Abel James: Hey. This is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. Have you ever had a concussion? Anyone who's ever had their bell rung knows recovery can be brutal. But with enough time and the right treatment, our bodies also have the remarkable ability to heal.
Today, we're going hard in the paint on brain health, electromagnetic
fields, and decentralization
in tech, food, and finance with our friend Tristan Scott. Tristan is an electrical engineer,
health marketing lead at Daylight Computer Company, and author of Bitcoin and Beef. After suffering from debilitating long term symptoms following multiple concussions sustained as a college athlete, Tristan made a commitment to healing his brain. This led to a deep dive into the world of alternative health, exploring the critical roles our diet,
circadian rhythm, and electromagnetic
environment play in our health and performance. I met Tristan in Austin last year at Squatch while feasting on delicious beef from her friend Johnny. And from our first conversation, it's clear why Tristan has become a rising voice and leader in the world of alternative health and tech. Tristan's expertise in electrical engineering gives him a unique perspective on the often overlooked impacts of EMFs and how we can reclaim our health and sovereignty
in the face of the technological
onslaught of the modern world. But before we get to the interview, here's a quick plug. If you'd like to be friends on the socials, you can search for me under Abel James, usually with the handle at Abel James. That's a b e l James. I even started a new Instagram account. I finally caved.
You can connect with me by searching for at Abel James. And if you dig this podcast, I bet you'd also like my newsletter. You can sign up at AbelJames.com
or on Substack.
Alright. Onto the show with Tristan Scott. You're about to hear easy tips to reduce your exposure to EMFs from a trained engineer,
Tristan's vision for decentralized
technology to create a more sovereign future, the surprising relationship between Bitcoin and beef, and much more. Let's go hang out with Tristan.
Welcome back, folks. Today, we're here with Tristan Scott, an electrical engineer, author of Bitcoin and Beef, and cohost of decentralized
radio, as well as the health marketing lead at Daylight Computer Company. Thanks so much for joining us, Tristan.
Tristan Scott: Abel, thanks for having me. Yeah. It's great to reconnect.
Abel James: Totally. Yeah. I was so glad to meet you and the folks at Daylight,
and and and that such a cool event in Austin A Few Months ago,
as you guys got off the ground. But, man, your your background is fascinating.
You're a brainiac yourself. Let's talk a little bit about how you got into this this whole world, especially of alternative health because you have somewhat of a traditional background.
Tristan Scott: Yeah. Yeah. It's been a unique journey, I would say, but so fun. Met so many great people and just have continued to learn and evolve. And, you know, it's funny being introduced as, like, the author of Bitcoin and Beef because to me, that feels almost like a lifetime ago Yeah. Writing that three years ago.
And that was kind of my starting point in terms of getting out into the public sphere,
but everything else was still, like, two, three years prior. So end of twenty seventeen, I actually suffered one too many concussions and, you know, did everything wrong in the acute recovery phase. And,
basically, I have post concussive
symptoms and syndrome, daily headaches for over a year,
and that just led me to this self healing rabbit hole that I knew I had to go down to get better,
because I was getting no answers from the centralized health care system, seeing neurologists,
etcetera.
And I went from being, you know, a very high functioning college soccer player and electrical engineering student to when I was dealing with that, you know, I had to sleep twelve, thirteen hours a night. I could barely exercise. I literally could
just get fatigued from walking across campus.
And,
you know, my whole world got turned upside down. It was the most depressive period of my life, but it was also the inflection period of my life. And it was great because,
I was in my you know, ending my second to last year of studies,
and, you know, I knew I was getting a degree in electrical engineering, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. And then I just went down the self healing rabbit hole, realized there's this whole space of alternative health, biohacking,
self learning, other people dealing with similar issues.
And I just began to implement a lot of things, you know, lifestyle routines,
focusing on sleep, taking some supplements for for brain healing and recovering, getting more outside.
And I I got better. You know? I I healed myself to a point where I was able to be a functioning member of society again,
and I pretty much just became obsessed. And then I graduated college and, you know, had a summer off, so I spent a ton of time outside exploring and as well as just dialing in my recovery,
and I kept learning. And then from there,
it just kind of proliferated, and I graduated
and simultaneously,
you know, was was getting into Bitcoin and kind of understanding what's wrong with our monetary system. And then I was starting a new job in Silicon Valley, in the semiconductor industry.
And I was like, yeah. You know? I just graduated, and it's probably helpful to get knowledgeable about health and about wealth because, you know, it's like the two most important areas
of anyone's life. Unfortunately, you do need to know money and have money to function in today's world. And then if you don't have your health, you know, what good is is having money? What good is having anything? Because that's, you know, the crux of everything when that goes down the drain.
And then COVID happened in in 2020. And I was, like, primed for, you know,
understanding what was really going on. It opened my eyes even more. I I dove even deeper down the, you know, monetary system side of things and then double down on on the health side,
understanding that
we really need to have a more decentralized,
you know, health care system, just understanding of health, and really we don't know that much about our biology
And that so many things in this modern world are just toxic for us. Our our food, the things are, you know, spraying on the food,
the air we're breathing, the electromagnetic
inputs,
plastics. I mean, you could go down the whole list, and I'm sure you and your audience knows them all. And then, yeah, I I realized that nobody was kinda talking about this intersection between the money and the food system and also the health system,
all being related. So I I wrote that book called Bitcoin and Beef. Originally, it was getting called, like, Bitcoin and biohacking, but I really hate the word biohacking, to be honest. Me too. So the more I learned, I just became really passionate about regenerative agriculture after, you know, starting to buy, like, quarter half beefs
from a friend of my sister's in Wyoming.
And, you know, I've always been really obsessed with nature and how things are functioning and, you know, be the best steward of the environment as possible.
And regenerative agriculture just blew my mind that we could actually, you know, because it was the complete opposite of, like, the anti meat narrative which was peaking pretty much, like, four years ago.
And
I was like, well, this is incredible. Something that's natural and providing us nutrition can also simultaneously
fix and restore and repair the environment.
