[00:02:20] Preston Pysh: I mean, come on, if you’re doing well in life, you want to live longer, you want to enjoy yourself. So we’re going to cover some of that on the show today. You want to start off, and I also want to start off on this idea of technology’s great. It gives us all these luxuries and we’re able to do things with ease, but it comes with this double-edged sword of sometimes it cuts the other way too, where it can be very detrimental to our health.

[00:02:45] Preston Pysh: So take it away, like tell people kind of your working thesis on this and why it’s important to consciously think about this and to be aware of both sides of the coin, I guess.

[00:02:58] Justin Evidon: So throughout history, we have continued to innovate and create new technology, and it necessarily changes how society functions. And the dawn of the internet is probably the sharpest, double-edged sword that we’ve ever encountered. There has been a huge amount of really incredible new opportunities that have come out of that, but we also, I think especially in the last five to 10 years, have seen the very serious negative effects that can also come along with it, and so finding the right balance and understanding where those pitfalls lies, that you could avoid them, and ultimately you can’t rely on the companies that create the technology to do that guidance for you because there’s a lot of profit opportunity in leveraging the negative impacts.

[00:03:48] Justin Evidon: We’ve seen that with the way that algorithms on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram steer you in the direction of continuing to doom scroll your way through life and to basically fly on autopilot. And so ways in which you can leverage that to be aware of when it’s sucking you in to the bad side, but to also then be able to take advantage of all the good.

[00:04:10] Preston Pysh: You know, Dorsey, Jack Dorsey recently talked about some of the pitfalls and how these algorithms are so deeply entrenched to get you just to scroll more. And to the point where he’s like, these things are programming you. It’s not like you’re programming it. And it was a pause moment for me.

[00:04:31] Preston Pysh: And I know, it was probably like two years ago. I was just looking at my X feed and they rolled out this feature where it was like AI generated, Hey, this is what we think you like to look at. And when I was going in there, what I was finding was. There was things that I don’t like to look at popping up in there, but it’s because previously I might have dwelled on something that was a salacious video or a whatever, and then because I paused and I looked at it, it started generating that type of content in this For You feed.

[00:05:03] Preston Pysh: When people started talking about this, I really made a conscious effort that if there was anything that ever popped up in that feed, I was going to immediately go into like, we’re obviously talking about X here. Go into the dots up there, like not interested in this content. Or block. I literally block if it’s something that is just not a fit or something that I just am like, why am I looking at this? I immediately go in there, either block it or tag it as not interested in this post.

[00:05:31] Preston Pysh: For me personally, I feel like my feed is so much better now, especially for the recommended content because I’ve really aggressively tried to filter this. I’m curious just your thoughts in general about like these AI recommendation engines and like what it means and just take us down this path.

[00:05:53] Justin Evidon: Yeah, and it’s funny because I had the exact same experience that you did when that For You got rolled out and I was so used to seeing it. This also predates the X shift. I don’t have a Facebook account anymore, but years ago when I did, they changed their feed from being this just like natural feed of the people that you’re following to then trying to feed in all sorts of other content that wasn’t something that you were actually subscribed to.

[00:06:18] Justin Evidon: And that actually, that shift was part of the reason that I decided, like this is clearly no longer a platform for me. But I ended up finding someone on X recommended a search query that you could bookmark that basically recreated the old chronological feed of just the people that you were following. And I’ve had that as my bookmark. And basically if I type in twitter.com in my URL bar, it defaults to going there.

[00:06:47] Justin Evidon: The problem though, there’s a clear advantage of using that approach and that is that it gets you to actually be able to engage with the people that you follow, that you want to see their content, right? If you go to the For You page, there’s a lot of content that people that you intentionally follow will never show up.

[00:07:05] Justin Evidon: It’s more for like discovery, right?

[00:07:07] Preston Pysh: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:07:07] Justin Evidon: And that’s the other piece of it. And this is a perfect example of one of those double-edged swords where the for you page. That discovery can sometimes lead to finding new content creators or new people that are thinking in ways that you actually find compelling and that you want to then follow as well.

[00:07:24] Justin Evidon: So I think that you need to be able to work in both worlds and to be able to, as you have done, try and refine the algorithm to feed you the things that are actually valuable and that you find interesting and to minimize the salacious or otherwise detrimental content. But it’s, again, you’re reliant upon a platform feeding you that information and doing so in a way that actually aligns with your ethos.

[00:07:51] Justin Evidon: And ultimately where we’ve seen a lot of people draw concern with X and with other platforms, is that the content really has to conform to their working guidelines, and that’s one of the reasons why people are moving in the direction of Nostr. And seeing this open protocol as an alternative where in order to be deplatformed doesn’t involve actually losing your ability to get your message out in the way that you intend for it and for your content to remain yours.

[00:08:22] Preston Pysh: Just a quick admin note because we have some listeners that aren’t Bitcoiners and might not understand what Nostr is. So Nostr is a decentralized protocol that is able to do basically what you have on X. So you can download a client, any client you want. You have a pub key, a private key pair that allows you to go in there and conduct free speech.

