Sunlight Matters

Fitness, the Sun and Winter Protocols

• Dave Wallace • Season 1 • Episode 12

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In this episode, we are joined by David Herrera, better known online as The Solar Athlete, who brings a unique blend of engineering, biology, and real-world coaching to the conversation. 

From his backyard in high-altitude Wyoming, David shares the incredible journey that took him from world-class powerlifter and oilfield technician to a leading voice on circadian biology, light hygiene, and solar optimization for human performance.

In this episode, we dive into:

☀️ Why sunlight exposure is the most overlooked tool for boosting vitality, performance, and sleep quality
🌡️ How cold and solar exposure work together to regulate metabolism, brain function, and melanin repair
📶 What happens when you're living next to a cell tower, and why EMF awareness is critical to long-term health
🏠 The role of melanin as a biological semiconductor — and how to use it like solar tech for your body
🧊 Simple, science-backed winter protocols to stay tuned to natural rhythms — including outdoor exposure, infrared light, and the surprising benefits of staying cold
💡 Practical strategies for working with — not against — the seasons using light, timing, and indoor environment tweaks
🏙️ And why sunlight analysis, shadow mapping, and smart home orientation should be a priority in architecture, urban planning, and real estate design

Whether you’re an athlete, architect, health hacker, or someone trying to shake off the winter blues, this is your blueprint for living in alignment with the original energy source of life: the Sun.

🔥 Tune in and discover how to create your own seasonal protocol, master light exposure, and reclaim the natural intelligence of your biology, One Sunrise at a Time.

David:

Not everybody has that type of lifestyle, right? They either have to be at work and has to be indoors, right? So this is where you come up with little hacks, little tricks. Can you get intermittent sunlight for 20, 30 minutes at the appropriate times, right? Because again, now that you understand that it's a clock mechanism and it's looking for frequencies, you can start to exploit that to figure lifestyle. That's kind of the most important thing that I try to convey to people. It's a clock. You're trying to tune it. If you frame the body as the universe, you start to understand that each mitochondria is like a little sun. And so that sun can power a solar system. A solar system could involve lots of cells in the nearby region. The pigment that tans your skin is also involved in your nervous system. It's involved in the brain, in the nerves, basically everywhere. And one of the things it does in the nervous system is it basically enhances your ability to collect energy from the environment. It's the reason why we're the hairless ape. We've figured out how to take all the melanin in our hair and put it internally to expand our brain. Even if they get to the office at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., the sun might not be up yet. Or say they're still at the office at 6 or 7 p.m. They're still at the office blasting all this artificial light on them. And then with enough time of that stimulus, the body goes, that must be what's happening. We'll suppress melatonin. It's waiting for that UVB light to come in. It never does. You finally close the laptop. You try to go to bed. You can't go to bed because you're trying to undo the circadian cycle. clock mechanism that you accidentally tripped in the wrong direction.

Speaker 00:

Welcome to Sunlight Matters, the podcast that reconnects us with the sun. Join us as we explore the power and influence of our star, the force at the heart of everything. Each episode, we speak with leading experts to uncover the ways sunlight shapes our world.

Dave:

Welcome to today's episode. And I am delighted to introduce from his front or back garden, David Herrera, who is in Wyoming as we speak. And it looks lovely and sunny, David, but but you were just telling me it's not so warm.

David:

No, not very warm. It is like 38 degrees this morning, but it's not too bad. The sun's up and it's going to be a nice clear day. So it's going to be warmed up pretty quick. So it's kind of like the perfect temperature if you're into exploiting the sun like I like to do, right? Like, or some of the people that I, how to, you know, teach how to do. And that's kind of what I do right now. Or as far as like coaching and things of that nature, it starts with like, proper lifestyle around proper solar exposure or environmental exposure, right? So cold and sun have a very intertwined mechanism in the body, right? One is a secondary backup mechanism to the other.

Dave:

Fantastic. Well, I mean, so you're on Instagram as the solar athlete, and I think that's what brought us to your attention. So we discovered you. There's a very cool individual that we would love to talk about. Basically, health and fitness and the relationship, as you say, between sun and cold. So what's your background, David?

David:

Yeah, so as far as technical background, I worked for a little over 12 years in the oil and gas industry in the actual oil fields, setting up remote locations and stuff like that. And so I was on the electrical and communication side of setting up the infrastructure for those types of facilities. Um, so my technical title would have been, uh, an instrumentation and automation technician.

Dave:

Okay.

David:

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I did professionally for 12 years. In that same time, I also had a hobby of powerlifting, uh, which, you know, is, uh, three lifts, bench squat, deadlift. And I got really good at it. It's got some world records. Uh, yeah. And, uh, Even to this day, I think I'm still qualified as like the top 100 in the

Dave:

world. So for my son's sake, he'd kick me if I didn't ask, what were you benching then?

David:

So my best bench was 440 pounds, 200 kilos.

Dave:

What?

David:

Yeah.

Dave:

Yeah. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.

David:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then, you know, that kind of led to coaching people and that's kind of how I got into the industry of like health and coaching. So, but at that point it was purely performance, other power lifters, other athletes is what I would coach. Um, and then I ran into a few issues at the tail end of 2020, um, where I had a cell phone tower built, like literally right next to my backyard and it started affecting me negatively like just at that time I didn't know it was the cell phone tower or whatever right but there was a lot of issues going on with like tendons and ligaments and like inflammation like my lymph nodes would swell up really weird stuff and so I ended up moving from that house selling and moving that house building this house that's behind me and that was like a two year process of going through that and in that time I didn't train but I had already been following jack cruz's stuff i'm not sure if you guys are familiar with him yes yeah

Dave:

100 percent

David:

um since like 2017 so still in my powerlifting career but really more exploiting the benefits of getting morning sunlight and infrared light and that sort of stuff and cold to help me with my performance in powerlifting right so that's kind of why i was reading his work at that time then the issue started with the health stuff and then that's when i started you know interacting with him more etc trying to figure out what was going on. And I mean, it was kind of blankly clear when it got pointed out. It was like, well, it's probably your cell phone tower. Get it tested, right? So we had our house surveyed. Sure enough, it was very, very high, a lot higher than recommended, even at the national level. So

Dave:

can you just explain what was very high? Is this EMF?

David:

Yeah, micro watts per meter square, right? So there's quite a few studies. And even in the, I believe in the EU, there are studies on this type of stuff with like Like tree foliage and stuff like that. And basically, they determined that anything over 100 microwatts per meter squared in the area while you sleep affects biology negatively in some way, shape, or form. You know, because of electromagnetic fields and how they interact differently with different tissues, it will never be the same effect for every person.

Dave:

Right.

David:

Does that make sense? Right. So, like, if me and you were both in my house for a year, we would get different side effect profiles. because of your genetics and how you're made up of, right? Like your water density in your body is different than mine because of age and all of the different parts. So the electricity, right? Because that's what we're talking about. We're talking about electromagnetic fields. When they interact with different substances, it does slightly different things at the frequency level, right? And depending on how it's causing that type of chaos reflects the disease that you might get, right? Or the side effect that you might get. So that's why it was so kind of difficult because immediately right like the symptoms I presented were something of leukemia which they thought I had like some kind of a leukemia cancer okay so but what you know and I basically stopped doing anything and everything training all of that type of thing and then had a series of MRIs and sure enough it kind of went away they didn't determine that there was some kind of a cancer and then from that point forward I just kind of dedicated to learning more about how the cell phone tower affects me and that sort of stuff and I found the cold was very helpful I got cold very regularly like two or three hours of being outside and you know 30 degree weather or zero degree weather if it's Celsius that seemed to help a lot so there were things that I did while at the house that involved sunlight and cold that helped me kind of mitigate the symptoms while I moved, sold my house and moved and all of that type of thing, right? And then since then, right, there is what do you do after, right? Like what are, what, how do you, what is the, you know, the protocol for electromagnetic field poisoning, right? Just like there would be one for any other type of thing, right? And so basically what you end up finding out is that melanin, right? So the pigment that tans your skin is also involved in your nervous system, right? It's involved in the brain, in the nerve, Basically everywhere. And it acts like several different things. But one of the things it does in the nervous system is acts like a semiconductor and and basically enhances your ability to collect energy from the environment. Right. That's like the simplest sentence that I can make it without any science. That is what you're. It's the reason why we're the hairless ape. We figured out how to take all the melanin in our hair and put it internally to expand our brain. right, our frontal lobes and our nervous system. Because a lot of people don't understand, just picking up a pencil and writing, that is not a very easy nervous system task, right? Apes can't do that. The reason is they lack the fine motor unit. Like, people understand what I'm talking about when I say those types of things. Like, why would that happen? It's because in order to control everything very refined, you need microprocessors. You need semiconductors, right? This is the type of work I did professionally, right? You need these things that regulate big voltages, AC voltages, and start stepping them down to micro voltages that you can control fine tune, right? Like, so for example, if I wanted to control a valve somewhere remotely, I would put a series of microprocessors in there. And what they do is they refine electricity, right? Because it's plugged into the grid. And that's at, you know, 120 volts here in the US. And that's going to be stepped down several hundred thousand times into micro amps and microprocessors. microvolts that you can fine tune hey i want it to go between zero milliamps and 20 milliamps that's a full stroke of a valve right so when the valve is closed zero milliamps when the valve is open 20 milliamps milliamps very very very very very small voltages right so that's how we do it in the real world biology already figured out how to do that it does it already it does it through organic semiconductors the best one to do that with is melanin it has a lot of other capabilities too which is why it's part of this remediation process so number one you find out that electromagnetic fields specifically dehydrate melanin right because melanin is on the surface of things and when it dehydrates melanin the charge of melanin goes up right so we already know this you can look this up in fact this might be something that you guys are more familiar with when you're putting up solar panels the material of a solar panel makes up its efficiency melanin is now being being studied for solar panel material, but it's dehydrated melanin, right? It's not hydrated, right? What does that allow it to do? Run at higher voltages, right? It's basically gonna collect more voltage, it's gonna run more voltage through it. That's a negative in the body, right? That's how you fry things at the electrical level, right? Like neurons and things of that nature, you start to not be able to remember things, you get brain fog, you're getting too much electricity at the nervous system level. Normally, melanin is very hydrated because it's inside your body. Right. But just a minor amount of dehydration bumps up the voltage. The opposite happens when it's very hydrated. Melanin drops its voltage. Right. Which is also been proven by Robert Ovecker is probably the signaling platform that biology uses to turn on regeneration pathways. Right. So you want really hydrated melanin to have a really low electrical current. so that when you kick on mTOR and sleep at night and all of that, you actually kick on these pathways at a much more systemic level than here and there. When you're basically being interacted with by electromagnetic fields, not only are you dehydrating melanin, it's putting a charge on your body. You can test this with various apparatuses and stuff like that as far as meters and stuff like that. So you're actually charging up the system and creating even a higher voltage. And so it does a lot of things to like... essentially stress the cells and make it so that the nervous system is the stress that's being produced on the cells, right? The easiest way that I could explain it is like, think of it like somebody's scratching a chalkboard, right? But you don't hear it. you just feel it

