Is It Possible To Make Our Screens “Healthier”? The New Blue-Light, Flicker-Free Technology That May Change the Face Of Computing Forever, With Daylight Computer’s Anjan Katta

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast.

Anjan Katta [00:00:03]: Most other displays when they light, they have something calLED flicker or pulse width modulation. And the basic idea there is, the way they change brightness, is they turn the light on and off at ridiculous amount of times per second. And the idea is, it's too fast for your eye to be able to see it. There's a bell curve to people's sensitivity to flicker, and for a lot of folks, it's subacutely causing them to have some cognitive load and some stress and some sympathetic arousal. This is the best evidence for its impact is people who have had concussions or traumatic brain injuries. One of the core things that's painful in the time after the TBI or concussion is screen time. And the core culprit of the screen time is the flicker of the backlight. And so when they use a reflective display, like a Kindle or a Daylight, they don't have the same migraines and headaches from screen time and eye strain. And so I think that is a really, really good clue.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:03]: Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:27]: If you're watching the video version of this podcast, I'm holding up this tablet. It's this weird paper-like tablet that I've been messing around with and is based on this new ink technology and kind of a new way to light screens. I find this stuff fascinating because anybody listens to this show knows. I'm kind of skeptical about the, well, I'm not skeptical about, I'm wary of the effects of light pollution. And I'm very picky about the kind of light I use in my house, my light bulbs, lighting in my bedroom, you know, my blue light blockers, all of that. But sometimes it's difficult to control the screens. So I wanted to talk today about the science behind all of these things that we're staring at during the day, how we should think about that, and what kind of technologies exist or could be invented that could help us out with this whole uphill battle against artificial light.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:24]: So I found this guy, Anjan. Anjan Katta. Katta. Katta? Did I butcher that again, Anjan?

Anjan Katta [00:02:58]: That's right.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:58]: Katta, Anjan Katta. And Anjan actually is behind this company Daylight. And they're pretty groundbreaking technology company, because they figured out how to make screens not have all these issues that modern screens have, issues that we'll talk about in today's show. So all the show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/Daylightpodcast. Just Daylight, just like it sounds. Bengreenfieldlife.com/Daylightpodcast. So, Anjan, tell me about, tell me about how you got interested in screen technology.

Anjan Katta [00:03:11]: Thanks for having me on first, Ben. This is cool to, I've been listening to your show for a long time, and it's cool to finally be here to share what I've developed. I think for me it was just the realization that at the end of the day, what we call a computer, if you ask a little kid to point, if you have a desktop, point at the computer, they're not pointing at the desktop tower. They're pointing at the monitor. For all the complexity, for all of the power of a computer, at the end of the day, a computer is a screen. That is the core way in which we interface to a computer, in which the computer interfaces to us.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:45]: Yeah. And by the way, you are correct, because I remember when my family got our very first computer, I had no clue what the box beside it was for. Eventually, I took computer classes and I learned how to take apart the hard drive and fix things and clean out the fan and everything. For the longest time, it was just this mysterious box next to what I actually interacted with, the screen.

Anjan Katta [00:04:06]: And that's the core thing is if we want to change our relationship to computers, if I wanted to change my relationship to computers, which like they're toxic, I found them extremely distracting. I find them messing up my sleep, messing up my circadian rhythms. They keep me inside. I could never really be focused. My nervous system is jacked up. I learned that at the core of that is the light, the junk light that a computer is creating is then the ensuing software that is not set up to be in alignment with your sovereignty. It's not set up for your focus. And so I got really interested in the idea if computers are not going away, if we're only going to use them more, how can we reform computers to be healthier, to be more analog feeling, to be better for our nervous system, better for our mental health, better for our physical health? And that's when I started to research alternative computer screens.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:03]: Yeah. And surely the EMF, I doubt you would deny that the EMF is also a problem. But I mean, like, at my house, everything's hardwired. So I've kind of fixed that issue, and I can install software on my computer that kind of dims the screen. And I might ask you questions about that software later on and what you think about it. But, yeah, it is kind of interesting that you're just kind of stuck with that screen, whether in bed or in your office or whatever. And the technology doesn't seem to have changed much. But I'm also kind of a luddite.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:35]: Like, I don't know what kind of advances have been made in screen technology. Like, have things been changing at all? Because surely somebody at Apple or whatever is aware of some of these issues.

Anjan Katta [00:05:47]: That's what's pretty interesting, is ultimately all the computer screens around us are actually, for the most part, just one category of computer screen. These are calLED emissive or transmissive computer screens. If you go back to the history of early computing, back in the day of Xerox PARC, those are the people who came up with the first graphical user interface as the modern computer really was invented by them. They were playing around with a bunch of different modalities to computer screens. Of course, projectors are one of them, but the other one is something calLED reflective or paper like screens. And the basic idea is, in physics, you can see something because it is producing its own light, like a star or a Firefly. That's calLED a transmissive or emissive screen. That's what everything around us is.

Anjan Katta [00:06:34]: Or you can see something because it's like a natural object. It reflects light. It bounces the light of the sun or whatever is in the environment. That's how you see a tree, that's how you see a dog, that's how you see the sidewalk. That's how you see normal things. And so actually, scientists at the time were playing around with creating computer screens of both varieties, emissive and reflective.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:57]: Now, why did. Well, it sounds like you were just about to get into that. I was going to ask you, why emissive one out?

