Awesome. So we'll just start. Uh, we're already recording on both sides and I would just love, first of all, welcome to our show. So excited to have you here. The founder of a very exciting useful resource that we'll let you go into details about. So take it over and tell people who you are.

Sweet. Well, thanks for having me on. is exciting cause it's, it's rare to find the multiple different threads converge. Um, whether it be me or the project, I feel like with a certain person, we're talking about the decentralized and sovereign aspects of what I'm interested in and what daylight is with somebody else, we're getting into the blue light and circadian rhythms with somebody else. It's about, you know, the social media algorithms and addiction and distraction. Uh, it's just, it just feels really cool. To meet somebody else where all of it intersecting, all of it is on the table. And that's probably the best way to describe me. I just, I've been very passionate about technology and gadgets and computers ever since I was a kid. Would always go to the store and try every single new laptop and phone and camcorder and boombox and everything in just kind of fell in love with it. The early images of Steve Jobs and Nolan Bushnell were these early Silicon Valley founders. Nolan Bushnell was the founder of Atari, which was kind of like the first irreverent technology company. total punks and rebels and hippies. I just fell in love with that. Because I come from a family of doctors and they're know, by the book and conventional. And I felt always a little bit more of a free spirit. uh, looking for some hero or something to identify with. And I'm like, oh my God, these people. They're like changing the world and creating new things and literally shaping the reality that we live in and they're doing it their own way They're not conforming and they're not, you know being lame. They're being awesome and creative so that that kind of like deep impression on much of the journey since has been like This absolute love and passion for technology and invention meeting what often was a very dysfunctional relationship Um, I'm pretty ADHD. And so most of what using a computer has meant for me is distraction and being addicted and 200 tabs becoming 400 tabs becoming 800 tabs the thing I'm supposed to do getting procrastinated just feeling like really crappy my self esteem and willpower and somewhere along the lines was like, okay, I'm not going to be successful because whether I want to be a manager at Chick fil A or, be a, be a field anthropologist. So much of my life's expression and work and productivity is through a computer and the computer is the bane of my existence. It's what makes me feel terrible physically, mentally, emotionally. um. I think my own journey of kind of reckoning with my relationship with technology kind of is what's interest reform computers and technology to be something that's a little more humane, a little healthier, some of us that are a little bit on the tails of the distribution. We're neurodivergent, kind of me.

I think a lot of can relate to that. I know we have four kids and our youngest and I used to fight all the time. And they would so heated, and they used to say to him, Please don't let technology come between you and me. I don't like what it's doing to our relationship. Because it was like that tug of war you were talking about. It's addictive. He doesn't want to do it. But it is where he's getting his stimulation from. It tug of war for, um, kids. know, that fall, as you said, towards the tail end of either side of the spectrum. Um, yeah. yeah, I think so many people can relate to that. You want to add something? Well, I'm just trying to think so our audience that we're shooting to help are people who are parents, young kids or want to be parents. And we do try to reach homeschoolers to tell them about Bitcoin. But honestly, most of our audience is Bitcoiners who want to homeschool And so what I'm having a little bit of trouble processing is how do we just take that amount of information? You got blue light, just the technology. You got, then you have the tech, the addiction want, to, I want to dive deep with addiction. And then you've got, the, well, I don't know if the, okay, well, I'm just saying there's multiple layers. There's multiple layers in there that I think would be helpful to our audience. just trying to figure out how do we just kind of take it out? Cause Otherwise, we'll be here all day. So, I'm just trying to think, how do we break this up so it's useful for people it's, and it's good. Well, I,

And I think there's a thread that connects all of it.

Yes, yes, definitely, definitely.

I and it's, it's been fascinating because each of it was informed by different life Um, but when I started to like, kind of crack away at the problem, I was like, oh my God, it's all the same thing. And what the core of it is, is essentially. A respect for that, which is Lindy. A respect for that which is empirical, that's tested, that has a proof of That is natural versus that, which is this like human kind of trying to be too clever by half. And so if you think about what a modern computer is, it's all this cleverness that has kind of redoubled on Hey, this is, can replace 20 different devices. This can be replaced for entertainment and education and that. And so much of the addiction and distraction comes from like, you've put crack cocaine in the same place you're trying to eat spinach. It's like they were trying to create something that is magical. Like, Oh, you can do everything in one place in real life, kitchen, the place where you have your TV, the place where you do your work, like you have different places in your environment, in the real world, you know, you would go hunt and then you would come back and be around your campfire and then you'd have your bedroom or whatever it may be. There's all these interesting ways in which our psychology is shaped for a particular world we evolved so much of the ways that technology undermines us is it's mismatched to the way we're evolved. It's mismatched to what or nature And so even the circadian rhythm impact of blue light and so on, that's unnatural. You don't get blue light And all the problems that kind of come from The red dots, notification pings and pongs, those are unnatural. Of course we're going to have an orienting response, because in nature, if something goes bing or this, you want to pay attention. If something is red, you want to pay attention. And so, kind of across the board, what I, the way I've kind of, God and like self clarity around this project is, Oh, how do we come back to natural How do we come back to things that are invariant? How do we come back to things that are beyond human cleverness? so that's where like things like Bitcoin sovereignty really are a similar thing. How do you come back to something that is beyond,