Dave:

right right right

David:

right which is weird yeah yeah you're feeling it's like it's like the best way i could describe it at the tail end of like living in my house i'm like every time i'd wake up i wouldn't wake up refreshed i would wake up like i'm hearing somebody scratch chalkboard right it would reverberate in me a lot

Dave:

yeah i mean it's it's interesting you say that because i mean i i sort of feel often feel exactly like that and um you know i'm beginning to wonder because as you know i've sort of been on this journey i'm beginning to wonder whether things like having my wi-fi on and you know may may actually be impacting the the way i sort of feel

David:

you know so oh yeah 100 100 so so again it kind of makes you rethink uh how you you like everybody talks about how great technology technology is which i agree with right it's the reason we're doing you know we're able to do what we're doing right out but there's also the you know let's put it this way like say we were not talking about technology any other tool right whether it's a rifle a spear a wrench or whatever right there's always multiple ways to use that tool there are incorrect ways to use that tool and correct ways to use that tool and some of those ways will hurt you right this is a thing that we all know right tools can hurt you if you don't use them properly right but nobody thinks about that about the greatest tool that's been invented by man, which is cellular communication. You basically have a supercomputer in your hand that can talk to anybody else on the other side of the planet in any given point in time. That is a really crazy tool. There's probably some crazy side effects if used incorrectly. Nobody puts those things together like that.

Dave:

I think it's really fascinating. You should put it so succinctly and so eloquently because i think you know the i'm a big believer in the law of unforeseen consequences but i've never really applied it to technology i mean i've sort of so fallen in love with the idea of technology over the years you know i i was pre-internet and um you know it's kind of changed so much but i've never sat down and thought gosh you know actually this stuff will have consequences so we're starting to see some of those consequences played out now though aren't we in terms of,

David:

you

Dave:

know, phone addiction and...

David:

Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing, we're actually seeing the effect of the effect is what we're actually seeing, right? Because you, like, when you kind of start to understand some of the things that I'm talking about and kind of go down that rabbit hole of like learning about the actual input that's causing the problem, which is an electromagnetic field versus, because see, that's the thing is we're not absent electromagnetic fields. The earth has an electromagnetic field. When the sun comes up, it creates an electromagnetic field on the ionosphere, right? We, as a biological being on this planet, have attuned to very specific electromagnetic fields. That's actually what runs circadian mechanistic clock switches, which, by the way, are in front of every single gene sequence. So in other words, what I'm saying is every single process in your body is started and stopped. by a timer. Does that make sense?

Dave:

Yeah, it totally, totally

David:

makes sense. Just like a watch, right? Like a well-made watch, specific gears, specific timing, everything moves succinctly. Think of it just like that, but these are wireless clocks, right? Wireless clocks that are being controlled by the electromagnetic field of the environment. Hey, when the electrical field, because the sun goes down, right? When the sun goes down, the electrical field goes down, but the magnetic field gets turned up, right? Because the earth has of a magnetic field. And as we know, when there's an electric field, there's a magnetic field perpendicular to that. So when the sun goes away, the electric field goes weaker and the magnetic field jumps up. That is something that the circadian mechanisms are paying attention to. Do you see what I'm saying? So now it has the ability to switch into two modes. We know this already. We know that there is parasympathetic mode and sympathetic mode at the nervous system. This is base nervous system one You have a sympathetic side and a parasympathetic side. One makes you move around, be awake, et cetera, all of those things. The other one is supposed to calm you down, let you sleep and regenerate, et cetera. Well, something's got to tell those when to be more active and when to be less active, right? This is dual parts of electromagnetic fields just naturally happening from the sun rotating or the earth rotating around the sun, right?

Dave:

I mean, I'm sort of feeling really stupid because there's the first time i've sort of gone well actually that makes sense so if you start putting in a bunch of other magnetic fields of course it's going to cause disruption

David:

exactly right so so you know once i again this started with a very simple question of like how do i exploit sunlight and and cold to gain more performance that's actually pretty easily done if you're a healthy person it's not that hard to do but when you start finding these other intricacies of how other electromagnetic fields can affect you and you know i kind was forced to do a lot of that type of digging. Then you start to figure out, okay, well, how do I use them to my benefit, aka get more exposure to natural magnetic fields? Because think of it this way, right? If your clock is out of sync and you send it to a watchsmith, that's exactly what he's going to do. He's going to take it apart. He's going to find the gears that are messed up and he's going to replace them or fix them, right? And get the timing correct again, right? That's how you fix it, right? And if you're talking about clock mechanisms, everything, right? We know this. Genetics tell us that There's a clock gene and a stop gene at the end of every gene sequence. They must be stopped by a clock mechanism. Then your job is, that's how it runs. Okay, it's a clock. Figure it out, right? And so you start figuring out the natural inputs, natural environmental inputs, not only start and stop clock systems. The reason they start and stop clock systems are because certain electromagnetic fields are being used at the body to do work, and because it's a certain electromagnetic field, the body can set itself up to exploit it at a greater degree. So I'll give you an example. When UVA comes out about an hour to 90 minutes, sometimes two hours, depending on where you are on the planet and the time of the year, right? And so the first part of the day from sunrise to maybe two hours into the day are completely infrared or mostly, right? And then UVA starts to come in and then there's about two hours of that and then UVB starts to come in, right? That turning point of UVA to UVB, that is a staging area for vitamin D production and sex hormone production. Right. And I'll explain.

