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Episode Description:

If you think light therapy is just about getting vitamin D from the sun or avoiding sunburn, this conversation will completely transform how you understand light as a fundamental nutrient your body desperately needs to function properly.

Today I'm talking with Brian Richards, founder and inventor of SaunaSpace, who discovered the power of light therapy over a decade ago when he was struggling with insomnia, acne, and low energy right out of college. What started as a personal health journey led him to uncover Dr. Kellogg's work, where he tested incandescent electric light baths on 50,000 patients and documented healing from almost every chronic illness imaginable.

Brian's approach is revolutionary because he's not just creating another red light device, he's recreating the full spectrum of healing light that our bodies are designed to receive from the sun, but without the harmful UV rays. We're diving deep into why we're literally beings of light, how over 70% of the photons we absorb from the sun are near infrared, and why this specific wavelength is crucial for mitochondrial function, melatonin production, and cellular repair.

From why LED lights are damaging our health to how structured water works in our bodies, Brian breaks down the science behind why light therapy can be life-changing for everything from seasonal depression to eyesight improvement.

In today's episode, we're talking about:

- How over 70% of the energy we absorb from the sun is near infrared light that directly feeds our mitochondria

- The difference between LED red light therapy and full-spectrum incandescent light

- How light exposure in the morning programs your entire day

- The revolutionary sauna technology that heats your body from the inside out using light instead of hot air

- EMF shielding and why it matters for creating the ultimate healing environment free from the constant stress of wireless signals

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 – Guest Introduction: Brian Richards, Sauna Space

00:51 – Brian’s Story: From Insomnia to Sauna Space

02:00 – The Science of Light Therapy

07:44 – Structured Water & Health

15:16 – Biohacking vs. Bioharmonizing

16:08 – Dangers of Blue Light

21:36 – Seasonal Affective Disorder & Light Solutions

27:00 – Sauna Science & Benefits

36:00 – EMF Shielding & Non-Toxic Living

Mentioned in this episode:

Toothpillow

Head over to www.toothpillow.com and use code 'WENDY' at checkout for a FREE virtual assessment!

  📍 Well, welcome back to the Toxin Freeish 📍 podcast. I have the most 📍 amazing guest today. His name is   📍 📍 Brian Richards and he is the founder and inventor of Sauna Space Red Light Bulbs.  And if you're on YouTube, you can see I've got my sauna space light going on right now. And if you've been following my light therapy.

Slight bath light healing journey over 📍 on Instagram. Then this is gonna be an episode that you don't wanna miss. 

📍 📍 Let's dive in.  

I binged a bunch of podcasts that you were on and you're so well spoken, so intelligent, and a wealth of knowledge. So I'm really excited. What got you into light? I mean, you've 📍 owned Sauna Space for a long time. You invented the bulbs years and years and years before this was cool, before light therapy, red light therapy, you know, infrared saunas was cool, but what made you get into that?

Oh, I, I was looking for a solution for my own issues. I had insomnia and acne on my back, and it's just kinda low energy. It's kind of lethargic and. I'm still young, but this was, I was very young. It was right outta college. And I talked to my mom. My mom's a general practitioner. She still practices in Missouri actually.

She's always been very natural. She was prescribing vitamins in the eighties in Montana where I grew up.

Oh

And interestingly, my dad is, now retired, but he's was a radiologist. So I actually saw two completely different approaches to health, growing up and I, I started to respect what my mom was doing much later, , once I grew up, you know, she was, it was cash only, and it was a more humble business, but she was achieving a lot more success.

I said, mom, what do you think I should do? She just said, oh pry, you're probably just toxic. You probably just need to detox and you should get a sauna. And in my research about sauna, which is amazing, you know, for so many, for really everything, I found Dr. Kellogg's work, so it's called, it's a book called Light Therapeutics.

And

And I was really blown away by this and the concept, and I didn't see. An wear electric light bath, and I'm a tinker type of person. I've always been kind of a tinkerer, so I built my own. Yeah. And I used it right before bed and I slept really well. And it was the first time in a while that I slept and I just woke up, just refreshed.

And so I, I feel like my insomnia was gone, like literally in one session. And that was intriguing because I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't working out taking supplements, you know, doing, doing, doing. I'm just being, just sitting in this light being and sweating passively. And so I continued to use it for six months.

All my other issues resolved, and I also realized I had some brain fog that went away that I wasn't even really aware of, you know, in the moment of it. I was just stunned by this experience. So that led me to start making my own. And slowly it shifted into I only did this, I used to do rental real estate and fix up houses and stuff, but I continued to shift into this and I was really called to do it.

And that was 12 years ago.

Oh my gosh. I can't even imagine being a newly graduated college student and being like. I'm just gonna create this thing and invent this thing and, and build this thing and, and you did it. I think it's phenomenal. It's interesting you used to do real estate. I just had Ben Salem on the podcast. He's the inventor of wave Block technology and he has a similar experience where he was like selling real estate but then just felt really called to invent and is also doing incredible things.

It's the call of the heart, sometimes it's really quiet and you have to really listen. We're really conditioned to make money and, you know, succeed with the mind. But all of us have that whispering of the heart, and when you follow that, that's you start doing something you love and you cease to call it work.