mean, for us, the, we want education to go back to the way it, the, the most most decentralized education you can have is the parents or the family. And, the separation of education and state, I mean, it's a similar type thing, Absolutely. If you're a Bitcoiner, all those concepts make sense. They just, they apply to that world as well. So here's, here's one question for you. Maybe it's a two part question. So, my point of view is, really don't think I've ever had anybody really push back on this, that you have to set an example for your You have to put your own oxygen mask on first, so to speak. And if the kids see you checking your phone at night and doing all those it'd be a little challenging to say, Hey, I'm going to force you to look at this device or use this other device. Um, so maybe, um, cause at this point still, we haven't even really told everybody what it is. your product, Right. I just realized that too. early. We're well into this thing. So, uh, so let's take a step back. Why don't you tell, us, take, do the 32nd elevator speech. What it is. that your passion led to. and then we can get back to the question I was just trying to, that I was just trying to set up for you.

sure. Yeah. So kind of the quest I've been on, and it's actually been six years from the first idea to. Now getting the first product, really tough The kind of quest is how do you reinvent computers to be like healthier? distraction free How do you redeem computing from being this kind of brave new world tool of mass, like numbing and stimulation and addiction and control into something that allows you to be sovereign? that allows you to learn, that allows you to be the highest faculties of what a human is possible for, our, prefrontal cortex and not our lizard And how do you do it in a way where it's not, it's not misaligned with your values. It's not misaligned with your choices. And that to me is is, you get to instantiate your values and so where I wanted to start with was the actual physical. Hardware, the actual physical substrate of a How do I make this to me, I got really light and how much light implicates, um, health and circadian rhythms and mood. the blue light of a computer, I started to realize how actually, how bad that and how it actually feeds. a lot of these cycles we could get into that. the core of daylight was inventing a new computer display kind of resembles paper, that doesn't produce its own light, but reflects the light of your environment. see a paper book in a dark room because it's not producing its own light. A normal computer screen is like a flashlight. of paper is like an analog object. so we were able to make a computer screen that's like an analog object. But where the black ink can animate and move around. Kind of like Marauder's Map in Harry Potter or Diary. the page is the same and the ink disappears. That's essentially what we've created. And the main reason to do so it's blue light free, it's flicker free, You could use it outdoors just a lot calmer And then what we're doing is we built a tablet with that display technology. So it's kind of like, you can think about it as like a healthy iPad is great better for you stuff on it. addicting stuff and social media and like that. Instead, you can read and write and sketch and listen to audio books educational whatever you'd want to do that, you know, computer can quite useful for, then the software wise is decentralized OS. that's where it's um, I don't know if we've sent it to you, but yeah, we have a whole proposal where you would, instead of Apple pay daylight pay would actually have lightning So Bitcoin rails underneath it, your daylight ID. Instead of being like Apple or iCloud, it would actually be Noster or

Yep. I

suddenly we don't need to convince people or sell them on it or have them have a clunky onboarding experience. you, you, kind of come for this healthier computer, but over time we're able to create a total new stack sovereign and decentralized and all the rails, payment, identity, storage, key management, and so on is And so that's kind of what we're excited about is like sovereignty at every level layer. physical health, sovereignty, nervous system, sovereignty, like cognitive sovereignty. We think of distraction as impingement on your cognitive sovereignty, the notifications, and then actual, you So hopefully it a decentralized computers. And frankly, I just don't think we can, Forever build the kind of world we want on whether it's us or I'm pretty

love to have a competitor to replace Apple and Google. Well, can we talk specifically for a moment about how this impacts children? Um, I'm currently reading this book called The Anxious Generation and yes, uh, and, um, And that guy, the, the author, uh, Jonathan, Height, He also wrote a book called The Coddling Mind, and so much of it has to do with the identification of microaggression, you just invent a million ways to make yourself unhappy versus looking for a million ways to make yourself happy. So let's talk a little bit about how social media, or just computers in general, access to the internet affects kids. and their image of self and the psychological Consequences of that. Can you comment on that in your design process?