Unknown:

Okay.

David:

Infrared, right at the beginning of the day, amplifies water production through ATP amplification. We know this from photobiomodulation studies that ATP gets raised whenever you get exposed to infrared light. Well, a byproduct of ATP production is water production at the cell. We know this. CO2 production goes up and water production goes up if ATP production goes up. So by default, they prove that water production in a cell goes up when there's infrared light. water hydrates melanin, hydrates all these other structures that are going to then receive stronger sunlight, right? Remember, this is the start of the day.

Dave:

Right, right, right.

David:

Right? And so it starts amplifying, hydrating all the tissues that are going to need to be hydrated. And not only that, the water is a red-like chromophore, right? That's why the oceans are blue and green, et cetera, is because they absorb all oranges, reds, the water absorbs it and the only thing that gets reflected back are the blues and greens right and so it's actually absorbing energy to make it easier on your body for heat regulation or heat production i should say right and so you're hydrating the tissues in the morning then uva comes out uva cuts off at about 390 or so and goes all the way down to like 310 nanometers uh per per uh yeah nanometers uva UVA starts to kick off the cleaving of POMC, which is a gene. And that gene also splits off into things like alpha MSH. Alpha MSH is a hormone that's going to make you tan, right? So it's prepping the body for what's coming next. All these dominoes, because of the circadian mechanism, are getting turned on at specific times when a specific frequency comes into play. And then, boom, you get UVB with UVA and infrared. You're hyperhydrated. You've secreted all these hormones that are going to protect you from UVB light, but you're not tan yet. So then you get all this UVB light interacting with you and your cholesterol molecules and your lipids on your skin and in your surfaces and in your blood, and that starts to get cleaved into sulfated cholesterol and other products, right? Think of it, UVB is very strong, so there's a lot of free energy there. Your body's going to collect that and use it to do chemical processing, right? Just like you do in the oil field. How do you take crude and turn it into just about everything else that you use you put it through pressures and heat right your body's doing the same thing at the molecular level And it's turning on all these processes through this circadian rhythm to the finalized point of middle of the day. It's when you're the most active. You're going to have the most capabilities to think in the middle of the day. And the reason is because you should be collecting all these free energy electrons all the way into the middle of the day. And so I teach people, again, I have a unique lifestyle now where basically that's what I do. Right now is the start of my day. It's going to look just like this all day. I'm going to be outside. doing consultations or doing my coaching and programming right from my workstation outside until about the middle of the day. Then I'll go do other things that I need to do, right? Run errands and all of that type of stuff. That thing right there is really what is called melanin remediation, right? If your melanin system inside your body has been damaged from when, you know, electromagnetic fields will do this, but there are other things that can do this, right? Certain types of medications and drugs do this we know that they do this and that's why there's psychiatric problems associated with them and stuff like that is they're degrading melanin right like dopamine drugs for example right like uh for adhd and stuff like that they start to degrade the melanin sheets in the body and this is in specifically in the brain um and stuff like that so melanin remediation is for anything that depletes melanin inside the body and that's what it consists of is basically prepping the body and being able to make as much melanin into the middle of the day?

Dave:

I mean, it's really, because I've been sort of following a much more rigorous get up early, get into the sun. You know, we've actually been blessed by having a wonderful summer here in the UK. And it's been, you know, from 4.30 in the morning, I've been up and getting my dogs out and, you know, spending as much time outside as I possibly can. And I think, you know, it's made a huge difference to me. Yeah,

David:

I believe I believe it. What I tell people, and again, this is kind of where my coaching comes in, right? Not everybody has that type of lifestyle, right? They either have to be at work and has to be indoors, right? So this is where you come up with little hacks, little tricks, things that you can exploit that maybe you can't spend the first five or six hours of the day outside, but can you get intermittent sunlight for 20, 30 minutes at the appropriate times, right? Because again, now that you understand that it's a clock mechanism and it's looking for frequencies or the addition of frequencies to turn on certain systems, you can start to exploit that or at least get them ticked off and working correctly as best as you can to fit your lifestyle, right? That's kind of the most important thing that I try to convey to people. It's a clock. You're trying to tune it. And the problem is it's an old school clock, but you have to wind, right? So you're going to have to tune it often. Basically, most days, you're going to have to set these dominoes into play.