It just becomes, it can be very challenging. And I definitely have some gray hairs, from during this journey, but. Yeah, it's really important to find, what gets you excited. And this was really exciting for me, like rental real estate. You're a landlord and you're trying to collect rent and all that, and it just, it couldn't be okay sometimes, but sometimes it could be very, emotionally challenging and I didn't, like, I'm not, I'm just kind of a nice guy.

I didn't, wasn't suited to that. Then with Sauna Space, I was making these and people would pay up front and call back. Like one of the first most amazing stories was only a few months into probably the first like 10 or 20 of them that I made. This woman called me just crying, just like bawling with but with joy.

And she told me the story about how she developed fibromyalgia and she lost her job and she was really stressed out and her family was stressed out. And using, uh, the sauna I made for her for three months, cleared her up so much that she got her job back and she got her life back and she was, and I was like, whoa, this made me cry too.

And, and that was kind of the moment where I like dropped my tools, you know, and where I was still doing the real estate and I was like, no. And I sold the houses that I had and, and got out of it and just went full in.

I love that story. So I, I, unbeknownst to me, I've had Asana Space Saana for like seven, eight years.

Wow.

Your sister is my chiropractor and my friend, and she was like, it was in her chiropractic office. So I would go in and get adjusted and then you would like pay a fee and then you would go into this on a,

you would have your session and eventually we were just like, we should just get our own, because you know, we can use it every day and all the time. But I have to tell you, over the last seven, eight years that I've had it, I've used it and I've enjoyed it. I don't think I had any idea what I actually had.

I, I know I didn't have any idea what I actually had. I didn't understand how powerful it was. I didn't use it as much as I should have, and I didn't understand the difference between your lights and, every other sauna out there, or even other red lights, saunas that are out there. So can we, I wanna talk about the actual idea of light as therapy and light as. Our overall health because what most people believe light is, is this big ball of,, fire in the sky and it helps us create vitamin D or it burns our skin, right? I really honestly believe that most people, that is the extent of what they think the sun is, stay out of it. It's not safe, it's full of uv.

It damages your skin. I do see that moving away. People in the holistic space are definitely talking more about sunshine and circadian rhythm, but in a very clinical, scientific way. I love the way you talk about life as light. Like light as life, right? Like that we are beings of light. Can we talk about how light and red, light and sunlight really impacts who we even are as humans?

Yeah, the, the sun, like setting aside everything that's ever been said, just go outside and see how you feel in the sun. It always feels good,, as long as you're maybe not getting too much. It's always nourishing. And that goes for every plant and every animal on earth. Almost all of them. The sun nourishes all life on earth.

And we humans are like plants. We eat light just like plants do. It's different wavelengths. So plants use, you know, the uv, we use a , lower frequency band called near infrared. And it turns out when we're out in the sun, over 70% of the photons we absorb. Are near infrared. So like almost all the energy as we're out there is in this special band of life called Near Infrared.

It's infrared, so you can't see it with your eyes, but your body sees it and your cells see it and they know it. And so there's a couple like really basic things that I like to mention. You can get the majority of your energy needs from the sun, like the majority if you get a lot of sunlight every day.

You'll notice that you're not as hungry. And that's because the sun through photobiomodulation, through light therapy, literally energizes the cells. It gives cells energy. And so, in the winter, you know, you get less sun, you eat more dense, hearty foods, more nutrient dense foods. But in the summer you can eat lighter if you're getting a lot of sun.

So the sun is essential for just, basic energy. And if we look more in like wellness. Wellness seems to be kind of going more and more towards one of the fundamental parameters of health being energy production. How are we, , taking in energy and how are we utilizing it? And is that process optimal?

And the mitochondria is at the center of that, so it's a little powerhouse in our cells. And it, it's in every cell of the body except red blood cells, so everywhere. And it's nourished more than anything. More than by sugar. It's nourished by light. It has light resor enzyme that absorbs near infrared and red light, but near infrared, penetrates a lot deeper in the body than red.

So if we want to nourish our brain and our brain, we have to use near infrared light and the deep organs of the body. I mean, it's all about near infrared, so that's just like energy, but also the sun. The, the near infrared light stimulates melatonin, which some people think is like the sleep, the sleep hormone, but it's actually an antioxidant as well.

So it's like a number one thing that's preventing the cells from getting to oxidated. So it's too like stressed out and it's near infrared light in the cells that produces 94% of the body's melatonin. And people used to think it was mostly coming from the pineal gland and blue light that you get during the day.

And there is some there, and that's blood-based melatonin. But cellular melatonin comes from the near and for life in the sun. So the sun is refilling our antioxidant reserves of all of our cells every day. And then I think one more thing that's really important to note, and this has to do with us being beings of light.

It, it's not a metaphor, it's it's very literal as well. the near infrared life in the sun repolarizes, our cell membrane potentials and our mitochondrial membrane potentials. And basically, everything in our body runs at the very small level. At the micro level. It runs on light and electricity.

It's not so much chemical. It's electromagnetic, so it's, it's light and electricity based and the sun. Basically the near infrared light in repolarization, these electric, these electrical potential systems in our bodies, slows down the aging process, gives us more energy, and it makes everything that happens at the cellular level be more efficient, which includes, water.

