbide is good at transferring. Works pretty well when it comes to moving heat as well. In particular, silicon carbide has excellent thermal diffusivity, about 3x higher than that of cast iron, and this tells us how quickly heat can redistribute through the material. Cast iron is the go to choice for home chefs due to total heat capacity that can build up over time, whereas a restaurants often will go with carbon steel since they have burners powerful enough to keep the pans hot. The problem with cast iron’s low thermal diffusivity is that as soon as the cool steak touches the pan’s surface, your temperature there shoots down, and there is significant lag until it re-warms. My hypothesis is that people overcompensate for this steep temperature drop off by overheating the pan beyond the optimal Maillard reaction zone, resulting in a process where first the pan is too hot, burning the steak, and then it is promptly too cold, leading to an insufficient sear, which may be compensated for by overcooking. The goal is to have a steady temperature by using silicon carbide, though of course, there are non-linear process in the steak as well, including evaporation, so targeting a more uniform heat flux might not be the true optimal, but I expect it to be a substantial improvement.

Some other benefits of SiC is that the surface energy is much lower than something like stainless steel so it is inherently less stick without a possibly toxic, low durability coating (everything claiming to be a “ceramic” pan is pretty much a lie, they are use a certain class of polymer coating with silicon oxide bonds that is a bit ceramic-esque, but not really). Stainless steel also has even worse thermal diffusivity than cast iron, with about 3x lower thermal conductivity, and even an all-clad pans top and bottom layers acts like massive insulators. Another aspect of the polish is the Leidenfrost effect — if you fry an egg on this, you will get a thin vapor layer that will prevent sticking that a rougher surface would puncture. This is similar to stainless steel where you need the pan to be hot first to get an egg not to stick, but steel will immediately gouge, puncturing the vapor layer, whereas there is quite likely nothing in your kitchen that will scratch silicon carbide short of a diamond ring if you have one.

We have a handful of silicon carbide disks currently en route to a cast iron company where we will attempt to cast these into iron, and then machine it down since we don’t want to much cast iron mass (SiC holds more heat per pound). Making the entire pan out of SiC would have cost us something like $20k, so we are taking this approach instead. There are still some uncertainties as to what final costs will be in production, but it’s looking like we will be pricing these in the $600-900 range. No website or brand name yet, but if you want to buy one of the prototypes, please reply and let me know.

Bonus: this pan will also be far more effective when it comes to stopping small caliber bullets. Hopefully, you never have to use that feature.

Your choices are simple: consume, and decrease bitcoin’s float, for I will hodl, or accept the inferiority of your pan to mine. You have to live with one of those choices. This is the law of the excluded middle. The free markets are coming, the real free markets, the ones you have never experienced or probably even properly attempted to fathom, and you probably aren’t ready. I am not ready either.

Cheers!

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If you don't want to read through this lengthy spiel, you can just check out the product and preorder at coldbed.com. Tight Lights are also now available for pre-order as we work on finalizing our first production batch at TheTightLight.com. Latest batch of Ironforges and D-Lights is only a week or two out, and as always, you can purchase those and other Chroma products at getchroma.co.

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Conceptual background on hot/cold exposure

Chroma has its origins in solving the problems related to catastrophic health and human performance problems that have arisen in the past ten thousand years ever since we shifted from an outdoor nomadic lifestyle to an indoor lifestyle filled with articial biological signals. The most obvious problem was that of artificial light, which we were able to mostly solve with the dark red lens of the Carbonshade glasses. We then went on to deconstruct the various spectral components of sunlight and develop products to effectively deliver these as a supplement to real sunlight and to mitigate the effects of living inside toxic buildings, or high latitudes.

However, the impact of sunlight between day and night and between seasons goes well beyond the biochemical process that are initiated by photons. Photons also carry energy with them, which dissipates as heat. During the day, and when the Sun hits directly, it is warmer. When it is night time, or the angle of the Sun is more shallow (winter) it becomes much colder. It turns out that both extremes are critical for heat, and the mix of indoor heating and AC is similar to the problem of it being too dark indoors during the day and then far too bright at night.

If you subscribe to this newsletter you probably are at least vaguely familiar with the health and performance benefits of heat exposure and cold exposure. Building tolerance to heat involves the release of heat shock proteins and increase in blood plasma volume, while cold exposure has numerous metabolic benefits, including upregulation of brown fat, enabling the body to more effectively metabolize fat. I speculate that cold exposure has a similar effect as aerobic exercise due upregulating the AMPK-pathway and it may help shift the respiratory coefficient (measure of the ratio of fat oxidation to glucose oxidation), a key metric in fat adaption that is of interest to endurance athletes and those interested in higher fat ways of eating such as keto or carnivory.

Sidenote: there are quite a few people who become interested in heat exposure as well as the sort of near-infrared/red light therapy LED products that we make, and then they get rather confused about which is which, resulting in the purchase of what we consider a rather foolish system: the "infrared sauna", which does a very poor job of both functions. These are low cost saunas, which seem like a great deal until you realize they don't get as hot as the standard type. It seems like a bunch of useful light, but the broad spectrum has nothing to do with the red and near-infrared light from narrowband LEDs -- you might be thinking, but the sun is not an LED, how can you say a narrowband output is superior to the sun's broad spectrum!

Good question, but the reason white light is considered "5600 K" is because 5600 Kelvin (9620 degrees Fhrenheit) is the temperature an object must be at to produce that spectrum from blackbody radiation, and broad spectrum infrared lights do not have a high concentration of the far red (~660nm) and near-infrared (~800-900nm) near-infrared light that is biologically active as demonstrated not just indirectly, but also via absorption spectra of the cytochrome c-oxidase within the mitochondria itself so we REALLY know that that is the range in which to focus.

Regardless, many authors have written about the various chronic benefits in depth so I will not waste more time reiterating on that. We are more concerned here with the acute effects of heat and cold as they pertain to circadian rhythms and the ability to rest soundly during sleep, and we will consider the long term effects separate from the improved sleep itself just a bonus. When considering the factors that allow for good sleep, we can briefly summarize them as darkness, absence of excess digestion activity (though carbs can have a sedative effect and transitioning to low carb can initially lead to some restlessness), and a cold environment. It is hard to say definitively how these rank because there is no common unit. You cannot say how many pounds of beef equals N number of blue light photons delivered to the eyes at a certain rate, nor can either of these directly match up to an influx of heat.

Instead, I would say it makes sense to consider all of them individually and think about the idea of marginal return. If you already wear Uvex orange glasses every night, will you really get all that much of a benefit switching to Carbonshades? -- probably not -- and if you wear Uvex glasses at neat, but eat dinner at 10 pm or a bunch of late night snacks, dropping those will certainly be orders of magnitude more impactful. The various Chroma products allow to optimize your daytime and nighttime light exposure for healthy sleep patterns, and when you eat is on you, but solving for temperature is by far the hardest problem because of just how energy intensive it is.

Take a look at the thermal image of a house at night.

This house is a massive thermal battery. During the day it soaks up heat from sunlight and at night, it radiates this heat back out at you. It's not too dissimilar from how we directly or indirectly collect photons from the Sun and turn them into energy sources we use to emit light indoors at night. Except with this radiative heat there's no off switch. There are three categories of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation, and unfortunately, this last one seems to be largely neglected.

An air conditioning system cools down air and then convectively and conductively cools down the rest of the house. The only problem with this is that air has extremely low density compared to your house an the objects in it. The heat capacity of air is comparable to that of your house on a mass basis, but a cubic meter of air only has about 2.5 pounds of mass. So you're going to have to cool that air over and over again before it puts a dent in the house, all the while, the radiation is hitting your body. This is partly why a house that is heated to 68 F will feel much colder in the winter than one that is cooled to 68 F in the summer.

If you haven't picked up by now, we need to get cold at night to optimize our sleep and almost no one is getting cold enough, especially given that you can make your body adapt to feel comfortable at cooler temperatures. Take whatever environment would be so cold it would disrupt your sleep, and then dial it back a notch -- that's the ideal setting, and one that few get to enjoy. I was fortunate enough to encounter such a setting while I was doing the van life, and this was what helped me understand just how critical temperature is. A van weighs a whole lot less than a house. Mine had the advantage of being poorly insulated, and finally, the steel structure is an excellent conductor of heat so it can quickly fall close to the outdoor temperature even without air flow (in comparison, you can have tons of ventilation in a house that remains at a much higher than outdoor temperature throughout the night).

Consider a natural outdoor environment: it would be a lot closer to the steel van. Living in a cave or a hut, you are directly exposed to massive heat sinks. I was walking in the pacific northwest the other day on a rather hot day and as soon as I entered the cover of forest, I immediately felt far cooler. But the greatest feeling was as I climbed down between two large granite boulders. Standing there observing the texture of the rock, I felt the heat being surreally sucked out of my body and drawn into the cool rock. Houses do not usually achieve these sorts of effects. Of course, the simple solution, conceptually speaking, would be to add stupendous amounts of concrete to the construction of a house so it can act like a cave, but that gets expensive. An alternate solution would be to fill the walls of a house with water, and I mean a lot of water.

I want several inches of water thickness throughout the walls, not some tiny tubes and heat spreaders. Stage 2: connect this massive thermal battery / damper to an underground reservoir, which will stay perfectly cold throughout the day, allowing you to quickly get your house as cold as you want. Stage 3: connect a parallel system to a set of thin wall tanks that absorb sunlight throughout the day for passive heating since you don't want only cooling. Bonus: have your hot system connected to a liquid cooling system for some bitcoin miners.

Our heat sinking solutions for better sleep

Ok, we are going off on a somewhat irrelevant tangent since obviously I am not in the business of building sci-fi houses and no one else is going to give this a stab anytime so soon. So let's look at the interim solutions I'm building. I actually had this idea a while ago and never got around to building it in part because living in a van I already had such a good solution. But this summer I've been living in one of those lousy normie buildings and with the heat waves looming, I was on the clock to get a prototype for myself built. In summary, it is simply a large passive heat sink for the entire body that rests on the bed as a mattress topper, and the passivity is key as compared to other products that are readily available. Take a gander:

This pad is filled with a thick, solid layer of water -- except it doesn't feel like you are lying on a thin water bed -- instead, there is an interior gel (elastomer) grid, which provides almost all of the mechanical support for your body, and conforms to your mattress underneath. This first one I built for testing purposes was about 3 cm thick.

In comparison, the typical products on the market use thin tubes through which water is flowing that connects to a module that sits on the floor next to your bed. Some of these systems only work with WiFi, and they all have pumps and fans, which are rather quiet, but represent more potential failure modes, whereas the only thing that can go wrong with a passive system is if you stab it with something sharp and rupture the outer layer. Based on reviews and talking to a number of people, it seems that the higher end versions of these have enough cooling power for the majority of people with those that want it colder being a small minority, especially given that those that are unhappy about the cooling power we can expect to be overrepresented as they would be more vocal than a content customer. The tubes however are something that people seem to begrudgingly accept as they are almost universally found to be stiff and uncomfortable.

Now, I actually did get something in evaluating this that was dead wrong, and I hate to admit it, but it is a bit embarrasing. When estimating the cooling power of the thermoelectric peltier coolers used in the modules for the systems on the market, I was looking at efficiency metrics based on turning a heat gradient into electricity (~5% efficient) rather than the other way around. Oops. Anyway, the real coefficient of performance / efficiency is more like 25-30%, which explains why the pad I made, even when filled with about an inch of water, was only mildly cool by the time I awoke from heat saturation. Though to by fair, thus far I have only had the chance to use the pad during a heat wave with indoor temperature that were on the warm side in the 70s, or even low 80s during the peak of a heat wave. I can at least confidently say it would have been far worse without this pad. One thing I can't comment on is how pleasant people will find it atop a soft mattress since the mattress I tested this on was extremely firm.

Nonetheless, the pad I was using was also a bit on the narrow side. So doubling the thickness and increasing the width from 0.9m to 1.2m would put it on par with one of those EightSleep or ChiliPad Docker Pro pads over the course of a night (considering the correct efficiency numbers), and in fact could end up being too cold (I recall reading that classic water beds were capable of inducing hypothermia if their heaters were not running). I suspect there is a happy medium that makes this approach work, and if it is too cold, the pad can simply be underfilled or used with a blanket on top. The challenge becomes that with increasing thickness, the surface begins to acquire the feel of the gel grid (similar to a Purple mattress) and less of the feel of the underlying mattress, which could potentially defeat the entire purpose of shifting away from tubes to increase comfort. Regardless, I think more experimentation is necessary.