Dave:

And I think it becomes quite tricky. Like we're heading into the winter here and obviously you are in my Yeah,

David:

yeah. Well, that is where being a mammal has given us quite a advantage, right? Because we've taken, especially humans, because we've taken melanin and put it inside of us, and remember, melanin is a semiconductor, it can be exploited by the mitochondria, and the mitochondria do this themselves. Whenever they experience a temperature drop, they upregulate metabolism. Metabolism creates what's something called euthanasia. UPEs are ultra-weak biophotons. They're just emissions, basically, of light through metabolism of small organisms, okay? So mitochondria give off a lot of infrared. That's not foreign to anybody. That's why we're warm-blooded. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but these ultra-weak photon emissions or biophotons are in the UV range, right? The reason why it can do that is because because of melanin in there right and so essentially when you get cold exposure you start adding to the weak sun that's outside by creating some of the same uv and uh frequencies at the microscopic level internally now here's the thing you got to understand about this this is probably the most difficult part like people like if i tell people that they're like okay great but then the very next thing they say is light from bio photons these ultra weak right they They call them this because you can't actually observe them without very special equipment. And we know that they're only traveling very short distances. But here's the thing that you got to realize. If you frame the body as the universe, you start to understand that each mitochondria is like a little sun, right? And so that sun can power a solar system, right? That solar system could involve lots of cells in the nearby region, right? And now if you put that into perspective, each cell has about, I don't know, anywhere from as low as 10 to all the way up to a few thousand mitochondria in it, right? They're all doing this UPE emission when they're all exposed to the same environmental stimulus. So then you start to understand that there's actually quite a lot of light going on inside the body. It's just traveling very short distances. And here's the other thing that people forget to take into account. We live in a world where Einstein proved and has been proven later on that he was correct. Relativity. What does that mean? That means that the strength of the electromagnetic field, this includes light, gets changes as the scale changes so in other words as you get bigger right planets solar systems gravity becomes stronger as you get smaller gravity's still there but it impacts you way less right but magnetic fields and light fields impact you way more right so a little bit of light at very short distances if you were somehow to imagine yourself as a tiny microscopic mitochondrion and you're being blazed with light, even though it's very short distances in terms of what we think of, those distances are quite long for them and quite far reaching. Think of it that way.

Dave:

It's super, super interesting. So as you're sort of heading into winter then- I

David:

acclimate to being cold. So this is what I do. I don't change anything. I keep going outside exactly like it's summertime, dressed almost as close as I can to what I'm dressed to right now, which is just my swim shorts, right? And I do it for as long as I can stand. That's basically what I do. Now, most people, like I said, are going to have the time and they can't there's ways to get this done much faster which is water emission which is you know the popularity with cold plunges and stuff like that I don't mind them I just don't like to get wet right like it's just one of those things where I just don't like it so instead I just go outside and stay outside for longer that's the difference right if you're exposed to the air it takes longer for and basically that mechanism that secondary mechanism that I'm talking about where mitochondria start to do their thing at a greater level and supplement light internally that has It happens at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit. So I'm not quite sure what that is Celsius, but at 55 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, if the skin experiences that temperature change or lower, that starts that process of kicking off the higher amounts of UPEs and bio photons that are going to regulate the body. And so you really don't need a lot of cold. It just is kind of like sunlight.

Dave:

55 doesn't sound too taxing to be honest with you so

David:

no it doesn't right now obviously when it's really cold out out here like every now and then i don't know for a week straight in january or so we'll get like negative 10 to negative 20 fahrenheit which is like i'm not sure negative yeah negative 15 so yeah it's very cold right so at that point am i dressed like this no i'll just but i'll dress in shorts and a t-shirt right i'll dress in shorts and a t-shirt and have my my sandals on and still be able to stay out for i think i average So my outside time during the summertime is like six hours. My outside time in the wintertime is closer to three hours, right? So it's about half.

Dave:

Still pretty long. Still pretty long.

David:

Yeah. Yeah. But those three hours in the winter, they're more like spread out over three sessions, like one hour in the morning, one hour in the middle of the day, one hour in the evening. Now, something that I was going to say, I do happen to live at a very high altitude, right? So I live close to 7,000 feet above sea level. What that means is I still get UV light in the winter. Right. And so I do a little, like if it's a sunny day, even, even if there's snow on the ground and it's like negative 20, if it's a sunny day, I'll go out and tan. I'll go out and tan and I will get a tan because there's UV light. And here's the thing. Cold, uh, splits the palm seed gene more aggressively into alpha msh you tend to secrete more alpha msh in the cold uh because your body's because melanin again it's being used as uh as a it's got a lot of rules right but in the summertime when the when the weather is hot melanin is being used to protect you from uvb when the weather is cold melanin is being used to amplify the absorption of any uv that you can get right so what i'm saying is there are places on this planet native Right. Right. Like the native people in those regions, right? And that's what you start to find out is that melanin has a lot of different roles. And when you're lacking sunlight, it can be used to collect more sunlight, specifically infrared and heat, right? So when it's really cold, it's beneficial to be pretty dark or at least underneath, right? We know this with polar bears. They have black skin with translucent fur on top, which makes them look white. And so they can absorb more solar energy through that mechanism and stay warm. It's the same exploitation. That's done through alpha MSH. So if you're trying to get more out of the sun, even in the cold, if it's a sunny day, it's a great time to just sit out and relax in the sun as best as you can. Now, I will say when you're getting UV light, if there's any sliver of UV light, you'll warm up pretty quickly. So if it's not windy, I can stay outside tanning at like negative 20 degrees as long as it's sunny and not windy for probably a couple hours.