So I became really focused on that and
was just like all in on on Bitcoin and and wrote that book, got on social media, and opened up a lot of doors for me. And then that was kind of my my thing for twenty twenty one, two, and part of 2023. And then as I was wrapping that up, you know, I realized that I wanted to kind of continue my learning and, you know, got the baseline down for the food,
understanding
what's nutrient dense, etcetera.
And throughout this whole time period,
I was
spending more and more time outside
and I was feeling better. You know, at this point in twenty twenty two and three, I pretty much surpassed
my vitality, how I was feeling from before my brain injury. So I was I was now better than I was pre injury.
And it was a big part of the reason for that was was because how much time I was spending outside. And I knew things like grounding. I knew the circadian rhythm stuff. You know, I bought blue light blockers in 2018. I was blocking blue light, had a grounding map
for years and years, but I I didn't really dive super deep into it. And I realized, you know, spending more time on social media, listening to some people talk about this stuff and EMFs and light, and I was kind of like,
these people don't really know what they're talking about. Like, they're they're just, you know, average health influencers.
I don't know what degree or background they came from, but they clearly never took a physics class or had any background. So I was like, wow, I actually had this unique opportunity
to use my degree in electrical engineering to discuss,
educate, and learn more about these electromagnetic
aspects of our biology. And then I kind of, at that same point, serendipitously,
like, discovered folks like doctor Jack Crews and who has, you know, been talking about this for a very long time. And I kinda just listened to his one podcast, and I was like, gave me a whole list of researchers and books to go and read, and that's what I've done. And since then, that's kind of been the main focus. And, you know, now I get to apply that to to my actual job at at Daylight Computer, which which is amazing. So, yeah, it's it's been an incredible journey.
I'm continuing to learn so much, but I still feel like we're just scratching the surface on on what we really know about health and nature
and our own biology. Yeah.
Abel James: Man, it's so cool. I would I would love for you to talk a bit about,
Bitcoin and beef and kinda how that came to be and also decentralization in general. And and, of course, I would I definitely want you to talk about EMS and and that whole situation as well. But let's start with some of
the talk around decentralization.
What is that? Why is it important? I think people kind of, like, throw that word around, especially now Mhmm. Without, a deep understanding of what it represents
in in the world of finance or food.
Tristan Scott: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's definitely a buzzword. So is sovereignty, which is another word that I don't think people actually really understand, like, the true meaning of. But, I mean, a a system
is decentralized
when there when there's no single point of failure or there's no single point of control. So, like, our monetary system is
completely centralized because we have the Federal Reserve,
and then we have these, you know, big commercial banks controlling everything. So there's all a central point of control and issuance and and also failure.
And the same thing with our food system. So our food system,
using beef or meat for example, there's four companies that control pretty much 80 plus percent of the meat industry.
You know, JBS and Tyson and Cargill and
I think National Beef,
but it depends on on which type of meat
that's highly centralized. That there's such a few amount of companies. Talk about tech, you know. There's the FAANG companies or whatever the newest acronym is now. It's like Nvidia. Like, these folks are so big. They're the biggest companies in the world, but there's, like, just a few of them. So
this has kind of come to a fruition because of the issues with the monetary system and the legislation that has been passed. So when we fully went off of the gold standard in the seventies that we
really just changed the entire dynamic of of how money works
in our society,
how
the average person is is going to have that value, that purchasing power altered. And, subsequently, there's a lot of changes in these various industries. So in the same time period, you know, exporting our our agricultural
goods,
internationally
proliferated because of the secretary of ag, Earl Butz, saying, like, go big or go home. Let's, like, monocrop the crap out of our our farming system.
And that ultimately,
like, led to a boom and then bust, which consolidated
the the farming,
in our country tremendously. And the number of farmers, the percentage of the population farming went down, and then the size of, you know, the upper half of farms
skyrocketed. So, basically,
the small guys went bankrupt and the big guys bought out the small guys, and we just led to this insane consolidation.
And then the nineties, they introduced all these subsidies
to just proliferate more, these kind of monocrop
agricultural
products.
And, you know, that's resulted in the food system that we have today and the even more centralized system. So
what decentralization is is just the antithesis of that. So in regards to the food system, it looks like, you know, what it was in, like, the early nineteen hundreds where there was a ton of local farmers,
you know, a good chunk maybe I don't know. I don't remember all the stats from my book, but at some point, it's like, you know, 50%
of the population is is farming. They're raising food,
in some capacity. And now it's like one or 2%
producing food for the other 98%,
barely scraping along. And the average age of a farmer's in their 60s now. So we have all these issues. So
decentralized,
how does that, you know, impact it? And it's going back to what it was. It was also hyperlocal.
The thing that, you know, people are now realizing
is that food comes from all over the world. You know? There's some ridiculous
supply chain
and just global economic
trade going on, and we sell a ton of our beef in The US to Asia, and then we import a ton of beef from Australia, New Zealand,
and South America, Mexico, and Canada. And then there's all these labeling issues as well that you don't even really know where it's coming from. And that's a pure waste of energy globally,
and it's, you know, a big question mark on the quality. So
decentralizing things really is getting to
a system that's resilient, it's redundant,
and it's hyperlocalized.
And it all kind of goes hand in hand with the money.
And, again, when you go to the grocery store,
if it's, you know, Walmart and you're buying
meat that's coming from who knows where, that money is not staying in your local economy. But if you go to the farmer's market and buy beef from a local producer
or some produce from a local producer, you can not only support someone in your local economy, which is gonna back pay itself
from some other means. You know, maybe it's getting, you know, piled around in improving local infrastructure, education, or other things in your community. But in order for that to happen, it needs to stay in the community. And then you can also verify the quality. So, again, the thing we don't know is
how
high of quality, how free of toxins is our food. Well, really, the only way for you to know that because of the marketing labeling, you know, phenomenons that are are going on in in the food industry
is to literally have a relationship with the person producing it. And the only way you can do that is is going directly to the source and then verifying that yourself.