Yeah. And, um, if you don't mind, I'll take a step back just to give a bit of context. Most of what Apple has done has been, Steve Jobs has been implementing the vision of Xerox PARC and a guy named They're kind of these early pioneers who had. Basically dreamt up the modern computer because before then computers were calculators, right? Like they were not, we think of them as so much more now, but back then it was more in the realm of like a toaster. It was a particular appliance he used for And so his original intuition for what a computer was is it's having the library of Alexandria on your desk, It's having something that The inner poet in you has so much of a better way to it's able to help you in particular ways. If your word blocked, it's got tools to do it. It's an interactive animated dynamic thing that can be personalized and contextualized Every media in the past you can read the book, but you can't talk back to it. The whole point of computers is time, we can actually have it go in both can interact with it. You can animate And so actually his original, one of the original papers he wrote, which is one of the first kind of like examples of what a personal computer could be instead of these big machines, is he has two kids holding these little tabs. He invented the idea of the tablet sitting in the grass, like learning. And. For him, that is what the vision of computing was, is to make education and learning fun and interesting. Like, you know, the dopamine system that we have is set up to reward learning in the natural And he's like, we could harness that with a computer because it can be interactive and engaging rather than, you know, something that's kind of boring and static. It can only allow us to better cultivate our own agency, our own inner curiosity. And so Alan Kay says, he's like. Somewhere along the line, that original vision of computing to be this great empowerment for children, the imagination, for creativity, for learning, was lost with a far easier task of just creating tools for entertainment and communication and business people. And he's like, that's what happened because it was more convenient for Steve Jobs to cater to those markets than the original intention of of us all, and particularly And so I think that's where so many of these problems there's nobody who sat down and said, this is what I care about. Instead they were optimizing for, well, you're going to buy this new one because it's got more colors. It's more shiny. Look at the specs. It's faster, right? They're like always trying to sell you on specs. And so kind of like peacocking, it's just been a rat race to more colors, more shininess, more saturation, more stimulation. know, my candy is going to be more addicting than your candy. And it's just felt like Nobody's really sat down and said enough is enough Like this is not being optimized with our actual goals or intentions in mind And guess what? They had some good ideas back then in the beginning. come back and so I think it's as much the education and the intentions we have and things like podcasts and it's funny These same social media things allowing us to connect and organize and you know self educate ourselves is making it possible for us to try to create alternatives. And so I think the combination of that and Moore's Law, which the pace of progress of how much computers improve, doubly as fast every two years, which has continued for a long time. That's finally gotten to the point where You don't really notice the difference between the new computer You don't, like, between the last iPhone and the new iPhone, the new MacBook, like, do you even notice anymore? And what that means is you're not stuck in a rat race of trying to spend billions of dollars to make the state of the art computers, otherwise you can't compete. And I believe that's only kind of happened in the last and so it makes it possible finally for upstarts To make computers that are good enough. You don't need to spend billions of dollars to have the latest chips and fancy things, but we can re imagine it with a total different And for me, the most important values health, which I consider to be physical sovereignty, cognitive sovereignty, and then actual, of monetary the hope here is if you can re imagine a computer where you just carve out the good parts of it. know, learning, reading, writing, sketching, So on, you then can remove all the things about a computer that are kind of dangerous and addicting. And then you don't need to be like, here's 30 minutes of screen time to your kid, right? Like it doesn't need to be this thing that it's like going to central park where there's lots of drug dealers. Like that's what a normal computer feels like. Like it's a beautiful park, but you're like cautious the whole time. Like watch out. The goal here almost is to create a new park that's free of drug in itself, play to the innate curiosities of kids and they'll, know, read books be able to learn things that's kind of the, the goal here is to create addicting in that way, redeem this medium

can you with with with daylight, can you I would think one of the challenges of adoption for it is going to be i'm going to have something I need to do whatever it is. a certain you on my laptop or there's a certain app. There's a, whatever it is. And if I can't use whatever I think is critical to my job or studies or whatever it is, if I can't use that on there then I, to me, it's like, okay, here's a roadblock to get me use it with the kids. I think it's easier because parents have a little bit more control over, Hey, yeah, this is how you're going to, if you want to email, here it is. And you give them a, um, a, a, safer, healthy tablet as opposed to one that, you know, a traditional one. So, um, I, still come back to, you still have to, if you're gonna get the, adults are going to have to get on board with it in order, I think for them to then push on their kids or introduce it to their kids. I say push, Um, I don't, I don't, I think you could try to do it just saying here, this is only for your kids, but I'm assuming you're marketing to both, right? You're marketing to adults and kids. You don't care who it is that the things you're talking about from a health perspective apply to everybody, right? So how would a, so use me an example. If I had a tablet, if I had a healthy tablet, how does my life change if I have that versus what I'm doing today? I don't know. I'm walk through an example to make it more tangible.

yeah. yeah.

who's listening to this saying, okay, what do I do with this information if I got thing? What do I do with it? What changes do I have this period where I'm using both or do I go cold turkey? Have you gone cold turkey? Have you do you have another?