[00:08:44] Preston Pysh: Nobody can delete your account and you can talk and it looks and feels a lot like X, but they don’t have the algorithms. Or you can even switch to a different client provider, software provider that organizes your feed differently than maybe the one that you don’t like.

[00:08:59] Preston Pysh: And Jevi and I both are of the opinion that with enough time that something like this actually might become more prevalent and more desirable by people because they don’t have the algorithms that are dominated by a monopoly like X or Facebook feeding you the content and you have the choice to go to a different client provider that’s not organizing your feed or your data in a way that as very click baity or sucking you in so that you stay there all day and just doom scroll.

[00:09:26] Justin Evidon: So, well, this could be a whole different topic that we could dive into. Which is security data privacy, sovereignty.

[00:09:35] Preston Pysh: Let’s go there. Break this out.

[00:09:37] Justin Evidon: What I think is interesting, and this is also a perfect example of where Bitcoin as a rabbit hole creator, drops people into this environment. People that don’t understand Bitcoin or haven’t taken the time to understand Bitcoin are comfortable with continuing to use the existing financial structures and they don’t see the potential pitfalls there. And likewise, people that don’t understand concerns regarding data privacy because they think to themselves, I have nothing to hide, so why should I care?

[00:10:07] Justin Evidon: They haven’t touched the stove yet. They haven’t gotten burned. They haven’t had their content removed from some provider. They haven’t gone to a digital service provider, left their data there and had that data removed or otherwise taken from them. Sorry, you wanted to say something?

[00:10:22] Preston Pysh: No, I just, I think that point of view is the majority. I think if you line up a hundred people, at least 95 of them are going to be like, yeah, that’s how I see this. Like I don’t have anything to hide. I actually kinda like that it’s feeding me the stuff I’m actually interested in and they’re just, it’s more convenient.

[00:10:41] Justin Evidon: That’s the problem. Is that like it takes effort. To step outside of that controlled, centralized environment. In order to take control and to understand where those pitfalls lie is just the first step. Then there’s the next step, which is to go and execute and to be less reliant upon those centralized providers and to be more self-sovereign. Understanding that there is benefit to be had. I don’t want to become a digital Luddite.

[00:11:09] Justin Evidon: I think that’s one of the common terms that I come back to. I see huge benefit from what a lot of these technology providers offer, but I want to do so with intention. I want to know that when I am using these tools that I’m aware of where things can go wrong and where I can become too reliant.

[00:11:27] Preston Pysh: Yeah, I think that’s kind of where I want to go with this is just when you look at somebody that’s saying, well, you know what? It’s kind of beneficial that it knows all this stuff because it’s able to kind of feed me. That’s the one talking point.

[00:11:40] Preston Pysh: But you and I both know like how dystopian some of this can get. But where I’m really concerned is where does this take us in 10 years from now? And if you set up the wrong habits or you’re just not interacting with this in a conscious kind of way, 10 years are going to show up. And it’s not like you can undo what you’ve done by not taking action today or thinking very deeply about where this is all going. So I think that’s the foot stomp, at least from where I sit.

[00:12:09] Preston Pysh: Is this bad now? Yeah, it’s bad, but I think most people are eh, but I don’t have time to set up all these other things. And there goes the argument. So, as you’re talking to the audience, give us your pitch on why it’s so important to, and I don’t think that what you’re saying is that you need to leave that gated ecosystem completely. But I think what you are saying is that you need to be very direct or very thoughtful in the way that you approach what you’re actually using and that you should have a foot in both camps and you can lean on one or lean on the other depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, right?

[00:12:46] Justin Evidon: Yeah. So let’s use AI and LLMs as a perfect example of where to strike that balance. There is a huge benefit to these tools. Many of us in the Bitcoin space have jumped into it headfirst and seen the opportunity. I’ve been leveraging it in my day job as a product manager at Unchained.

[00:13:08] Justin Evidon: It’s a huge benefit in making the process of gathering information and distilling it much more efficient. But you need to know where that information is going, because if it’s just going into some public infrastructure without data controls around it. There’s potential that there is information that is sensitive going out and potentially being utilized for training in ways that you wouldn’t want it to be.

[00:13:35] Justin Evidon: And likewise, there’s I think, a huge opportunity for AI tools to become. Really high functioning Second Brains. I don’t know if you’ve heard the term Second Brain before, but the basic premise here is we have used journals and private tools to be able to take down information for centuries, eons, right?

[00:14:00] Justin Evidon: But then leveraging that information that has been taken down and being able to recall it and synthesize it into new pathways that live outside of your brain takes a lot of effort. You have to then take time to step back and to look through it, and a digital second brain. The idea there being is that you can be capturing all this information and you can take down these ideas, and then you can leverage the technology to be able to assist you in finding those synthesis points.

[00:14:31] Justin Evidon: But in order to make that second brain really function in a way that is beneficial. You have to give the system all of your information, including private thoughts and conversations that you might have, and that feels antithetical to the privacy concerns that people should be carrying into these worlds.