Just as we're of light, we're also beings of water. And water is, structured by the sun. So water is put into a more bioavailable state called the fourth state of water, also called structured water, where it just works better. It works better. As for nutrient delivery, for as a communication, system, it's like everything works better.

And so all the water in the mitochondria is all structured and, and if you look more and more at the body, like the heart itself is a water structuring device. So it's a v vortexes the blood and restructures it, but there's this fundamental layer, this fundamental stimulus we're supposed to get every day, and that's the sun.

And so it's, it's just coming in and like correcting and harmonizing everything

Also deep down the rabbit hole of structured water. I'm dying to know what, I have one of those machines that like swirls and like the water, the

yeah. Yeah. It's cool.

so I, that's good that I'm doing

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So two ways to structure water and one is with light. Near infrared. Light is one of the best 'cause it goes deepest into the body. You're structuring water that's inside your body. But yes, ancestrally, all the water we consumed in nature was also structured. And the other way to structure water is by vortexing it.

So when the water goes through under the ground, through the springs and goes through waterfalls and rivers, it gets mixed up. Structured water is when the, the charges are aligned instead of like randomly distributed. 'cause water is a polarized molecule and so that you can vortex it in the little myu thing.

You, you can also use crystals, and you can also speak into water. , There's the Maru Ma, Moto, I think his name is the, the studies he did where you speak love. Speak loving things into water and you freeze it and the crystalline structure's very beautiful. And then the opposite occurs if you say mean things to water.

So it, we can structure water in different ways and basically all the water we consume, even the water we bathe in, ideally would be structured. So there are devices that you put into your plumbing system that basically run water through crystal marbles. And it structures it to where it comes out of this faucet structure.

We're recreating what exists in, in, in terms of water and nature. And this is way beyond just taking the chemicals out, which is also important to make the water clean and non-toxic. But then it needs to also be like, from a physics perspective, it needs to be put in a natural state.

Yeah, I, I love that you said that we're just trying to mimic nature. 'cause I talk a lot about 'cause, so I have used red light therapy in the LED perspective, like a high quality LED device. In a very clinical way, like on my thyroid, because I have hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's, and so I clinically have been using LED in very targeted ways.

But I always have said to people for years, all of these biohacking devices, I mean. All of them. I can't think of one single one that wouldn't fall into this category is us as humans, as modern humans living in a modern society indoors, where we're not outside in the sun and we're not sleeping on the ground by, you know, an open fire flame.

We're trying to recreate that environment to fit our modern

Mm-hmm.

Be, you know, most people aren't gonna go live outdoors and go back to hunting and gathering and avoid, our in, in indoor synthetic environment. That's something that's just not realistic for most people.

Yeah. So what do you do? You know, it's, I think you can, I don't like the word biohackers so much anymore. I like a, I like to call it bio harmonizing. So we wanna make the indoor environment mimic the outdoor environment as much as possible. And, we just talked about water and then.

Light, light becomes so important. And nowadays all the indoor lighting is usually LED or fluorescent. So lots of, toxic blue light, like matrix light. And it's, it's very stressful light that our bodies are not designed to get very much of. In nature. We get it from the sun, we get a little bit of blue light, but we get a lot more near infrared that.

Does all those healing, balancing things that really counteracts the, the effects of ultraviolet and blue light. But, with like red light therapy and light therapy in general, you can actually have the best of both worlds with what we do. So you can get, a mitochondrial stimulation, which is what you're doing with red light and ear infrared light.

And you can get it in a natural way with the spectrum that mimics the sun spectrum with what we do with our firelight bulb, it's basically mimicking the sun, but there's no blue or ultraviolet. But the nature and the, the feeling of the light is very matching. That original light. It's optimal light. And that be, that's because it's the full spectrum that stimulates your mitochondria.

And it's also the heating wavelengths as well, which also exists in the sun. And we're designed to get all this stuff. It's like if you went to your friend's house, and to listen to them play piano and you got there and you sat down and then they started playing one note and there's the whole rest of this octave.

And you're sitting there and you're like, is there more, like, I feel like there should be more Your, your cells are saying the same thing. There should be more light and light in it's. Natural form where you get the full octa, you get all of the notes is with incandescent broad spectrum light where LED light is one note.

It's one frequency, it's one wavelength and, and like a high power level. So they both produce a mitochondrial response. But the feeling of LEDs, like you said, is very clinical feeling, and you just use 'em for a little bit of time. Whereas the firelight, whether it's in our saunas or in our, in our portable glow lights, it, it, it feels like a, a campfire,

it does. And for those of you watching on YouTube right now, I have like this red glow going on because I have. Light sitting here. I wanna talk about how this full spectrum light can cancel out. The blue light that's happening indoors, because I, that's something, is a change that I have made recently where I really don't have any overhead light on, but I live with other people who don't appreciate that.

So, they will flip on these overhead lights and one day I will replace all of them. But for right now what I do is I have. This glow light in a room with me and I keep it on and I kind of like put it up so that it takes the glow and like the whole room glows and maybe it's all in my head, but I one, number one, I'm really sensitive to light in general.

I get headaches, I get migraines. I can spot flicker a mile away. Not with my eyes, but like my body. I'm just very in tune to how my body feels. I'm very sensitive to EMF in general, and I feel so much better. Like right now I have a horrible blue LED light on my face only because we're doing this interview, but somehow having this red, spectrum light on me, it just feels different.