I've not gone cold turkey

Right. So if you can't do it like you're the you're the visionary man. You're like I'm like so Help me understand what I could do with it. Like I want to as a non techie dad What can

I think the goal, the goal is not to go cold turkey. It's not realistic. And the point isn't to demonize the existing things is to give yourself some sanctuary to give you some, some, like some option that hopefully over time is more and more And so even now we're just a tablet and but over time we want to create a laptop a phone a monitor So more and more of your But um, actually the the product is it's pretty cool How the same kind of substrate of like I want to create a more natural healthy computer ends up being like Very powerful for adults as well, and not just um, for kids. Obviously the use case here is and reading and writing and learning. Um, and not, addicting distracting but for adults, what it essentially is, soccer Your iPad is tennis It's kind of a lowest common denominator And what the daylight is, is it's soccer an iPad that is opinionated such that it's amazing for text for reading, for writing, and so on. And so because of the paper like screen, you get tremendously less eye if you're on an iPad. So like, a lot of the Early customers of our thing are not just parents buying this for their kids, but they're buying it for themselves because they're an engineer They're a scientist. They're a business person. They're a hedge fund manager. They're uh, Whoever has to kind of like read lots of documents and pdfs and articles and essays Take notes and meetings and so on They're buying it for that because they're like, I don't want slack and email and all these distractions and hey the blue light The science is getting pretty clear about how bad that is for our circadian rhythms Instead of, you know, checking my email at nighttime on an iPad, I and I'm able to sleep a lot so for parents, you can kind of think about it as two things. One is it's a performance device. It's the best possible tool for reading and writing, particularly like PDFs like that. And it's a healthier computer. You can use it at nighttime not have blue and not, for kids, the health, physical health side, and then the

do we talk before? I think when we talked before this podcast, think we mentioned homeschooling conferences to you. Did we, am I, did I, is that, am I remembering correctly?

remember one of them, but I don't, I don't know if

So I, um, as you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, it'd be, it would be good if you could bring it to a school because in a school, basically, whatever, depending on the school, it's, it's, jurisdiction, how they make their and what is, what their kids are going to be using or teachers using. That's more of a top down type approach as opposed to the decentralized. So I think from a, a value orientation, the homeschoolers are aligned with you. And I'm just thinking if you were at a convention, um, it's, I mean, it's similar to the Bitcoin conventions or anything else. You're going to have, everybody has their booths and there's going to be talks and, and. Um, it's just focused on education. I think the message of a healthier alternative would resonate with that particular, that particular group of people. I, I, would agree with that. So the homeschoolers kind of fall into two subcategories, very, very generally speaking. You have the ones that are just rejecting modern technology and will not let their kids touch a phone. They don't have computer they're making their own clothes, like, you know, Little House on the Prairie kind of thing. They are just trying to stay as pure as possible. And then you have the other homeschoolers, and they recognize that in order for their kids to grow up and be competitive in society, they must engage in teaching. technology. So then that's the group that's really going to struggle with that tug of war. And it's always come, it always seems to come down I will give you, it's like a barter system. If you this, you get 30 minutes an iPad or something, which I really hated doing with my kids because I, even those 30 minutes, when I give it to them, I'm like, I'm literally feeding them poison. You know, it's like, I'll let you have ice cream spinach, but then you're also having the ice cream. And is that really better than just eating the ice cream if you have some spinach in there mixed up? You know what I'm saying? So I love that this resource is now available. You wanted to say something? Yeah, I disagree with you a little bit. I just, just, I mean, I don't, that category is not completely true because you have The parents that are more Jeff Booth like, they don't know Jeff Booth, but they're Jeff Booth like they're trying to use a tool that can enhance education. I mean, we just, you said it earlier, right? In world, you can get any information, any language, anytime now because of the internet. And now you can do it while you're sitting the lawn or in the car. So the quality of education should be improving and the cost should be coming down, right? Technology should be helping. There are parents that are looking at. These pads and Khan Academy and anything else that you can do online and they're saying these are the things that we can do to enhance our kids education There are others that are saying that might just say I'm really tired right now And I just want my kids to leave me alone for a little while. So I'm going to give them some like a, a Cartoon, I'm going to give them a phone I'm going to use this use this

more as a as a escape

Because I just need to lay down for a few minutes so the kids can put on a

movie or take out a laptop.

So, I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt.

I think

applying this kind of technology is

a way of

improving

education,

but it's also improving their health

they're doing it.

I absolutely

with that. I don't

think with that

at all.

Um, I just know that the, so I'm thinking back in our own Our kids

didn't have access to a phone. until

they were old enough to

be in different club and activities.

And they were in leadership roles and everybody was

communicating through my one phone.

And when they say Lindbergh, I can never tell who they're So I finally

just said,

just, everybody get your own phone so you can coordinate, right? The problem with that is the moment you hand them

the phone,

they now have access what

they said before

a carnivore,

uh, not carnivore.

carnival of choices that are not always good for them. is at their fingertips and you have the parental controls, but that Raises another issue of distrust and that distrust starts to build between

you and the kids, which

I also did not enjoy I don't agree with that. I mean, I know we have to

them, but

it'll be so much easier if I could have handed them one

your

Tablets and go go crazy and know that it's gonna be okay So what are you gonna give the kids a nostril like they're now they have their own privacy and they can go look at

own stuff

Like how do you

do you okay?

