TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #496: The World’s First Blue Light Free Computer with Anjan Katta & Tristan Scott

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Marty sits down with Anjan Katta and Tristan Scott to discuss the Daylight computer. Anjan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnjanKatta Tristan Scott: https://twitter.com/bitcoinand_beef Daylight: https://daylightcomputer.com/ 0:00 - Intro 5:05 - Light and temperature 16:31 - Honesty 21:57 - Wisdom 25:56 - Creating Daylight 32:12 - Gradually, Then Suddenly 32:52 - Hardware has more impact than software 41:44 - Don’t start a hardware company 47:02 - Getting the screen made 59:10 - Fiat culture 1:06:42 - How Daylight succeeds 1:17:41 - Amusing Ourselves To Death Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Gentlemen, it's been fun having you in the office for the last hour. big fan of paul miller okay yes big fan of paul miller yeah yeah i'm as well i think we could have sat out there for probably another a couple hours we came to the right spot to to show off

the daylight there's a bunch of tech nerds in here yeah that are always playing with this stuff yeah it's just funny too that earlier today we're talking about zap right and the zap right people are right here so this is a this is a cool corner catty corner to where we are at the bitcoin commons We had the Austin University, University of Austin, which is all the Silicon Valley tech guys trying to create a new university. Where are you at, Alden? San Francisco.

San Francisco. Where the company's based. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging. I'm taking one for the team. I'm going to Costa Rica after this, and I feel like... What part?

All over. Nosara, Evita, Santa Teresa. Yeah. I'm partial to Jaco myself. Really? How do you spell that? uh j-a-c-o j-a-c-o okay i might go there flyer hermosa is a great great wave that's that's actually how i judge success for daylight like where i can i work from costa rica and i can be

successful why why is costa rica the barometer i just want a place that has great sun a free government good soil good food animals i love animals water magnetism like you put all those factors together it's hard to beat yucatan peninsular mexico el salvador costa rica and maybe a couple other places yeah that's what uh getting down to jaco surfing hermosa yeah some of my favorite memories are like coming out of the water after like a long session and then they just have dudes chopping coconuts and like pouring them into plastic bags which you probably shouldn't drink out of but anyway you're parched after like an hour and uh you just got cold coconut water waiting for you it's easy to be like just feeling good all the time when you're

when you're in a place like that it's like naturally outside more and yeah that's uh i think the key to a successful life i try to sleep outside when i'm there oh mosquitoes don't eat you alive no no the uh my uncle had a spot that he sold that was in uh in hawk but you were his back porch you'd like go out there like 9pm and all the stars

would be out and you'd just sit there stargazing after a day of surfing inevitably fall asleep and then wake up outside to the sun

at like 5am oh man amazing daylight it's important hey get outside how long have you

been on this journey producing when you were just showing us I started this summer 2018 in some ways feels like

I started this in 2012 when i started having seasonal affective disorder but um the actual like put my full time into it was mid 2018 and then the company officially founded on april fools 2019 so five years hell yeah what's the seasonal defective order seasonal affective disorder stands for sad it's when you get really sad in the winter months basically there's a certain group of people that get very depressed in the winter months and uh just due to how dependent my physiology is on the sun yeah i'm not sure if it's like infrared it's not the angle of the light the amount of light

like it's still surprisingly complex but i get very very depressed in the winters and so that's that's where like going to costa rica or mexico or something like that like i went to el salvador within two days out of the depression really two days and were you in san francisco at the time when you yeah la san francisco they all just don't they're not close enough to the equator they don't have the quality of the sun yeah so on so yeah i experienced this i got uh somewhat hoodwinked into going to college in chicago uh-huh went with my dad on a business trip in the middle of july oh yeah cubs game through there during one of the beautiful 100 days of summer i was like i love this see i'll go to college here and then uh freshman year showed

up in the sun that appears the clouds for 90 straight days i was like what the fuck am i seasonal depression uh is real you're just inside you know i mean that's part of the the big reason behind it i think is well for for anjan he's you know you're in canada yeah so that's quite quite a different environment than where your ancestors grew up right so complete opposite and then we're just inherently spending no time outside when it's just miserable and cold and under all the artificial toxins inside. So I think there's a lot of gains to be had. This winter in Wyoming, and Wyoming gets cold,