[00:14:51] Justin Evidon: That’s where leveraging a private or a self-hosted LLM is really beneficial. The problem for a lot of people is that most privacy oriented AI tools require. Effort. They are cumbersome. They’re inconvenient. You have to host them yourself. More often than not, it then doesn’t retain context about previous conversations that you’ve had.

[00:15:16] Preston Pysh: Which let’s just be honest. It’s crazy helpful. I mean, the fact that I am able to go in there and use AI in a way, and it knows what types of questions I ask, it knows what topics I’m super interested in, and so that context of it, knowing that is very helpful for me. Anybody telling you that it’s not is, in my opinion, just lying about the utility, right?

[00:15:41] Preston Pysh: And so that’s part of the challenge. And so you’re getting at this idea where in order to do this in a secure way where Big Tech doesn’t know everything about you, you have to set up your own server at your house, that your own hardware, and you have to store all of these questions locally and not run them up into the cloud.

[00:16:00] Preston Pysh: So that’s a tech burden. But we both realize that is a worthwhile cause, but how do we convince others? And you know, I mean, everybody’s got their rationale for why they would or wouldn’t do something.

[00:16:15] Preston Pysh: I guess this is the real question. Is there a turnkey way to do it today that is pretty easy or easy enough for the common person to go out there. They aren’t super tech savvy, but they’re willing to try. Does that hardware exist? Does the software exist to be able to do that right now or are we like three to years out?

[00:16:37] Justin Evidon: I think we’re getting close. Early on, there was just, the capital investment was all going in the direction of convenience and centralization. And large tech companies taking advantage because they had the capital to just chunk in there. And the privacy oriented alternatives just weren’t getting that investment. And I think that there are some really great examples that are coming about. One of them is Maple AI. Which you may have heard of.

[00:17:05] Justin Evidon: Oddly enough, another Bitcoiner in the space that started that up. And the goal there is to make it a ChatGPT replacement at reasonably the same cost, but to not give up the convenience at element of ChatGPT, that you can just quickly jump in there, sign up, have a website, not need to host anything yourself. And I love that direction that we’re going.

[00:17:31] Preston Pysh: How are they making sure that it’s secure? Like how would you be able to authenticate that? Or is it just kind of they’re telling you that they’re not storing any, it’s all encrypted on their cloud servers.

[00:17:42] Justin Evidon: They have tools that allow you to validate the end-to-end encryption that they use if they’re using technology that they developed called Open Secret.

[00:17:50] Justin Evidon: I don’t want to dive into the technical specifics of it. But it’s worth for people that are listening, if you’re interested in learning more, going and learning about Open Secret and Maple ai, I think that they’re really incredible tools that are moving us in the right direction.

[00:18:04] Preston Pysh: That’s awesome. Okay.

[00:18:05] Justin Evidon: The other thing that ties in with this notion of, are we at a point yet where taking control of your data or taking control of these tools. It’s something that you can do at home turnkey hardware.

[00:18:17] Justin Evidon: I’ve actually, over the last year, gone through the effort of setting up a lot of these self-hosted tools. A perfect example of this being the reliance that people have on Google photos and iCloud photos. I don’t know about you, but for years. Stuck in it, right? And it’s like, how do I even consider moving out of this area?

[00:18:37] Preston Pysh: Let’s just frame this for a listener that’s not very tech savvy. Every one of these pictures that you’re taking, it’s geotagged. It knows the location. With AI, now you can take a picture almost anywhere in the world and it knows exactly where, even if the geotag wasn’t there, it knows the context. It knows people by referencing. Social media. So if you give access of all your picture files to some application that you have no idea who is the entity behind that application. It could be a foreign government, it could be whatever, right? And you give full access of every photo you’ve ever taken for the last, call it 10 to 15 years, let me just tell you, you are giving up so much information to whoever that is.

[00:19:23] Preston Pysh: And so when you go into your apps on your smartphone and you say, have you given access to your photos, full access to your photos, to any of these applications, you’re basically giving them the full Monty on anything and everything you’ve ever thought about taking picture, blah, blah, blah. I’ll get off my high horse here.

[00:19:40] Justin Evidon: Well, it’s a big deal. It’s a good thing to warn people about. I will say my experience with iOS is that they’re trying to create better patterns for photo sharing with applications where you can have kind of like private photo access where only the specific ones that you want to share with a given app are going to be shared with them.

[00:20:00] Justin Evidon: But Apple has access at the end of the day. To all of your photos. And Google has access to all of your photos. There have been documented instances where people have been convicted of crimes or child abuse or other things based upon evidence that was extracted from the photos that they were hosting with a given cloud provider. So it’s not just this like tinfoil hat thing as to whether or not that information is accessible to these companies. It’s proven.

[00:20:34] Preston Pysh: To your point that you were making before we went down this is if you’re running your own local server or hardware device that is storing data and information, there’s a way to store your photos locally so that you’re not giving it, you’re not putting it into the cloud for AI on it. And sorry to interrupt, but you were making another point there.