So if you have the, the glow or the, or the hearth next to you, you can measure with a spectrometer. And we, we show this like on our Instagram, maybe a little bit back, away, but you can measure the blue light that comes from LEDs. And you get a, from an LED you have a spike of blue. It's very pronounced.

And when you bring in the firelight spectrum, you can measure how it completely cancels it out. The spike, Dr. You know, disappears and there's like almost no measurable blue light. And there's also no flickering either. So it LEDs. Like our screens and stuff, they flicker, because of the alternating current.

So it's pulsing light that also we don't have in nature. Almost none, you know, it's all di direct current constant light. So, so that's another thing it does. It cancels out the blue light and the flickering light, and. I think it's the photons of near infrared just completely overwhelm and drown out the, the blue, so you can't measure it.

And since you can validate that with the spectrometer, , it's the same thing with your body. Your body's not really sensing the blue and it's not sensing the flicker as far as the flicker goes. The constant non flickering firelight is filling in the  gaps between those pulses. So it's just, again, it's, it's kind of.

Tricking or convincing our bodies that the light is constant, what we're getting, basically what that means is, it, it really helps with screen fatigue and technology fatigue and it's not just in front of your screen. It's, anywhere you're indoors, in the living room, if you do have to have those overhead lights on, if you're watching tv.

Just have the fire light on it really like, makes it less stressful on the body, which, you know, blue light, especially after dark, is very disruptive to our, our systems.

I wanna talk about that for a second. 'cause I have teenagers. Who have phones, right? Like most teenagers do. And I have really tried to implement, like once the sun goes down, we have like no technology on. But when you have kids that are doing homework late into the night, that's just not always. A thing that you get that you can implement.

And so I have read there, I mean, we have a lot of studies, but even most recently we have studies showing that even the slightest bit of blue light exposure after the sun goes down, the way that it hurts, not just your sleep, but brain development and kids as they're growing up, like having blue artificial light in our life after the sun goes down is seriously damaging to our overall health.

And it's something that's just so normal. In society, and I don't think people realize how truly impactful it is to our overall health.

It, it's, it's very poisonous actually to the body. 'cause it's ancestrally. We're, we don't have any experience with that. And when you get it, it tricks your body to stay awake. , And it's also stressful. It puts your body into a stressful nervous state called sympathetic dominance. So what that results in is like for men and for boys.

If you get a lot of blue light really late. You can wake up the next day and your testosterone level will be like 50% of what it's supposed to be, which you can recover from very quickly. But if you do that every day constantly, and especially for young men and adolescents that are, going through puberty, that actually affects your, your, your physical development over time and definitely your brain.

Not just your body, but your, your brain. It weakens. It weakens you, basically, and it, it, it makes you more, not to mention the, the other aspects of being on a phone, with the apps, the, the dopamine like training that's going on, all that is very destructive. So first thing you can do is try to not have overhead lights, try to have desk lamps that are lower and they're shaded, so you don't have like the direct light.

And then you can use also incandescent bulbs instead of LEDs if you can at home. They're still available. You can still get 'em online everywhere. And you can also use red l if you have to use LED, you can use red LED, where at least you're not getting any blue. So there's ways to mitigate it.

And also they have the like night shift on the phone. I use that all day long, actually. I never turn that off. And at night there you can put, in your settings, you could turn on a, a red color filter and you can make it really dark and red when it's like very little light and it's very dark at night, so you can still kind of get away with using your phone a little bit and you're just lowering your amount of blue light.

But it's, it's very toxic. We're, we're taught so much in wellness about food. There's so much focus on food, but our, our relationship to light, our light diet is. Just as important, maybe more.

flip that for a second and then I wanna move into saunas. But first, one of the reasons why I started really diving into your lights is because I originally lived in San Diego. I grew up in Arizona. I have always lived in very bright, warm. We don't have seasons. There's like one season, you know, a year.

And where I live now in Northern Virginia in the winter. I really struggle. This is gonna be my fifth winter now in Virginia, and I have yet to find something that significantly helps me not feel like, I mean, I, I get seasonal affect disorder, like I just really struggle when it's dark and when it's cold.

And I've tried all the happy lights that are all LED by the way. I've tried all the things and this year I was like, adamant I was gonna find something that was really gonna help me. And so unfortunately, when you wake up and it's dark for multiple hours, what do you do? You flick on all the lights in your house and that's what does that do to our bodies when it's dark outside?

The sun hasn't risen yet, and then we like turn on all of this artificial light indoors.

Ancestrally, you woke up and saw the sunrise. The sun is mostly red and ear infrared. That's why it looks that way. You know, it looks reddish and you're not so much getting much ultraviolet in blue. So when you start the day with a mostly near infrared red light source, it programs your.

Your hormones and really just calibrates your, your body, your physiology for the day. If instead, you wake up and look at your phone, or even if you're like, oh, I'm not gonna look at my phone, but you go to the bathroom and you flick on the LED lights above you, the first light you get is blue. Uh, that puts you into, it puts your brain right into like a beta brainwave state.

Let's get stuff done state. And it, messes with your hormonal response basically throughout the day. So it, it messes with your energy levels and your body's, ability to respond to stress and so many other things. It's just like the shock in the morning that hasn't a detrimental effect of weakening you in all ways, like mentally, physically, emotionally, like for the rest of the day.