So that's also giving you more autonomy and more sovereignty. So mention that word at the end of the day. And that word
really means, like, in its core definition,
being the ruler of, you know, something, which in an individual sovereignty perspective means being the ruler of your own life, your own decisions. So
so much of the, you know, repercussions of the centralized system is that everyone has outsourced
the decision making of their own lives,
and they've traded convenience
for quality. And now we're suffering
from that, and we have this, you know, chronic disease crisis, you know, the the inflationary environment, the purchasing power of our money is, you know, falling off a cliff. And, yeah, that's kind of where we've been trending for for decades. And
now
it's it's really amazing because I wrote that book in 2021,
and now we have, like, RFK talking about seed oils,
in the mainstream and, you know, the issues with our food system.
And we have a lot of momentum now, so it's so encouraging to see this. And, you know, that is the power of the Internet and social media. And that's a topic, you know, in and of itself. And what I've been talking about even more lately is, you know, our attention. We really live in an attention based economy.
And we're spending all our days staring at screens. So it's encouraging to see that the Internet and social media and really COVID had a positive impact, but at the same time, I still think we need to remember that we do live in somewhat of a bubble and the vast majority
are kind of suffering more than ever, and they don't even realize it because they're just so preoccupied
by the attention
and the stimulation
from their devices.
Abel James: Yeah. Man, it's so much to unpack there, but it it brought to mind you know, I think we started
tinkering with or or being interested in Bitcoin around the same time. And and a few years after that, I started looking as well at
silver and gold, not necessarily as investments as much as proxies for what is our currency doing? What is what is the dollar doing? And so I think it was in 2020, and I was I was just looking at silver was something like
14 or $15 an ounce.
And, gold, I think, was 1,500
or 1,600, something like that. You look at that those numbers now, they have doubled basically like silver's $34 an ounce, not 14.
Gold is something like 2,728
hundred dollars. And it's like gold and silver didn't really change in the past few few years. Right? Something else is changing. Now it's becoming so obvious,
to to many of us, whether we're buying food or just trying to afford a roof over our head for our families.
This is starting to be a problem, not just for the, you know, kind of devout weirdos like us, but for our population at large. So,
some of the solutions
looking toward decentralization
with nature as a model
is so important because
the kind of
world that we're living in right now is so manipulated. All these supply chains and the way that that the wrong food is funneled into schools or into our workplaces or into grocery stores. There's
a lot that needs to be done to fix these systems, but you could argue that building a parallel system next to it is probably a better solution than trying to fix some of these corrupt behemoths
because that's that's a fight that I'm not even sure we could take on. Right?
Tristan Scott: Yeah. It's it's a great point. And a few things to note there is, like,
everyone always says that things have gotten so expensive. And in reality,
the items have not changed at all. It's just the purchasing power of the dollar.
And what's really corrupted
our
understanding
of value
is all of this government
intervention,
such as subsidies and food and a global economy. Right? Like making things in China and Taiwan and Indonesia
for like pennies on the dollar. There should be no world that exists where a dollar 99 a pound chicken is real. Like, that's not a real price. The only way you get that is through highly subsidized
feed and highly
factory farmed settings for these animals.
So when people see like a pastured bird costs like $10.12
a pound or a grass fed beef
that costs $10 a pound. They they freak out. Oh, it's so expensive.
And if you still crunch the numbers, they are that is so reasonable. And it's really, like, paying for for what matters. What what is the true value of of what you're paying for and what you're getting out of it? And that's all been so distorted by these big conglomerates and government intervention.
And, yeah, a cotton t shirt probably shouldn't have cost like $10.
That's not a real thing.
When we had to use natural materials
and make them in
our local environment,
it'd probably be three, four x.
But, yeah, getting back to kind of just
these issues at large, it's phenomenal. And being
someone who's been in the world of supply chain and
both in the semiconductor industry and now with Daylight, it's amazing the fragility
of these global systems. But you're absolutely right. Like building a life raft and then
transforming that life raft into
an arc and then
whatever size vessel you want to talk is really the best way to do it because
who knows? I'm not here saying that this is going to be the mainstream.
Everyone's just going to switch over. Like these companies
are are literally the biggest companies in the world, and they're propping up the entire fiat economy as a result of their economic activity.
So when that continues to erode, it isn't gonna be pretty, and we do need to build this alternative path
for the people who see that and are awakened to
doing something about it and want to join and want to support that. But the most important thing that I've realized and everything I've worked on personally
and now with Daylight is if there is no alternative,
then there's going to be nothing for people to switch to. And that barrier to entry
needs to continuously
be brought lower and lower.
And the more alternatives there are,
the more freedom is open for people to choose the path.
And it's been amazing
in the past five years to just see how many
better, healthier, more sovereign products, alternatives have come to fruition and come to market
and it's only accelerating. So I think that's been the most exciting
part of this is seeing how much everyone is building in this realm and the support that is slowly transitioning over to it. Yeah, I agree. It is
Abel James: a very exciting time in that regard. Many thanks to people like you who are driving a lot of these fields forward. To go back a little bit earlier about healing your brain,
what do you think really made the biggest difference as you went from a place of really not feeling like who you naturally are? Like, your personality starts to go away with a brain injury, which I also experienced and largely recovered from. What was that recovery like for you, and what do you think really worked the best?
Tristan Scott: Yeah. My recovery was it was interesting because, again, I did I did everything wrong in that, like, one month after concussion brain injury. I was drinking, I went skiing, I was exercising.
I just never
did anything
right. So I was basically setting myself up for failure and then months went by.
So I was in a predicament where I started implementing lifestyle changes.
Like first off,
let me tell you that your mindset
and with everything in life is the number one thing that you need to correct to heal. And if you don't believe that you can get better, you're never going to get better. So for me, the first thing I did was I was spending a summer in Portland, Oregon where I was kind of reinvigorated
with my love for the outdoors and nature. You know, I grew up my mom's from Austria. We're hiking, camping all the time, skiing.
But then I fell away from that in high school and college like any, you know, teenager does when you stop hanging out with your family.
And I had that summer at Oregon where I was dealing with all these symptoms, and I realized that when I spent time in nature, you know, no service, was camping,
oh, I could actually go on a hike and not feel horrible
the next three days. Whereas, when I was going to the office for my internship,
I would come back at the end of the day and just, like, I was I was done. I was empty. My battery was was not
functioning anymore to to power my human body. And I started meditating and then going out in nature more just gave me this mindset that,
oh, like, I'm starting to feel a tiny bit better. Like, what if I can get 10% better, 20% better from where I'm at now? I'll never get back to where I was pre injury.