Dave:

I mean, it's absolutely amazing. Amazing. So, I mean, I'm already starting to think about like my winter protocol here in terms of, you know, I tend not to get out so much in winter, but I'm

David:

sort of thinking about... I would encourage to not, like the easiest way is don't make it too complicated. Try to maintain, you know, because I can tell that you already kind of go outside regularly and all of that. Just try to maintain that rhythm of life. But the only thing that will be forced to change is the day will be compressed, right? Because it's a shorter day and a longer night, right? So you won't get up quite as early, but you're still wanting to do most of the same activities that you would do, right? It might not be nearly as long, but just getting outside regularly, like you mentioned that walk the dog early when you wake up, right? So you do the same thing in the winter. You basically, and here's the thing, in the winter, as long as you obey some certain practices of like the type of light that you let into your eye, you don't Right. Mechanisms, right? So the way that you do that is you make sure that you don't interfere with the central climactic nucleus and that is through light, right? The only light that's going to not impact melatonin is like candlelight, firelight, incandescent bulbs do pretty dang good at that. They do suppress it a little bit. And then from there it gets worse, right? So the brighter, the wider, the more LED, the more energy efficient it is. Think about this, right? Right. Right. right so you're in

Dave:

the middle of the night when you're reading your bloody ipad so

David:

exactly right you see what i'm saying so now that is a circadian mechanism right remember what i said the the body is preparing you for this blue that's going to happen in the middle of the day certain things happen there right and so and one of those is wakefulness the suppression of melatonin that's when it's going to be the most suppressed etc all these things and then you go and the the The night comes at like 4 p.m. where you live, right? And so now you have from, you know, obviously you're not going to go to bed at 4 p.m. You're probably going to go to bed at 9 or 10. That's five hours of potentially disrupting a very potent circadian switch. Does that make sense? Yes. beat me up, right? Like you come out of that, you're feeling good, right? It's sunny now, but you clearly, you know, look back through the winter and you're like, it was fun. I made it through it, but I kind of feel a little beat up. I need a recharge, right? It might be mental, it might be physical. It might be a combination of both, right? And then some people are like, man, I got so sick all winter long. I don't know what I got to do, but I got to do something, right? That's common is what I'm saying for most people. Winter is not a abundance of anything really time, right? for most people. The only people that I hear the opposite of that are people who literally have jobs outside, right? Ski instructor, people that are out moving snow. Those are the only people that are like, yeah, it was okay, right? It kind of sucked, but I didn't feel it. And the reason is because they're still maintaining the circadian mechanisms and not messing them up as much because some of these people are up not in their own room or at their office. They're in a cab of a truck moving snow, right? There's no artificial or very little, right? But there is some disruption or less disruption, I should say, than with somebody who goes to an office, for example, or works out of an office, right? Even if they get to the office at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., the sun might not be up yet, right? Or say they're still at the office at 6 or 7 p.m., right? Which is not uncommon, right? But the sun went down at 4 and they're still at the office blasting all this artificial light on them. And then with enough time of that stimulus the body goes well it must be new we that that must be what's happening we'll suppress melatonin we'll make sure that these other things it's waiting for that uvb light to come in it never does you finally close the laptop you try to go to bed you can't go to bed or it takes you a very long time to kind of finally wind down and that's because you're trying to undo this circadian clock mechanism that you accidentally tripped in the wrong direction

Dave:

Very, very interesting. I mean, I guess there's a tremendous amount in there, but actually, you know, when you boil it down, it's relatively simple. If you want to, and I guess what was so interesting about you, David, is you started with unpicking, like you've got a radio mast or a mobile mast near you and you recognised that that was causing issues for you and then it sort of helped you understand And you're obviously very fortunate because you have that sort of brain which was able to kind of unpick a lot of this stuff. But actually, you know, I've thought about and done it is sort of getting outside a lot more. I've been wondering about winter. So it sounds like there's some really easy things to do there. Things like, you know, buying incandescent bulbs. So, I mean, you'd be pleased to hear I took my son to university this week and my parting gift to him was an incandescent bulb. incandescent bulb for his table lamp. I was like, you must have that because university students, he's going to spend the next three years possibly not going outside at all, to be honest with

David:

you. Yeah, that's 100% true. When I say you don't want to undo that mechanism, that nighttime mechanism, even though you might be up still at night, an incandescent bulb is by far the best thing you can do in terms of I still need to do work I need to see clearly what I'm doing, right, and all of that. And I want to mess the least with these circadian mechanisms. An incandescent bulb is about the only thing that can do that to a pretty good degree compared to everything else,

Dave:

right? Yeah, no, no. I think it's, I mean, I was talking to Glenn Jeffrey, who's a researcher from UCL, and he was explaining just, you know, even the tiny amount of infrared in an incandescent bulb is enough to impact mitochondrial function. He's done a bit of research which indicates that. I guess one of the other things is when you're actually training people, I guess I think about my family. I've slowly been changing all our LEDs to incandescent bulbs. Sometimes they look at me as if I'm absolutely mad because this is a kind

David:

of chemical That's the hardest part I try to teach people to do. Sorry? That's the hardest part, getting people to change their light bulbs. That's by far the hardest part. Well, I

Dave:

think now my next thing is, okay, guys, we're going to be turning off the Wi-Fi overnight. I mean, so when you're doing the training, do people kind of worry about how they talk

David:

to their families? Well, at first we kind of do, but now that I've put out enough content and stuff like that, most people come to me and say, me and they already kind of know that this is kind of what we're going to, but, but they don't know the ins and the outs. Right. So, so they're not really questioning. They're more like, okay, well, how does it work? Right. Like I'm going to do it, but how, how is it actually going to be helpful? Right. Um, for example, the wifi thing, a great hack for that is a little timer. Like just, you just plug it into the wall, a manual timer, right. For like a light and you just plug your wifi router into it. It turns off when you go to bed, turns back on when you wake up, you never have to worry about it again. Yeah, no, that's

Dave:

good.