After the slight letdown with the pad, I realized the exact same approach could be applied to construct a pillow, and unlike a mattress pad, a pillow is inherently much thicker so the amount of cooling you get per square inch of contact area is way higher. The "state of the art" is also rather lacking in this area to a more extreme degree since there are exactly zero serious cooling pillows on the market today. There are pillows with thin gel pads, or holes for air, but as we discussed with the HVAC, air doesn't do much and your cooling is proportional to mass if its passive. Water is not only extremely heavy, it also has a particular high specific heat (the amount of energy to raise a certain mass of said substance by a certain temperature). The other nice thing about a pillow is you don't have to worry about compatibility with mattress in terms of comfort, and it's way easier to setup since you can carry it to your bed (though petite women may struggle with this) rather than having to fill up at the bed. It's a smaller, lower cost product, certainly much lower than a ChiliPad or an EightSleep.

Plus, the head and neck can dump a massive amount of heat. Of course, if you are standing naked in chilled air, your head and neck dissipate heat proportionally to their area for the most part, but the metrics of "40% heat loss from head" actually are valid if the entire body is well insulated, which is effectively the case when you are lying in a normal bed with your head on a pillow filled with water. Plus, if you are a serious athlete or biohacker and are really looking for peak performance, you can leave the pillow in a fridge during the day for maximal cooling power. I'm really excited to get some pillow samples made and decided to open up the sample production batch with a round of pre-orders. Given that I'm working with the same manufacturer to as the pad to build this, I expect we can get this delivered in 6-8 weeks.

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In other news, we are going forward with a production batch of Tight Lights using extremely thick, tough borosilicate glass for the outer cylinder. So get your pre-orders in for those as well.

Closing comments

And as always, every order helps keep us alive since this is a side project for me to pay the bills as I try to do other things. (Though someone recently joined who knows marketing and might actually get this to scale -- check out the Chroma instagram, can you tell when he joined? haha) Previously it was commercializing the strongest materials in the universe, now it is accelerating the downfall of the fiat institutions that fail to deliver basic health solutions and instead have led humanity to the worst health conditions in all of human history. People who are professionals in healthcare that myopically focus on narrow metrics while oblivious to what is happening at a macro scale... well, it is now abundantly clear that these people are seriously mentally ill. There will no doubt be interesting working for psycho-historians in the decades to come.

Anyway, the specific thing I am working on to accelerate the transition is building tools that make it easier to use (use as in spend) bitcoin in your day to day life, while ending up with more bitcoin. A requirement of such a platform is we are building out the world's lowest fee bitcoin-only exchange, and to further attract people (since I know how to get simple hardware built as you know from Chroma) we are going to be running a very low margin bitcoin hardware store that members of our exchange have exclusive access to. If you want to know more about that check out the Caliber website and consider signing up to the wait list.

You can also follow Caliber on Twitter (Chroma is on twitter too), and I also have another newsletter focused on my broader thoughts on bitcoin, technology, and civilization you can check out: Astigmatic.

Cheers!

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We finally solved the reliability issue we were having in some of those so all of these now have a chamfered round edge, which prevents cable damage that was causing fans to stop working. New batch also has a gorgeous red anodization on the aluminum heat sinks.

We also tried making a new near-infrared light product over the past couple months: a near-infrared + deep red light dildo for women. The idea was spurred after a customer asked us about an anal device in relation to concerns about prostate health. It turns out there is some rather promising research in this area. Just last year a paper was published reviewing the literature around photoimmunotherapy (PIT) for cancer treatments, which differs from the photodynamic therapy you may be familiar with (which is itself different from the photobiomodulation that light used by itself provides). Near infrared photoimmunotherapy for cancers: A translational perspective

PIT works by combining light with a dye that is injected into the body, designed to bind to the cancer cells and respond to the light such that the cancer cell is ruptured in a way that triggers an immune response. This is fundamentally different from the majority of other cancer treatments.

Regardless, we are not working on medical devices at Chroma, just wellness devices so we came up with The Tight Light. Check out the website to sign up to the Tight Light mailing list. We sent out some prototypes and are ready to move forward with a small production batch once we get enough interest. Retail price will be $220 and the initial batch will be $150 so let us know if you want one . As with our other products, we are again massively undercutting the medical establishment, since we will be selling a product for a couple of hundred dollars that can be used thousands of times, instead of having to pay a couple thousand dollars for ten sessions!

Tight Light Website

Want to buy the Chroma company?

With the large dip in the price of bitcoin, I’m looking to sell anything I can, including the Chroma company. It’s a small DTC e-commerce company, with poorly run marketing and no ads so there is a ton of uside for anyone that wants to scale it. Takes a fairly small amount of time to manage now. Reply to this email if you’re interested or pass this along to anyone you know who might be interested.

Stay healthy, friends.

• Sky Portals

• Carbonshade glasses

• Near-IR Flashlights

• Ironforge 2.0 (new version, limited supply)

• D-Light 2.0 (new version, limited supply)

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Other deets in this thread 👇

Click on a tweet to see the rest of the thread on Twitter since we can’t fit the entire thing in this email, or

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If you have been re-directed here from carbonshade.com or getchroma.co, it is because Shopify has been freezing our accounts and creating a poor customer experience so we will be switching to a more sovereign e-commerce platform that we can control (eventually).

In the meantime, the stores will stay closed. Feel free to look for the newsletter archives to find out more about sunlight, health, circadian rhythms and so on.

Best,

Michael (Founder of Carbonshade and Chroma)

P.S. If you want the store re-opened faster, share these posts with people who might subscribe so I know there is interest in the products we built!

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Brief history of Carbonshade & Chroma

Carbonshade was my original foray into “biohacking” when I started building it late 2015 and then launched it on Kickstarter early 2016. Our key innovation was the use of dark red lenses that previously did not exist outside of laser safety glasses due to the enhanced aesthetics of the color red over the color orange, despite the fact that a dark orange with the right transmission spectrum (e.g. the one Uvex offers) is about as effective. Since building out the initial product, Carbonshade has almost always been at most a side project for me due to a combination of the small market, and it not making sense for me to figure out the Facebook/Instagram ads game, especially since I was focused on a startup developing a new manufacturing process for very lightweight aerospace parts, which is a massive market.

In 2019, after I had left this aerospace startup and was on a bit of a sabbatical (mountain biking and rock climbing while living out of a van), a friend reached out about working on Carbonshade to grow the brand, and I agreed to work with him on it, along with a mutual acquaintance. I had already been working on various personal visible lighting systems for years at that point, and had also built myself a personal near-infrared device, but it was around that time I realized other people were also interested in these systems that were rather complimentary to the glasses at Carbonshade (glasses eliminate the harmful artificial light from our electronics, whereas additive lighting systems can restore components of sunlight that we are missing by living indoors throughout the day).

Alas, our visions for Carbonshade differed. Where I was more ambitious and wanted to build a variety of products related to lighting to include alongside the glasses, they wanted to take a more tepid approach. So we ended up going different ways and I started working on Chroma to build all the new products I envisioned, and customers loved them. Unfortunately, with startups, it is often easier to overshoot and miss, rather than having a small goal that does not leave room for error, and predictably, both of the guys that were working on Carbonshade abandoned the project, which has led to some unfortunate service disruptions. Seeing that Carbonshade was basically in stasis and orders were barely being fulfilled, I acquired 100% of the shares so that I could re-integrate the two diverging brands. [For anyone who has an order pending now, please note that we specified on the website that these are backorders and both Chroma & Carbonshade orders will be shipping early September (except for Ironforge and D-Light).]

For Carbonshade customers, here is a quick rundown of the (mostly LED) products we developed with Chroma.

1. Sky Portal: A bright sky blue light to be used at a desk. This is sort of an exact opposite of the Carbonshade glasses. Importantly, 480nm cyan blue LEDs are used rather than 440 nm dark blue LEDs that are the cause of health concerns. Cyan light has extremely high melanopic lux, which means the stimulatory effect is equivalent to that of a much brighter white light (almost all white LEDs are also loaded with this sub-450nm harsh, dark blue, and they have a dip in the cyan range exactly where you want light, which is known in the LED industry as the cyan gap!). Each Sky Portal comes with a 2nd LED channel that can be either near-infrared, or a very high fidelity, violet phosphor pump white LED that we custom tuned to further fill in the cyan gap. Read more: #8 The Complete Solution to Human Health in the Modern World

1. Chroma Nightshades: A variation of the original Carbonshade glasses that lets in a bit of violet light, making it easier to navigate your environment at night, as well as making it easier to see colors in mobile apps or watch movies without everything being monochrome. These aren’t a replacement for Carbonshades since even though they work well, they don’t get you that 99.8% absorption of light in the melanopic range. Read more

1. Ironforge/Redforge: A compact, very high power, hand-held near-infrared or deep red light. I built this originally to accelerate healing of a pulley injury in my finger from rock climbing. This stuff has been extensively studied and has been shown to be effective for a wide variety of applications including pain, bone density, injury healing time, neurodegenerative diseases, mental health, skin appearance, balding, etc. Other products in this space are built almost exclusively by non-engineers who have trouble understanding something as simple as the power consumption of a device in watts and the efficiency of a system, which is something a 10-year-old, or a bright 6-year-old should have no problem understanding. A small, power dense device can be used like a large device, but the reverse is not true. Read more: #9 How does high power density red light therapy work? or #6 The Truth about Joovv Red Light Therapy.

1. Near-IR flashlight: A low power, battery-powered near-infrared device with more power than “lasers” sold for 3-20x the price.

1. D-Light: the first ever consumer product with UVB LEDs, which is the portion of the UV spectrum that leads to vitamin D synthesis.

   

…and the Carbonshade glasses: a non-high-gamut version of the Nightshades that blocks more light with a dark red instead of a pinkish lens.

Ironforge 2.0 and D-Light 2.0

We streamlined the Ironforge/Redforge series with a single product that is 80% 850nm near-infrared and 20% 670nm deep red. This enables the focus on deep tissue, while still offering the skin benefits of deep red in a single device. Additionally, instead of having multiple power levels, we put as much power as is practical into a single device (works out to a bit more than the white series since we are not doing as much undervolting as in the black series, which requires a ridiculous number of diodes, driving up production costs). While every other brand has been raising prices due to the massive 30% inflation in the past year, we decided to slash prices instead with the hopes that this will lead to more word-of-mouth sales since we don’t run ads.

A good way to use the Ironforge if you want more power is to get 5 or 20 of them and zip tie them to a vertical poll or wooden frame. With 12 units, you match the power of a Novothor at less than a tenth of the price. According to one of our customers, Jeff Bezos has a Novothor in every home he owns. So get yourself 13, and you’ll have a higher power system than what a centibillionaire owns. If you are reading this, there exists a dimension by which your wealth exceeds that of most billionaires who clearly neglect their health as is readily apparent at a glance (Bill Gates comes to mind).

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With the D-Light, we finally found a supplier for the ideal wavelength of UVB (297-298 nm peak), as opposed to the previous LED we used at 290 nm. These narrowband wavelengths have been shown to lead to more vitamin D synthesis per DNA damage. We discontinued the original version after I noticed some hyperpigmentation in my skin after using it and all customers of that product were advised and given the option to return the device. The hyperpigmentation spots might have also been due to the UVA, which was included at a lower ratio than what would be found in sunlight, and the new version will have only about half as much UVA since this is not critical to vitamin D synthesis. UVA leads to nitric oxide synthesis, but near-infrared light does that as well so this seems less critical. Since UV is absorbed without penetrating very deeply, we are shifting the wavelengths used alongside the UV to include more visible light, along with some shorter wavelength near-IR (mix of 630, 670, 780, and 850). The goal of including these lights is to reduce the damage that the UV causes since it is ionizing radiation. …lots of research backing this up. Too much to list here so scroll to bottom.

Eventually, we would like to validate the superiority of this device from a safety perspective to fluorescent, broad spectrum 311 nm lamps such as those used in the Sperti lamp as well as the superiority of this device to sunlight itself. This could be observed by the levels of cyclobutan pyrimidine dimers with respect to vitamin D level elevation since this is a fairly good measure of DNA damage. Some other ways to reduce the damage of UV is simply being outside all day instead of merely solar noon since there is more red and near-IR light in the morning and later in the afternoon — or you can use the Ironforge every morning before you head out into the sunlight.