But that would be really nice. I feel like I could do a lot more and my life would be a lot better. And then that's like you're locked in, that seems reasonable,
and then you get there and you're like, wow, look what I just accomplished. If I can get 10% better, I can get thirty, forty, 50. Like, I can just keep going.
So really that mindset shift when I was spending more time in nature was the most monumental thing. And then I realized, probably a combination of just being so stubborn
and the motivation from being outside a little more, I was like just not I was like, I'm 22 years old. There's no way this is my life to be so limited,
and and that's why I'm so big on sovereignty now because I just had it taken away from me. I never want to be out of the driver's seat of my own life again. I never want to be so limited again. And
just started learning, and I was like, oh, wow. Look at all this information available to me. These people had it way worse. This person was paralyzed and, you know, now they're walking. And this person, you know, couldn't do anything motor functionalized for years and they've healed this. So
that belief system and that, you know, self,
fulfilling prophecy really is important. But, you know, I'm a science data nerd as well, so I just started trying things. And I tried a lot of things. Things that really helped me in the beginning were, like, high potency fish oil and CBD to calm, like, the inflammation. Now I know how important DHA is for brain health from, like, an electromagnetic
perspective.
Just dialing in sleep, you know, blocking blue light, managing stress,
getting up in, you know, the first thing in the morning, that was tremendously helpful. I was actually a participant of, like, this clinical trial for a neurostimulation
device where it would have, like, microcurrents of electrical stimulation on my tongue
while I was doing rehab, like vestibular therapy, meditation, and gait therapy,
which, again, testifies to some, like, electromagnetic
input having a positive effect. And and that really pushed me over the edge of, like, being able to get back into exercise.
And then from there, it was just, like, fine tuning lifestyle habits.
And I went keto, strict keto for, like, four months. That was super helpful to just, you know, have a very strong baseline of of blood sugar and not fluctuating a lot and, you know, anti inflammatory clean diet. And, yeah, just every year that passed, you know, more time outside, more time in the sun, more time grounded. When I you know, it was COVID happened. I never worked in an office after that, and, you know, I've woken up and watched the sunrise every day since then. And, you know, I've tried some other supplements and things, but I used to take a lot of supplements in 2019, '20 '20. I pretty much take nothing on a daily basis now. If I'm traveling or if I'm, like, you know, doing a ton of work and don't sleep as much, for recovery maybe, but,
again, goes back to the more time I've spent outdoors
connected to my local environment, both from a light perspective,
pure nature perspective, and then dialing in local seasonal diet, which I think is very underrated. And last winter,
I probably embraced seasonality from a lifestyle perspective more than anyone I've ever met, and that helped. Like, I just felt amazing. It was, you know, five degrees in Wyoming. My house is 48 degrees. I'm full carnivore keto at this point,
and I felt
so vital and was thriving. So it's all, to me, just about
using kind of supplements and using some interventions to get to a point where, okay, I've calmed this storm down.
Now the lifestyle habit changes in connecting to the local environment and nature as much as you possibly can is gonna be what moves the needle the most. But, again, I understand that you need to use some interventions and supplements to get to a point where, you know, you're able to get back to some, like, daily baseline that's high enough to, you know, do your job or, you know, take care of your family, etcetera, etcetera.
Abel James: So was your gait disturbed as well?
Tristan Scott: No. It's mostly vestibular and ocular that I had issues with. And I still think ocular,
have some issues because I've noticed and it's and again, serendipitous
with daylight. The number one thing that would activate my symptoms again would be staring at my phone for an extended period of time. Yeah. And I I didn't know what it was, and now I really think it's it's the the size of the screen and then the flicker of the LEDs. And flicker
on your phone is far worse than on a laptop monitor
or a TV or anything. And then, of course, the the smaller size is just, like, terrible for, you know, your eye health, your your retina.
And that's why, you know, myopia rates are just astronomically high compared to twenty years ago. So what's the problem with Flickr for people who aren't aware?
Yeah, so most people don't know that
every LED, unless it's some custom circuit,
is flickering.
It's flickering because the standard electronic control method for LEDs
is called pulse width modulation.
And it's just an advantage from an electronics control perspective
for signal modulation. But it's basically
changing an amplitude
or brightness or flickering
at a rate that you can't visually perceive, but your brain can tell that it's happening. So, like your iPhone, the last time I measured mine was like four eighty or 500 hertz. It could be 120
hertz.
It could be, you know, a kilohertz, which
it's just that's the number of changes per second. So, like, 500 hertz is means that's like changing an amplitude, like, 500
times per second.
And above 60 to 90 times per second, you can't visually see that anymore.
But it's a real stressor for your brain to basically compensate for that, and then it's also straining your eyes. And this is really undebatable.
You can even look up, like, IEEE
seventeen eighty nine, which is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, will just straight up tell you the side effects of LED flicker are eye strain,
migraines, headaches,
aggravating autism symptoms,
potential, you know, causing epileptic episodes and also inducing anxiety,
and potentially panic attacks. And this is known. This is not, like, debated at all. But for some reason, every single LED in the world pretty much flickers.
Fluorescent lights also flicker,
in some degree. And you think about that being a very unnatural
phenomenon because
sunlight
is continuous.
A candle or a fire, you know, we're talking about the only sources of light in our
natural world.
And
fire and candlelight flickers at maybe like the tiniest, the lowest frequency where it's it's absolutely no big deal. And
Abel James: that's the the reality of the world we live in. And that's something that people don't know about. But what do they know? They know when they stare at a screen all day, their eyes hurt, their head hurts, they just feel drained, and that's a big reason for that. I mean, when you take a step back, it's kind of insane that that's what we're all doing, like, all day. Or if you just wanna hop into the grocery store, it's also going to happen to you. No matter how clean you are with the rest of your life, like, this is just kind of built in. Okay. One of the ways that I think about it is if you go for a walk in the woods and you hear the birds singing, our nervous system kind of relaxes
into that. When you're staring into a screen, even if you don't perceive that flicker, it's doing the exact opposite. The level of stress that you're experiencing isn't something that you're usually cognizant of, but you might feel totally burnt out and empty by the end of the day.