I did my best to try and, like, embrace the local seasonal environment, and I've never felt better. Wild, man. Cold plunged every day in the river, slowly turned the temperature in my house down one degree every day, and by mid-January, it was like 48, 50 degrees in my house. What? Wild, man. And I felt amazing.

because the thing about this we live all year round at one temperature and we're so disconnected from our local environment and yeah we're inside so that's the hard part about winter is like we're not getting enough energy from the sun and then you couple that with indoor lighting and just indoor living which is even less energy and you know less connection to nature you're gonna get depressed you're gonna you know and then we're eating foods and you know having temperatures that are completely misaligned. So I went full carnivore as well and felt amazing. Yeah.

I was just thinking about it. I spend a lot of my time in this office, in this small office. I was about to say, dude, come on, man. I know. Fluorescent lates and stuff. We try with this in the corner here. But it's hard. There's not that many good solutions, really, actually.

And it's something, you know, Ange and I talk a lot about. It's like we need to bring better and healthier, more sovereign alternatives across the board. And, you know, the lighting space, the screen space, the tech space, massive gap still. Yeah, and that's why I'm really fascinated about what you're building at Daylight because when you think about screens in front of our faces all day, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Obviously, we had TVs for quite a while, but in terms of smartphone era, it's only, what, 16 years old now at this point. I mean, LED is new too.

So that blue light that you get is also a new phenomenon. Any light. I mean, think of just light. Like the light bulb is, what, 1890s? We're talking like 130, 40 years in human evolution. That's nothing. And we've drastically changed our environment so much in the past 150 years.

And then the past 25 years, 10 years with smartphones and technology really becoming the thing we spend the most time on. I mean, it's a completely different world. And our biology is not adapting that fast, nor should it maybe. No, it literally can't. We have biology that's been slowly developed over the course of millennia. But it does. I mean, look at my pinky.

That ain't straight. That's from holding my phone. Is it? Yeah. Most of us, our pinkies are slightly. Myopia. Near-sightedness has become now probably the most prevalent health issue in the world. In one generation, China went from 15% to 90% myopia.

One generation. 90. 9-0. 15% to 90% or 50%? 15% to 90%. Korea as well. Because we're just one foot away. 2D.

On screens all day. Screens. Because they have to read. You know, we have 26 letters in the alphabet. I hope I didn't get that wrong. They have like thousands. so they got to start studying way more at a much younger age and they're doing it on screens and so it just uh fucks up and they're not getting time outdoors which you need to change your focal

distance and stuff so so how'd you go from realizing that you needed to control your physical environment to focusing on a physical tablet to to saw like how did you go from yeah my exposure to sunlight is affecting right my well-being too i want to build a product that focuses on light exposure well i needed like four or five things that all kind of triangulated into into one spot because uh i tend to doubt myself a lot so it's like i need i need like multiple things to finally hit me over the head and be like okay i need to do this so i think one of them was exactly that i was just like i need to spend way more time outside or i'm going to be depressed and I just got frustrated like I can't print everything out and I feel bad for doing so

too and you're wasting it and so I was just looking for my life depends on a computer email and writing things and reading things and doing all this type of stuff how do I use a computer outside so I try to like shelter myself or stay in the shade or do all sorts of things I would just sit there and you know my iPad would die after two hours I go charge it again and die after an hour and charge it again i try all sorts of stuff the one thing that like really worked is my kindle after college i spent two years backpacking i was disillusioned with silicon valley i went to school in the valley and i was like wow this place does not give a fuck about people it says it does i want to change the world i want to connect the world i want to help people