We only have a single D-Light product now, whereas previously there were two power levels. The current version has about 70% more UVB power than the higher power original version, yet the price is only around 40% of the original. We can’t bring the price all the way down to the same levels of the Ironforge since UVB LEDs are actually insanely expensive — more than an order of magnitude higher cost per diode, along with more than an order of magnitude lower radiant efficiency — this likely why you have never seen a consumer device with them (as an aside, this is also why far-UVC is not a feasible solution for preventing transmission of respiratory diseases… the economics are even worse at those wavelengths).

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Future plans for Carbonshade and Chroma

If you want a product from either store, I’d suggest getting them sooner rather than later, especially for the Ironforge and D-Light — we are switching to a batch model of production so we are not sitting on inventory, which is fairly costly. The batch model enables us to lower our prices, and you might notice we have been gradually lowering the prices on the Sky Portals as well. We will stop taking order for the next batch of Ironforges and D-Lights in the next couple weeks so that we do not delay beginning production, and we will not immmediately open a new batch.

Instead, we will be re-building the storefront to combine Chroma and Carbonshade into a website where we will only accept payments in bitcoin, which will eliminate the fees from the legacy financial infrastructure, allowing us to pass those savings onto you. I appreciate all my customers, so I would like to show my gratitude by sharing with you a glimpse of what the world will look like in the coming years. In the coming months, if you want to purchase a product from us, you will only be able to do so with bitcoin — in the years to come, if you want to buy anything from anyone, you will only be able to use bitcoin. You will find that merchants do not wish to receive a money that is easily counterfeit by governments and private banks that are able to inflate the supply of money and make the dollar worthless. Bitcoin is the only thing that can preserve its value long term since the supply is capped.

The problems that exist in the health system, where we are coercively scammed into insurance products only to receive services from entities among which there is a near total absence of competitive forces driving improvements, is entirely rooted in the problems with the money. I might elaborate on this point further in this newsletter, but for now, simply understand that Bitcoin fixes this. There is nothing unfathomably hard about any of the products I have built. LEDs are not rocket science. Not even close. The problems relate to incentives and psychology and in a sound world, the products of Carbonshade and Chroma would be so obvious everyone would use them, there would be significant competition, and the prices would be lower. So I will aspriationally lower the prices in anticipation of the world to come over time, a deflationary world. Until the new website is setup, anyone who wants to buy in bitcoin can message me directly and get a bit of a discount.

Carbonshade

Chroma

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Citations

(all the notes/links I have under UV in Roam, sorry it’s a bit messy)

• Near IR reducing UV damage -- how much relates to DNA, which shorter wavelengths pose more risk toward

• https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(15)40236-2/fulltext

• https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijmm/5/3/247

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S186386780700580X

• http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/2896/

• https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2013/pp/c2pp25152c

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1562/2006-04-27-IR-884

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0625.2005.00397.x

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/lsm.20615

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/exd.12968

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2011.01031.x

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1011134416305334

• https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2018/pp/c8pp00118a

• https://www.byonik.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/low-level_laser_irradiation_protects_the_chick_emb.pdf

• #UV narrowband uv light less damaging, can then combine with red and near ir https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170913193101.htm

  • vitamin d helps with covid. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT01102374?term=high+dose+vitamin+k&draw=2&rank=9&view=results

  • The paper points to a mechanism that allows you to measure UV damage via cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers formation and in fact, such a study was done in rats. That means it could also be measured in humans to prove that keto/carnivory enable lower levels. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1011134413001243?via%3Dihub

  • Of course it can be measured and it has, decades ago in fact re fish oil. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7561154

  • Cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, a typical UVB-induced DNA damage, were found to be produced in significant yield also in whole human skin exposed to UVA through a mechanism different from that triggered by UVB https://www.pnas.org/content/103/37/13765.short

  • https://sci-hub.tw/http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/40/2/719.short LED for D3

  • whereby CPDs account for 80% of all UV-B-induced DNA mutations https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56591-9

  • https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/5/2/23

• Relevant papers, need to find alternate URLs to Sci-hub https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12502793/

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8022889/

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9523529/

• Chemistry justification for 360 = much better than broadband. In fact, should make a tanning bed out of this https://sci-hub.tw/https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp961692+

• Peak RNOS? https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.109.207019

• Study to determine most effective UV for NO https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00418-020-01858-w

• UVB spectral power data https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK401584/#

• https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/53/jresv53n2p113_A1b.pdf

• UVB bracelet https://open.bu.edu/bitstream/handle/2144/13952/Ravichandran_bu_0017N_11483_web.pdf?sequence=10&isAllowed=y

• UVB vitD spec http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/40/1/565.short

• another paper

• http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/40/2/719.short

• What is the actual action spectrum??

Now, for those who might not be aware, Wittgenstein’s ruler is the idea that if you take a ruler to measure the length of a table, but your ruler is inaccurate then the attempt to measure the table will not work. Your ruler will return an incorrect number — but let’s say you know that it’s incorrect (maybe you have a very sturdy stone table with a length you know from hundreds of prior measurements that have been validated umpteen different ways). Then the measure given by the ruler is actually a measure of its own inaccuracy. You have used the table to measure the ruler. The greater precision with which you know the size of your table, the smaller the error in the ruler you can pick up, and if the ruler is extremely inaccurate (e.g. it says that your dining table is 6 miles long rather than 6 ft) just eyeballing the length of the table would instantly tell you the ruler is very far off — you wouldn’t know that is exactly 5,280x off, but you’d be extremely confident saying it is somewhere between 1,000x and 10,000x off.

So if you want to understand the world, turn yourself into a table, insert yourself in the world, and observe the attempts the world makes to measure you. Do not take information at face value. The signal there is noisy. At least that is my approach — the view that most inputs must be sanitized to prevent rogue thought execution.

Setting a Least Upper Bound to the “Elite’s” Intellectual Capacity

Back to having solved the pandemic and how simple it is: first, let’s consider the requirement for a pandemic to continue — it’s an R_0 value greater than 1. That is how growth is defined. It means for every infected individual there will be greater than 1 additional infected individual infected by the time they recover or die. So we can define a solution to the pandemic as anything that brings R_0 below 1. We can add the observation that out of any number of possible diseases that could become pandemic (most of them far more dangerous than coronaviruses e.g. influenza, which has the added downside of evolving faster — COVID only appears to be evolving very quickly because the scale at which the virus is operating means it is going through more iterations per unit time).

Of course, R_0 is not a property of a virus, nor is it a constant at any time, but an average of spread within some field of observation over some amount of time. So to call something a general solution we should expect that it allows us to dramatically reduce R_0 well below 1 such that with some distribution of viruses, we can eliminate a large portion of the ones that would cause pandemics from doing so (and even for the ones that are so virulent R_0 would not drop below 1, that might be the shift between tens of percents of the population dying and what we have now, which is a miniscule fraction of that).

So what impacts R_0? There are some inherent biological underpinnings, but once those are normalized, it is based on interactions and movements of individuals and the environments in which these interactions occur. We know of course that viruses do not jump across wide open oceans and they do not reach people that are isolated. It is in modern dwellings that humans currently interface and this is where almost all transmission occurs. Interestingly, we are back to the modern building posing a health threat to humans — before it was lack of sunlight, and now it is disease transmission.

Among the various mechanisms by which a virus can transmit, it turns out that for SARS-CoV-2, airborne transmission is the primary one. I’ll spare you the details since this is dragging on a bit, but if you want to learn more you can scroll through the Reflow Labs tweet history. Anyway, scientists explained this by the hundreds, including the historical meta-science of how public health persons fail to recognize airborne transmission and how we have plenty of models to understand what was going on. With that information, it is now public knowledge (unevenly distributed, in fact, it was mostly known all the way back in March) that reducing airborne transmission substantially would eliminate this pandemic, and those that are likely to come over the next decade. This airborne transmission has virtually no risk outdoors, but spreads rapidly indoors where aerosols accumulate in the air.

This can be solved with HEPA purifiers or ventilating with outdoor air. Ventilation is problematic since it makes most buildings unpleasantly hot, cold, or both so HEPA is the default — alas, it is costly to have sufficient HEPA purification. This is where my observation comes in: if you don’t have to push air through a dense filter, you can move air more quickly, which means you can move a lot more air. A UVC light with a reflective chamber can then inactivate the virus instead. This means for a fixed amount of air exchange, you need fewer machines, fewer filters, a lot less electricity, a lot less noise, and all around lower costs. Pretty f****** simple, right? I should have had 1000 competitors before I even started, but even to this day, there are none. There are idiots that combine HEPA filters with UVC, which does absolutely nothing since the entire point is to remove the HEPA filter. Moreover, having something in HVAC ducts is a subpar option since it does not localize the clean air flow where it is most needed, including right where people are (personalized ventilation).

So where did people go wrong:

1. Venture Capitalists: their level of scientific thinking is below that of a smart middle school kid. They do not understand that technology is tied to energy so the idea of something with a lower energy cost did not compute to them. Additionally, they struggled to understand the simple concept of radiated power coming from a lightbulb and passing through air and how the levels of power match the level of powers. Venture capitalists these days are mostly a combination of failed/mediocre entrepreneurs and ivy-league people that have never even attempted to build anything. They are so oblivious to how companies and products work, they do not even understand the difference between a hard or an easy hardware product to build — that they have zero ability to think into the future gives us some understanding of what happens — they take a small amount of revenue and consider it meaningful when in fact, a few million in revenue has zero inherent information. People buy lousy products that don’t scale all the time.
   
   This was the final nail in the coffin of the maybe VCs aren’t all idiots lingering, intrusive thought. I had previously built what we can summarize as the strongest materials in the universe, and VCs failed to fund those, but I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt by thinking it was just advanced technologies and aerospace they struggled with because those things are genuinely hard to understand. I grew up in Palo Alto and used to admire VCs, but this admiration was without evidence.

2. Corporate/Finance Executives: I only reached out to a small set of people, but enough to identify a major systemic problem that I simply did not want to deal with — executives have limited incentive to actually solve problems because they are hesitant as to whether the steps they take will be acceptable to governments, which drives them to signaling via what is being called hygiene theater. Given this reality, they also do not put together teams of competent people to address this problem. If you think about a lot of large corporations in the food/restaurant industry this is not all that surprising since they don’t have a need for engineers. I found myself talking to a non-engineer responsible for over 7000 eateries worldwide who did not understand to concept of power over some unit area over some amount of time, and how to compare that to well-established research values for viral inactivation of coronavirus, nor could he understand the concept that the inactivation energies did not arise from God as if chosen by a random number generator, but in fact fell on a narrow spectrum across multiple classes of virions such as influenzas, but I digress. This is the person the COO of this private equity behemoth had handed me off to.

3. Journalists: This group of course has no skin in the game. They make their ad dollars regardless of whether what they say is true or false. Their arrogance toward average people is astounding given that they completely failed to convey the information needed to end the pandemic. Someone from CNBC Advancements actually wanted to feature Reflow Labs, but only once it had some momentum, but that goes back to the institutional failures of finance, and the financialized base of customers.
   
   A common phrase among journalists and the healthcare industrial complex is “vaccine hesitancy”, which is ironic because the hesitancy obviously arises from the gross incompetence at every level. There is the lingering question of how can these people be trusted to figure out something that is complex/advanced such as a vaccine, when they can’t even figure out something as simple as COVID being airborne and the idea that you need more air flow to fix it? (though vaccines are a local optimum that are better than not having vaccines given the reality of societies ineptitude — unlike them, I accept the reality of what we’re dealing with whereas they will imagine a hypothetical world such as one where everyone wears a mask)

4. Entreprenuers: There are various people selling products, but they face something beyond merely not having an intelligent world to sell into. Their valuation is detached from what they actually do and is maybe 90% just a reflexive mimetic schelling point, except it’s usually not a schelling point because there are many that are doing the exact same thing.

5. Governments: These entities simply have very high latency and rely on other institutions not failing catastrophically as they did.