Anjan Katta [00:07:03]: So the problem with reflective is it ultimately, at the time, was not very the process technology was not there for it to look good. When you're reflecting light, ultimately, whatever is the color of the light of the environment, whatever is the intensity of light in the environment, is what your screen will look like. And back then, their process technology was not high enough to reflect a large percentage of the light that hits it. And so what happens is in some environment it'll look dark, some environment it'll look warm, some environment it'll look bluer. And so if you're trying to show movies, tv, video games, any content like that, you need to be able to recreate the colors. You really need to be able to recreate the fidelity of the picture well. And so emissive screens because you're providing your own light source. It's consistent regardless of what environment you're in.

Anjan Katta [00:07:57]: You're able to control it.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:59]: Because the light source is actually built into the screen itself. It's backlit.

Anjan Katta [00:08:02]: Exactly. The light source is built into the screen. It's kind of like a flashlight that is then shining into your eyes, versus a reflective thing, which is like a piece of paper where the ink particles move to make different letters or shapes or whatever is there. And so a reflective screen is a natural object. It's an analog object. But a transmissive remissive screen is a manufactured object. But it looks sexy, it looks consistent, it looks cool, even if it's not natural. And that's why it kind of won out and took over everything.

Anjan Katta [00:08:32]: And we totally forgot that there was this other category of displays that existed. The big insight I had when I went back to it, I was like, okay, we're going to use computers forever. They're going to fill our lives. Think about VR. We're forever living in this world of emissive transmissive screens that are then emitting junk light. To your point about do they know about the consequences of this? I think the reality is they're late to understanding technology from the perspective of health, whether it be physical health or mental health. That's not how engineers look at it. They're looking at it from supply chain, they're looking at it from engineering efficiency.

Anjan Katta [00:09:07]: They're looking for end user application. And the reality is, it's also convenient because an iPad, an iPhone, a monitor, they all can use the same white LEDs, which are blue LEDs underneath. They can kind of use the same screen technology. And so when I kind of really got obsessed with circadian rhythms and blue light and regulating my nervous system and felt, hey, you have to make a screen that goes from being an unnatural, emissive, transmissive screen to a natural, reflective or paper like screen, because then the computer is really just an analog object that moves. That's when I started to do my research and find out, oh, there's things like the Kindle and E ink that exist, but they're so slow. The refresh rate of the display technology, how quickly it can scroll or zoom or type. Your iPhone or iPad is 60 to 120. So you can scroll, you can type, you can move, and Kindle screen is one FPS.

Anjan Katta [00:10:08]: So it's fine for Harry Potter if you're just flipping a page, but you basically can't type, you can't scroll, you can't zoom, you can't use a browser. You can't use apps.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:16]: Or watch a video, for example.

Anjan Katta [00:10:19]: Or watch a video. Exactly. And so that was the core insight here is, whoa. What if we could resurrect this long lost arc to computing, which is of reflective screens? If we can solve the technical problem of making them fast enough, then we could have laptops, tablets, phones, monitors, whiteboards with these kind of healthier screens.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:39]: So the Kindle paper is an example of a reflective screen technology that already exists that a lot of people might have experienced before.

Anjan Katta [00:10:46]: Right? Exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:47]: Okay, so how do they light it up? Because if I'm reading a Kindle, I I used to have a Kindle paper. I don't know where it went, but I remember, like, on a dark airplane or in my bedroom, I could still read on it. I don't recall having to shine a flashlight on it or something like that.

Anjan Katta [00:11:03]: So what they do is they put auxiliary. So the screen itself is reflective. But think about, like, those little book lights where when you're reading a book, they kind of cantilever over. Essentially, they're using a micro book light. And so they have lights on the side that are then bouncing off the screen. And so that's the idea behind that is, well, reflective screens require the sun. They require environmental lighting, just like analog objects, how to use them at night. And so basically, what you can use is an auxiliary light.

Anjan Katta [00:11:35]: And that's one of the things that we figured out also, is to how to make that auxiliary light that you can optionally. You don't need to use it. You can optionally use at nighttime how to make that flicker free and completely blue light free.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:48]: Well, how do you do it? I want to nerd out on this. I'm actually curious how you pull that off.

Anjan Katta [00:11:51]: To give the high level picture. What success looked like was if I could make a computer screen that I could use in direct sunlight so I could do more of my computing outdoors. That didn't strain my eyes, which meant it was reflective or paper like versus emissive. It was easy on my nervous system. And that's where that paper like reflective screen doesn't have the same screen apnea, putting you in a sympathetic response. And it is completely blue light free. So I could use it at nighttime or even during the day. I don't need to wear blue blockers all the time.

Anjan Katta [00:12:26]: And long story short, I discovered a really old reflective screen technology that was thrown kind of in the dustbin. And a bunch of different professors had been trying to work on one little problem of it for about 25 years. Another professor for 30 years. And so from the nineties onwards, a bunch of random professors in Germany, Netherlands, Florida state and Japan had been trying to solve this problem of an old reflective screen technology called reflective RLCD. And essentially, I found out that the process technology had finally got good enough. And I came up with a way of combining a couple different material science innovations. And so the core difference of this is it's a reflective, paper like screen, but you can microperforate it, so you can optionally backlight it at nighttime, so you can use it at night. And it's 60 to 120 FPS.