I think, I think it's realizing that a lot of these things are backend rails, right? So you don't even need to know about it. You don't need to think about it, but now these companies can't So there's going to be potentially new front ends. There's going to be new services be a part of, but Hey, if they ever do something that you're misaligned with And so that's where I feel like that's what's happens in the natural there are top predators. There are keystone species. But they don't, they don't have, they're not a gatekeeper can collect rent on the environment, right? It's more rhizomatic. And so the goal would be for software to match that And I agree, like we have to be realistic. Like it's kind of interesting, like, uh, some of the early customers who have daylights who are parents. So one of the examples I thought was really cool was previously, um, yeah, their kid was only allowed to get. You know, 30 minutes of screen time on Friday, you know, another 30 minutes over the weekend, they got like a restricted amount of screen time and no gadgets allowed in their bedroom. But now with the daylight, um, they're allowed to kind of have unlimited screen time on their daylight. Cause it's, but what are they doing on their day? And they're allowed to bring it into the bedroom. It's, uh, he's on Kindle and he's reading, or he's listening to audio books and audible that the parents have loaded up or he's playing chess on it. Cause it's actually like really good for playing chess. Um, And he's also, brilliant. It's like an educational game thing called Brilliant. you like rudimentary math and science and and the idea is, as a parent, you're like kind of okay if they have unlimited screen time on those type of

Yes. Yeah.

my point is the physiological underestimated, the blue light over activates and stimulates your dopamine system. So then when you're not on the device, your brain is confused because its baseline has been shifted. think that's where a lot of the ADD esque symptoms are coming from is our attentional and dopamine rewired so that's kind of the goal is to level the playing So there's a second. Kind of parental use case kind of similar to what you're saying where they're like, okay, sometimes I just need to like have the kid watch Cocomelon or Peppa the Pig, but it's now like not heroin. It's like right? And like candy is not necessarily like good for you, but it's also not And so the way one parent described it is what I like about the daylight is it's more interesting throwing a tantrum or picking your nose, but less interesting And so there's a way, like, you'll never go to the backyard if you got Peppa the Pig in front of you, but on a daylight, you might be satisfied by Peppa the Pig and you might also And I think that because we've leveled the playing

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Can you, um, I'm a little distracted too.

do you have

resources that impacted you that you would recommend to parents that want to understand just how

bad that negative impact you described of getting,

so, you know, the kids are exposed

to the, to the, The the negative.

The blue

light, as an

example, and it messes up their sleep, or it messes up their circadian rhythm, or messes

whatever it

is, which has secondary and tertiary effects,

right?

There's another part of it called Flickr, by

flicker. So, perfect. So, I, I personally want

learn

more. Do you have one or two resources that you would recommend?

Because,

I'm just imagining, again,

I'm thinking of

someone listening to this, their parents are going to be a parent, and they

hear this stuff.

And it's, it's, one thing for somebody to get a podcast and say, blue light bad, and flickering bad,

and whatever.

But if there was a way to say, here's a resource, it's a documentary, it's a, it's a book,

it's a podcast,

what were, can you give one or two

recommendations

that might

helpful?

yeah, I would, um, well, one guy who I think, was extremely influential for me was John Ott, who was kind of an early pioneer in revealing that, uh, Medicine did not quite appreciate how absolutely light mood to cognition metabolism. so if, if you look up his book, health and light, it was written a long time ago, And so he's got a cool video also you can find on YouTube where they have a classroom with flickering fluorescent it's kind of a time lapse the kids are rambunctious and they're kind of like not really paying attention and they're not focused and fidgeting and all that and then they have this the same classroom but the lights are replaced with non flickering incandescent bulbs and suddenly there's like 60 to 70 percent less fidgeting and rambunctiousness His point is, uh, we've gotten so used to these environments that are unnatural. We don't realize what it's doing to our nervous system and, uh, and what it's doing to

You know,

So,

wow, do phones have the same, flicker type of issue

so that's, that's, the problem with modern phones and laptops and iPads and tablets. Is not only do they have blue light, they have And so a flicker is nerdy do you want me to

That's up to you. I'm just I, I, would say go a little nerdy, yeah, because

go nerdy.

let's, I want people who hear this to say, that really piques my interest. I think this is something that can

my family.

Because if they

have that,

then it's just, ah, okay, it's interesting. This guy's on a mission, his six year quest to stop flickering. You know, like he's It doesn't have the same impact as, this

helps the health of my

family. My kid is going to be able to focus better, better education,

life.

That's compelling

me. So get nerdy.

Hey, I'll get into it. And might sound like a hyperbole, but I don't think it's that far away. I think like five or 10 years from now, we'll look back and be like, Oh, our relationship with technology and the way computers were set up. It was like, it was like smoking and secondhand smoking. Like we didn't realize actually how bad it was and how many externalities there are until we did it for a while, right? And it's the same thing with like lead and gasoline. It's like we look back and we're like, holy crap, why were we doing that? I think it'll be a similar thing here with the blue light, the flicker, the distraction, the addiction,

Hmm.