Tristan Scott: Exactly. Your nervous system is just always on edge. And this is like one thing, right? So imagine you have like someone just like tapping your shoulder really fast and then add in radio frequencies, which are pinging, you know, cell towers, wifi networks, like every eight to fourteen seconds. So then like every ten seconds,
someone else is tapping your shoulder a bit harder. And then you add in all the other crap that is just
detrimental input to our biology, of course your nervous system is going to be completely dysfunctional. You're always going to be in this fight or flight,
sympathetic dominant state. And, you know, as a result of that, we have all these chronic fatigue, we have these oxidative stress issues.
Your body's always just like fighting something and it never has a chance. So like you're saying, you go out in nature
and what do you hear?
Nothing or very
natural sounds that are healing to the body or
just not activating something in a negative way. And I think in this modern world, we really take that for granted. It's just
like silence,
because we're just being bombarded with these unnatural input signals
from every direction. And it's the one thing I appreciate so much about, like, going hunting or going out in the mountains because I could just sit there and for the only time in my week, and even living in a small town in Wyoming,
there's still there's noise, there's, you know, EMFs, there's screens I'm looking at right now. It's better than a city, but only when I really go out into nature,
it's just the signal to noise ratio is actually restored. And that's an engineering term, but it's pretty, you know, self explanatory,
is that the noise we get from our environment
is really diluting
the correct signals that we're supposed to be receiving
from our environment, from nature, from the good things that we're putting into our body.
And that's just the only way I can explain it
and the more you reduce that noise on the line, the better
your body is going to function and your health will be. Because we're having a conversation right now, it's very clear, it can understand you, and there's no disruptive
inputs that would make me kind of misinterpret what you're saying or what you're asking. But if we were in a room or say there's like 30 more people on this call, it would be really hard to communicate and understand what's going on. And that's the environment we live in. We live in a room of just
noise
and that conversation that our body needs to have, that communication that our body needs to have is just not happening. And that leads to chaos and biological chaos
is inflammation.
Abel James: So that's where we're at. So let's talk a little bit more deeply about
EMFs.
How should people understand what's going on a little bit differently than they might now based upon the conversations on social media or kind of like the superficial conversations that are out there?
Tristan Scott: Yeah. And and it's hard for a starting point, in this conversation because you always just get some naysayers saying, you know, the sun is higher
EMFs than anything else from our technology or non ionizing radiation is not harmful. And that's true. But again, you need to have this understanding that
energy,
power, frequency,
wavelength, these are all different variables. Yeah,
the sunlight
has higher energy photons
than anything from our technology, anything from radio frequencies, anything from power frequencies.
That doesn't mean that it can't have an effect on our biology. And I can point people to plenty of studies, and if you want to look up the best one, Doctor. Henry Lai from the University of Washington
put together this collection,
and he still updates his Google Drive. He has over 2,500
studies
just coming from the late 90s to today. If you want to go back to the days of Robert O. Becker, Andrew Marino, and kind of the Cold War, there's hundreds and hundreds more. Alan Frey studying permeability of the blood brain barrier because of EMFs.
That's like not even included here.
And those studies say in this collection, like eighty to ninety percent of these studies are showing harmful biological effects. We're talking about radio frequencies, we're talking about power frequencies,
60 hertz coming out of the outlet, you know, 50 hertz for international folks.
And a lot of them are are just leading to oxidative stress or neuropsychiatric
issues or fertility, reproductive issues, cardiovascular
issues. And you see this trend, it's like, oh, the most energetically
important areas,
the most electromagnetic
areas of our body are being the ones affected. And that's not a coincidence.
So, you can point there. Or I can tell you maybe that
there's manufacturing
warning labels on our technology. Apple tells you to never hold your phone
on your body, never have it zero distance from your body. It says that in a warning label and they don't promote that, of course, and nobody ever talks about that. But when the manufacturer has a warning label,
then that's maybe a cause for concern. And if the energy of the photon
was really the only thing that matters,
How come when you go to a a cell tower, they have all these warning signs outside? If you ever been very close to a cell tower, it says, like, warning, you know, like high levels of radiation, like, you know, this can be dangerous, authorized personnel only. It's the same thing there. Well, that's because the power of the cell tower is extremely high. The power density of those electromagnetic
waves are extremely high. The energy of the photon
is the same as
your
cell signal coming from your phone pinging that because it's the same frequency.
But power does matter and distance does matter. Both those two examples tell you that the distance to your technology matters tremendously.
And that's because of inverse square law, meaning that if you put one x of distance away from the source of the EMF, you're you're squaring the magnitude of the reduction of the fields. That's why
you should never hold them on your body. Use speakerphone, you know, step away, don't sleep or work next to a Wi Fi router. That is like kind of the eightytwenty approach to this being
able to move the needle a lot with little to no effort. But really, I like to convince people
innately
that our body is electromagnetic
at the lowest level.
And why do
we know that? Why is that undebatable?
It's because
let's look at the things that we use to measure the activity
of our vital organs, the heart,
electrocardiogram,
the brain, electroencephalogram,
EEG.
If you get a tumor or orthopedic
injury,
Magnetic resonance imaging machine, which basically
puts your body in a very strong static magnetic field, pings it with a radio frequency after those
hydrogen ions are aligned and then receives an image back. So, this is all rooted in electromagnetism.
So, it might be true
that
the entire electromagnetic
spectrum, which is vast we're talking everything from that power coming at your outlet to x rays and gamma rays and light in between that All of that
would be affecting our biology
in some regard and thinking
what is the electromagnetic
spectrum that we are designed to take as an input signal? Again, talking a lot about inputs here, right?
And it's simple. As an engineer, if you want to align the outputs of a system,
which the outputs of our system is energy, vitality,
having that ability, that drive, the relationships,
everything.