Anjan Katta [00:13:26]: It's the same speed as an iPad or iPhone or anything else.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:30]: That's the part that's interesting. How do you actually go from one FPS to like 60 to 100 FPS?

Anjan Katta [00:13:35]: So the big difference is, in a conventional Kindle, paperwhite or e ink screen, it's moving ink particles up and down like this across an entire capsule. And the time it takes to move across that capsule, it's like running from one side of the football field to the other, end zone to end zone. What we were able to do is instead we can make it go from black ink to a white reflector. Like, kind of like it goes from paper to the ink by turning instead of moving the entire football field. Imagine the football field is super skinny and you can just kind of run from sideline to sideline, but there's only 2ft of a gap. And so it's a total different principle in which to create a reflective screen.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:19]: Okay, that's super interesting. Okay, so I want to back up a second here because, you know, you talked about some of these problems that you wanted to solve. Being able to look at it in the sunshine and being able to be able to see it well in a dark room and having the higher resolution, or FPS. But of course, the other thing you mentioned was you didn't want to deal with a lot of the perceived health issues you were experiencing from a normal screen. Have you looked much into this? This whole concept of flicker or backlit LED what we're actually talking about when it comes to the biological effects.

Anjan Katta [00:14:55]: That was one of the core advantages of a reflective screen is because it can be used without any backlighting at all. There is no flicker. It can use the spectrum of the natural light. One of the cool things we invented on top of that is we found a way to microperforate the screen so you can optionally light it at nighttime. And one of the core things we did there is we made our own, manufactured our own custom LEDs that have, like, a campfire spectrum, so totally blue light free. It has oranges and reds in the longer wavelengths.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:30]: Almost like the same type of, like, biological LED or OLED. A lot of people, including myself, are installing in, say, like a bedroom or sleeping area of the home or something like that.

Anjan Katta [00:15:41]: Yeah. Figuring out what wavelengths actually are healthy to sleep and circadian rhythms and doing that. But there's a second layer to what we did as well, which is most other displays, when they light, whether it be lighting around you or in your computers, they have something calLED flicker or pulse width modulation. And the basic idea there is the way they change brightness is they turn the light on and off a ridiculous amount of times per second. And the idea is, it's too fast for your eye to be able to see it. And if they want to make it brighter, it's on two thirds of the time and off only one third of the time. And they flick through that faster. If they want to make it darker, it's only on one third of the time and off two thirds of the time.

Anjan Katta [00:16:24]: And that's actually how they're changing brightness, is they're changing the percentage of time in 1 second in which it's on versus off. And so when they did this, they did very simplistic studies to be like, I guess this is okay. This is above the threshold of cognition. The core thing that was missed is actually there's a bell curve to people's sensitivity to flicker. And for a lot of folks, it's subacutely causing them to have some cognitive load and some stress and some sympathetic arousal. And for some folks, it's quite acute. And I can get to that where the evidence is super interesting. That's the case.

Anjan Katta [00:17:02]: But we were able to do is we did essentially what originally LEDs were lit by, which is something calLED dc dimming. And so basically, there is no flicker. We created a flicker free, direct, current driven, blue light free LED. And so during the day, you get a paper like reflective experience. It's equivalent to reading a Kindle or reading a printout or a book. And at nighttime, you get this beautiful flicker free, campfire spectrum optional lighting.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:32]: A really interesting way that I think I heard this explained once, maybe it was an audiobook, a podcast, I really don't remember. But the comment was basically from, like an ancestral or an evolutionary standpoint. A human being would normally not experience an extremely high level of flicker unless they were, say, like, sprinting through the forest with little bits of sunlight coming in here and there, as they ran. Or doing something that involved sympathetically activating activity out in the sunlight and that there's some kind of transfer over of that same type of sympathetic stimulation. When you have this flicker, even if it's sub perceptual, when you're standing in front of your computer all day. Is there any accuracy to that kind of idea?

Anjan Katta [00:18:18]: I think the core thing is the magnitude. If you're running through the forest, we're talking about maybe like 50 hertz, a hundred hertz. When we're talking about flicker, we're talking about thousands of hertz and millions of hertz. I think the answer is yes. Essentially you're providing a stimulus and removing and providing a stimulus and removing and providing a stimulus. Your brain's baseline is to want to orient towards that stimulus. And your saccades, your ability to perceive it, are all being confused. There's nothing in the natural environment that turns on and off at that speed.

Anjan Katta [00:18:53]: And what's fascinating is for most of us I think the effect is pretty sub acute. It's a chronic effect. But for some of us, flicker is perceived acutely and I think this is the best evidence for its impact is people who have had concussions or traumatic brain injuries. One of the core things that's painful in the time after the TBI or concussion is screen time. And the core culprit of the screen time is the flicker of the backlight. And so when they use a reflective display like a Kindle or a Daylight or a printout, they don't have the same migraines and headaches from screen time and eye strain. And so I think that is a really, really good clue.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:38]: There's this guy I interviewed named Andrew. I'm blanking on his last name. I'll hunt it down and link to.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:43]: It in the shownotes

Ben Greenfield [00:19:44]: Show notes gonna be at bengreenfieldlife.com/Daylightpodcast. We did a podcast all about TBI concussion. He's actually a big bitcorner, so we thought about bitcoin and NFT and stuff like that as well. But he was talking about how when he had a really bad head injury, which oddly enough was while doing intensive Wim Hof style breath work while standing on concrete and passing out and hitting his head. So warning to folks about stand up breath work on a hard surface. The worst culprit in terms of re triggering headaches, migraines, you know, confusion, brain fog, fatigue, etcetera, was light and in particular light from screens. And he became adamant like blue light blockers and installed all the software on his computers. Like Iris and Flux, and, you know, would stay in a. Or stay in a dark room a lot of the time, you know, sleep with an eye mask.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:38]: And, yeah, there's something incredibly stimulating about light that becomes even more magnified, particularly when it comes to the flicker if you've had a TBI or concussion.