David:

Good. Very good. Very simple. Very simple. feel or hear it kind of is reverberating in in the I I would feel it like in the back right but it's different for everybody but I do notice that whenever I go to somebody else's house or whenever I go to a hotel right and they have wi-fi embedded in the

Dave:

room

David:

if I spend too much time in the room I'll start to feel that right like it doesn't happen like immediately like I walk in and I'm like oh but you know but if I'm in there for like two or three hours uh I I will notice that type of thing right and then immediately I'm like oh there must be a wi-fi thing right And you start looking and there is like, oh, yeah, there it is. Right. And then you go outside and that kind of goes away. Right. So am I saying that's 100 percent what's happening? No, but it often is. Right. Especially if you can feel something happening, just turning it off or walking outside usually undoes that. So another thing that I like to tell people is if you are experiencing brain fog, especially if it's in the middle of the day, like from about noon until like 3 p.m., something like that, just go outside for literally five minutes. It'll undo it.

Dave:

Great, great,

David:

great advice. It really is. Especially, well, do two things, right? Assess whether you drank any water, right? Because this is another thing that happens, right? When you're indoors, you're not hot, right? The temperature is perfect. So you tend to drink less. Remember what I said, EMFs are already making you dehydrated. So then when you go outside, right, you're going to get charged up, but you're not going to be able to collect sunlight very well because you haven't hydrated the tissues, right? So you drink some water, right? Just drink, I don't know, 15 ounces of water, maybe a little salt in it. Go outside for five minutes. You come back in, the brain fog will already be dissipating or completely dissipating.

Dave:

Yeah, no, it's very interesting. So, I mean, one thing, like, again, going back to cold as well, do you have a, is your house quite cold or do you kind of restrict cold to outside?

David:

So, this house that I built, I built it on a lot of these principles. So, number one, all of my floor on my house, it's one level, is concrete, right? And so I have in-floor geothermal heat in that. Okay. And so that's infrared. That's a lot of infrared, right? So inside my house, you're already passively getting a lot of infrared. All my light bulbs are incandescent. So when you turn them on, they're putting off a lot of infrared heat. So in my house in the winter, I'm already kind of exploiting a bigger infrared field, if you want to call it something, right? So that my tissues are already pretty hydrated. So then when I go outside to get cold, I want to get the biophoton thing happening as quickly as possible. So I don't hesitate and I just walk outside and get cold in the morning, probably as I drink my coffee, essentially, right? Now, our bedrooms, we can control the temperature in them. Those are always colder than the rest of the house, right? To induce sleep better and stuff like that. But the biggest hack that I would say with like cold exposure is like using it for nervous system regulation, right? Like if you're agitated or something like that, literally just taking like a cold spoon and rubbing it on your eyes and doing some vagus nerve stimulation that's very very relaxing for most people or just a simple face dunk into some ice water and just hold your breath for 20 seconds do that two or three times you intentionally want to get a brain freeze essentially right yeah yeah another simple hack is you take uh water and you put some electrolytes and some sodium in it and you put a bunch of ice in it that's going to make it colder than normal and you slowly sip on that until holding it at the back of your throat just like you would ice cream and you give yourself a brain freeze that that also stimulates the biggest nerve there i like to use that for like uh before consultations or when i'm trying to read a lot through a lot of like complex stuff i usually drink on cold water uh for that effect um so those are things you can exploit literally you don't have to do anything with getting physically cold

Dave:

right i know well that's good but but i also really like because i you know i do the occasional cold plunge i don't really like it But I really like the idea of being able to go outside. You know, that feels very doable for sort of almost

David:

everybody. And so what I usually tell people is if you're just going to go outside, that's how you're going to exploit cold. The best thing to do is just continue to do your same routine. The difference is don't dress up, especially in the months of October and November, right? Because it's not quite freezing yet, but it's cool enough that you're going to get the effect, right? So the things that I don't cover up, I don't add more clothing to the upper body, right? So the most that I'll wear is a t-shirt. And then to the lower body, I like to wear shorts only and sandals, especially into this time. Now, once there's snow on the ground, you know, I'll put some shoes on and that sort of thing. But I basically only dress up just a little bit so that I can stay outside for basically the same amount of time that I do before. But I'm clearly, like if somebody touches me, they're clearly like, like my wife always is like, you're always cold. She touches my skin. He's like, it's freezing, right? But I feel warm, right? That's kind of the effect that you're after between now and November. Then once November hits, you can dress up a little bit. Or if you're just wanting to intentionally get some cold and get the most out of every minute that you're there, but you're not going to be there very long, say 20 minutes outside or whatever, use compression clothing.

Dave:

Right.

David:

Right. So like, especially like if you can get like a full body compression clothing, because what it does is it compresses all of the hair, all of the initial skin, compresses it all down. Now it doesn't hold a heat barrier. So now you're instantly feeling the cold right at the receptors that need to be feeling the 55 degrees or less.

Dave:

Interesting. Very interesting. So what about sauna as well? What do you

David:

think? If it's a traditional sauna, I I like that. Infrared saunas are kind of like an electromagnetic field nightmare. Not because there isn't good ones out there. The problem is there's a lot of bad ones. Right? So it's one of those things where it's like most of them are underpowered to really give you the effect that most people want or would need. And a lot of them do not shield the inside appropriately against the electromagnetic fields and all the wiring that's running around uh the shell right so if it's a traditional sauna great have at it i would use the heck out of that that's basically the hack that i did to my house right i don't necessarily need like getting to the point that you're sweating and all that that's great that has its own benefits but just getting the benefits at the biological level from infrared um that could be done at a much lower temperature right so you can use the sauna um pretty pretty effectively or you know like most scandinavian countries they have in a geothermal heat in the floors and stuff like that. They're exploiting a form of sauna as well. It's just at a lower level.