6. Philanthropists: Same problem as Governments. They have a lousy information funnel. I realized that it would make sense to run Reflow Labs as a non-profit focused on selling goods since collapsing margins could allow it to scale faster (one might wonder why this never happens), but emailing as many people as I could on the Giving Pledge, I found that none of them were interested. I find it odd that no billionaire was interested in making ending pandemics their legacy, but it likely comes down to fear since even billionaires are subject to the non-ergodicity that threatens their goals so they typically pursue easy goals.

All of this does not even consider that the Ironforge product would probably cure / eliminate severe cases of COVID given the results of this pilot study. That goes purely into health-industrial-complex territory so I didn’t even bother making much of an effort to have that go anywhere. Abstract from the study: A 57-Year-Old African American Man with Severe COVID-19 Pneumonia Who Responded to Supportive Photobiomodulation Therapy (PBMT): First Use of PBMT in COVID-19 

A 57-year-old African American man with severe COVID-19 received 4 once-daily PBMT sessions by a laser scanner with pulsed 808 nm and super-pulsed 905 nm modes for 28 min. The patient was evaluated before and after treatment via radiological assessment of lung edema (RALE) by CXR, pulmonary severity indices, blood tests, oxygen requirements, and patient questionnaires. Oxygen saturation (SpO2) increased from 93–94% to 97–100%, while the oxygen requirement decreased from 2–4 L/min to 1 L/min. The RALE score improved from 8 to 5. The Pneumonia Severity Index improved from Class V (142) to Class II (67). Additional pulmonary indices (Brescia-COVID and SMART-COP) both decreased from 4 to 0. CRP normalized from 15.1 to 1.23. The patient reported substantial improvement in the Community-Acquired Pneumonia assessment tool.

Wild stuff. Of course, when I say “probably is a cure”, I am purely referring to the class of thing of which the Ironforge is an instance — it is observation of physical phenomena, not prescription. Nothing I ever say is medical advice, as I am not of the ordained class. Nothing I sell is intended to treat or cure anything since my products are merely for wellness — if you have medical concerns I am required to refer you to the ordained or people with guns will come for me.

What is the root of this idiocy?

This incompetence does not reflect a lack in cognitive faculty, but rather a functional unintelligence. This is why you can speak to people within these groups and by and large, you could very easily get the impression they are all reasonably smart. The functional aspect to intelligence requires some objective that is being sought from which one can say whether that objective is being pursued intelligently. All of these people in this sense can be said to be locally brilliant, and this is the scale where I could be justifiably called a fool (if you were not locally a fool, one could argue that I could be succeeded regardless, but good systems have good enough error-checking, which is also why I don’t edit this newsletter. Perfect accuracy is very costly. Humans are nhrntly gd at prsng lssy nfrmtin ). And it’s perfectly fine for different people to operate at different levels of abstraction, so long as there is a final settlement layer grounded in hard physics — but what happens when settlement is not only never called for, but fundamentally uncallable by most participants? Well that is exactly the situation we face.

There is only one possible type of shared consensus that one could imagine that might organize human activity in a rigourous way attached to the physics of the universe, which would be a good that attaches to nothing of physicality, lest it compete with that thing itself, and such a thing would have to be finite, final, liquid, durable, informatic, and divisible to all scales. A finite substance that can map to everything that itself never changes is the only way to ensure that we can measure reality, which is to say, everything. Alas, our present co-ordination system does not have these attributes. The present monetary system of dollars and other fiat monies is not a closed system, but an authoritarian system that extracts wealth from everyone to give it to the wealthiest (Cantillon effect) — this of course impoverishes and enslaves people, but it also makes the wealthy functionally retarded (descriptive, not pejorative). They become unable to operate based on reality, but instead they must operate on fiat declarations and forever chase the dragon of the fiat spigot that has an infinite amount of nominal money and never settles.

If only we had an alternative that were forever fixed, then all these problems would begin to resolve as soon as its adoption completed since there would be a settlement layer of eternal truth. Intelligence in achieving something comes from truly wanting the thing itself. When one wants the right thing, the rest can be figured out, but we know desire is mimetic and the mimetic process will be forever broken until we can find an intrinsically useless object to which all scarcity can be attached, and in that process make the entirety of the world abundant, delaying mimetic violence forever, and bringing forth endless, intelligently directed human action. I will leave it to the reader to decide for themselves if such a singular object already exists and what implications that may have on their life.

The shilling part of the newsletter

People have been quite happy with the Chroma Sky Portal, but I wanted to make it more accessible so there is now a lower cost version that does not include near-infrared light in the 2nd channel. Instead, I worked with the diode manufacturer to customize an already high-fidelity white LED for the 2nd channel. This white LED has a boosted r9 value, a number that is not captured in CRI, but is of great importance since it measures fidelity of red hues that are critical to accurately rendering skin tones i.e. it will make you look good on Zoom a bit more effectively than studio photography lights. That version is also available in a smaller size unit with half the power. The sky blue channel remains the same. To recap the purpose of a narrowband sky blue, it has high melanopic lux while having low brightness, which means it is very effective, but not obnoxious the way a pure white light would be — furthermore, the sky blue channel does not include dark blue (the portion of blue that people are concerned about for eye strain on potential long term effects, though research on how harmful that actually is is a mixed bag).

Since I’m moving and won’t have access to some inventory for a while, this week I’m offering a 5-pack 50% discount on Sky Portals. You could do 3 at the desk, 1 by the bed, and 1 for a friend. Also a good option for your employees… how much is their productivity worth to you?

It also seems people really like the near-infrared flashlight I released. Someone messaged me about using it for a knee injury so I went ahead and ran the numbers. Surprisingly, if you have a very localized requirement it actually puts out a decent amount of power. It’s currently backordered so the price is temporarily dropped making it a better value than ever. There are similar items that are sold as “medical” devices and offered by medical “professionals” with a fifth of the power at ten times the cost. Don’t be a schmuck, get the “wellness” device that bypasses the health industrial complex markups or DIY it at an even lower cost. It’s just LEDs.

There is a single White Series Ironforge left and a single Redforge. Those will not be back in stock for at least a few months. Plenty of Nightshades left (best blue-blocking glasses; they let in a bit of violet light to offer a higher gamut with the minimum penalty in efficacy). Nightshades this week are buy-one get the 2nd pair 60% off with code 60glasses.

The more you share this newsletter, the more I’m incentivized to build products, increase their availability, and eventually drive down their costs. At this point, I’ll keep the doors open, but I’m not going to go out of my way to grow things… I’m going to be thinking and writing about that singular object I mentioned (and how it relates to various things) since I expect it will be possible to both implement the solutions to human health at scale, and proceed with the advanced foundational aerospace technologies I was working on — work from which I was ever so rudely interrupted from continuing.

Also, every customer can now become an affiliate. Since affiliate/influencer marketing is kind of BS these days, people must first order something before they can be an affiliate, and once they are an affiliate, they can get a 5.7% commission, but they do not give an additional discount to the customer — why would I want to punish people that organically find out about this stuff rather than through an affiliate? Sign up here if you're already a customer.

Be healthy and get lots of sunlight. The world is about to get much, much better.

Shop Chroma

The premise of red and near-infrared light is that it makes mitochondria work better. The challenge with red light is it concentrates more on the skin, whereas near-IR can penetrate further, allowing for a broader range of effects. If you look at the research papers, you'll find that the researchers can name more cellular components than I do, but at the end of the day, I don't think they actually have a much deeper understanding than "makes mitochondria work better".

Mitochondria vs genetics, microbiomics, and the rest

If you're taking a broad perspective on health you might wonder why mitochondria are so important. While there are many of them and they're in every cell, that's not a de-facto explanation of their importance over any other number of things in the body that are also critical. A cardiologist might say it is the entire organ of the heart that is most critical, and someone else might argue it’s the gut microbiome, but these people might be getting too far into the weeds. It's largely the premise that mitochondrial dysfunction is fundamental to etiology across all or most disease rather than say, genetics. So while it cannot prevent a particular disease, it might reduce the odds of any disease in the same way any lifestyle change that improves baseline health might.

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, no one pays attention to the foundations of health and the root of the problem might lie in the legibility challenges associated with taking this perspective. Just like mitochondrial problems might be a better explanation for disease, illegibility might be the root cause of the society’s inability to solve this problem rather than the various conflicts of interest (big pharma, big food, healthcare industrial complex, overfocus on AI biotech despite curse of dimensionality, etc.) that could instead be viewed as a downstream phenomenon. Cheap sensors and wearables may provide enough legibility that it could eventually be too hard to ignore the information that some of us find self-evident just based on the research we have available today.

High power density near-infrared, red, and UV light

The reasoning behind the Ironforge, Redforge, and D-Light devices is that in addition to the systemic effects, there are tons of localized benefits, which may require a concentrated dose to get the maximal benefits. Some examples: targeting specific muscles being trained on that day; targeting injuries/pains; targeting cerebral benefits; targeting endocrinological/hormonal effects; targeting hairline or face for aesthetic purposes. The evidence for all these specific effects is scattered across thousand of studies so you might want to take a look at this database and search for specific terms. Some effects are more profound than others.

The reason I started working on near-infrared light was to accelerate healing of a partially torn finger pulley. Since a finger pulley is rather small, and I wanted to achieve an optimal dose on the pulley itself rather than on my skin I knew the existing products wouldn't cut it. Moreover, I didn't just want to heal my finger, I wanted my hands to be more resilient overall and to maximize training benefits in my forearms, which are typically considered the limiting factor in climbing. A boxer might care about strengthening the bones in their wrist; a tennis player or golfer might focus on their elbow; a runner might focus on their quads and shins; a software engineer might focus on their brain; a model might focus on their face; etc.

Compared to a big panel you can have doses on the order of 100x in localized areas. If you know about red light therapy, you'll know there is a biphasic response curve and you don't want to get too much, but the problem is that with a regular panel, you might only be getting 1-5% of what you want for something localized. But then if you do want that whole body effect, it's just as easy to pass the device everywhere and get that. Compared to a panel, the whole body effects still work better because the majority of the light actually hits your body, whereas being a foot way from a panel might mean 80% of the light goes off to the side.

The best time to use red or near-infrared light is in the morning or a few hours before some physical activity. I intend to use it twice daily, morning and late afternoon. If I'm going to train late in the afternoon, I'll move the 2nd session to be a couple hours before then. The best time to use the D-Light would be midday, but you could also use it in the morning if that's more convenient for you. Using the D-Light in the evening might interfere with sleep.

You might be wondering why our red lights look white instead of red and that’s just how bright they are. Everything red looks white when it gets hot enough e.g. molten steel.

Optimal sleep, alertness, and happiness

To recap on the Sky Portal, it solves the problem that a typical indoor environment has only about 1% of the brightness of an outdoor environment. It also drowns out short wavelength blue light from your ambient lighting and screens by causing your pupils to contract with long wavelength sky blue, while also providing near-infrared to mitigate the damage from the remaining high intensity blue that doesn't fully get eliminated. The Nightshades cut out both bands of blue at night when you don't want to be alert, which allows melatonin to be produced. Melatonin is extremely important for health separately from just sleep, and it's ideal to synthesize it endogenously by blocking blue and green light at night.

Finally, we now have another style of Nightshades in titanium, which gets you a lightweight, sub-20g product.

Shop NIGHTSHADES

Want to work with Chroma?

As mentioned in the last newsletter, Chroma will be closing down in the coming weeks after we fulfill orders. We’re still looking at opportunities to start working toward enterprise and military solutions. It’s just difficult to get most individuals interested in figuring out the details of the product so we’d rather get to the point where we can just say, “the Air Force and big company XYZ that you know uses it so you should too; trust us that it’s the best”. To that end, we are looking at some Air Force research contract opportunities and we would need some people working on those. We’re interested in people with either a STEM, B2B sales, or product management background with the key requirement that you be able to work at least 51% time (no other primary employment) for at least December, January, and February. You can reply directly to this if interested, or pass this along to someone who might be. The focus would be primarily on transitioning these products to meet Air Force needs.

If Chroma is to succeed in a major way, we will need powerful allies. Even if we are closing down B2C and primary operations for a bit, building the proper relationships takes time. We can slowly build up these connections in the background while the rest of the world sleeps on this technology, and then when we’re ready, we pounce.