Anjan Katta [00:20:49]: I think that's what's so powerful about this is the academic research is still so far lagging. What is the amount of case studies of people that we have? You go to neurologists, and they all say one of the core unsolved issues is what to do about screen time in the weeks after somebody gets a concussion at TBI. Your example of your friend where it is magnified, I think that's what's fascinating here, is we're still just in such early innings in kind of accruing all of the negative stuff from our relationship to a computer to its blue light, to its flicker, its distraction, and so on. And so it's almost like there's a societal reckoning of, if this is the rest of our lives and relating to our main sources of light are like this, we got to do something about this.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:38]: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I don't want to bore people with, gosh, it seems like I tweet out a new study just about every week about the impact of blue light on sleep and the impact of things like the flicker that we're talking about on kind of low level brain fog during the day. We could scaremonger people all day long with a lot of stuff that I've already talked about. But I want to come back around to this idea of more of a solution oriented approach. So the first question is, before we jump back into this whole idea of reflective screen technology and what that would actually look like, why couldn't you just wear blue light blockers or install a software program like Iris or Flux for people who don't know what those are? Those can reduce the amount of blue light on the screen, you know, lower the color temperature of the screen, etcetera. Of course, the glasses can block some of that glare and reduce some of the irritation of the flicker. But why couldn't we just do things like that first?

Anjan Katta [00:22:39]: I think that's a really good thing. I think everybody who can wear blue light blocking glasses use Flux and Iris. I'm a fan for that. I think the problem is there, they're somewhat half solutions, and they're kind of band aid solutions. So on the band aid solution point of view, I think it's just hard to get mass compliance in society across the board. Get kids, get everybody to download these programs to wear blue blocking glasses. I think we actually have to just change the computer itself if we want this to be a mass market.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:13]: That seems like a much bigger uphill battle, or maybe as big as getting everybody to wear blue light blockers.

Anjan Katta [00:23:18]: Well, I think the difference is the convenience is the habit, like how often you have to remember to wear your blue light blockers. Easy to lose them if your computer, you just use your computer as is. But I think that's only half of the argument. I think the other half of the argument is blue light blocking glasses. Iris Flux, they don't do anything about flicker. And that's one of the core things that we wanted to do, is a reflective screen and a dc dimming backlight. You're able to add a hardware level, remove flicker because there's nothing you can do at a software level.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:50]: And that, that might be news for some people. So if I install some kind of software or put my phone in night mode or something like that, and the brightness of the screen is diminished, that's not impacting the flicker?

Anjan Katta [00:24:01]: No, that's flicker.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:03]: Is it impacting like the intensity of the flicker, though?

Anjan Katta [00:24:06]: It's actually making the flicker worse? Oh, the flicker is worse at lower brightnesses because it needs, the duty cycle is further out.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:14]: So that's interesting. And you know, by the way, Brian Hoyer, the guy who did my building biology walk through, he said he wasn't a huge fan of dimmable switches and some of these bulbs that weren't super bright but didn't have flicker free technology built in, because as you use the dimmer or as you use some of those, those, those flickering technologies, it could also increase EMF. So anyways, the idea here, though, is just dimming the screen not only doesn't get rid of the flicker, but it could actually increase it.

Anjan Katta [00:24:46]: Yes, the answer is yes. The flicker would go up at the lower brightness. Something like Flux is only reducing blue light. Like kind of 20, 30, maybe 50%, something like Iris or putting a red color filter reduces it a fair bit more. We're still like 99.9, so we're blocking blue light at a hardware level. This is all trying to do it in a software level, so we're able to kind of remove all of it. And for some people, even that 1020 percent of blue light that's coming through is still enough to kind of put them over the threshold. The other thing that's happening is if you look at the spectrum of a display, when you have Iris on it, it's extremely narrow.

Anjan Katta [00:25:24]: It's just basically one red peak. And that's really unnatural. Like, that's. You never see that in the natural environment. If you look at the spectrum of an incandescent bulb or a campfire, it's a broad based spectrum. It's got reds, it's got oranges, it's got yellows. And so that's what we've done, is we're actually giving you a broad based spectrum, not just a narrow peak, that's unnatural. And we think the impact of that is that your body can better relate to the light.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:54]: Do you know how much of the blue light that blue light blockers filter versus how much flicker they blocked?

Anjan Katta [00:26:02]: They don't block any flicker at all.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:04]: None. Interesting. Okay.

Anjan Katta [00:26:05]: The flicker is the light turning on and off. They can't do anything about that. They're simply.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:11]: That makes sense.

