#19 Chroma: My Biggest Blindspot on Sunlight, New Products, and Fixing Food

It has been an interesting past 6 months since the last post. As I have always promised, as sales go up, new products also go up (which no other light therapy company delivers on the way I do). With the help of various people, Chroma has finally reached a stage of stability and growth, without much of my time being required. This allows me to jump in here and there to push new product concepts without losing a bunch of time, and with the confidence they will actually be able to reach a wide range of customers. This growth has led to frequent product backorders since the business is bootstrapped and there is only so much cash to build out inventory, but this should be mostly resolved over the next few months.

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.

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.