We're kind of on the precipice of it now, where the academic literature around starting to really come through. And people like Jonathan Haidt, publishing The Anxious Generation and pulling the science and and it's still really early. I so Flickr, what Flickr is, and it's something modern, um, you don't get this with incandescent bulbs and lighting of the That's what's super interesting about this. This is kind of like a new societal experiment. That we're kind of running 2010 onwards. know, we really don't know, we haven't really run this essentially what happens in modern lighting, like the leds and is the way they change brightness is not like the way leds the way they change brightness, put the brightness less and you put the brightness more, the way they change brightness is they change. In one second, what percentage of the time it's on versus And so,

Yeah.

so if you want to be 100 percent bright as an led, you're on for the entire time. And if you want to be 0 percent brightness, But if you want it to be 50 percent brightness, if I was on for half a second and off for half a second, you would see that, right? It would like visibly look like it turned on and And so they were like, okay, we can't do this. So they like realized, huh, there's actually an optical illusion where if I'm on for five milliseconds and off for five milliseconds and on for five milliseconds and off for five milliseconds and on, you don't notice it as click, click, click, click, click, click, click. You just notice it as a darker But if I'm on for seven seconds and off for three and on for seven and off for three, it just looks like a brighter white. And if, and so this playing around with the proportion of on and off, but doing it in these really, really, really small time is actually how they change brightness it's based on kind of old perceptual science that like, oh, under this threshold, humans Right. And they didn't really have great ways of testing that they'll put people in front of it. And they're like, does this give you a headache? You know, how do you feel? Do you notice this? And they're like, great. But no one sat there and did it for six months or a year or multiple years. Or, you know, back then they spent an hour on a computer, not the 10 hours we spend now. So this is a total like untested societal experiment. And the basic theory is actually, they didn't understand that even in the moment, you cannot consciously perceive it. There is a subconscious perceptual load

just had a flash.

Yeah.

I remember,

I remember

there was a thing, I don't know if it was in the marketing

class or what it was where, uh,

when the movies, when movies first came out and they were actual

film, right?

yeah, subliminal

They would put a subliminal message in there with, with Coke or popcorn and people would suddenly get thirsty and

buy more

stuff and they couldn't perceive it because it was maybe one frame out of, I don't know what the numbers are. If it was 10 or 20, whatever the number of, of like

frames would be, they

just, they would flick it in there. So I couldn't see it. And, uh, I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that for, for

years. So what is the. What is

the damage

these constant flickering?

Well, that's a great question.

Causing to your cognitive energy efficiency functioning.

Uh, I think it could be understood in terms of like three, kind of depending on where you are in the curve. So on the extreme end of the curve, if you have a concussion or a traumatic brain injury, and actually even sometimes PTSD, um, a common thing, called post concussion syndrome is screens really, really painful You get nausea, you get headaches, you get eye strain. It's like really, really uncomfortable. And the best theory is your brain doesn't have much of a buffer now in that state. And so that little bit of load from the flicker actually really affects And so that that's one of the theories where the the light and the flickering of the light the emissive light Why it's so not one of the things they really stay away from and so that's a really good evidence that like we basically all have this buffer You And when we don't have that buffer, it actually affects us. It's like when, you know, when you're sleep deprived, it's easier to get sick. It's a

Yeah. Wow.

So that's like pretty strong evidence. We're all kind of dealing with it subacutely. And when you get concussed, it becomes

Does

so that's kind of one effect,

well, just to continue on that. So did the John Ott health and light cover flickering or is that too early?

uh, they covered in the context of fluorescent

That was where everyone is.

leds and kind of flickering leds and this super high frame rate

So. Wait, but he was going to tell us the other effects. Okay, I was just trying to, I was trying to get clear on the effects, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm happy to come back around the other. So the other effect is essentially what that is what some people feel very acutely, but actually, the vast majority of us feel it at level. And so there's, I guess I'll give the evidence second and give you the frame. First, the frame here is like, Do you know when you like kind of have to start really going to the bathroom, you really have to go pee, you start like tapping your leg and you start being a little more distractible and you interrupt it's because there's some underlying discomfort that you're then having to That's essentially what's happening with where there's like some underlying a parasympathetic little jacked. the theory is that's what's driving some of the distractibility. It's the same way you're kind of like, you to stim or be distracted when you have to go pee, you're getting a similar thing where there's an, there's almost like an anxiety away from, the, the evidence for that is there's a phenomenon called screen sleep apnea is when you're sleeping and you, you know, you don't breathe, they called it screen apnea, Where what happens in these studies is when you're on an emissive or iPad, emitting light, bright and flickering, um, your breathing your tidal volume gets shallower, your breathing rate goes down. And so there is another layer of physiological anxiety from breathing You're literally more so it's kind of this. Crazy vicious cycle where You are so much more stuck to the dopamine slot machine physiologically at nervous system level compromised you're a little more on edge and so of course it's like it's like binge eating, you know When you're stressed you binge eat they're kind of doing a similar thing here and then you you keep hitting facebook You keep hitting hitting your And so it's fascinating how the the software and the hardware are working together in this there's a way in which what we're trying to do Actually really targets the attention economy at its core Because when there isn't the same stimming when there isn't the same need to binge What happens what happens to their business it's like ozempic and junk what happens

Well,

there's also

compound effects, right? If you're chronically stressed, you're chronically

sleep deprived,

there are a

whole host of other

health issues and you'll never be able to perform your best at work, or in this case if we're talking about education

with the school, um, kids learning.