Anjan Katta [00:26:12]: There's actually one last interesting point here, which is there's a curve called v lambda, which is the sensitivity of our eyes to different wavelengths. So when we do use Iris or things like that to make our red color filters, we're picking a red color that actually our eyes are most sensitive to, green. And then there's a drop off on either side towards blues and violets and towards red. Actually, the melanopic impact is not just the spectrum, but is also the intensity of photons. And so when you are that red color, the v lambda, the sensitivity of your eyes to that is actually so low, you need to actually amp up the brightness a fair bit. For example, two green photons can look as bright as ten red photons based off of not just looking on melanopic impact based on wavelength, but also then combining that with what is the intensity of photons? To actually read something, you come out with a slightly different point in the curve, which is optimal, which is not super dark red, but actually more this kind of orange or fire. Now, if you want to do environmental lighting, red is fine because it's kind of dim enough. But if you want to resolve letters, which is what you want to do on a computer, if you want to be able to read things, you're actually better off in our perspective from being slightly more orange and going up the v lambda because your eyes are more sensitive to those orange spectrum.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:44]: So you can make a case then, by the way, if I were able to manually adjust, like the nighttime color filter on the phone, don't have it super dimmed in red, have it slightly brighter and a little bit orange, because if I don't do that, then I'm risking things like eye strain and myopia and things of that nature. It's going to be very difficult to find a sweet spot. Like, you could reduce eye strain by decreasing the red and increasing the brightness, but then you've got more blue light, and you could get rid of the blue light by dimming the screen and switching it to more red, but then you've got eye strain.

Anjan Katta [00:28:18]: And that's why we invented what we did, which is you break those trade offs, which is you don't get flicker. You can be a lot lower brightness, and you can have something that's the combination of least amount of melanopic lux and v lambda maximization.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:33]: That makes sense. We'll hold this tablet again. So this one that you guys sent to me to mess around with so I could wrap my head around what this technology looked like prior to the podcast is about the size of a large Kindle or an average size iPad. Tell me about how you went from reflective screen technology research to actually being able to make something that would actually work like this tablet. Because I've got like 20 apps on, it's got YouTube, it's got Google, it's got Chrome, and most of the functional apps on it that you'd find in the Google Store or the Android store.

Anjan Katta [00:29:06]: My vision was, it took me, I started this in mid 2018, completely spent my entire life savings to try to develop it. And it took three years to come up with the first proof of concept, which was, whoa. Reflective display. That's as fast as an iPhone and iPad, which means you can make phones, laptops, monitors, whiteboards, tablets. You could do all of kind of computing with it for the first time. This was never possible before. It reflected displays. And the first product I chose to make was a tablet.

Anjan Katta [00:29:36]: And the reason was it was what I thought would have the most broad based appeal. It's kind of hard to get people to start by replacing their phones, but it's a little bit easier to get somebody to replace their iPad. A lot of kids, tablets are the main thing. They use a lot of the elderly. And so I really felt, too, that a device that could be used at nighttime, a tablet, was a great recline on the couch, read things, relax type thing. And that's the place where I felt computing was most harmful, was at nighttime, that kind of night routine. And so it took another about three years to then get the screen technology into production, build the rest of the hardware. Turns out building a computer is extremely difficult, which is why there are basically no new personal computing companies.

Anjan Katta [00:30:26]: The last big one was Oculus a decade ago. So it was a pretty monumental effort to then try to produce a computer. And then we just launched it earlier this year and we sold out.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:39]: Have you guys done any actual research, or have you looked at even, like, anecdotal case studies of people who are giving it to their kids instead of an iPad or anything like that? As you started to roll it out?

Anjan Katta [00:30:49]: We're starting to get a fair bit of. As we're rolling it out now of reports back from people around how much better the kids are sleeping, how much more energy they have, how much easier it is to get up in the morning, how much less distracted and addicted, how much you're actually able to wind down. And so it's been cool to just see that validated. There's a fair bit of case reports from people using Remarkables and Kindles and things like that that have kind of validated the reality of, yes, if you remove blue light, yes, if you remove flicker, you do get the impacts you suspect. And we're basically just the same technology now, broadening it to other things.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:27]: Well, you said reduction of addiction. Why would that be?

Anjan Katta [00:31:30]: It's basically you've made a not overstimulating computer.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:33]: So you've got a reduced dopaminergic response or something like that when you're using a reflective screen versus an emissive screen.

Anjan Katta [00:31:40]: Exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:41]: Yeah.

Anjan Katta [00:31:41]: Well, I think most people focus just on the software aspects of distraction, and I do think there's actually a physiological aspect to it as well, which is the blue light, the flicker, if you are in a sympathetic state, you are going to seek to kind of numb that. And that is, it's kind of when people binge eat to deal with stress, I think there's a subtle version of that happening with social media or feeds. And so in so much as you've removed the color, in so much as you've removed the kind of the over saturation, and you've made something that's kind of basically boring, I think at a hardware level, you've leveled the playing field so that these things are no longer super normal stimuli. Because that's, at core, what's happening is the software is being designed to take advantage of your evolutionary impulses and make you into a dopamine slot machine monkey. And so a reflective black and white screen is kind of at a hardware level, leveling that playing field.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:40]: Yeah, I kind of became a trend, I think, after that book Dopamine Nation. Maybe it was suggested there. I've seen it suggested elsewhere, too. Flip your phone, your phone to grayscale or super red mode, which might have issues, as we've already established, when you're wanting to reduce your propensity to doom scroll or excessively use it. So, yeah, it's absolutely something I've come across, and I'm familiar with it. But the sun thing is also interesting to me because I took it out in the sun. How come it works so well in the sun? Like, without a screen protector or an anti glare device or something like that?