The inputs need to be aligned. And the inputs we're designed to take
is the solar spectrum
without filtration or dilution or alteration,
which is everything from ultraviolet light to infrared
and far infrared. Anything that makes it to the surface of the earth from the sun is a natural electromagnetic
input. Once we start putting ourselves behind glass, once we start filtering it, putting sunglasses in between, we're altering it and that's becoming
a non native
solar spectrum input. And then we have
absolutely
nothing in the radio frequency
range, pretty much. There's a very, very, very tiny amount of radio frequencies that makes it to the surface of the Earth from space.
And I think one researcher said if you put one cell phone on the moon
and it was pulsing, it would exceed that. So pretty much nothing in terms of radio frequencies.
And then we have the Earth's natural
geomagnetic and electric fields, which are either static, meaning they're DC, they have no oscillation, no frequency
associated with them, or they're very low frequency and their resonances are very low frequency,
such as the Schumann's resonance, which a lot of people have heard about. And, coincidentally,
you know, the Schumann's resonance first harmonic is in the same range as our alpha brain waves at like 7.8 to eight hertz
and higher harmonics are in line with other states of our brainwaves.
And again, it's because a lot of our biology is operating in this low frequency
range. So
there's some cause for concern there and anyone who knows anything about
electrical engineering or signals or audio engineering knows that electromagnetic
interference
is a real thing. When you have two signals with similar frequency ranges,
they can interfere with each other and they can create constructive
interference, which means it'll amplify the signal if it's in phase or deconstructive, which means could potentially cancel each other out.
So if our biology is operating,
our brainwaves
are in this low frequency range of tens of hertz and then, you know, we have electrical power at 60 hertz and 50 hertz internationally,
You know, we're getting in a range where electromagnetic
interference
is a real issue. So you don't need
any sort of high energy photon
to disrupt.
And that's what I think is really going on and there's multiple levels here and how it's affecting our biology.
And
there's so many studies showing
like sometimes
a weaker
intensity field is actually causing a higher biological
effect.
And that might be the case, especially when it comes to magnetic fields, because the Earth's magnetic field, which is again,
static DC,
is very weak. And the
DC magnetic field we're getting from just using our phone is higher than that.
And there's a reason why
if you have a pacemaker
or some really
artificial input from a medical device perspective,
they tell you never hold technology six inches or closer to your body.
So, there's so many items and areas of this electromagnetic
spectrum
to unpack and there's ways it affects our biology differently.
But at a high level, that's how I lay it out. We are electromagnetic.
You can see that by the devices we're using to scan the health and the action
and the function of our biology.
There's warning labels. There's
clear negligence in FCC guidelines that haven't been updated since 1996
and people like RFK Jr. Have sued them and won in 2021 and 2022.
Manufacturing warning labels.
This
body of research,
that is showing
very weak,
intense fields,
can
impact our biology. And then it's like,
why would you not want to exceed caution for something? Again, logically, it makes sense. When I go to to the mountains of Wyoming, I take out my RF meter and the reading is zero.
There's nothing. There's nothing there. And then you take a reading in your house or in a city and it's just off the charts. So,
just start thinking critically about maybe what is supposed to be in our environment, what is not, and then the evidence that's supporting it. Because guess what?
It is really inconvenient that our technology is bad for us.
It's really inconvenient.
We're using technology right now. It's, you know, put us to a level of
human activity and accomplishment
that we could have never achieved without it. But now we need to start rolling it back and saying like, okay, how do we make this better
and how do we remove
these artificial inputs that are potentially damaging? And the thing is, we know so little about
what frequency may be less worse for us or maybe neutral.
And I can tell you right now, it's very context dependent and very complex.
And anyone who's selling you any EMF
product
is taking a best stab at it at best. So, I'm very skeptical of anything there. But I'm encouraged that if we, again, acknowledge there's a potential issue,
dive into the research, build and engineer solutions around that,
we can make tremendous amount of improvement in this being less invasive and less detrimental to our biology and our overall health. So long winded answer there, but it's it's a lot. It's complex, and it's important to lay out the nuance.
Abel James: Of course. Brilliant answer,
in my humble opinion. But so where does that
where does that leave us, though? Like, is there a eighty twenty that people could kinda practice for their their home environment or how they use phones and technology that will allow them to get rid of the most damaging stuff that we know is bad for us.
Tristan Scott: Absolutely. And that's the best part about this is actually you could probably reduce or mitigate, like, ninety, ninety five plus percent of your exposure by just how you interact with technology
and doing some very simple things. So again, going back to the principles I've mentioned earlier, some of them distance is your best friend. So never carry your phone on your body, especially on, like put it on airplane mode.
You could buy a Faraday pouch, but that's kind of a bear to entry. Just only carry it on your body or hold it in your hand if it's on airplane mode. And then if you do need to use it,
again, if you're at your home, you have Wi Fi on,
put it on airplane mode, only use the Wi Fi. If you have the Wi Fi and the cellular data on, you're pinging two separate networks at the same time and now everybody can just use Wi Fi for texting and calling. So there's really no need, like my phone's on airplane mode pretty much all the time and then when I need to use it, I flick on Wi Fi. That keeps Bluetooth off, it keeps the cellular signal and data off. That way I'm only pinging one network, I'm only getting one RF exposure and then I turn it off when I don't need it. Distance, yeah, for phone calls, like using headphones
is really important, using speakerphones
and the way you interact with all technologies. Don't have your laptop
on your lap. Maybe that is why Steve Jobs got prostate cancer. I don't know. But there's inherently
a big distance
component that's really important and that's, I think, doable for anyone if they're aware of it. And then the other thing is duration.
So, a lot of these research studies that are showing harmful biological effects
are scary. But the good news is a lot of them are showing it just after a chronic level of exposure in terms of duration. So there is no break, twenty four plus, thirty six, forty eight, seventy two hours of just constant irradiation
to some degree.
And the good part is our body is very resilient,
especially when we sleep properly
because we're able to go through cellular repair, autophagy, apoptosis,
and,
you know, melatonin is like the master antioxidant and, you know, composing our mitochondrial
function. So if we get good sleep, we can really
deal with a lot of toxins. The problem is the amount of toxins we're exposed to now is exceeding this threshold and the quality of sleep
is going down because,
you know, the blue light in the environment right before bed or even during sleep passively.
And then the EMFs that we're exposed to are just having on residually in our environment.