And

so, I'm just thinking,

multiplying

you're talking

about, time, throughout

a child's development, it's, it's more

than just an hour

of flickering.

It's now, okay, now

in that different state,

it's going to be multiple hours after that or days, whatever the recovery is, they're going to have more

it in between then.

And I'm, I'm guessing, now you're in this chronic feedback loop

you're talking about.

And Now you, now your ability to absorb material and learn new concepts, problem solve,

be creative, fill in the

blank,

um, Now that's compromised. So

it's, I just imagine the heat, the longer you've been inundated with that, the harder

the recovery

would have to be. So

if you're a parent,

the detox process yeah,

has to be, you

have to go through withdrawal symptoms. Well, does it take, right? Right. Yeah. So if you're a parent. And

you hear that, you're like,

okay, I, kids gonna be with us

until they're 18,

you know, how

we help them get

healthy and be able to function and learn things for

themselves and do all that stuff?

And if we've set them in

in a stage that's chronically,

whatever you call

it, anxious or

I forget what the word was

that you used there, but

or sympathetic

Well, here's the thing though, uh,

we talked about this before. We can't. Um, I'm going to go cold turkey because this pad is still not able to do a lot of things the computers can do. So for example, we have two kids in college and they

are by necessity on the screen hours

and hours and hours and hours every

day when they go to the library, it's

fluorescent light. When they go to the cafeteria, it's

light. When

go to the student unit, fluorescent light.

How like what's available on your pad

that can substitute what they're doing on their

laptop?

I mean, that's what's kind of cool about it. To kind of answer your question too, where you brought up like, Hey, I have to use certain apps. Will I be able to do it on this? We have two modes. We kind of have a lockdown focus mode. mainly for kids and it kind of curates in that And then we kind of have an open mode be more geared for adults and there you get access to actually almost all of the Because we have access to android apps and web apps So if you're in school and you're using canvas We have that if you're using microsoft word if you're using excel if you're using outlook if you're using, you know, google docs all of those things run on our thing So in that sense, we're kind of a A one to one replacement for an iPad. a keyboard with ours, we can be a reasonable replacement for a laptop as well.

But everything you have is black and white. Is that correct?

that's the big To get the kind of health benefits that turns out for most people to be okay. There

Yeah. Yeah, because one of our kids is a design major and she needs to be able to see the colors. So, necessarily she's on her Kindle because she's using Procreate.

But I can see how

when they're writing papers, they can substitute your, um, tablet. Okay. For the laptop they're

using. Can I, can I go onto your tablet and watch a YouTube

video, but it's in black and white? Yeah. Okay. So

people

that's

cats and lectures and Khan Academy.

Wow. That's so helpful. That's amazing. Did you say you're sold out?

Uh, we are, but we're trying to get back on sale. So what we're doing 100 deposit down. You'll be first in

When, when are you expecting your next shipment?

February.

February. Okay. Gotcha. Okay.

I'm on the

computer 12

hours a day

because all of my work is online. I'm on zoom calls. I am working

on graphics.

I'm working on social media posts. I mean, I mean, I can stand up and feel my body. Complaining to me what

my eyes like I forget to blink. You

were

about shallow breath.

I feel it more in my eyes because I don't I don't I blink less.

So blink rates. It's like a deer in headlights. That's literally actually an amazing

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Um, and what what will blow my mind is this is the rest of our lives, if Mark Zuckerberg's right and so on, we're going to have these things stuck on our faces, more screens, more blue

your eyeballs. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's

Elon Musk right? putting your brain

we're trying to go the opposite where it's like the least computer possible, right? We're not vilifying technology, but we're saying, Hey, what matters in life is real life

yes

Look. Yeah, it's the low

low time preference technology, right? You're concerned about your health. what?

that's what we said on Cyphidine's

Oh, did you really? Okay, now I'm going to really, now I really

to go listen

to it. Um, so

what do

people, what are we not asking you? Like, cause this is new to us. Everything,

you've been doing this for six years.

I assume there's something we're missing just because we just

don't even know. So I kind of

want to just flip the script a little bit. Tell us something that you think That we probably don't know about or other people

know about like just

Um, I just feel like

is such a

new thing I don't feel prepared to ask you deep

questions

to really get your

out there. So

What are we missing?