Anjan Katta [00:33:15]: It's the same reason that a piece of paper is visible in the sun is because a normal, emissive, transmissive screen is trying to produce its own light and compete with the sun. And because the sun is brighter than your iPad or iPhone, you can't see it. But if you think of a piece of paper, it's not competing with the sun. It's reflecting the sun. It's in harmony with natural light. And that's what our display is, is it's in harmony with natural light. It is actually utilizing the sunlight. So when you're using a Daylight outside in the sun, the light that's then reflecting off the computer display into your eyes, that's sunlight, that's full spectrum sunlight.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:50]: Got it. So this is very similar to reading an actual paper book in the sunlight if you bring it out there.

Anjan Katta [00:33:55]: Exactly. And so if you were to boil down what we've done, we've basically made a computer that feels like paper. And so it's a boring, minimalist computer that's healthier for you, and it's the least amount of computer that you need. And that's, I think the crux of what this is, is computers are hijacking objects, they're overstimulating objects. How do we kind of tame them? How do we make them our servant rather than our master? And we think starting with the screen, but then also the software ergonomics, emfs. Over time, you can start to create a whole category of healthier personal computers.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:28]: I'm kind of a Luddite. Like I mentioned, I don't have Wi Fi at my house. When I got the tablet, I just use an Ethernet cable to plug it into the Ethernet or the Internet. And I synced some of my preferred apps that I thought I might use with it. Specifically, I synced YouTube so I could watch some YouTube videos on it, and I sync Kindle so I could download my Kindle library to it. And I'm one of those minimalist technology guys. I don't do a good job using every last feature. But tell me about the features of something like this versus an iPad.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:00]: Like, if I were to get one of these Daylight tablets, can I do everything with it that I would normally do with, say, an iPad or a modern tablet?

Anjan Katta [00:35:09]: Yeah, we have two modes to the device. We have a locked down mode, which we call kale mode, and then a cocaine mode. What you got is cocaine mode where there is no software blocking or this. You can kind of do whatever you want. All your core apps you'll be able to use. You'll be able to use the browser. The only difference is anything that's iOS exclusive or Apple ecosystem, Apple doesn't allow anybody to do it other than themselves.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:38]: Right. So I couldn't sync my Apple iOS app store with this. It would all have to be stuff from the. It's the Android store, right?

Anjan Katta [00:35:48]: Yup, it's the Android Store and then web apps. So this is anybody who wants to try to make an alternative to Apple.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:53]: What about storage space? Is the storage space different than that of a normal iPad or tablet?

Anjan Katta [00:35:58]: It's about the same. It's 128 gigs and it's got a micro SD.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:01]: And it's just one. It's just one model that you guys have right now.

Anjan Katta [00:36:04]: Just one model? Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:06]: Okay. So that gets me thinking about just the adaptation. I mean, you could obviously just say, hey, we got something that's like a Kindle paper, but you can do way more with it because you got more apps to play around with on it. Is that what you guys are thinking? Or could this. I mean, I. Because honestly, I use a tablet, but not a ton, mostly for reading. Could this eventually be like a phone or a computer monitor?

Anjan Katta [00:36:33]: A Daylight can actually replace your iPad. Any of the things you want to do, reading, Spotify, note taking, email, it can do all of that. And our vision is now that we've invented the first kind of high refresh rate, blue light free reflective screen technology, we want to make a phone, a distraction free kind of healthy phone that comes out of that. We want to make a monitor, we want to make a laptop. And so the hope is people will then have a choice to kind of have a healthier computer. And we have a lot of ideas of what to do on the software side, too, to kind of make it minimalist and distraction free. And the hope is a computer that's actually better for you versus a computer that, in practice, in the Apple ad, is supposed to make you the best version of yourself. And in reality, you're just distracted, addicted, feeling like shit, sleeping badly, staying up late.

Anjan Katta [00:37:20]: All the metabolic issues that accumulate over time.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:22]: Yeah, definitely. With overuse and improper use, it can be a definite issue, especially based on time of day of use as well. I mean, surely, though, the R and D on this stuff on this reflective screen technology was not inexpensive. How would you compare the price point to a typical tablet?

Anjan Katta [00:37:38]: We're about the same price as an iPad Pro or 729. It's a first generation product. It's like the Tesla roadster. We don't actually make very much money at that price point. And the idea is, start with the folks who have the greatest needs for this. People who struggle with sleep, people who struggle with eye strain, concussions, TBI, people who want to minimize blue light, and over time, start to scale down the price and get it more into mass market. The kind of ultimate audience we're most passionate about is a healthier, safer computer for kids.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:13]: Okay. Okay. Got it. And again, like, I don't. I don't want to say this too much, but I am a little bit of a Luddite. Like, I don't even know the difference between a reel and a story. And I'm barely capable of logging into my own Instagram account. And so I don't quite understand certain aspects of things, like tablet technology.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:32]: So forgive me if this is a dumb question, but how does the stylus work? Like, what are some ways you could use the stylus that comes with it?