[00:20:53] Justin Evidon: Yeah. I came in prior to Bitcoin and prior to being in tech, I was a freelance photographer, videographer. And I had, you know, for the better part of a decade, I shot digital negatives, which are exponentially larger than a JPEG file, and I chose to go the route of never deleting any photos because in my opinion, that space was available and it was better to keep everything and to be able to regain access to something than to think that you’re okay to delete a photo and then realize after the fact that was actually the one that you wanted to use.

[00:21:27] Justin Evidon: So that means that I amassed literally terabytes of content and I was already doing a lot of digital asset management and keeping backups, but it was very similar to my experience of backing up seed phrases and evolving through self custody best practices where I would have a backup hard drive at my computer.

[00:21:49] Justin Evidon: And then I realize what happens if something happens to that backup hard drive. It’s in the same location as my main computer that has all of the data on there. I should create another copy and keep it at another location. But what if both those hard drives degrade and I don’t know about it? And finally reaching this point where.

[00:22:06] Justin Evidon: I purchased dedicated hardware. It’s referred to as a network attached storage, where you can not only have redundant hard drive space within the device, but it functions as a server where you can access it from anywhere. You can access it from other computers, you can access it from anywhere around the world, and you can run your own applications on it.

[00:22:28] Justin Evidon: It’s really just like a souped up version of a computer that is designed with the express purpose of trying to store a lot of data. And my intention when building this out was, and this is exactly what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I’m technically savvy enough that I’m going to go through this process, document the whole process, and then I’m going to share that information with friends and family.

[00:22:50] Justin Evidon: And Preston, I had to break it to you, but it’s still really hard. And there were a lot of places where I got stuck and I was using ChatGPT to try and answer my way through troubleshooting problems. And I think that we’re getting closer to where that is more accessible.

[00:23:07] Justin Evidon: We have stuff like Start9 that is trying to be this like all in one server tool that can want to click your way into stuff. You still need some handholding, but I think that there is enough motivation now that people want to build that and there’s a demand for it. If you can get the convenience to close to what the convenient factor is of an iCloud or a Google Photos, you’re going to have something great.

[00:23:34] Preston Pysh: I completely agree with you. You got Start9. You got Enbrel that are moving in this direction. What’s really interesting for people that have never run their own Bitcoin node, which I’m sure a majority of people listening to the show have not. When you do this and you log in, it almost feels like an iPhone type app experience where you log in, you can download different applications onto your own home server.

[00:24:00] Preston Pysh: You can set up some of these tools if you wanted to store all your photos on a device like this. The interface is actually pretty user-friendly for the most part. Like I don’t think that you need like a ton of tech experience to do it, where I think that it’s still a hard sell. Is when you look at how people are collecting and transmitting information, it’s almost always coming from one of these devices, right?

[00:24:25] Preston Pysh: I’m holding up a cell phone for people that are just listening, and I think because, and this is just my working theory. I think because people know that they’re using one of these devices to create and transmit all this information, either through some type of Apple or Google device or Google operating system, they already know that they’re still giving up everything to one of these two companies for the most.

[00:24:50] Justin Evidon: You don’t have to.

[00:24:51] Preston Pysh: For the most part. But where I’m going with this is do we really need a hardware device that can compete in an open source kind of way to encourage people to go into the full privacy stack? And is that kind of the limiting factor? Because I’ll be honest with you. I want to go in all these directions, but I still feel like I’m just leaking out all of this private information and data and it’s just not worth it yet.

[00:25:19] Preston Pysh: But if I had an open source phone that I could use that’s not an Apple device and go full on into the privacy stack, I think you’d have a lot more people that would commit. I’m kind of curious if you would agree with that.

[00:25:31] Justin Evidon: There is a solution out there. Google Pixel devices, you can side load a privacy oriented open source software and operating system onto Google Pixel phones. It’s called Graphene, and you can then use your phone in a much more privacy oriented manner.

[00:25:48] Justin Evidon: You can still sandbox access to Google Play Store and use applications that need to interface with it, or even Google specific applications like maps or using Gmail, but. It comes at a convenience cost. It always remains part of the equation, and I think that there is a need to try and close that gap between the convenience of Apple and Google versus the complexity or the burden of needing to set things up yourself.

[00:26:17] Justin Evidon: One final piece that I wanted to add to the discussion around iCloud photos and Google photos. One of the main motivations that I had for setting up this home server, this network attached storage, is I came across an open source project called Immich, I-M-M-I-C-H, and it is a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos or to iCloud photos where you can run it on your device and it will automatically, as you take photos, back it up to your own server.

[00:26:49] Justin Evidon: It uses its own internal AI tooling to be able to do face detection, geo tagging. It has an interface that is very convenient and user friendly and very reminiscent of a Google photos, and I’ve been in the process. I was able to set that up and migrate all of the photos out of iCloud photos. I was able to turn off iCloud photos so it’s no longer backing up there.