There’s a joke where a mathematician notices some smoke coming out from under a door. He looks inside and sees a fire in the corner of the room. He looks around the room, sees a bucket of water on the desk and proclaims, “ah, a solution exists,” while he promptly exits the room to go work on the next problem. I find myself in a similar situation with the products now being announced.

I’ve managed to figure out effective form faexpect a lot of these will sell out since we have fairly small volumes, but if they don’tctors to deliver every biologically critical portion of the solar spectrum. While these products are not meant to be a replacement for sunlight, I suspect if they were used as such for a person living in a cave, they would fare better than the average city-dweller. Without such a solution, I never would have considered moving to Bellingham, Washington, one of the cloudiest places in the US.

How is health achieved?

There are a few pillars of health/wellness/vitality: diet, exercise, and physical environment (primarily light and temperature). These factors all interact with each other, especially if you include mentality as the 4th pillar. If you eat poorly, you will not feel like exercising, after which you might not sleep well, and then you are more likely to eat poorly the next day, and so on. This problem has never been solved in a scalable way in the modern world, even in wealthy nations.

But 1 of the pillars presents a unique opporunity. Only 1 of these can be built and permantly optimized without further effort. Once in place, it serves as a kernel that can perpetually bootstrap the physio-psychological state that will lead to us going back to solve the other problems for ourselves again and again until it is habituated. This is not just a solution, but I have never seen evidence to suggest there could be any other (within the modern world, of course, we can always go back to living in the wilderness). The only part of the solution that I do not yet have is the thermal aspect — you will need to figure out a way to have a cool sleep environment at a minimum or the whole thing could still unravel (more intense cold and heat exposure are good, but not as critical).

Biologically Active Components of Sunlight

This is what the solar spectrum looks like, more or less, and there are 4 main portions we care about:

1. Ultraviolet B for vitamin D synthesis. Defined as 280-320nm.

2. Ultraviolet A for nitric oxide production. Defined as 320-400nm.

3. Visible light for circadian rhythm. Melanopic spectrum peaks at 480nm.

4. Near-Infrared light for mitochondria (i.e. everything). 810-850nm
   (Deep red is in this category at 670nm)

There are various products to address all of these things poorly. 5 years ago I started scratching away at one of these, and over the past year I figured out how to build products that solve for all of these well.

IRONFORGE and REDFORGE (Near-IR and Red)

Near-IR is what Chroma is most well known for at this time. We unveiled how every other company in this space doesn’t know how to buy a $12 power meter from Amazon to find that their devices pump out 2.3x fewer watts than they claim — and that’s just the “reputable” brands such as Joovv, Platinum, EMR-Tek, etc. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the ridiculously over-priced Novothor beds are also lying about power output) — if you get into some of the ones that are the 20th brand selling the same greenhouse panel lights as all of these, it can be off by 4-5x. Moreover, since most of those products mix red and near-IR in the same device, the near-IR power is lower. You might think it’s as much as 50%, but since the errors in total power are primarily due to the near-IR LEDs, it could be as little as 30%. This is a problem. Near-IR is a lot better than red light for the primary reason that the longer wavelengths are able to penetrate further into tissue, whereas the visible red or deep red light is mostly absorbed in the skin. Red light might do some things 1.5x better than near-infrared at the skin, but near-IR is 10x better for everything else.

I’m not going to go into details on what this light does since as I mentioned it interacts with mitochondria, which gives it its do-everything effects. If you want to dive-in to what that means, you can skim through this spreadsheet summarizing the several thousand studies on the topic, which also lets you see what wavelength and power was used. I became interested in near-IR light after partially tearing a pulley in my finger rock climbing. Some of the main effects people are interested in with near-IR are cognitive and sleep enhancements, better looking skin, hypertrophy and faster recovery from physical training, pains/aches, and hair re-growth.

Our product (the IRONFORGE) packs more near-IR light than most large panels into something the size of a brick so you can get enough near-IR where you actually want it, or pass it around your entire body and actually have it hit your body rather than losing most of the light to the sides because geometry (if you are of a wide rectangular form such as the plant beds that those greenhouse panels are designed for, this may not apply to you). We’re anodizing these now.

Meet the REDFORGE: Since people keep asking us about red light, and since red LEDs are actually cheaper than near-IR LEDs, we decided to make a red light version called REDFORGE and it’s only available in the Black Series, which offers the most power. We split the power 50:50 between 670nm and 630nm LEDs, which are a bit more aligned with the cytochrome c-oxidase absorption peaks, though pricier than the standard 620nm and 660nm that is typically used. You may be wondering why we felt the need the need to add 630 when 670 is probably a bit better, and it has nothing to do with trying to offer more “features.” Near-IR is invisible so it doesn’t make for great marketing. 670nm is even dimmer than 660nm, but by adding in 630nm, we can increase brightness by 1.5x so it looks like more is going on — this will certainly be of uptmost important to everyone who couldn’t be bothered to check the power output of their $5,000 Joovv panel with a $12 plug-in power meter. Most importantly, with that change we can say that the number of lumens on this device is over 9000, which has zero importance for anything.

We also built a near-infrared flashlight that has more near-IR power than a $300 Joovv Go, while concentrating that power into a smaller form factor. I’m not that excited about a device with about an eighth of the power of the IRONFORGE Green Series, but it will be better than the cheapo red lightbulbs on Amazon that have almost no near-infrared in them.

Meet the Chroma Sky Portal (Visible)

This is the product a lot of people have been waiting for and it addresses the most important part of the visible spectrum.

We sold a few crude prototypes of this device and have vastly improved it since then. The idea for this product was actually where Chroma started. In the first iteration we used a fresnel lens to achieve incredibly high brightness, exceeding the melanopic lux of direct sunlight on full brightness. This was overkill and unpleasant. It worked best when setting the brightness somewhere in the 1-10% range, and since the light was so concentrated you had to have your head in exactly the right spot to see it. The prototype was built out of buckets from Home Depot, hot glue, and engineering-style control modules for dimmers — naturally, about half of the people that bought them took us up on our no questions asked return policy, but the other half absolutely loved them because for all the flaws, it was way beyond anything else available.

The Sky Portal is not a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) light since there is no such thing as SAD, only modern building induced damage to our health in which the severity of damage follows some distribution. The Sky Portal has no effect on you, only the building, hence the name.

By delivering light from an LED that peaks at 480nm, we can stimulate the melanopsin cells that control the wake-sleep cycle, which is fairly important since typical indoor lighting is about 1% as bright as it is outdoors. Additionally, we have almost zero light in the sub-450nm region, which is your harsh dark blue that you get from white SAD lights — in fact, you even get a hefty dose of this harsh blue light from cheap blue SAD lights that will combine 440nm with 520nm or thereabouts. Perceived color does not inform you of the spectrum! You might notice it looks white in the center and that is due to how cameras work. Brightness also changes perceived hue.

What you need to understand about a lot of the SAD lights out there is they’ve existed for longer than we have known the cells in the eyes that control circadian rhythms exist. No one has actually bothered updating their product in the past 2 decades since that discovery. Most of what you have are things like a startup that Mark Cuban funded to the tune of $800k to make the same shitty SAD lights with nicer fixtures. The only way you see the fixture is be your garbage (mine too) ambient light — if you want a physical thing that looks nice buy a sculpture. The purpose of a light device is to emit light so what matters is the wavelength of those photons, how many of them you have, and the angle they are coming from (light from above is twice as effective, not surprising given where light comes from outside). Until you get that right, why would you even think about trying to make it look pretty? That’s why we use a tripod instead of some custom carbon fiber sculpture arm from ADM Works. We did make it thin though.

Bright light during the day doesn’t just make you feel alert or prevent building-induced depression, it also is critical to how you will sleep that night, how much melatonin your body will produce, and when you will go to bed.

Bonus - near-IR on your head and face:

Since the Sky Portal is shining down on you (held up by a tripod) we figured that would be a good place to include some near-infrared light too. This offers a sort of barbell dosing approach with the Ironforge, which can give you a ton of power in one spot in a short time. By hitting you throughout the day, this offers a better value then low-power head-worn near-IR devices that you’ll eventually want to take off. In addition to cognitive benefits and the possibility that it might alleviate symptoms even for people with neurodegenerative diseases, near-IR to the head is great for sleep. When I was using the near-IR helmet mentioned in a previous newsletter, I was seeing more deep sleep based on my Polar watch. I now have someone else using the helmet with an Oura ring to get more accurate data on that. Front of the head is also ideal for the aesthetic reasons people care about since it hits the face and receding hairlines. Finally, for people that are worried about eye damage from the harsh blue light spike from indoor lights and screens, this is an infinitely better solution. Not only does the soft sky blue light drown out that harmful light by causes the pupils to dilate, the near-IR light also reduces cellular damage.

You can control both channels independently by adjusting from 10 to 90% blue vs near-IR, along with adjusting the overall power (2 dials). With nearly half as much near-IR as our IRONFORGE Green Series, you’re getting about as much near-IR as you’d get from a $1200 Joovv Solo.

This sort of light is the complement of blue-blocking glasses in the evening.

Meet the Chroma D-LIGHT (UVB and UVA)

When I started working on Chroma I knew we would be missing a large piece of the puzzle until we could figure out UV. I never would have imagined we would be releasing a product with UV so soon since I used to be hesitant about working with UV since it can be dangerous. All of that changed when someone sent me a study showing that a narrowband UVB LED with a peak at 293nm is safer than the broad spectrum sunlight provides. Although all UVB light is harmful to some extent, part of the spectrum is far more effective at producing D3, and the spectrum varies in its ability to produce D3 more than the degree of damage varies. This enables an increase in the D3/damage ratio. If you look at the LEDs mentioned, you’ll notice that vendor does not supply those LEDs — in fact, almost no one supplies any LEDs in the 290-300nm range! Eventually, we found an LED manufacturer that agreed to make us custom diodes that peaked at 290nm and had a fairly narrow spectral distribution (some are wider than others).

At first we thought these LEDs were 10x as expensive as other LEDs we had worked with, but we were mistaken — UVB LEDs have incredibly low efficiencies, typically around 2% so for the same radiant output, they were actually several hundred times more expensive… this likely explains why no one has ever release a consumer product that contains these. The most popular UVB light today (Sperti) was designed before the end of World War II and it uses fluorescent UV bulbs, which means it is more likely to lead to skin cancer (the most lethal cancer iirc) than sunlight.

We simply built the D-LIGHT on the same platform as the IRONFORGE. The only change we had to make other than the diodes was the cover plate since polycarbonate blocks UV. We use a 2 piece cover where the top plate is a thick piece of fused silica that lets the UV through.

Running the Numbers:

From the paper the above article was describing:

For example the suberythemal exposure of the skin type II to 0.75 MED from the 293 LED produced 2.3 IUs cm^2 (5.63 ng/cm^2 ) in one half minute compared to a less than half the amount (0.9 IUs; 2.35 ng/cm^2 ) vitamin D3 when the same skin sample was exposed to the sun for more than 60 times longer time (32.15min).

0.75 MED = 24 mJ/cm^2 —> 24 mJ/2.3IU = 10.4 mJ/IU. For the D-LIGHT Pro, we have 12,000 mW of 290nm LEDs, and with about 1.5% radiant efficiency we get 180 mJ/s, or 17.3 IU per second, or 1038 IU per minute. This exceeds the 600 IU recommended minimum, but many people believe amounts closer to 10x this are more appropriate. Another paper showed better results with 290nm than 295nm so we can’t reliably correct for variations of a few nanometers.

The D-LIGHT also has UVA, which is known to produce nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is is a vasodillator and the reason you feel almost instantly relaxed when you step outside and are hit by sunlight. We went with LEDs peaking at 365nm for this since that is the closest option to the peak theoretical quantum yield. UVA goes from 320-400nm, and the shorter the wavelength, the more it damages your DNA so this is probably a lot less damaging than the broad spectrum UVA lights in tanning beds, which definitely increases cancer risk more than sunlight. In sunlight, there is about 40 times more UVA than UVB, but this ratio is higher early in the morning and late in the afternoon. We went with around 60x UVA irradiance with respect to the amount of UVB.

Did we beat the Sun itself on safety?

The elephant in the room with all this spectral optimization is that does not take into account that sunlight includes mechanisms to actively mitigate the cellular damage that is being caused. UVA induced priming of the body to produce its own “sunblock” is one mechanism, but it’s the large amount of red and near-infrared light that makes the biggest difference. I have a bunch of articles in my notes on this so I’m just going to link to all of them [Study 1 Study 2 Study 3 Study 4 Study 5 Study 6 Study 7 Study 8 Study 9 Study 10 Study 11 Study 12 Study 13].