Anjan Katta [00:38:40]: Essentially, what we're doing, it's a Wacom technology. And so one of the great parts about it is our stylus actually has no battery, no bluetooth, no electronics in it. So if you're somebody who's electrosensitive, you'll be able to operate our display without touching something that has actively emitting electronics. And we made the tablet actually have a friction to it. It took us two years such that it feels like you're writing on paper. So, compared to an iPad, which is very slippery, when you write on it, we try to make it feel like our favorite Japanese paper. Once again, how do you kind of make a magical piece of paper as a computer?

Ben Greenfield [00:39:19]: Yeah, that's interesting. I'd be a poor use case, because, again, I haven't used the stylus much, but I downloaded this workbook to it. This PDF workbook, for a branding course that I'm going through in the workbook, has a place to take notes, and I was taking all my notes with the stylus, and, yeah, it felt like I was writing with a pen on paper. And that's not normal to feel that with a stylus?

Anjan Katta [00:39:36]: No, not at all. That's one of the interesting things.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:40]: Wow, how cool. So in terms of the availability of this thing, are people able to get one now, or are you making so few that there's a waitlist or something like that?

Anjan Katta [00:39:51]: We're sold out right now, but there is a waitlist that people can put a deposit down for, and we're hoping to get more inventory soon.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:00]: Well, that's good to know. So let's say. I mean, you're obviously somebody who thinks a lot about light. Let's say I were to visit your house, Anjan, are there certain things you've done in your living space or something you might do when you go to Airbnbs hotels to manage light? I'm just curious what your own light management protocol looks like with as much as you think about lightning.

Anjan Katta [00:40:22]: I think the biggest thing is I try to spend as much time as possible outside or with a window open and get actual full spectrum light, uv and infrared, and that I try to have a lot of natural light during the day. At nighttime, I make sure to have no overhead lighting. All the lighting is not above my head and it's all warm lighting.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:49]: Why would that be? That it's not above your head?

Anjan Katta [00:40:51]: Because in evolutionary history, you had lighting at nighttime. It was never above. The only time lighting would come from above is from the sun. So if you think about fires, things like that.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:03]: That's a good point. I never thought about that. What about the moon?

Anjan Katta [00:41:06]: So the moon, stars? It's an interesting question about the moon. I actually looked into it, too, because moonlight is reflected sunlight, essentially. It's just intensity is attenuated enough. But if you actually look, there's a lot of cultures that talk about staying up later or being energized on a full moon, and that might be one of the reasons why it's essentially.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:30]: Oh, yeah, I can tell you right now, I sleep better when it's not a full moon cycle. The thing with not having the lighting overhead, though, how are you pulling that off? Do you just have a lot of lamps or.

Anjan Katta [00:41:43]: Exactly. I have basically little pools of light. I have little lamps all over the place. And so I have. It's interesting.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:51]: What else are you doing in terms of, like, the style, like, in those little lamps? Is there a certain type of light bulb that you have in the. In the light?

Anjan Katta [00:41:57]: Can I like. A couple of them are incandescent. A couple of them are blue blocked. I have some pink salt lamps as well, because I really like the aesthetic that comes from them.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:08]: Okay, got it. And you're wearing blue light blockers right now. I assume we're not doing this podcast on your end on the Daylight tablet, are we?

Anjan Katta [00:42:15]: Unfortunately, the Daylight webcam attachment is still in the works.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:18]: Okay. Okay, got it. So you're wearing blue light blockers. Are you picky about those, about the style? Or do you look at the lens technology or anything like that?

Anjan Katta [00:42:26]: For me, it's more just about what spectrums is it able to block and how much?

Ben Greenfield [00:42:32]: Okay, got it. And since you guys don't have a phone or monitor yet, what do you do to your own phone or monitor right now to mitigate some of the issues we talked about?

Anjan Katta [00:42:45]: The big ones are I try to put it with reduced white point. I try to put its brightness at a reasonable amount such that it's not the lowest amount of flicker. And then I put the red color filter on.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:59]: I'm familiar with how to turn the red. That's easy because you can just go to color filter settings, and I'm familiar with the sliding scale for the brightness. But what's the white point that you talked about?

Anjan Katta [00:43:08]: It's in a similar thing. If you go to display accessibility, essentially what it does is it just drops the intensity of the white.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:15]: Oh, I didn't know you could do that. Interesting. Okay, what about with the monitor?

Anjan Katta [00:43:20]: With monitors, I essentially have Iris maxed out. Or sometimes if the red from that is a little bit too intense, I'll have Flux maxed out.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:30]: Okay. Which do you think is better, the Iris or Flux? Or can you explain to people the difference between those two?

Anjan Katta [00:43:36]: Yeah, Flux will have a little more of a broadband spectrum, a little bit more yellow and orange, and Iris will be like, kind of pure red. But for me, the core thing there is just moderation. I try to. I try to spend as much time as I can moving more and more of my computing to Daylight.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:52]: Yeah. And do you travel much?

Anjan Katta [00:43:54]: I travel a lot, yeah. For.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:56]: Are there certain things that you do when you travel to mitigate light exposure because you're in control of a lot less in that scenario?