What are we not asking you? on this

two things come to mind. One is this vision from science fiction primer And the second thing is the possibility architecting computing the primer or primer is this book Neal Stevenson called the diamond quite some time ago. in this, it's like a weird futuristic nanotechnology world that's Victorian. It's old meets new, protagonist girl named Nell, and some really hard so she doesn't really have much going this world, but she gets this magical book called the Primer or Primer, And what's cool about it is what it does is it writes chapters and stories are appropriate for what's happening for her in Where she's getting bullied in school and it writes a chapter about how to like and creates pictures she can relate to will include her stuffed animals as characters. So it has like context on her. the previous conversations they've had. And so it's kind of this like teacher built And the basic idea is she is able to bootstrap herself out of like some really tough circumstances because she's got this amazing, ever personalized And so this has been kind of one of the hidden visions in personal computing, which is, you know, Stevenson calls it subversion, similar to like the Alan Kay, the point empower You know, Steven said that said the point of a real good education is subversion. A kid willing to challenge an adult. A kid willing to challenge the status quo. A kid willing to follow their own instinct, their own intuition. And that actually is how you learn agency. And that's how you learn sovereignty. own confidence And his point is, if you could kid instead of going to adults every time they're blocked, going to an authority figure, always stuck on somebody else, but instead felt they could figure it out themselves and there was something there that that could unstuck them at times, they could really develop And so that I found to be like a really inspiring vision. and that's one of the ways I like think about is how can you create like the next evolution of the book? How do you create this magic book? And now, you know, with the advances in language models, it is possible to have something you can you know, if you really nail the privacy and security and it's on device, it's not on the cloud and so on, maybe it's okay to trust it with it having context on you, it knowing your interests, the suddenly it could personalized and maybe you're dumb. Maybe it's like you feel dumb if something's explained in a way that's like out of context. But it's explained in terms of skateboarding and you love skateboarding. Suddenly it makes a lot of And that's And it knows what you've like learned in the past and what you don't. And so to me, like the possibility for self learning, even in the context of homeschooling or not, potentially it can be like dramatically And especially if we figure out how to value align. This little sidekick with what values you have as a family and parents, right? because it's kind of, in a way, co parenting the syllabus. That, to me, potentially one of the, one of the, like, core levers to learning reliance of so that's my kind of like work with the best educators and learning designers parents and different value sets and figure out how to

Beautiful vision. Yeah, I love that vision. That's amazing I

think that I, I have just imagined

that homeschoolers would resonate

with so many uh,

yeah, um. Alright, what do you want to?

Well, I think, I

think we should end on that note because

it was such a, it's such a beautiful imagery. I just absolutely love that. And I,

I

would love if I were to go back in time again. would love to let my kids have access

to something like that because I do feel like they would be amplified and I think one of the key, uh,

key

variant would be that the computer doesn't

get upset, you know, because

the parent can have

a bad and

you can get upset

at

kid and they can internalize it, but it had nothing to do with them. It could be just that you got a parking ticket. It could be that, you know, you, you burned some food on the

stove, but You know, you're and

it, you can't help it. it, goes into your teaching.

You said you wanted to leave on the positive image, you just said, now you throw that out there? No, but that's, that's, but it's because

of that

I

patient. Yeah,

the infinitely patient,

no judgment, because if the kid feels safe to ask any

question at all, that opens up a whole world

of learning that

otherwise,

It's close

to them. If they're scared of getting a bad grade, if they're scared of being laughed at,

if they're scared

of the why didn't you learn that yesterday? You know, that kind of thing. That's different though. You need feedback. You do need feedback. When something's not right. Correct. But the robot, not

robot,

the computer you feedback. Well, I just think

that's a really important variant.

totally. It's like, it can give you feedback, but it can also be infinitely And it can,

Yeah.

never get

Yeah, exactly.

I have the deepest of empathy

So,

um, I want to make sure too, let's do it verbally

if you could

also send, the information. Can you tell people where they, your, website, your preferred

handles,

give us, give us all that and then afterwards send it to us as well so we can put it in our show notes and make sure everybody can find you and find,

find Daylight.

Yeah, if you're interested in what we're building and to daylight computer comm and our socials are at daylight co for Twitter and I always love when people write to me with they want, or if it can be built in this way, or they want to collaborate, or content or sold us for I'm Anjan, A N

Well thank you for everything you're doing. can have a huge, huge positive and uh, six

six years, talk about proof of work. Yeah,

I spent all my life savings on it too. I bootstrapped it for the first couple of years because or investors,

yeah, well, that's proof of work and it's going

to have huge impact.

Um, so, uh, thank you for,

thank

you for pursuing that

passion and helping people out,

um, with that. Thank you for sharing

all of your ideas and, um, intellectual discussions. I mean, this has been so

eye I'm going

to go look into that whole flickering business. That,

That, makes me upset. That makes me upset. And just story to

finally wrap this up, we have a stove that only has on off also because

our dogs

got on it. And

when they came down, turn

all the handles on and it kind of burned

off the So

our stove is only on off.

So our medium heat is just. more, more off than on, so I can totally, it's

guys have an intuitive understanding of Flickr. oh, that's

absolutely understand.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you so much for chatting with us today. so much. Hang on. We'll stop the recording, but

just if you could hang on for a

And something like this doesn't exist if it isn't for podcasts Like the only way people found out about stuff would just be Apple and

That's true. Yeah.

feel like we're all on the

Well,