it's like no dude that's the shit you wrote in your admissions essay to get into yale and it's like your friends know you don't give a fuck about any of that shit it's that same energy what like how so how would you describe the i mean there's a facade of let's help the world what's behind that facade yeah and it's not a facade in the sense like people are evil like they're actually like nice reasonable people it's that like it's that like mckinsey consultant energy right where it's like they didn't like have the they didn't have the self worth or agency to actually do something they still wanted to please mom and dad and they still wanted to be successful and high status so they do this like safe thing right and so it's socially

safe to be like i'm here to have impact i'm here to change the world join my boring ass startup because i'm helping people right like it's it's this hope for receiving something from the other and it's not um it's not bottom up like if you didn't get people to join your company if didn't get investors to rationalize investing in you if you didn't get the regard of other people they wouldn't do it and that to me is the problem it's not actually inherently flawed because it is the flaw is it's done instrumentally it's said to get something and to me like the real way you can have positive impact is when it's a side effect of you just doing what's most real for you because then it's ego less or less attached or yeah there's like a formula that can lead you to

making the world a better place which is actually like maybe i get rich from this thing oh i need to get into stanford i'm gonna go volunteer in namibia and give people popsicles that's why you should accept me to your university in med school it's that energy yeah you're still helping people but like come on like do you really even care well i don't i don't want to be cynical but to me it's sad because there's so many brilliant people who could be doing so much better stuff and we're being like channeled into these socially wasteful ways of being so and they say you don't want to be cynical but i think we're at an inflection point where there's so much needed like cynicism in the sense of like just being up front with people like this is not like we were

talking about ai right like look what like google's gemini like all the ai engineers were baking in uh bias into their models and to like even the prompting you set a prompt we're finding out that the llm just has like all these queries are like all right i need to fix the prompt here here and here and give you this response that has nothing to do with the actual prompt you gave me we injected a bunch of this bias which is not um not truthful at the end of the day and are you really helping the world if somebody's looking for a particular answer and you're injecting your bias into it yeah yeah i feel like the real truth is saying you're biased rather than pretending you're an oracle and let somebody choose who they want to listen to don't say hey i'm the truthful one

listen to me just say i'm biased he's biased he's biased she's biased you pick yeah i'm gonna be honest about what i care about yeah no that's like what this platform is is like particularly on the bitcoin focus is like i'm gonna be up front with you uh i think bitcoin is gonna be the next reserve currency of the world if i hold bitcoin that means i'll get insanely wealthy if if that happens um i do think it is the best money that's ever been created like i'm not i'm gonna be up front with that yeah it is this is my bias i think the money's fucked i think bitcoin fixes it um i am trying to sell you on this but i'm telling you my bias i went to stanford because i was like fuck finance people like tech people care now i'm like dude i love

new york finance people because they tell you transparently about their self-interest and tech people are like no i'm not doing this out of self-interest i want to help people i'm like dude just tell me you want to get rich like at least we can you know i think that's a northeast thing as well that's what i love like marty and i get along we grew up almost in the same area and it's just honesty it's brutally honest and it's like proof of work you know obviously there's a lot of flaws with how the northeast is run but i don't know some of that west coast energy is just a bit it's a bit the dutch are very honest i guess yeah that's what i learned i'm from philly and went to college in the Midwest

and then moved to New York. But that's like one thing I noticed. The Midwest people don't get sarcasm, number one. But number two, like blunt, like telling people like what you think bluntly is not received well in other parts of the country. Where like Philly, I came from like a blue collar family. Both my grandfathers were union workers

and had big Irish Catholic families and a lot of successful uncles who went to wall street and it was part of like them just being blunt and all that um it's weird when i again going back to like i think a degree of cynicism in terms of like world where the world's going particularly from a tech perspective like funneling us into this digital panopticon is necessary because if we keep going down this road without fixing the problems at the base layer of these technologies and the ethos that drives a lot of them were fucked. I've got two young kids, and I do not want them to live in the digital panopticon