On the D-LIGHT Pro, we combine 850nm near-IR, 670nm deep red, and 630nm red in equal amounts. We then max out the space we have to physically cram these diodes onto the board, which roughly maxes out thermal limitations and puts total power close to the IRONFORGE Black Series with UV-power included. Since the UV light is right at the skin, we figured this is an application where a mix of red and near-infrared actually makes sense. The protective effects of red/NIR actually peak later, which lines up with the fact that the sunlight has lots of red light in the evening and then in the morning, before the midday light that has lots of UVB. So for circadian mimicry and possibly optimal results, you might use an IRONFORGE late afternoon and in the morning, and the D-LIGHT around solar noon. With that protocol, combined with the narrow UV spectrums, I suspect you’d have a slight edge on sunlight for Vitamin D safety.

The standard version of the D-LIGHT is the same, except with ~3x fewer UV LEDs and thus 3x less UV power. If you use it 3x longer, you can achieve virtually identical outcomes, but this is less convenient, and you may not achieve your preferred dose. The standard version keeps the 630nm red LEDs, but drops the 670nm and 850nm LEDs.

Vitamin D and Nitric Oxide Context

These are two exemplary compounds to look at because they tell us so much about the medical industry, science, and modern society. They also seems to play a large role in COVID-19 outcomes [Vitamin D Study 1, Vitamin D Study 2, Vitamin D Study 3, Nitric Oxide Review].

While the idea that there are powerful people trying to make us physically weak and apathetic by suppressing healthy levels of sunlight and vitamin D seems a little too far-fetched to me, it might not be necessary to go to such conspiracy theories to see the devestating effects we have today materialize. Perhaps L’Oreal’s anti-sunlight campaign in the 1980s was all it took. These sorts of campaigns can be self-sustaining because the “scientists” that perpetuate memes such as sunlight bad are themselves weakened and thus are only able to operate as superficially intelligent zombies.

Nitric oxide is interesting because it’s incredibly simple, a single nitrogen atom bound to a single oxygen atom, yet we barely understand half of what it does. The complexity of molecules grows at an unimaginably fast rate since it’s not just which atoms and where, but how they can rotate at each bond. The curse of dimensionality shows how foolish many efforts in medicine are — in particular, anyone smart enough to figure out how to somehow overcome all those problems, would first have solved all the problems I have solved since what I am doing is far more trivial. Given that they have not, we can only conclude that the entire industry is rather foolish and serious about the problems they claim to be working on.

Chroma will be going into hibernation post-launch

Unfortunately, there is not enough numerical literacy within the niche of people who care about red light therapy to get ahead by simply building the best products. The grifters have the edge since most of the people can’t figure out that they’re being fooled, and I’m incapable of taking that approach. This means that in order to scale I’d have to do a bunch of clever growth-hacky things, but even that doesn’t actually do much in the grand scheme of things. When startups are raising hundreds of millions to make more drugs, working toward simply displacing Joovv and Novothor is not a goal that motivates me. I’d much rather continue to work in aerospace — and for making money in the short term, I think a new product I’m working on will be far more effective since it addresses COVID-19 directly rather than a niche market (Reflow Labs). That might actually give me the ammunition to tackle these problems with the attention they deserve.

In aerospace, there are people trained to evaluate different technologies so if I go to them and say I can make parts with XYZ strength, they know exactly what that means. There are no experts in being human. Not only are they not experts, their performance is dysmal so I can’t rely on them to operate in logical ways the way aircraft manufacturers will. What I can do is sell to businesses that across enough total people can see a large enough return to figure out how this all works (if you can make employees 10% more productive, that’s huge, the health benefits can be ignored). I can also sell to the military since they are interested in human performance. All those things take more time, which I don’t have. I’d like to do it eventually, but when I was working on my previous aerospace company I imagined it as the 20+ year out retirement plan when I could drop $1b on it an really come out swinging at healthcare industrial complex. So I can’t say whether Chroma will return in 1, 5, 10, or 20 years.

What I can point out is that Chroma has a much better ROI for customers. Joovv makes millions per year and has never built a novel product — instead they line Facebook’s pockets with ad money, patent troll, and intimidate small business owners for pointing out that they are lying to everyone on power output (luckily, I know that math and numerical literacy trumps money so I won’t be intimidated). Every new product being announced here was a result of the small batch of IRONFORGEs we sold several months ago. So I can offer a lot more value by building Reflow Labs and Black Lattice first, and then coming back to this.

For now, all products that we are bringing will only be available for about 3 weeks, after which the store will close. I am doing a clearance discount that will be active for 1 week. The discount code is BLEEDINGEDGE all caps, and it is good for 35% off every single product. Once a product is sold out, that’s it. I expect a lot of these will sell out based on how fast the previous IRONFORGEs sold and this batch is about the same size since we were spread out across so many products.

Some of the products are still being wrapped-up in manufacturing, and others already shipped to our distribution warehouses. We managed to get a warehouse in the EU too so hopefully we can help avoid VAT for everyone, but can’t guarantee it. For IRONFORGE and D-LIGHT, we can ship directly to you if you order before the whole batch ships. Limit 2 of each per person, except flashlights and glasses, which are unlimited.

SKY PORTAL Days from being in stock in the US and EU

IRONFORGE: In stock.

REDFORGE: Same.

Near-IR Flashlights: Arriving in the US and EU this week, if they haven’t already.

D-LIGHT: Boards being assembled, other components prepped so assembly will finish around end of next week, and then 2-3 weeks to ship to US.

NIGHTSHADES Days from being in stock in US and EU.

Get Chroma

If any products are left 3 weeks from now, fantastic, I’ll build a super-array of lights around my desk! Thanks for joining me on this adventure.

Questions? Post them in our Facebook group so other people can benefit from seeing the answer.

Prologue: The video starts with some stuff about materials engineering that might not seem relevant, but to me it’s deeply connected. Once you see how much nuance and detail there is within a “simple” material and how imperfect our models are, you get an intuitive sense that there must be limits in systems that are unimaginably more complex (e.g. anything biological). This does not mean that we cannot apply physics and scientific methods in these domains, but that it is imperative we chose our questions wisely and frame concepts in a way that will deliver good results.

If we do not do this we run into the problem that Nassim Taleb called the Carpenter’s Fallacy: just because a carpenter makes the roulette table does not mean she knows probability theory. Similarly, most of what is taught in biology is what things are in name and how to use various instruments in a lab like a technician. People know that molecular science will not suddenly yield an answer to the life, the universe, and everything, so why do they expect molecular science to be the dominant factor that impacts health outcomes?

An obese, sedentary person with all modern medicine is worse off than a healthy fit person without it. Anyone who would nitpick about the benefits of medicine in a handful of highly impactful ways in not taking a high-level enough perspective. For instance, germ theory indicating the need to wash your hands is of uptmost importance when you live in a primitive city, but if you live in the wilderness, you might not have to worry so much about whether people are defecating in the water supply. Modern medicine has given itself a rather big pat on the back mostly for resolving some of the major issues that come when we change the dynamics of how we live.

As we are witnessing now, those high level dynamics can be more important than the biological tools at our disposal. I am hopeful that the realization that an engineered technology such as a position-sensing door opener that prevents hand-to-hand contact can be followed with something slightly more advance. We still need the biology, but the system that replaces the doorknob is arguable the cutting edge, and with that perspective, I propose the “basic” technologies of light I discuss here are the real bleeding edge of health technology.

If you want to support a better quality video next time, you can order stuff from our webstore. Production on glasses and lights is nearly finished. Hoping to have everything shipped to US in 2-3 weeks. Some of the IRONFORGE near IR lights are running low (2 left on Black Series) so if you want one now’s a good time to order. We will probably revamp graphic design and marketing before ordering more of those, and even if we don’t you’ll still be waiting an extra ~2 months for the following batch.

Shop CHROMA

First, Some Updates:

As you’ve probably noticed, we haven’t sent out a new issue of this newsletter for a while. This one is only a sort of intermission newsletter. It does not have the depth of content I’d like and it’s missing the anchor content of research summaries (probably have ~2,000 studies in my inbox piling up).

Also, if you don’t follow our Facebook or Instagram, you might not know we started selling the near-infrared IronForge and Nightshade glasses a few weeks ago.

Both of those have small batches that are nearly finishing production, though the IronForges still need to have the cover-plate re-designed before final assembly. Those in particular are limited in number so order sooner if you want to ensure you aren’t waiting another 2 months or more. I’m probably going to be waiting on my Black Series given popularity :/

I’ve recently started working on a new aerospace/advanced-materials/manufacturing startup, and last week launched CopperCoater, a copper-loaded spray paint to help combat COVID19 (copper kills coronaviruses and almost every other pathogen upon contact).

This limits the time I can spend on Chroma so if you’re interested in working with us, please respond to this newsletter or email me at michael@getchroma.co (might not have something immediately available, but have some projects under development that may allow us to hire suddenly).

Finally, when I started this newsletter, I mentioned I would include essays that are a bit more abstract to explain the meta-context behind the failures in health institutions. Their failure to achieve health in society is now more obvious than ever. That sort of content will be written in my other newsletter instead: http://astigmatic.substack.com/

If you want to buy a pair of Nightshades and improve your sleeping patterns, or an IronForge for everything near-infrared can do, go check out our website:

CHROMA Website

Shop Now

(Update: We are rebranding. Fountain Portal is now Chroma [tm]. Instagram @getChroma.co — Twitter @getChroma — Facebook @getChroma)

Announcing the Chroma Night Specs [tm]

Originally announced in our Facebook Group as the first and only high-gamut blue blockers, let’s explore what that means. First, we need to understand the primary cells in the eye that respond to different wavelengths of light and how blue-blockers in general work. Let’s break down what the following graph means.

S (dark blue curve) = short wavelength sensing cones i.e. perceived as blue.

Mel (light blue curve) = melanopsin containing cells i.e. the circadian wakefulness/sleep controller. This is what we want to either stimulate (daytime) or avoid simulating (nighttime).

R (dark green curve) = rods [ignore] helps you see motion and in very dim conditions.

M (light green curve) = medium wavelength sensing cones i.e. perceived as green.

L (red curve) = long wavelength sensing cones i.e. perceived as red

[Numbers on the bottom are wavelengths. The colors/numbers shown are a bit off. Based on the colors shown, it should be only 700 all the way on the right. The Wikipedia page on cones has a better image.]

How “blue-blocking” works

If you block out blue light corresponding to blue, you also block about half the melanopic lux. Blocking green light as well, up to 570 nm is the only way to remove almost all the melanopic lux. The downside to this is that everything looks red, and also becomes rather dark. That is why most blue-blocking glasses go with far less effective yellow, orange, or light red tints. Moreover, “blocking” is not actually how a lens works. At each wavelength, some percentage of light is absorbed. Many yellow/orange glasses not only let in green light, but might let in >10% right at the peak sensitivity of the melanopsin curve at 480 nm. Daytime “blue-blocking” glasses are a completely different product related to eyestrain, for which there is far less compelling research. Moreover, daytime glasses pose a risk of worsening sleep since they reduce that signal for wakefulness.

The Chroma Night Spec violet innovation

Blocking blue light is only correlated to (partially) blocking melanopic lux, but on the far left side, in the violet range, the melanopic sensitivity is very low. So instead of allowing more green light to see more colors, which can increase melanopic lux >100 fold compared to a dark red pair of blue-blockers (Carbonshade, which I built originally pioneered this), it is possible to add violet light instead. This light is mostly in the 400 to 430 nm range. The end result is a transmission spectrum that looks a bit like a U, with an opposite shape as the melanopsin curve (dips low to maximally block light at the peak melanopsin sensitivity, then gradually rises on either side).

This results in a reddish lens with a slightly pink hue. It lets in far more color than the standard Carbonshades, with only a slight reduction in efficacy. Light induced melatonin suppression has a dose-response so you don’t need 99.8% light reduction all the time, although some prefer this for the last 15-30 minutes before bed.

This violet lens tech is proprietary to Chroma so we are not planning to release it for now. You might think, “how can I know how well it works if I don’t have that data?” Well, it’s very interesting because the reality is you would still not know even if you saw the graph because you don’t know the spectrum of the light coming in!