So. What's cool is if you're in a place where you can't get access to sunlight and you just, it's all LEDs everywhere. You can take our little glow light and just for two minutes and you shine that in your face and you'll mimic the sunrise and your body thinks like it's getting what it's supposed to.

And then you can go into your, into your LED day and, and it's a lot better. But yeah, it's , very important. Just like after dark, no blue light. When we start out in the morning, the first thing should be near infrared light.

My whole household now just gets ready in the kitchen. I. Take this glow light and I sat, I set it in the middle of our kitchen and I turn it on and that we all just get ready. Because , my kids are getting ready for school before the sun even comes up. We're leaving as

Yeah.

rising. I've been spending a lot of time outside on my way back, like watching the sunrise, going out on my paddleboard and. The biggest difference that I've noticed other than like energy, like I, my mental state is better. I'm more of a positive person throughout the day. I'm not ra rattled as much, which is something that, I have a very stressful life. I do, I try, I'm doing a lot of things all the time, as we all are.

We all are very much in this, you call it the Matrix, but like we're all in this really busy matrix of a life and I have noticed that just that single change in my life, I have more stability. My emotions and in my mental state, I'm more positive, but I've also noticed my eyesight is getting better.

Oh wow. Yeah, so that's another thing I should mention. When you get near infrared and red light first it, it galvanizes the cells against ultraviolet and blue light, so it protects them. So if you get near infrared light in the morning, you're more protected from sunburn, but you're generally, you're more protect your cells have this like protection.

That they're primed with against ultraviolet and blue light and ultraviolet and blue light can damage the eyes, , and wear them out over time because it's very high energy light. We're only supposed to get so much of it. But that's, I I love that you brought that up. There's actually some very pretty recent research showing that getting near infrared light in the morning prevents worsening of the eyesight and improves eyesight and.

We have a ton of customers who talk about that, how their eyesight improves, how they don't need reading glasses as much. I I have a, I remember one customer who like would, use the sauna frequently and when she would travel for and leave the sauna home for six weeks, she would need to use her reading glasses slowly but surely.

And then when she would get back and start using the sauna again, her need to use her reason, glasses went away. And I can also attest to that my vision has a halved in strength. So it's, I am, , a little bit near style still, but I, my contact strength and my glasses strength went down by one half, , in the last few years.

And definitely a big part of it is the light.

And I like couldn't read like a vitamin bottle or something. And I was like, oh my gosh. They say when you turn 40, I didn't realize it was gonna be actually on the day. But those studies that you're talking about, they tried to duplicate and mimic those studies using LED in the afternoon and it

Uhhuh. That's a good point. Yeah. There's something very interesting about needing it in the morning. You're correct. There's a, I, since we're talking about proving eyesight, this is a little fascinating for me 'cause it was, personally. Something that I've been working on.

There's some other things you can do too. So the eyes, the optics build up heavy metals, and so you, you can take binders like TRS we sell TRS. There's other ones. It's a zeolite supplement. Then there's like plenty of them out there. But, you can spray it in your mouth, but you can also spray it.

Actually on your eyes. Anyway, that's what I've done. And so I've, I've been, working really heavily on getting the heavy metals out in ways that are complimentary to the sauna, of course, which we'll talk about. It's like the best way to get out heavy metals, but the, the metals that you detox with sauna, with heat, it's really helpful to have a binder to bind them, which, activated charcoal is good, and t and zeolite is good.

But another thing you can do is take pearl powder to like, help your body replace minerals. , So you can consume pearl powder. This is an ancient Asian, wisdom and some people take pearl powder and mix it with castor oil and smear it around their eyes before they go to bed. And it's all about like just taking these cells and nourishing 'em as much as possible and cleansing them of of poison.

I have heard the castor oil thing. I have a lot of people that do that, and then they have like these crazy eyelashes because. It's also really for growing your eyelashes.

Yeah. And then another thing that's even more interest, maybe not more interesting, but also interesting is as you detox the body really thoroughly and you use all these things, relationship with lights, sauna, and, and like, watching what you eat. Many people find that their eyes get lighter over time.

As the eyes detox, as the whole body detox, the eyes also detox and the eyes become, , the whites of the eyes become brighter, but the actual eye color can become clearer and lighter. It's actually happened to me too.

Fascinating. So let's talk about sauna. I'm a big fan of natural detox pathways and sauna is one of the things that I always tell people is well researched safe. It's very ancestral. We have all of these studies from the north, right? Like all of these really healthy cultures where sauna is like a part of their.

Culture. And I think the last study that I saw that I have kind of shared around was talking about people whose sauna multiple times a week live a lot longer. So I wanna talk about the difference between a typical like heat, steam, sauna versus your sauna, which uses your firelight light bulb.

Yeah. So in those studies you referred to, you can look up, , one of the best review studies is Dr. Rhonda Patrick's sauna use as a, a lifestyle practice to extend health span. I think it's something like that. And so. In a review of all of the, these longevity studies where they're looking at people using sauna in Finland, usually for like 20 years, 30 years, thousands of people.

There are three outcomes that are required to validate a sauna session, and one is to raise core temperature, three degrees Fahrenheit. And the second is to sweat out like a pound of water, half kilo. At least. And the third is to reach a subjective state of exhaustion.