So, prioritize a sleep sanctuary, get your phone out of the bedroom or turn it off, turn on airplane mode,
unplug any appliances you don't need on in the bedroom. I don't even have power in my bedroom. I shut the circuit breaker off. That might be a little high, bear retention for some people, but again, I'm just there to sleep and then I wake up and get out of my bedroom. I don't hang out in my room.
And when you have two pronged appliances like a lamp or a TV plugged into the outlet, it's ungrounded,
you're emitting an electric field like six to eight feet outward for no reason. You're sleeping. You don't need that stuff. You're not using it. Same thing goes for Wi Fi. That's become pretty popular to turn your Wi Fi off at night. And it's great. Why? Because who needs wifi on when you're sleeping? You're not working, you're not doing anything, you don't need to be reachable 20365.
You can buy a $10 timer at Home Depot
and set it on a schedule. So, maybe you have roommates, maybe, you know, it's annoying, but
even four hours of a break could be a tremendous improvement. And if you live in an apartment complex and you have 42 Wi Fi networks near you, it's not ideal. But the one closest to you, which is going to be your own router,
makes the biggest impact because of distance, because of inverse square law. So, just using technology a bit smarter
and then just, you know, laying common sense out. The more devices that are around, the more signals they're going to be posting the network, the higher the RF exposure. The more population density, the more people you're around, the more devices there are.
And if you
max and take advantage of your weekends,
be a weekend warrior,
go somewhere healing, go somewhere where that signal to noise ratio is far higher. Out in nature, go camping,
just leave the noise and leave the EMFs behind.
And from a circadian rhythm perspective as well, maybe you don't have the ideal light environment, but
there's camping
studies from CU Boulder saying just two days of camping pretty much resets your circadian rhythm. You're getting
so much of that light exposure on the weekend and that can carry you through the week if you have like a standard nine to five. So, I think doing the best with what you can. And again, everything I just told you costs $0
maybe an outlet timer costs, like, $10.15 dollars. Like, there's nothing to sell here.
It's it's a less is more approach. If you think adding things is gonna be the defense,
you're not wise in that assessment, in my opinion. You're wise if you realize the more things you can remove,
the better your body will be at interpreting what it needs and then optimally functioning and healing on its own.
Abel James: So cool. Fantastic answer, Tristan. Thank you. We only have a couple minutes left, but I wanna make sure that we talk as well about the daylight tablet. And when you came through Austin with the daylight folks, I was really fortunate that you hooked me up with an early version of this tablet. So I've been using it for a few months now.
And, I can say I use it primarily for for reading, a little bit of writing, and then performance of music. So, basically, putting my sheet music on there using an app to display music, whether it's it's other folks songs for bands that I'm playing with or or some of my own. And,
that is a fundamental difference.
One of the things that happened in the world of music,
in the age of the iPad is we went from sheet music, sometimes with old school kinda incandescent or even red lights. If you were down in the pit playing as a musician a lot of times, it wouldn't be the LED lights, at least in the past. So we went from that, at least when I was growing up and playing music that way, to iPads just staring into it, you know, dark. So the brightness is, like, often turned up. You you feel the flicker intensely and you're supposed to be playing, like, a laid back relaxing song or something like that. So it's this internal struggle that I've had working with technology,
which, you know, you mentioned the promise of that, but also it comes with a physiological
cost.
And so transitioning from using an iPad or or a traditional tablet
to the daylight tablet in the past few months has fundamentally changed the way that I play music. In the sense that, if I'm sitting down and playing piano, I can look at this tablet and I can tell it's not directly damaging my eyes, my nervous system, or the rest of me. And that means that you can play better music. Your performance can improve. You don't get burned out as quickly. When I first started using it, I was playing generally for an hour or two. And after a couple of weeks of just using this tablet to play, I could play for three or four hours without really getting fatigued. So I thought that that was really interesting and there's a lot of promise for using technologies like these. But maybe you could just step up on your soapbox for a moment and talk about how these devices
are fundamentally different than the ones that most people are used to, whether it's tablets, phones, or computers.
Tristan Scott: Absolutely. And I'm I'm so excited to hear you say that. Honestly, my, like, clipped that up and use that as like a testimonial because it's amazing to see where this is coming from, like the music industry. It's not like a key target
audience or market for us, but it's everyone that's suffering from these screens,
from the detriments of modern technology in in different ways, in different environments. So I'm so happy to hear that. Definitely need to chat more. But,
you know, what we think about at Daylight is is again, I just talked on this podcast about why technology is bad for us. So, we talked about the flicker, we talked about the EMFs.
We didn't dive deep, but
blue light.
The screens are very high
in blue light and they're completely deficient in
infrared light and very low in red. And that is
artificial
because the solar spectrum is balanced. You never get blue light without red and infrared and the rest of the visible spectrum. You never get violet. You never get ultraviolet without the rest of the spectrum. And that's where all these research articles studying ultraviolet,
you know, causing skin cancer, etcetera, etcetera, they're all done in artificial environments in isolation.
So, when you're exposed to light, you want a broad source, you want the whole spectrum, You want all of the frequencies, all of the wavelengths, because they all hit different functions in our biology
and they all balance each other out in some capacity.
And the lower energy ones are more healing,
they're more restorative, they penetrate deeper, and the higher energy
wavelengths
are
more stimulating and they don't penetrate as deep and they can cause oxidative stress, but sometimes that's important to have reactive oxygen species signaling for a certain degree. And that's why
just taking antioxidant supplements doesn't work. That's another story. But what we did at data is how do we address this? How do we fix this problem? And it looks like the biggest
issue with most devices
is the screen. And that's the main interface
with technology and that's, you know, what we're glued to all day long. So at Daillet, we invented a new display technology. So founder Anjan, who you had on, explained this, I think, in-depth,
and he worked six years on it. And the reason was because he felt like a Kindle was
noninvasive
to his attention, to his thoughts, to his biology, and that's because a Kindle uses a reflective
screen that's monochrome
in color. It's grayscale.
And the reflective screen has a lot of benefits.
And the number one reason why I think the daylight computer is the healthiest
device that you could buy
is because it lets you go outside.