[00:27:13] Justin Evidon: I can’t do anything about the likelihood that they aren’t honoring my request to delete the data that was already there, but that’s a different conversation. You can only control the present in the future. You can’t control the past, and that tooling is now. Anytime I take a photo, it is automatically connecting to my network attached storage, and is keeping that data in my environment.

[00:27:35] Justin Evidon: And they just got to a point where they have a stable release. It’s only been around for a few years. It’s been incredible to see what motivated open source developers can put together. And it’s just like a call out that I want to make sure that I was giving so that people were aware of that. Because I think that there is finally starting to be more of these tools that are a one click away from allowing you to migrate away from these centralized solutions. In terms of the hardware I mentioned, being able to migrate your Google Pixel phones over to graphene.

[00:28:08] Justin Evidon: There’s also, I think, other concerns related to technology that I think we start to segue into, which is the concerns regarding light and the impacts on circadian rhythm. Yes. And all of our devices are, whether they are Apple or Google or they’re a laptop or whatever it might be. They are shining in our faces day and night, and a lot of people walk through life unaware of the impact that has on them.

[00:28:35] Preston Pysh: Let’s go down this rabbit hole. So since we started the show, we’ve been talking about the software implications. Right? And what that means. Now we’re going to pivot and we’re going to go into the hardware ramifications.

[00:28:48] Preston Pysh: What I think is lost on a lot of people when we start talking about all of this technology, like I just had a gentleman on two weeks ago and we were talking about Tesla and all these robotaxis and the battery technology. What is almost never discussed. Is the electromagnetic frequency on all of this stuff.

[00:29:07] Preston Pysh: It’s almost like it’s the thing to ignore and to never discuss because it’s so nice having AirPods or it’s so nice having an iPad, you name it, all of this technology. And people might think this is a tinfoil hat kind of topic, but I’ll tell you what, I pay a lot of attention to people that I respect immensely for their deep thinking.

[00:29:30] Preston Pysh: And every one of these people keep coming back to this idea of electromagnetic frequency, the radiation with some of these devices. And just to name a couple your AirPods, the electric cars, the frequency of the light coming off of all these LED lights, especially the bulbs, right? Just going into a hardware store and trying to get a luminescent bulb like you used to get back in the day.

[00:29:56] Preston Pysh: It’s nearly impossible to find them without it being a decorative type bulb. You look and you look at the frequency of these bulbs and what those ramifications are. Our eyes were not designed to be handling these types of frequencies that are coming out of all of these devices these days.

[00:30:14] Preston Pysh: So give us the rundown on your thoughts on all of the hardware emissions and what it means from a health standpoint and just overall ramification long term. What does this mean?

[00:30:26] Justin Evidon: Here’s a fun exercise that you and anybody else that’s listening to this can try out for themselves. When you’re in your home and you’ve got lights on, if you’re out at a bar or a restaurant or anywhere else around town. Take out your phone, open up the camera, switch to the slow-mo camera and just shoot five or six seconds of the space and then play it back.

[00:30:51] Justin Evidon: More often than not, what you’re going to see is what your eyes cannot perceive, which is the lights just flickering like crazy. When we think about like going to a moody restaurant or a nightclub or anywhere else, we’re expecting, you know, dim lighting and it’s all nice. And think about the salt lamp that I’ve got in the background here, right? Like moody lighting.

[00:31:12] Justin Evidon: But when you’re using a lot of LED lights, which are more modern solutions to creating lighting, you end up needing to dim it in different ways. In some cases, you are able to dim the light itself and have it remain a solid light. But the cheaper way to do it is to cut the amount of electricity and to just cut it in and out, such that it is perceived as lower intensity by your eyes.

[00:31:43] Justin Evidon: But to the naked eye, you can’t see that flickering occur. Unfortunately. While you can’t perceive it, your brain does, and your brain is having to work over time. And this can also, you know, there is some potential concerns that could be a large contributor to some of the behavior that has been attributed to ADHD over the years.

[00:32:04] Justin Evidon: I remember seeing, there was a research study where they had a classroom and they had, on one day they had fluorescent bulbs that were flickering, and another day they had fluorescent bulbs that didn’t flicker and the behavior and the way that these kids interacted. Totally different.

[00:32:24] Justin Evidon: We’re looking at like kids jumping off the chairs versus sitting quietly and be able to take in the information. And it’s just another example of where the potential physical impacts of modern technology are hiding in plain sight, and we don’t recognize them.

[00:32:40] Justin Evidon: EMF is just another example of this. We don’t really know the extent to which this can cause problems. I want to caveat this by saying I’m not a scientist, I’m not an expert, I’m an enthusiast, and I don’t want to come off as some kooky conspiracy theorist. But I do think that there is a level of scrutiny that needs to be applied to these things that many people aren’t doing because doing so would disrupt the convenience factor that we’ve currently come to enjoy.

[00:33:10] Justin Evidon: We’ve seen the concerns regarding WiFi and some people pushing for still wanting to use ethernet cables to connect all of your internet connected devices. But outright swearing off WiFi is not a very convenient thing. We’ve seen people yell about the difference between 4G and 5G, and I think that some of those arguments have gotten a bit too outlandish, but I do think there is potentially something there. And do I really need to have that extended speed of 5G relative to 4G? Probably not.