Anjan Katta [00:44:02]: Yeah, it's really tough when you're traveling. Oh, gosh. The way hotels are lit and other people's houses and this and that. I have a little light that I bring with me that I use as my, like, I won't really turn on the overhead lighting when I go to places, and so I try to keep it pretty dark evening onwards. And just use my little pocket light.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:25]: Yeah, I'm similar. I have a little red light reading, you know, a portable red light head reading light that I can clip onto the nightstand. I use just a basic cheapo headlamp that I got on Amazon. That's one of the ones that can produce red light. And then I wear blue light blocking glasses, and that's just kind of how I jam. And then, of course, I'm sure many people have heard about this, but the old, the hanger curtain trick, you grab a. Do you know about this trick, Anjan?

Anjan Katta [00:44:54]: No.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:55]: You grab a hanger from the coat closet in the Airbnb or the hotel or whatever, you close the curtains. And you know how there's always that annoying sliver of light that comes through? And if you're staying in a city, even at midnight, there's a bunch of light pouring through from the artificial lights, or maybe you've traveled, you know, whatever, from east to west, and it's lighter than what you want in the morning. You can use that coat hanger to keep the curtain way more shut and essentially turn it into much more like the equivalent of a blackout curtain. The last thing I do is I always have a strip of black electrical tape in my backpack. And you know how if you walk into a hotel room, sometimes you turn off the lights and you realize, oh, my gosh, things lit up like a Christmas tree? Well, if I really want to optimize sleep, I would literally just go cover up those little lights with the electrical tape.

Anjan Katta [00:45:44]: I think what's cool to what you're pointing to is it's going to take redesigning our entire environment. It's not just going to be one aspect or one object. It's going to be really thinking through everything from the perspective of light, temperature, EMFs, water. It's going to be refactoring everything. I think it's fascinating to think about what are the other categories? The way we wake up in the morning, the type of alarms we use are the type of computers and whiteboards and so on. Are we really all going to go into VR and put that on our face? Is that really our future? What's the alternative to that?

Ben Greenfield [00:46:19]: Exactly. It's crazy how many biohacking technologies arrive at my house for me to try to have screens, and they're super bright, but they're technology meant to be used for relaxation or sleep. So it's kind of funny because you can get just blue light blocking Saran wrap off. Amazon kind of looks like Christmas wrap. And I literally have almost every screen in the house overlaid with that slightly transparent blue light blocking red light, and it kind of fixes it. But yes, it's shocking how many companies just design an amazing piece of equipment that actually does work really well and then just backlit the hell out of it. One company who I just interviewed on the podcast, Jasper, they're a standalone HEpa air filtration company. They do a good job.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:04]: Like they have a button you push on it that's dark mode, and you press it and let's say you have one of those running in your bedroom and it goes totally black. So now I look, you know, to know if a company's thinking holistically, I look at a, can you disable things like Wifi or Bluetooth so that's not running constantly, particularly if it's something near your head or while you're asleep. And then secondarily, have they designed a way to dim the screen or set it into dark mode? And I think more people should be thinking about that when it comes to the, you know, the health of the technologies that we're using.

Anjan Katta [00:47:39]: This is not how anybody in tech really thinks about it. Like, this is going to be a bottom up wave of us who realize Maslow's hierarchy. Like, you need your physical health and mental health and nervous system health to build up of it. And that's not how tech, you know, we're in the middle of Silicon Valley. I went to Stanford. I got to see kind of the belly of the beast.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:00]: From a business standpoint, this reflective screen technology. Let's say you guys do a really good job of this and you hit it out of the ballpark, and maybe you do come out with a better phone or a computer monitor. What's the likelihood that somebody like Apple or Dell or some big computer company would acquire you? Or is the cost of goods sold just monumental for something like reflective screen technology?

Anjan Katta [00:48:28]: I think the way we think about it is if you want to make healthier products, you got to think about it holistically. So we don't want to just innovate on one aspect of it and then have somebody just slap it on. Like, how do we, the natural materials that make up this, how do we choose that? How do we have kill switches for Wi Fi or Bluetooth? So I think our interest is not just to kind of create a screen technology and call it a day. It's to continuously keep reforming computers to kind of be healthier and saner.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:58]: It's a very interesting tap. I'm going to hold it up again and again. A ton of functionality. I haven't even tapped into half of the things this thing's capable of. It's called the Daylight. I'll put a link to it and more information in the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/daylightpodcast, I'll include a few other helpful links there, like the podcast I did with the guy who got the concussion. I think I did one with the guy who invented the the Iris software as well, if you want to check that one out.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:25]: And then all the information about the Daylight computers, I'll put over there as well. Anjan, this has been super interesting. I've been wanting to learn more about this weird looking tablet ever since I got it, and you've debriefed me pretty thoroughly. So thank you.

Anjan Katta [00:49:39]: Yeah, thanks for having me on. I hope this is just the first innings for society and reforming computers with AI, this is only going to be more computer y things around us. Maybe they're even trying to be in us and stuff like that.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:54]: More computer y things. Hooray. Well, I'm glad that in about two weeks I'm just heading off in the mountains to go elk hunting. So I'll be away from all computers except maybe a satellite phone for a while. So anyways, though, the show notes folks are going to be at BenGreenfieldlife.com/daylightpodcast. Check it out. They're doing cool things. Spread the word.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:14]: And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Anjan Katta, signing out from bengreenfieldlife.com. Have an incredible week.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:22]: Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more, check out bengreenfieldlife.com.

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