It lets you tap into
the real input signals that our biology needs to thrive, whereas modern technology is not designed to function
outside
in what I like to call the real world.
And we spend the average person now, like 90 ish percent of their time is indoors and most of that is why
because we talked about we don't farm anymore,
we work on computers.
That keeps us inside and if you bring your laptop outside, it overheats quickly. You can't see the screen because it's an emissive screen and it's competing with the sun in terms of brightness.
So, when you go from inside to outside, everyone like opens their eyes like, wow, it's so bright outside.
Yeah, it's actually on average a thousand to 10,000 times
brighter outside. It doesn't
perceive that way in terms of how drastic that difference is, but that is
why you can't see your laptop outside and it's why it's so like abrupt when you do that. And that's important because brightness is really just a measure of, like, photon density, and photon density
is really energy. So we're leaving, like, thousand fold of energy on the table from this electromagnetic
side of things
just on the table by being indoors all day. So we can bring that back. You can be grounded. You can be in a park. I mean, pretty much if it wasn't super windy, I was debating on doing this podcast outside in my park.
I'm going to go there right after because
we can work outside. You know, obviously rain and snow and cold, etcetera, makes it a little challenging. But if you can take advantage of the nice days outside,
that is huge. You know, circadian rhythm
is dependent on both light at night and then light during the day. So we address both because you can do
your work outside on the daylight computer with the reflective screen technology we have that, again, it's similar to a Kindle, but it's now fast enough. The refresh rate is fast enough to where you can use it for downloading any Android app on the Google Play Store. You can web browse. You can go on social media even, but you don't have those bright stimulating colors
that is gonna suck you in. So imagine if a Las Vegas casino,
instead of being a dungeon pit with all these bright flashing lights, no sunlight and the games,
you kept the games,
but all the colors were grayscale
and they just had these giant open windows letting in sunlight. Or maybe it was even
outside. What would happen? Nobody would be gambling. They would not make a lot of money because people would have the right input signals to not be sucked in and they wouldn't have these desensitized dopamine receptors
to being so compelled to keep pulling slots. So
that's what we've done. And then at nighttime, as I mentioned, the other kind of key core component to the circadian
input
is, you know, we're staring at this heavy blue lit screen that's also flickering.
At nighttime,
right before bed, when in nature when the sun goes down,
you know, the lux of like a full moon is less than one, and one lux is like a one foot candle.
So, that's brightness, measure brightness of like one candle. And your screen's hundreds of hundreds of times higher than that.
And then blue light, it's rich in and that just so happens to disrupt melatonin like three to four times more than red light. But any light at night is artificial.
So our backlight
is nice because it's flicker free because we got rid of the pulse width modulation
control
dimming and signaling.
And then it's also amber in tone, which is a % blue light free, but it has a more broad spectrum. So anyone who's a, you know, blue light free fanatic has blue light blockers or iris or f lux,
they know
if you go full red mode, which is the only way really to get rid of all the blue light, you literally can't see your screen. It's a terrible visual experience. And if you're wearing red blue light blockers, it's debatably dangerous to just walk around even,
especially if you have all the other lights off in your house.
So, our spectrum, again, it's more broad. There's no light in nature that's just red. Like,
doesn't exist. Candles and fire, they have a broader spectrum where they have, you know, maybe even a tiny bit of blue, but more green, more yellow, more orange, more red, and then most infrared.
Whereas our backlight, we have a little bit of green,
more yellow,
more orange and amber, and then some red. And that allows for us to visually see it better. It allows that power density to be spread across more wavelengths,
and that's because our photoreceptors are more sensitive to, like, green and yellow versus just red. So, we're trending towards
similar to a candle and in future generations we hope to incorporate actually some infrared light to make that even closer to a candle. And then on the EMF side of things,
we, you know, have this blank slate. It's like, yes, we acknowledge this is a problem. In the future, how do we attack this problem? The first version, nothing's been done on the hardware, but even on the hardware is not the only place you can have an advantage of mitigating EMFs. You can actually
implement software changes where say, okay, I have my daily computer next to me right now, I'm not using it.
It's going to automatically go into airplane mode in standby. Or you're just taking notes or you downloaded
your song for your
band, your music performance and it's just a PDF.
Do you need to be connected to the Internet?
Probably not. So it'll just automatically go in airplane mode and you won't have to manually be doing that. So there's a lot we can do there, but it starts with
attacking the reasons why
technology is detrimental
to us and
really just allowing us to knock those down one by one. It starts mainly with the screen technology,
but there's so much more. And, yeah, we're we're just getting started. So it's really exciting.
And we just have this opportunity to have devices that
restore their use as simply a tool that brings out the best in humanity, that augments our output
as a species
and removes
the detriments and addiction and stimulation.
Abel James: Nice. I know we both have to run-in a minute. I would love to keep talking to you. We'll have to have you back on, Tristan. But in the meantime, what is the best place for people to find your work as well as daylight?
Tristan Scott: Yeah. I appreciate you having me on, Abel. It's it's been a pleasure. And, yeah, there's there's not a ton of folks who are so well rounded, but there's more and more. And this is what's really exciting to me because I think the decentralized lifestyle, the sovereignty,
this spans all areas of our lives. And it's so fun for me to connect the dots. And I I think daylight is kind of like an intersection
of a lot of these. And and we have plans, you know. One of the other detriments of technology is the privacy
aspect of this, and, you know, that's something we value heavily also, and we wanna build into our core software operating system that we're working on. So you can check out Daylight Computer at our website, daylightcomputer.com.
We're gonna be probably back on sale when this comes out, I think, based on the timelines you said. And we're at DaylightCo
on Twitter and Instagram, so follow us there for updates.
My personal,
Instagram is at Tristan underscore Health, and then on Twitter, I am at Bitcoin
and underscore
Beef.
Abel James: So, yeah, appreciate you having me on, man. It's been a blast. Right on. Tristan, thank you so much for all the work you're doing in the world.
Tristan Scott: Appreciate you as well. Education
platform like this is the reason why we can spread the word, so equally as important.
Abel James: Hey. Abel here one more time. And if you believe in our mission to create a world where health is the norm, not sickness, here are a few things you can do to help keep this show coming your way. Click like, subscribe,
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