So that's, of course more subjective, but the first two are very measurable and easy to achieve. And so what they noted in that study is that it doesn't matter what the heat source is, all that matters is the physiological outcome in the body. So yes, you can do it with finished sauna. You can also do it by wearing these like sauna suits.

They actually used to have these in the sixties. You could buy like a sauna suit. It's like this foil goofy looking bag. But there's some interesting like cardiovascular outcomes using, sauna suits. So all that to say that what matters is not how hot the sauna is or, or what the he source is, but what is the response in the body.

So with that context. Finished saunas and far infrared saunas, which are most infrared saunas out there. They heat up the air and then the air heats you up from the outside in, and that's why you have to preheat 'em. You want the air to be really hot and toasty, so you preheat it for a while, and then you get in and you wait, 45 minutes or an hour, and you get that sweat response.

Your core temperature increases. All good w with sauna space. The heat source is radiant light, so it's very different. And this is kind of confusing for some people because they think, oh, red light comes from LEDs and there's no heat and saunas are using the air to heat you. So sauna space, it's not, it's confusing.

You know what, what is going on here? Well, it's, it's heating you just the way the sun does. If you get out in the sun, you feel like that warmth inside of you, and it's because there's. Near infrared light. That's most of the firelight experience, most of the sun's experience that goes into your body, and some of it hits your mitochondria and is absorbed and creates a light therapy effect.

And then some of it is absorbed by the water inside your body and it heats up the water. So it's called radiant heating. So we're, we're using light to heat the body, not really the air. So with Sauna Space saunas, you don't preheat it. You just get inside, you're naked. And the light immediately heats your core.

Those outcomes of raising core temperature and sweating are achieved a lot faster. Like really fast with the, our regular, our classic sauna, it's like 30 minutes or so with our newer super sauna, which has more bulbs. The sessions are only like 12 to 15 minutes. No preheating. So it's extremely efficient, extremely fast, and it's in, it's also interesting and maybe confusing for people 'cause it doesn't require the air to be really hot.

The air's not like 180 degrees. It's warm, it's comfortable inside. It'll get up to 120, 130 degrees, but you'll really sweat. You have this really strong sweat response and that's the difference. We're using light, particularly near infrared light, to heat the body and. Traditional saunas, infrared saunas use air to heat the body.

Well, and I always feel like I'm doing double duty when I'm in there. 'cause not only me am I sweating, I'm getting all the red light therapy too. I'm , getting all, all the. I'm like, I'm doing all the things at one time. I am curious since this, this, you know, these bulbs are your baby and you probably you do, know more than anyone.

When I very first started using it, it actually took me a really long time to start sweating and now I get in and it's fast. I mean, is that like a body detox mechanism where my body is now more efficient? Sweating and detoxing, whereas maybe before I was just so overloaded that it was just taking my body a long

Yeah, I mean, yes. The short answer is, is yes, the when the body is toxic. It has a lot of poison inside of it. Things are sluggish, the blood flow is sluggish, the cellular detoxification is slow. Lymphatic drainage is all clogged up. The gut is leaky, everything is all out of whack. And so that's a very common experience where people start using our sauna and it takes a while to like get it, get sweating and initially, and it, it may even be disappointing in the beginning and that's okay.

It's. The body's homeostasis has to shift and get used to this, especially if you haven't really done sauna before. Your body's like, whoa, what do I do with all this energy and all this light? And it, those systems slowly reoptimize and slowly rekindle. And you'll see that yes, over time you'll sweat faster and you'll sweat more freely.

And also you'll be more resilient to the heat. So you, it, it tempers you and you become. You basically become heat tempered over time. So you, some people find that they sweat more quickly, but then it takes 'em longer to raise their core body temperature with the heat. And that's actually a good thing that, that, that is, sort of a thermal flexibility that your body develops.

But yeah, that's very common that it can take a while in the beginning there's people who have like Hashimoto's or other things like that where their resting body temperature really low. Like really low. I, I've met people who are like from 95, 96 degrees and the, they're, the enzymes in our proteins in our body are very sensitive to temperature levels and just a little bit like up or down has a huge, difference.

So yeah, it all starts to, to clean as the, as. It's not just shifting the homeostasis, it's also getting. The toxins and the poison and the heavy metals out of the fascia, out of the fat in our body, out of the organs, in our body. And then the liver works better. And the, the lymph, the spleen, the lymphatic system, everything starts to like unclog and, and go faster.

And then you can actually benefit more from the light back to that energy utilization. Your body can utilize this really powerful energy more efficiently. Yeah.

I definitely crave it. Now, I wake up in the morning and I, I crave the red light. I crave the sauna, like physically, I'm sure mentally and emotionally as well. Because your body knows what's good for you and when something's good for you, you obviously want more of it. But, I notice the days that I skip or the days that I, I'm like, oh crap, I wake up late and like someone flicks on a bunch of LEDs and, or I don't zana that day, or, whatever it is.

I definitely notice a difference as somebody who pays attention and also as somebody who had

Hmm.

and has healed it. That all just kind of makes sense in my head now, but the other thing I've noticed is I'm not as sensitive to the sun. I used to like squint and like the sun. I was very sensitive to the sun and I'm not anymore.