You can know the light spectrum being emitted from lightbulbs in your vicinity, but unless all you’re doing in the evenings is staring into lightbulbs, that’s not the light you’re actually getting. You get that spectrum, multiplied by the reflectance spectrum of the world around you, which of course varies dramatically from object to object. Not to mention the ABSOLUTE levels of brightness vary wildly indoors at night. It would be very difficult to define a “typical environment,” and even then, the scientific data on dose response comes nowhere close to being able to comment on this. The general heuristics work far better.

Background and Timeline

I actually built these glasses for myself well before I was planning on selling them with Chroma and I have used these regularly instead of my Carbonshades without any issues. That’s more meaningful to me than contrived estimates of melanopic lux. Given the fact that Carbonshade is nowhere close to being the market leader, that is also an indicator that precisely communicating specs that indicate superiority are fairly uncorrelated to market success. You’d be amazed how many people don’t intuitively grasp that a clear lens cannot be blocking out much light of any color, or why blocking blue and green requires that a lens appear dark red.

ETA on Chroma Night Specs: ~3 months. We did other cool stuff like make the frames carbon fiber along with a higher performance lens material than anything out there now (as might be expected for an aerospace/materials person working on this sort of stuff)… you’ll have to wait until it launches to find out about the lens material!

Circadian Rhythms & Visible Light Research

Health consequences of circadian disruption [letter to the editor]

Many clinicians are not fully aware, however, of the far-reaching implications of the circadian system for human health. …

Many disease states may be caused or exacerbated by exposure to circadian misalignment

I don’t need to “know more” than MDs, I just need to know where to focus alongside a bit of math and engineering experience. Nassim Taleb recently conveyed the problem well.

Perfect timing: circadian rhythms, sleep, and immunity — an NIH workshop summary

The goal of the NIH Workshop was to highlight recent basic and clinical research advances in sleep and circadian biology linking immune dysfunction to pathobiology, and to foster interdisciplinary conversations that could point toward future research objectives.

My newsletter and products are more impactful than your workshop. What good is looking into all the minutiae if almost no one is implementing the very basics in their lives? It is almost theatrical. Thanks from coming to my TED talk.

Early-evening light mitigates the sleep disruptive effects of late-evening light exposure

Yes, this is just the effect of getting bright light during the day and doing it once toward the end of the day period i.e. early evening is better than not at all. This is why daytime blue-blockers are dumb. It is much better to add in the right type of light that is less harmful, which causes pupil dilation so a lower portion of high intensity blue light from monitors comes on. The other approach, which works well in parallel is adding deep red light. This concept is the basis of the Portal, and the possibility of a radically different implementation will be explored in the next newsletter.

Assessing the impact of daylight exposure on sleep quality of people over 65 years old

Bright light during the day improves sleep. One noteworthy aspect of this study is the comparison between summer and winter conditions — it is not just light, but temperature that varies greatly. Colder conditions improve sleep, but this shows one instance where light has a larger effect. Where did this study take place? — London. Not very hot there even in the summer. Heat/cold can be the most important variable if it is obtrusive, just like a person sitting next to you playing the drums would suddenly become the most important variable impacting your sleep. If it’s too hot (doesn’t take much) your sleep will be impaired, but after that is solved, light needs to be the focus.

The effects of melatonin on signaling pathways and molecules involved in glioma

Melatonin regulates the biologic rhythm and inhibits the proliferation of malignant glioma cells due to antioxidant and anti-apoptotic effects. …

Melatonin is secreted by the pineal glands and plays a main role in the regulating of biological rhythms and endocrine function [12, 20]. In addition, there are various sites of melatonin production, including testis [21], platelets [22] and lymphocytes [23]. …

High levels of melatonin synthesis in mitochondria are very toxic to GBM/GSC [glioblastoma / glioblastom stem-like cells]

Melatonin and Glioblastoma: Pathophysiology and Treatment [Editorial re. above]

The interactions of exogenous melatonin with GBM/GSC circadian genes will be important for future research

Or, you know, get it it endogenously as a starting point.

All-trans-retinal induces autophagic cell death via oxidative stress and the endoplasmic reticulum stress pathway in human retinal pigment epithelial cells

Short wavelength blue light (~440 nm, typical white LED peaks here) triggers all-trans-retinal about an order of magnitude* more than long wavelength blue light (~480 nm, peak melanopsin sensitivity and where white LEDs have a massive dip i.e. the cyan gap). *see figure 3b

Impact of circadian disruption on glucose metabolism: implications for type 2 diabetes

Experimental evidence indicates that circadian disruption impairs beta cell function and insulin sensitivity, resulting in impaired glucose tolerance (Fig. 4). Circadian disruptions acutely impact glycaemic control and thereby may increase the risk for impaired glucose tolerance and the transition to diabetes

Melatonin rescues osteoporosis by upregulating BMMSCs’ osteogenic ability but suppressing BMMSC‐mediated osteoclastogenesis via MT2‐inactivated NF‐𝜅B pathway

Bone loss and microstructure disorder in mice were profoundly reversed after melatonin treatment, as an integrated result of anabolic and anti‐resorptive effects.

Want a free pair of Chroma Night Specs?

If you stayed until the end, here’s a photo of our compact, high power near-IR prototype since we didn’t have one when we originally announced it in a previous newsletter.

getchroma.co

>300 watts 😳 That's more near-IR power than a "1200 watt" standard mixed wavelength panel, concentrated into a much smaller unit. Maybe we'll have an option with even more than just 10-20x the power density of what is available now...

February 6, 2020

Contest: What should we name this near-IR brick of sorts? If you give us a name that we end up using, we’ll send you a free pair of Night Specs! All you have to do is share this post on FB, Insta, or Twitter with your name suggestions — make sure to tag us so we see it. You can offer as many suggestions as you want.

Quantom Dot LEDs, Future of Displays & Lighting

Normal LEDs are usually built with multiple layers. First there is the LED itself, and then on top of that you might have a phosphor layer. Phosphors can take a standard LED with a narrow spectrum and output a broad range of wavelengths i.e. it can get you white light. But the aspect that controls the output is largely related to composition of the phosphor, which only gives you so much flexibility (not that many atoms out there).

Enter the quantom dot: a nanocrystal that acts like an artificial atom and can be used in place of a standard phosphor. Unlike the usual phosphor, a quantum dot’s properties can be finely tuned by adjusting its size. This precision enables more control over the light that is emitted, and the quality of most lights is awful even when CRI is high (CRI is a junk metric).

Additionally, individual colors are possible, as is desirable for an RGB display. In addition to eventually being able to offer superior color, emissive quantum dot LEDs are far more efficient, and as the resolution of devices has increased, their battery life has dropped. Greater efficiency also means you will eventually be able to to have a bright enough laptop to use outdoors while you face the sun. The laptops Samsung has recently announced (not yet available) are the first to have a QLED display. At 600 nits, they are quite a bit brighter than most laptops, but not as bright as an ultra-rugged laptop you might take outside on an oil rig. Hopefully, this trend continues.

Circadian Rhythms, Melatonin, and Sleep Research

Psychiatric Treatment by Light to the Eyes

Seasonality, however, is not essential for the light effect: The much larger cohort of patients with non-seasonal depression also responds to morning light. Circadian rhythm sleep disorders, especially with sleep onset insomnia, can be normalized by timed light treatment, avoiding recourse to hypnotic drugs. New applications of light treatment with promising initial data include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, fibromyalgia and other pain disorders, and symptoms of Parkinson's disease and dementia.

So pretty much exactly what I've been saying. It's actually good for all humans and it is not actually "treating" anything. It is simply the absence of light that makes everything worse. Psychotropic drugs are not that great and have tons of side effects. They should not be the first choice, but with pharma spending ten billion on digital ads this year, they often are.

Sleep problems and risk of all-cause cognitive declineor dementia: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis

Ten types of sleep conditions or parameters, including six (insomnia, fragmentation, daytime dysfunction, prolonged latency, rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder and excessive time in bed) with moderate-to-high levels of evidence, were linked to higher risk of all-cause cognitive disorders. Furthermore, a U-shaped relationship was revealed for the associations with sleep duration.

Melatonin Effects on Glucose Metabolism: Time To Unlock the Controversy

The concurrence of elevated melatonin concentrations with food intake in human decreases glucose tolerance, whereas high melatonin during fasting may facilitate beta cell recovery.

Epigenetics: A Bridge between Artificial Light at Night and Breast Cancer

"The second most frequent cancer all over the world is breast cancer (BC).It is reported that only about 10% BC cases are attributed due to inherited genetic mutations while remaining 90% cancer cases are associated with environmental factors. Artificial light at night (ALAN) is considered one of the major environmental risk factors for breast cancer. It inhibits production of melatonin (MLT) from pineal gland which results in abnormal epigenetic changes that relates with an increased risk of BC. [emphasis mine]"

Breast cancers cells to big-data machine-learning genetic biotech startups:

Sidenote: that’s how you’ll look if you don’t get sleep and sunlight.

Photobiomodulation Research

Evaluation of Effectiveness of Ultraviolet Emitting Lamps on the Cutaneous Production of Vitamin D3: Relationship of the Lamps Vitamin D3 Producing Potential to the Production of 8-Hydroxy-2’-Deoxyguanosine and Nitric Oxide

One lamp demonstrated optimal production of vitamin D3 with the least amount of DNA damage and intermediate production of nitric oxide suggesting that it could be developed into a device for treating vitamin D deficiency.

Note: nitric oxide is another molecule that gets upregulated with sunlight. What else might be missing from a vitamin D supplement that sunlight delivers?

Potential Beneficial Effects of Vitamin D in Coronary Artery Disease

epidemiological data have suggested plasma levels of vitamin D to be inversely correlated to cardiac injury after acute myocardial infarction

Interestingly, while nitric oxide was mentioned as one of the treatment modalities for coronary artery disease, no connection was made between vitamin D and nitric oxide levels. If these are correlated, conclusions based on the epidemiological data could be misguided.

Effects of infrared radiation and exercise on bone mass: implications for the prevention and management of osteoporosis

Over a 12 month period, post-menopausal women undergoing 850 near-infrared LED therapy (plus a treadmill program) had about half the bone loss of the women who just had the treadmill program by itself. The light dose was 108 J/cm^2, which is several times higher than what some studies claim is the peak of a biphasic response curve. A bit more evidence in support of my hypothesis that larger effects are possible at higher doses. This is not the first time the effects of light on bones have been noted…

Herodotus on Photobiomodulation

Here is a letter to the editor of a medical journal from E. V. Wilcox in 1939 transcribed in full:

EFFECT OF SUNLIGHT ON BOND AS REPORTED BY HERODOTUD IN 450 B. C.

To the Editor: — In book III of Herodotus’s history, in which he described some of his travels in Egypt and Libya, an account is given of the Persian invasion of Egypt under Cambyses. Near the mouth of the so-called Pulusian Nile, the forces of Cambyses met the Egyptians under Kind Psammenitus in 525 B. C. Herodotus viewed the battle field about seventy-five years later. His attention was called to the striking difference in thickness and strength of the Persian and Egyptian skulls which were still lying on the surface of the ground. His explanation of this difference is interesting, being so far as I know the earliest recorded definite proof offered of the effect of sunshine in thickening and strengthening bone tissue. A translation of chapter 12 of book III, in as nearly the simple style of the original Ionic Greek as I can make it, runs as follows :

"I saw a great marvel of which I had heard from the natives of the country. The bones of those who fell on either side in this battle lay scattered separately. The bones of the Persians lay in one part of the field and the bones of the Egyptians in another, as the two armies had separately stood. The skulls of the Persians were so fragile that a mere pebble thrown at them would penetrate them. But those of the Egyptians were so strong that you could hardly break them with a stone. The cause of this, so the people said, and I readily agreed, is that from childhood the Egyptians shave their heads, and the bone is thickened by exposure to the sun. For the same reason they do not become bald. Of all races of men bald heads are rarest among the Egyptians. Such then is the reason for their strong skulls. And the reason why the Persians have weak skulls is that they cover their heads all their lives with felt hoods, called tiaras by the Persians. Such are the facts of the case. I noticed the same condition at Papremis in the skulls of the Persians slain by Inaros the Libyan”

So both the Greeks and the Romans picked up on the importance of sunlight. Science is a process, not an answer. If you don’t build off of the right foundations you won’t get very far. Would be interesting to see what medical science could accomplish if it did not insist on running blind with both hands tied behind its back. I would love to see scientists in medicine delivering useful technology, but they need to offer more than what can be achieved from a few basic principles, not less. Until then, for better or for worse, we’re largely on our own when it comes to health and wellbeing.