[00:33:41] Justin Evidon: There’s a lot of concerns that I think people just need to be aware of them. And again, not to swear off all conveniences in the technological solutions that are out there, but to find the ones that you prioritize because those are the ones that really make a big difference.

[00:33:59] Preston Pysh: When you talk about the LED lights and the flicker that’s associated with it, the on off that you don’t get with a luminescent bulb. I’m reminded of this book. It was, I think it’s called Consciousness and the Brain, is what I think the name of the book is, and they talk about this experiment that they did with individuals where it was like, I’m going to mess up the name, but it’s a toilet paper tube test where they basically put a monocle over each eye simultaneously and they put two different pictures on each eye.

[00:34:28] Preston Pysh: So maybe the left eye had a picture of a cow and then the right eye had a picture of a rooster or whatever. And when you look through these monocles, what they were testing is forcing the brain to see one image. And they were curious like, how would a person’s brain interpret? What are they going to see? Are they going to see the cow? Are they going to see the rooster? Because they’re forcing each eye to see something different.

[00:34:49] Preston Pysh: And what was interesting in the experiment is that a person, when they look at this still image is your brain will actually flip flop. It’ll see the cow, and that’s all it’ll see. And then call it five seconds or 10 seconds later, it flips to the rooster and then all you can see is the rooster. And then five seconds later it flips back at this frequency. It flips back and forth between the two images.

[00:35:11] Preston Pysh: What they did next, which was really fascinating, is they put it onto a video. They turned the picture into a video, so it was a video of a cow that looks like it’s just a still image, and then the video of a rooster. That was, again, just a still image. And what they did is they took a one frame, and I think it was cycling at like 30 frames per second, or 60 frames per second. I can’t remember which one it was. I kind of think it was 30.

[00:35:37] Preston Pysh: They swapped out one image on, just say it was the cow video. They took one of the 30 frames and instead of it being a cow, they made it, call it a bullseye or some random picture. But it was just one frame out of 30. So the person who’s looking at these two different images, they think that they’re just seeing a still picture. They don’t even realize that it’s a video.

[00:35:59] Preston Pysh: Okay, but what did the brain do? The brain stopped flipping from the one image to the other, and it just stayed fixated on the one that had the one frame every 30 seconds. and the viewer, the person who was looking at this, said that all they saw was the, and I forget what I said in the example, but let’s just say it was the cow that had the one frame that was swapped into the bullseye.

[00:36:21] Preston Pysh: When they looked at this, even though they’re seeing both things, they’re looking at both things. The only thing that their brain was interpreting was the video that had the one frame that was swapping out. And so the reason I tell this long story is you might not think that you’re seeing, or that your brain is comprehending something that’s happening in a very short amount of time.

[00:36:43] Preston Pysh: In this case, one frame per 30 seconds. Like the person didn’t see a bullseye at all. They just saw the picture of the cow permanently. They didn’t even know why their brain wasn’t flipping over to the other image like it was before when it was a still image. But the processing that’s happening in your subconscious is so profound.

[00:37:02] Preston Pysh: That it’s something that I read this years ago. I think that was the right book, but I bring all this up because of this idea of these LED lights that are flickering on and off, and I don’t know what the frequency is for a lot of them. People would just say, all I see is a permanent light, just like a luminescent bulb and clearly there’s nothing wrong there, and I would argue, I think there’s proof out there that what’s happening in our subconscious is way more profound than what any of us can possibly imagine.

[00:37:28] Justin Evidon: Yeah, at 30 frames per second, an average video camera is also not going to perceive this, but something that you’ll notice it depending on the intensity of the flick. You’ll sometimes notice the light. There’s a horizontal band. That will move slowly through. And if you do the slow-mo, suddenly that horizontal band moving slowly becomes this very noticeable flickering, and I think that the brain stops being able to perceive flickering at a thousand hertz or something.

[00:37:56] Justin Evidon: And so there’s a long way for us to go. So ideally you want to use light that is going to be consistent. Once you have consistent light, you also need to think about the spectrum that’s involved.

[00:38:07] Justin Evidon: One of the things that we’ve seen in the last, let’s call it 20, 30 years, the emergence of these LED bulbs and oftentimes being sold as energy saving, and you’re doing your part for the environment because they last longer and they are cheaper and they’re more environmentally friendly.

[00:38:27] Justin Evidon: What they failed to tell you is that large amount of the energy savings came from getting rid of a lot of the light spectrum that you would otherwise include with a fluorescent or a halogen or an incandescent bulb. In doing so, it was concentrating a lot of the light output in the blue area that I should say in and of itself isn’t necessarily the worst thing possible.

[00:38:56] Justin Evidon: If you go outside midday sun. There’s a ton of blue light. The difference, however, is that you’re experiencing that blue light in conjunction with a broader spectrum. Including ultraviolet and infrared. And that is what our bodies were evolved to be able to process and perceive. And throughout the course of the day, we see the spectrum shift very early on. It’s very orange, it’s very infrared geared, and then throughout the day it becomes more full spectrum moving into the UV direction and then tapering off towards the end of the day.