I don't wear sunglasses ever. And the sun doesn't bother me even on really bright days.

Yeah. And that, that goes back to that, that protective effect that it gets. So yeah, these are all the basic things. People notice your cognitive function will be better. For me, it's very obvious if I, live here in Florida, so you know, I get lots of sunlight in the morning, most of the time. But I can tell even if I go to the beach for two hours and get lots of sun.

But if I come back and use the sauna after that, I can tell the improvement that I have in like focus and like recall and, and just clarity of the mind. And so it is, we look, we live in a super toxic world. Our ancestors already used sauna and they weren't in a toxic world. And now we're in this world.

We're indoors all this blue light. We're not using sauna very much. And we just are getting, we're getting overwhelmed.

products are all

Yeah. The all disease is a function of disharmony in, in the body and, and the poisons, really quickly overwhelm us. So the sauna is not just to like warm you up and, and make you feel a little better.

It's really essential to keep you. Clean and clear in a world where you can't avoid all this exposure that we have. And the foods not as nutrient dense as it used to be. And yeah. And we're all, even me, I have some of the lights up here so that I'm lit up, you know, I've got the blue light, the spotlights right.

When it's your job,

But, but yeah, we can, our, our body can recover really quickly and it's fundamental. , Its fundamental nutrient is light more than food.

Yeah. So before we kind of wrap things up, I do wanna touch on EMF because one of the things I love about your products, your sauna, your bulbs, is your EMF shielding technology. Also, the fact that. Your sauna, it's all, everything that you make is like organic materials.

But the EMF shielding, , is something that I think is really important to talk about.

It's another part of our toxic world. It's most of the EMF we have nowadays is, is microwave cell phone and, wifi and Bluetooth. Ya, there's a lot of that. The, the most, the biggest amount of wattage is cell phones, which are everywhere. And it doesn't matter if you don't have, if you have a cell phone on you or not, that makes it worse.

But if you can answer a cell phone in your home, that's because the tower signal is beaming like all the way into your home. And now with the new wifis are also like really maxed out. So all of this stresses your body out your body. Doesn't have any biological ancestral experience with it. It interprets it as a stress, but it's almost like confusing because your body can't see where's the stress coming from, and humans are not supposed to be in a state of constant stress.

In, in the in, in the ancestral environment. We only had intermittent stress, whether it was environmental or it was like a big lion that was chasing us or whatever. It would, there would always be a time where it would go away and then you would relax. EMFs are stress on our body 24 hours a day, and there absolutely is a biological connection because of the, that, what I mentioned before, that were electrical beings.

We have like voltage gates for example, that let things in and out of the cells and the blood brain barriers of voltage has a, a voltage gate that, so it's open and closed with electricity, with electric fields. And the cell phone signal is an electric field in the air so that when it hits your body, it basically causes, a lot of oxidative stress.

It causes calcium to flood into your cells. And your cells are like, what should I, what should, what do I do with all this? And you get too many super oxides that are produced and it all results in DNA damage, just like x-rays do. It's just kind of a little bit slower. And so when we look at the research, we see that.

The number one or, or , the primary associations in the scientific literature between having a cell phone here and disease are, guess what? Brain cancer and throat cancer and,, and so it's a problem. It's just gotten worse and worse and worse, right? There's like billions and billions of times, a hundred billion or more times more EMF than there was a hundred years ago.

And I didn't realize this in the beginning, but as I worked through the years and I met Brian Hoyer of Shielded Healing and kind of raised my awareness on the EMF shielding, the concept, I was like, whoa, this is not something that should be in the sauna experience. This needs to be designed out. So we use EMF shielding technology in every aspect of the, of our light panels and also in our sauna.

The light panels are fully electrically and magnetically shielded, so we're not bringing any EMFs into this situation from Sauna Space anyway. But then with the sauna, it's like, well, what can we do to protect the person from the EMFs that are already in their home? And we first came out with a grounding mat, which is cool.

That gives you also grounding earthing effects, which. Basically infuses your body with electrons and relaxes your nervous system and recalibrates you. And it's amazing. But it also acts as this barrier that protects you from the electric fields, from electricity, which is another source of, of EMS. So after we designed the grounding mat, which is, a standard in all of our saunas now.

We developed, various generations. Now it's like the third or fourth generation of our, our silver lining. And the silver lining is basically a layer that goes all the way around the sauna. It's in the curtain too, so, and it's made of 35% silver and organic cotton. So it's a really cool product we developed.

The original ones were not that way. It was, I was just using some third party fabric, but that's another thing that we kind of figured out how to do on our own. We got it tested for 5G. It tests really well. And it's also grounded just like, the grounding mat. So it creates what's called a Faraday cage.

So it's this box that blocks, it protects you from all the wifi and Bluetooth and cell phone, as long as you don't bring any transmitters inside. So if you wanna listen to some music or some healing frequencies, , you gotta turn your phone on full airplane mode. So Bluetooth and wifi have to be totally crossed out and off.

And you get inside and you're in this environment that your body really craves. It's very quiet to your senses. It's very relaxing. It's an optional upgrade, but it's this really awesome, upgrade because it creates this maximally parasympathetic environment. There's no track lighting, there's no blue light.