Dave:

Yeah, no, interesting. Interesting. Well, listen, thank you. I mean, it's been a really interesting, I mean, there's so much more I guess we could cover, but I'm also conscious that, you know, I've taken up a lot of your time and I'm really grateful for that. I mean, you look in very good shape, I have to say. And, you know, we haven't covered things like nutrition. And I mean, I guess just, From your point of view, would you say from a fitness and when you're coaching people, is the sun the sort of foundation or the rhythms around the sun the foundations? The

David:

circadian mechanism that I spoke about, yes. It is crucial because if that's not working correctly, you're just not going to get them. Even if you're completely healthy, you don't have any problems with you, you're not going to get all of the recovery you should be getting. You're not going to be able to exploit all of the performance. that you should be getting, right? That's what I'm saying. Like using it for performance enhancing things like I used it, you know, before I got ill, before there was the cell phone tower next to my house and all of that was basically just maintaining a good lifestyle against light hygiene, meaning I would get as much natural sunlight as I can. And when the sun went down, I eliminated as much artificial light as I could. Now that's been ramped up to actually electromagnetic fields and stuff like that. And that's kind of the base of as complicated as indeed to get, kind of like what we spoke about in this episode. Now, to exploit that into performance enhancement and stuff like that, then you start timing that with eating for the season. If you live somewhere where there's seasonal eating or seasons in general, that's going to dramatically enhance or detract from energy expenditure, meaning how hard you can train, stuff like that. So I teach people how to eat to that, basically to seasons. And then we start to exploit uh training timing dependent on when they've gotten the most amount of sunlight for their lifestyle or whether we can modulate that or not because we you know like we you know there's studies hey if you do an infrared session before you have more atp for the training session right you can do it with some infrared light you could do it with natural exposure so we play with all those kinds of things to set them up to make sense to it to add to to their performance

Dave:

Amazing. Amazing. I mean, it's such an interesting field, particularly as so much of it can be got for nothing, basically.

David:

Yeah, that's kind of... Nature really does know that. This thing will do all of these really wonderful things. You just got to engage with it for long enough, consistently enough, and it's free, right? Like a lot of it is free or costs you almost nothing, right? Like very, very little, especially compared to like... supplements and things like that right so it's it's one of those things where it's like there's there's a lot of there's a lot there and that's why i'm saying like athletes this is a thing that you should be doing it costs you nothing right it costs you almost nothing other than knowing what to do

Dave:

but i guess what i mean what is really good is you're sort of starting with the science i mean i'll show you this is a book i'm reading by a guy who is really interested in quite you know bio photons and uh and it's fascinating to me like the human body is so so so amazing like all of life it's so amazing in terms of what's going on these intricacies

David:

it's it's pretty crazy and and it's it's actually not as crazy you know kind of like reflecting you know mirroring that to technology right like you've witnessed the rise of technology and all that so i buy and it's an awesome amazing tool and the way that it works isn't really that different than how biology has already figured out how to work When you take some of these key concepts of communication and electricity, the body's already kind of figured all that out. It's just, we didn't, we're not putting the two together like that. But when you start doing that, then you start asking the right questions, right? Like, oh, well, we're made of electricity. We use electricity to fire bio photons, et cetera, all these things where we have semiconductors, all of this. And then you start looking, okay, well, a lot of the technology that we use is emits or uses those or, and we know this in the communications field, right? We know we cannot put high voltage lines in the same trough as low voltage signaling lines because they interfere. We know this type of stuff, right? This is part of electrical engineering and automation and all of the, you know, the world that I came from, right? So then you started going, well, we're not shielded, right? We don't have a way to shield ourselves from electromagnetic fields like we do with wiring and stuff like that. So then you start to understand that. It's not about shielding. It's more about knowing how these interact with you and mitigating them in terms of very simple things. Like, for example, you mentioned Wi-Fi. I have a Wi-Fi in my house, but it's not on. Only when visitors come. My house is just hardwired, right? Like I have hardwire connecting me to you, right? I don't need Wi-Fi. I realize it's very convenient, but I don't need it, right? So it's one of those things where just simple decision-making of how you're going to use the tool, going back to the very beginning, right? It's a tool. There are right ways and wrong ways to use it, right? So you start thinking along those lines and then you start doing little changes, right? Like learning to turn your Wi-Fi off or like Like if you're getting a new home or I built this home, I went ahead and made it so that I wouldn't need it. I just set up the infrastructure that way. So that's the type of thing that I think once people start asking the right questions by viewing the body or biology and technology and how they actually do interact at a field level, that's when you probably are gonna be able to design better homes and more healthy homes and that sort of stuff. And there are already people unknowingly doing that type of thing. Or knowingly, right? I'm not the only person that knows information.

Dave:

I think it's something that increasingly people are becoming aware of. Thank you so much for your time. You're so eloquent in terms of the way you explain things. I feel like I've learned a lot. And you've given me some real food for thought as well. So thank you.

David:

Thank you. My pleasure. Have a good one.