[00:39:34] Justin Evidon: Not only has that been an important part of our ability to perceive light and to go through life in a healthier manner? It also shapes our circadian rhythm, and it does so in a way that we don’t really perceive as like an average person.

[00:39:51] Preston Pysh: In a major way too. I don’t think people, I know when I travel international and into all these different time zones, what I’ve learned through AI because I’ve asked it. I was like, how can I get to the new time zone faster or more quickly without having all the, you know what the number one thing it said was, get out first thing in the morning when the light comes up.

[00:40:15] Preston Pysh: And make sure that you get a lot of that into your eyes and it’s going to help you adjust to the new time zone faster than pretty much anything else you can do. It goes to this idea that you’re talking about, which is how heavily tied your circadian rhythms and the timing of your entire body and your entire system is to that light source and that frequency that you’re getting at that certain time of the day.

[00:40:35] Justin Evidon: Your eyes and your skin are absorbing all of this light information and your body uses that to decide what hormones it should be releasing. It signals to the body, it’s morning time, it’s active time, it’s sedentary time, it’s time to go to sleep and to heal and to process the day. And a lot of people are hijacking that circadian rhythm without even realizing it.

[00:41:03] Justin Evidon: The tech is so addictive that they’ll stay watching their TV until 11 o’clock at night, and it then takes hours for their body to wind down and to then be able to start to get into those deep and REM sleep cycles. I think that people are missing that aspect because it is, to a degree, ironically, invisible to them, right?

[00:41:27] Justin Evidon: You think that light is going to be the most visible thing, and yet the way in which it interacts with your body is entirely invisible. So I think that there are ways in which you can mitigate that. One is, spend as much time as you can outside and to your point, first light is probably the most important because it sets you up for the day.

[00:41:47] Justin Evidon: And it really punches your system to find that marker of where you should move forward. The other is to be aware of how you should support your circadian rhythm throughout the day. And you’re not going to be averse to blue light altogether. I take, for example, as a product manager, I’m having to work with designers and image files. Or when I’m a photographer and I’m looking at photos, I need to be able to see exactly the definition of that color spectrum as it’s intended. And that’s going to involve some blue light.

[00:42:18] Justin Evidon: But if I’m working on some tech stuff and it’s getting into the afternoon, I have a program on my computer. That is called Iris. There’s other tools called Flux. I’ve seen a bunch of different ones around, and you can adjust the color temperature of your screens. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it gets a long ways there. You can also use color filters on your iPhone. You can set like almost getting to a red light if you want to be able to use it in the evening time still to send some last minute messages.

[00:42:48] Justin Evidon: But again, there are plenty of people who aren’t able to just conform their technology use to the ideal circadian rhythms, night and day. As an example, I’ve got two kids and there are times when I need to hang out with them for the afternoon and make dinner and spend time with them and get them to bed and read a story. And once I’ve done that, I might still have some things that I need to do.

[00:43:14] Justin Evidon: I might still need to get some work done, or I have some personal projects that I want to be working on. And that is one of the rare moments throughout my day where I have time to myself. But I’m also planning on getting to sleep relatively shortly thereafter.

[00:43:27] Justin Evidon: And so you can mitigate that with some of these tools, but there’s still going to be some impacts with blue light. This is actually one of the reasons why a year and a half ago I got really excited about this new product that came out called The Daylight Tablet. It is an Android tablet.

[00:43:44] Preston Pysh: These guys just the foot stomp. These guys are crazy brilliant. Yeah, I’ve met these guys and what they’re building is like mind blowing.

[00:43:53] Justin Evidon: Well, here’s, the thing that I find so fascinating is that it’s effectively an Android tablet, right? At the end of the day, you’re getting a device that functions like an Android tablet. The difference is they’ve stripped out color as a function of the screen, and they’re trying to use this technology, I believe it’s transflective LCD, basically, where light can not only pass through from underneath the screen array, but it can also deal with light that’s coming from outside and reflect back to you.

[00:44:27] Justin Evidon: Think of it similar to what with a Kindle, an e-ink tablet where there’s like, when you go and you sit outside with a device like that, you can see it even better than you could inside. But the reason for using this transflective version is that then they’re able to have a light source that they’ve built in that is intentionally designed to avoid the use of blue light and to reduce the opportunity for flickering.

[00:44:55] Preston Pysh: Jevi, my understanding is that they’re working on trying to make it a color display despite, like no light being emitted from the device. Yeah, just I’ve seen and held the device and looked. It’s pretty phenomenal how it just makes you feel as far as like in the evening when you look at this thing, it’s just a completely different experience.

[00:45:16] Preston Pysh: But the refresh rate, how can I display it? So for a person who has seen a Kindle and done the Kindle reader, it’s almost like an etch of sketch. But the difference is the refresh rate of like what it’s doing. It can play videos, it can do all of these things, but yet it still looks like this etch a sketch type picture. It’s wild.