Other Stuff

If you want to read any paywalled article in full, DO NOT use sci-hub.tw to freely download it in violation of copyright law. Pay no attention to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27: the right... to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. ;-)

Mini Portal Prototypes: There are only 4 of these left for sale and they will be ready to ship in a matter of days (first come, first serve). This an insanely bright, perfect sky-blue (zero UV, zero short wavelength blue) light that points down at you and is held up on a desk with a tall monitor arm. Nothing else like it. A friend dubbed it “a personal pocket of sunlight.” Once they’re gone, I won’t be building more for a while (maybe 6-8 months) since I’ll be focusing on near-infrared first. You can reply to this newsletter for more details (michael@fountainportal.com).

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For a collapsible, interlinked version, you can read this newsletter in Roam Research.

Special New Decade Edition: We are going to share every single major near-infrared and sunlight simulation system we plan develop in the coming years! But first, the usual research roundup:

Circadian Rhythms, Melatonin, Bright Light, and Sleep Research

Sleep as a default state of cortical and subcortical networks

Being asleep is the default state, which is interrupted on a daily basis to be awake, not the other way around. Possible implications? -- a failure to properly signal wakefulness might be more damaging than a failure to properly signal sleepiness since the latter sort of occurs on its own. Of course, no reason not to do both.

Vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy: A word of caution.

There is tons of research showing pervasive vitamin D deficiencies along with the safety of vitamin D. Now we have a study showing supplementation may pose some risks. It's hard to prove that something is safe with a finite amount of data. Some things have no other option and pose huge well-known downsides if we do not use them, but vitamin D is not one of those. We can easily get it directly from the sun.

Moreover, my view on things like melatonin and vitamin D is it's hard to know if all the benefits are due only to that one thing, or if it also has something to do with the 99 other factors you get in parallel from the natural source that you might not have been looking at.

Miniaturized, light-adaptive, wireless dosimeters autonomously monitor exposure to electromagnetic radiation

Some people wrote about building sensors that track light input. What gets measured gets managed or so goes the cliche. My take on the whole quantified-self movement is that they could really benefit from some new tools and products that actually make a major difference. Otherwise, you end up trying to find patterns/signals where there are none, or the effect size is negligible. If you don't give people shiny things to measure that actually work, they'll do silly things like use dosimeters to measure UV and tell people to get less sunlight... this kills the human

Bright light exposure augments cognitive behavioral therapy for panic and posttraumatic stress disorders: a pilot randomized control trial AND Blunted Nocturnal Salivary Melatonin Secretion Profiles in Military-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

One study finds bright light therapy helps alleviate symptoms of PTSD. Another study finds that PTSD has the effect of lower melatonin levels. Hard to imagine there's not a connection there.

Melatonin regulates breast cancer progression by thelnc010561/miR-30/FKBP3 axis

We've known for a while that low melatonin is tied to increased rates of breast cancer. It has even been shown epidimiologically that extreme latitudes have higher rates. Seems like we now have more of the underlying biochemistry explaining it, but I have no idea what those last ~25 characters in the title mean so I won't even try to explain it.

Constant light exposure terminates pregnancy in rats with pineal gland dysfunction, low melatonin level and pro-inflammatory response

If you take artificial light to exposure to extremes, it causes so much inflammation that it terminates pregnancy in rats. Dying of cancer is even worse, but because it is not a discrete event that happens immediately, the connection to light exposure goes ignored.

Photobiomodulation Research

Does photobiomodulation change the synthesis and secretion of angiogenic proteins by different pulp cell lineages

Deep red light (660 nm) stimulated an increase in VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor). This drives growth of new blood vessels and capillaries. After I looked into high volume low intensity training, which has been determined as the only way to drive long term progress in advanced athletes, my impression was that VEGF-driven adaptations played a key role (Capacity vs Utilization Training). There was also a study that showed VEGF deprivation accelerates cancer growth.

Enhanced mitochondrial membrane potential and ATP synthesis by photobiomodulation increases viability of the auditory cell line after gentamicin-induced intrinsic apoptosis

808 nm near infared light shown to help treat hearing loss. The list of things light exposure helps with seems to be growing without end. At some point the paradigm of light being called medicine starts to sound absurd. Imagine this: scientists want to test the effects of a novel health treatment they call 'bullet-removal'. They shoot patients in the foot, and remove the bullet. They shoot patients in the shoulder, and remove the bullet. They should patients in the gut, and in this case some of the patients die, but the ones with the bullet-removable-therapy were less likely to die.

This entire time no one bothers to ask whether the patients might be better off if you didn't shoot them in the first place. But this might as well be what modern buildings do to us, trapping us indoors away from the sunlight (which contains a fair bit of near infrared light among other things). So of course its absence will lead to innumerable processes in the body going haywire. It's worthwhile recognizing the origins and order of things when we can.

Could heat therapy be an effective treatment for alzheimer’s and parkinson’s diseases? A narrative review

Products, Patents, and other News

There are numerous light therapy products available today, but none of them are particularly novel. They are mostly re-purposed products with minimal changes. Near-infrared panels are just greenhouse lights with a particular set of LEDs. SAD (seasonal affective disorder) lights are usually just slightly harmful and less effective standard short-wavelength blue light fixtures sitting on a desk. The reason there are no engineered devices is the people building them do not understand their true purpose.

I propose that we must first define the purpose: I suggest that we think of what is needed as Chromatic Portals [tm]. A Chromatic Portal must be able to deliver light in a way that seamlessly integrates into dwellings and they way we live and work in them. We are at 0% UV, 0% near-infrared, and about 1% visible light indoors. Let’s hit >50%

Product 1: Iron Fist [tm]

Here is an early alpha prototype I built before starting to work on the Iron Fist (about as much near-infrared as a typical “1000 watt” in a package >20 times more compact. If you want low intensity near-infrared on your whole body all at once, why not go outside. An hour of summer sunlight gets you far more than a “1500 watt” near-infrared full body panel. :)

The Iron Fist is the first US-designed purpose-built high power near-infrared device that is built for consumers rather than costing tens of thousands of dollars. After running the numbers, the benefit of anything other than an insanely expensive full body bed (I've seen prices up to $140,000) didn't excite me so I started building my own systems a year ago. I'm now in the process of finalizing my latest prototype system that can be built at scale. As long as I'm happy with the prototype, there will likely be a pre-order launch for that in a couple months or so.

I will be writing an in-depth exposé of the current near-infrared consumer market over the coming weeks. I will also write a detailed white-paper on the design and thinking behind the Iron Fist.

Near-infrared panels exposé (teaser summary):

• Repurposed/rebranded light fixtures from greenhouses (companies like Joovv don’t have engineers or know how to build anything so they just patent troll with junk patent applications e.g. ~“hanging a near-infrared panel on a wall”)

• This leads to poor durability, hence the typical 2 year warranties.

• Actual power wayyy less than stated, from ALL suppliers. Irradiance numbers also don't add up (again, no engineers).

Iron Fist whitepaper (teaser summary)

• A device about the size and shape of a large brick.

• 5+ year warranty and built like a tank.

• Large and passive aluminum cooling block. Unlike fans, this eliminates noise and increases reliability.

• Ultra-strong acrylic face sheet held on with fat titanium bolts.

• Under-driven LEDs for extreme longevity (decades).

• >10x power per area of any panel light.

• Delivering something beyond what you can get from a sunny day or a warm fire.

• Pricing most likely in the $1-1.5k range (An order of magnitude lower than the closest form factor devices that have an order of magnitude lower power).

Product 2: Cerebro [tm] / Halo [tm]

This is by far the least thought out product. All I have now is a bunch of near-IR lights mounted on a hard hat. There were a bunch of people with Parkinson's doing DIY versions of near-IR helmets that had maybe a tenth of the power of this thing. If it's pulsed at 40 khz it might be a potent treatment for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

For now, I'm just interested in the potential for cognitive enhancement and sleep improvements. Hard to describe the feeling of running it at a full power for more than 60 seconds... but let's just say I've now decided 25% power is where I feel comfortable with it. I've been using this thing most days for about 30 minutes on average.

For now, I'm just interested in the potential for cognitive enhancement and sleep improvements. Hard to describe the feeling of running it at a full power for more than 60 seconds... but let's just say I've now decided 25% power is where I feel comfortable with it. I've been using this thing most days for about 30 minutes on average.

This prototype might be the most powerful device of its kind ever built based on the only similar one I found having 15% nominal power. It is >10x the power of hats marketed for hair regrowth or cognitive benefits, and ~20-30x near-IR masks for skin/beauty.

Product 3: The Portal [tm]

The Portal is meant to solve the visible light problem of living indoors where the intensity of light received is 2 orders of magnitude less than what is found outside. Seasonal effective disorder or winter depression is the typical application of so-called bright light therapy, but this light will not be built to treat that. Instead it will merely help remove the artificial effects that buildings have on people to improve the wellness of all humans. As an entirely new form of lighting, the Portal is quite different from any existing light on the market today. A summary of the in-depth blog posts I'll write about this are provided below.

Current lights are a joke, as in, they're so bad they are mocked. Such mockery was found in season 2 of Netflix's The Punisher as well as the latest season of HBO's Silicon Valley. While this may be disrespectful to people suffering from depression, my biggest concern is the element of truth that all these devices such. Health has become a status symbol in modern society, and since illumination is central to beauty, a proper device should elicit pride. We managed to come down from trees and make ourselves nice little tall huts in our modern cities. But now is not yet the time to pat ourselves on the back.

Why current lights are terrible (blog post teaser summary)

• Awful spectrum, some even use fluorescent bulbs.

• Use ill-defined "10,000 lux" metric, and deliberately mislead people about dosage with a small asterisk that mentions distance

• Require people to take time out of their day to use

• May pose macular degneration risk

• Companies making them don't take what they're doing seriously.

• Scattered light can distract people nearby, making them difficult to use around co-workers (I experienced this with the 1st thing I built for myself).

How the Portal fixes this (blog post teaser summary)

• Monochromatic sky blue LEDs provide peak melanopic response while eliminating high energy short wavelength blue light.

• Large fresnel lens delivers light as a column (like a spotlight): much higher light intensity possible (still dimmable), and zero light spillover that would both people nearby.

• Positioned about 1 ft above your monitor and pointed down with a 45 degree angle (adjustable) to seamlessly integrate into a work environment so you can be exposed to light throughout the entire day.

Here I am with a previous iteration at full power: ~100,000 lux without having to be inches away. It’s almost as bright as direct sunlight, but without any UV.

Here is another prototype. Notice how in the center it looks sort of white and how in other areas it is pinkish red? Color does not only not define what wavelengths are generating it (metamerism), but humans are unreliable observers of color even under constant chromaticity. When light is very bright, the brain basically says, screw it, we’re going to call that white. This is also why molten steel at around 1500 C can look white hot, even though if you think about color corrected temperatures of a blackbody (5500K being daylight and 2700K being a rather warm white), you realize its “true color” is deep red.

Timeline & Beta Tester Opportunity: this is a product that will take time to build to my satisfaction so it will not be available this winter.

I am building mini-prototypes for feedback. I originally mentioned on Facebook that I would make these available for one week trials, but there has been a lot of inbound interest. Therefore, if anyone is interested in purchasing one of the 10 trial units I am building please shoot me an email and I can provide last few minor details (michael at fountainportal.com). Price on prototype units will be only $500 so long as demand is low. I'm not really thrilled about sending people fixtures that are functional, but not beautiful (bubblegum and wire prototypes so to speak) so I do not anticipate offering this again. These will ship in 1-2 weeks as I just received the final component for these.

When the real Portal launches (~1 year out) it will be vastly superior: much larger fresnel lens, color modulation, and bi-functional red light, and a fixture with high-end materials. Remember, my background is aerospace and carbon fiber so I look forward to eventually making a really over-the-top version eventually!

Please share this newsletter so I can get these products to you as soon as possible!

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