It's very quiet in there sound wise. And then. Your cells are like, wow, I know I'm getting that stress that I'm normally getting 24 hours a day. And it's really wonderful. And what's really interesting also in terms of sauna use is that, and this was understood actually for about 25 years or 20 years, is that sauna, sauna reverses the oxidative stress effects of EMF exposure, the production, what's called proxy nitrite.

That's what damages your DNA. So sauna increases terah hid terin, and it basically reverses that, that damage. So when you're getting in the sauna, you're getting also an EMF detox. And when you can do that in a protected sauna where everything's shielded like what we do, it's just , you're creating a therapy that's a lot more layers than just light therapy and sauna therapy.

It's grounding therapy, it's sensory deprivation. , And the body goes into like this maximum healing mode, and it all happens really fast. So the design of it is portable and lightweight and it just plugs in and, and with the time commitment of only 15 or 30 minutes, a few times a week. I, I've, I use it more than that.

I use it like almost every day. But

I

you know, like you, especially, there's not a lot of sun, you know, it's cold, it's amazing every day, but it's a very. A minimal time commitment to get so much benefit.

Yeah.

That's it's really a game changer.

Yeah. I, I fully agree. I'm, I can't believe I'm even saying this, but I'm like kind of looking forward to it being a little dark and cold just so I can like. Enjoy my warm lights all over. And I also had the thought that, you have a hearth, right? Where you have the sauna lights, but it's not like in an actual sauna.

And there's a lot of people that have,, fireplaces and fire ancest, ancestrally is good for us, but a fireplace in the house where you're, you know, all the chemicals that you're inhaling, the gas fireplaces. And I'm like, I'm just gonna put that like hearth. Those lights like on a wall in my house, and that's gonna be my fireplace.

Yeah, we, a lot of people do that. Now. You, it's the heart is, you can put it on our pedestal or you could put it on on something else, and you have it in the living room and it's a fireplace without the smoke, it's, and it's more therapeutic, it has. It's more bright and more near infrared and like, yeah, I have one of those in my bedroom.

And, and lots of people now, they, you have in the living room, so you get home and instead of turning on the tv, you turn on the, the hearth and, and then everybody just like snuggles up next to that. And there's, you know, it's, it helps people relax and, and, and it naturally helps. You want it, it's conducive to connection.

So when you're in front of that, people just open up like flowers and they want to talk to each other instead of like zoning out, brain drain TV stuff. So yeah, it's very popular to, and you can do that on a smaller scale with the glow, which is what most people do, but the heart that it really is cool.

It doesn't creates a fireplace that's modern. Smoke-free. Yeah, I didn't think about gas fireplaces, but yeah, you, you, if your ventilation is not

a completely clean, non-toxic. Fireplace option that is a hundred percent

Mm-hmm.

I mean, that's amazing. Start installing them in everyone's house. I love this. I'm so grateful you came on. I'd love to have you back. I am really excited at the thought of coming back on the podcast like next spring after I've had like a whole winter where I have the support.

Of this amazing full spectrum light and sunlight, and seeing like how that makes a difference in myself throughout the winter. And I wish I could articulate better. You know, people really want like, well, what does it do for you? The black and the white. What did it solve? What did it cure?

What did it do? And I have such a hard time explaining to people that something as simple as having this glow light on all morning and then at night without LEDs and saing every day. I just feel like a different person. I feel happier. I feel clearer. I feel less need to be stimulated by things.

I used to go out and paddleboard and listen to podcasts. Now I do it in silence, which I would've told you before was like. Really uncomfortable to be in silence, and now I crave it. Now I want more silence, which is something that I is like against what, what I've been and what my nature has been most of my life.

And so I, for me, it feels very life changing. But I know that that's not, it's not a black and white thing, but hopefully. People will hear this interview. They will give, start with the glow light. Start with the single bulb. I, start there. See how it improves your life, your day, your cognitive function, the way that your body operates, your hormones, your sleep.

Just use that in the morning before the sun comes up. 'cause I know I have, there's a lot of nurses, there's a lot of people who work the night shift. There's a lot of people who are exposed to that blue light and there's not a lot they can do about it. And the glow light is like one thing that they can do to improve

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, everybody wants to know like, is this gonna take care of my. X, Y, z and yeah, the answer is yeah, but, but I would say high level, if you were trying to describe what it does to everyone, it, it helps you remember and, and reminds you how to be more of yourself so you can be more authentically yourself.

And the light just helps you like, remember what you've forgotten. You know that like when I hear you like able to go and paddleboard and not have to listen, you know, not have to have a, a mind stimulus, that's where you've dropped down a little bit out of your mind and into your heart and you're, you've somehow approached a more authentic version of yourself where you're just more okay, you're happy to just be.

And when you have lots of, poison inside you and toxins inside you, they're things that don't belong. They're foreign things. So 📍 it's hard to be your highest and best self when you have all this stuff that's not you inside of you. , For everybody, yeah, it's like, it's not just about treating something or healing something, it's about being in your highest, most vibrant expression.

And it's hard to describe, but it's. It's what we all crave. It's what we all want. And then you, you become a light and you're, you shine your light and, that uplifts everybody around you.

Well, thanks for coming on, Brian. I appreciate it. Will you come back in the spring? Maybe? We'll see how I did for the

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Enjoy using it. I really appreciate you having me today. Thank you, Wendy.