[00:45:37] Justin Evidon: Exactly. Yeah. So that is the tool that I use when I put the kids to bed and I still want to do some writing or some research.

[00:45:44] Preston Pysh: Oh, interesting. Okay.

[00:45:45] Justin Evidon: That is my tool. I use it every single day and I pay a lot of attention to my sleep cycles and trying to maintain sleep consistency. A big part of longevity is having a very consistent bedtime and wake time, and there are days when I’m just able to wind down and I want to read a book.

[00:46:07] Justin Evidon: There are other days where I still want to be productive and do some writing. I can do all of it with this single device, and to me that’s just a really huge unlock. Being able to still use technology and not be stuck trying to write stuff down on paper, as we were talking about earlier with that second brain concept.

[00:46:26] Justin Evidon: The more that you can capture that information in a digital form, the easier it’s going to then be to work with that within an AI tool and to be able to do recall and distillation and synthesis of that information.

[00:46:40] Preston Pysh: Amazing. For people listening to this, you know, a lot of the conversations that we’re going to have that are tech related are going to be talking about the benefits and somewhat ignoring the side effects or the consequences, which I tell people this all the time.

[00:46:56] Preston Pysh: As an aerospace engineering example is you can’t have lift without corresponding drag. Drag is always part of it. It’s just a matter of like how much drag is associated with the lift that you’re producing off the wing. And when we’re talking about tech and we’re talking about the benefits, often we’re just talking about that lift vector and it completely ignoring any type of drag that’s associated with it.

[00:47:19] Preston Pysh: And this is why I was really excited to have this conversation Jevi for people because so much of the stuff that we’re going to continue to cover on the show, we’re there talking about why it’s so beneficial. Why it’s so exciting, because I mean, come on. The stuff that’s happening right now is beyond exciting.

[00:47:36] Preston Pysh: It’s the stuff you imagined as a kid really is be driven around by a car without no driver and stuff like that. It’s just like miraculous what’s coming at us. But this is the stuff we have to go into this with eyes wide open and to really have an appreciation for some of the consequences. Some of the drag that’s coming off of all of this stuff.

[00:47:58] Preston Pysh: And if we don’t approach it early. It’s going to be 10, 15 years later, and it’s going to be, in all intents and purposes, a little too late to backtrack some of the things that you’ve given up, whether you realize it or not. And so you’ve done such an amazing job, just kind of like throwing out some really core things that people need to think about and to like really make a conscious decision.

[00:48:21] Preston Pysh: Am I okay with this? Is this something that I’m willing to just ignore? And unfortunately, I think a lot of people are going to say, yeah, I am okay with it, but hey, we’re covering it. We’re trying to make sure that you’re aware. And I’m sure that the feedback from the show is going to be very positive and we probably need to keep doing conversations like this moving forward because you do such a great job just laying it out for people so that they understand it in a fair and balanced kind of way.

[00:48:51] Justin Evidon: Yeah, I think I certainly came into this conversation being a little nervous that it was going to come off as being all over the place and not being too focused. I think there’s a lot of information to digest from this. If anything, my hope is the one thing that people take away is to be just that little bit more aware of the potential concerns.

[00:49:14] Justin Evidon: This isn’t a call to arms to swear off technology. I’m very much still, I use technology in my life every single day. It’s about finding the ways to be able to keep it in your life and to get the best out of it without just going and being a mountain man in the forest.

[00:49:32] Justin Evidon: I think that some of these tools that we’ve discussed today are more accessible than others. But I’m, yeah, happy to come back at any point in time and keep jamming on this stuff. There’s probably 14 different topics we didn’t even cover.

[00:49:45] Preston Pysh: Yeah. And we didn’t even get to the hardcore stuff like CRISPR or whatever. There’s so many other things that are, but yeah. Hey, if you’re listening to this, you enjoy the chat, we’re going to have a link to Jevi’sX Account. Also his Nostr account.

[00:50:00] Preston Pysh: So if you do have other things that you would love for us to kind of cover or address, you know, throw it out there, send it over to us so that we’re aware of what that is.

[00:50:09] Preston Pysh: And Jevi,, thank you so much for making time and coming on the show. This is long overdue. This is conversations that we have from time to time regardless of whether we’re recording or not. So I was thrilled to be able to do this with you.

[00:50:21] Justin Evidon: Absolutely, Preston. It’s my pleasure.

[00:50:23] Preston Pysh: Anything else you want to throw out there that people can check out?

[00:50:26] Justin Evidon: I, a couple years ago started a Substack called Primal Cut Sheet. I haven’t been writing as much in there anymore. Kind of got to the saturation point that I was looking for, but it’s tips and insights on how to buy beef in bulk and why you be doing it. And the motto being the correct number of chess freezers to own is one more than you currently have.

[00:50:48] Preston Pysh: We didn’t even go down that rabbit hole, which is another, you know, we’ve had long conversations on that one too. Maybe for next time.

[00:50:56] Preston Pysh: Alright, folks, that’s all we have for you this week. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.

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