that censors their speech, tries to censor their money, and tells them what to think and what they can do throughout the economy. And then it's on the devices that are simultaneously just robbing their frontal lobes of dopamine and shaping them in a way that's setting them up for being so easily manipulated so it's almost and you could debate whether it's by design or just evolutionary how the technology came to be but it's a damn you know effective you know dual strategy from both the hardware and software perspective and the i guess the social aspects the psychological social aspects of using some of these social media products yeah i'm gonna be up front my name

is marty bett and i'm addicted to social media attacks my dopamine uh receptors very well and as somebody like i'm thinking about my own life's journey that's why it's really interesting too i mean i'm 32. i got the first iphone when i was 16 or 17. so for half my life i've been connected to these smartphone devices and they've only gotten more addicting over time which is now i have two young kids and trying to be cognizant of being a father and not being attached to my phone is something that's top of mind at all times that's why i like working with this guy because it's almost like hi i'm ungin i'm like you like i still suck i still use my phone too much like i still eat at night time i got a little more

here than i need to have but it's like the way to think about daylight is hopefully ungin looks like tristan feels like tristan eats like tristan a couple years from now that is the promise of daylight and this is why you buy a daylight well that's like because that's the thing these technologies are like double-edged swords they're incredibly powerful and make you incredibly productive as an individual but then there's a completely uh addictive unproductive side of it and i guess that's the question is are we in this period of time where we're learning how to play with this double-edged sword and create experiences that trend towards being as productive as possible there's a beautiful quote by eo wilson he says um

what characterizes the modern man is we have paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and god-like technology and that's the key double-edged sword is if you want the power of gods which is what technology is you need the wisdom of gods and that virtue ethics that wisdom that what you learn from elders from grandparents from parents from you know whether it be church or your community or whatever it may be that's just so lacking in the modern world and so whether you're young or you're a parent or that it's just we don't necessarily have the wisdom to handle the power of these things and like we like to say um like the simplest example of wisdom is as a kid you want to eat all your halloween candy night you get it and your mom's like don't do it

you're like fuck you mom i'm gonna do it the next day you feel like shit and then that tummy ache that's wisdom you're like okay too much of a good thing can be a bad thing i'll wait next time i'll eat a little bit less right and um i think wisdom is like getting a massage right where it's like you do it and dude it is misery i don't know if you ever got a good time massage but that stuff hurts i'm not oh brutal but the next day you feel so good yeah And it's like the wisdom trajectory starting out with tummy aches and going to Thai massages where you go from just indulging in what feels good in the moment and you feel bad afterwards to restraining in the moment so you can have a better, more sustainable long-term life. And I think that's hopefully what we can be doing is not necessarily just what we invent or contribute, but start creating and catalyzing a movement to enable there to be more wise technology, for there to be more wisdom in handling technology, for more technology to be in the Thai massage category, around the tummy ache category. Yeah.

Like we're trying to build Thai massage technology. I like that. I like that analogy. no and when you put it that way too it's like we are the generation that whether we like it or not i think this has been forced on us to develop the wisdom to understand how to harness and use this stuff it's so quick who who has a chance to learn by the time you're on to the next thing you're on to the next thing this has never existed before is like is never this amount of change that quickly that deeply has access to our attention to our children

at all times it has never existed before so um i think it's like almost a collective humility which is like i need to slow down and handle this power and it feels like little boy energy is like give me more power i'm fine i'm fine i'm fine right until you die right or things blow up catastrophically and so i feel almost like it's um it's a growing up moment in every area of her life it's like instead of buying the 15 h m thing they'll fall apart like buy the natural fibers cotton linen thing that's like durable sustainable and feels good right like we're just applying that same philosophy to technology and so whether we start with a tablet or we make a phone or we do this or do that i think what we always want to define ourselves by is not being a computer company

but trying to bring this like growing up to technology however that looks and what does look a certain way with the daylight tablet the ms like what is it made up like what in your mind is like the optimal stack for providing the market with this incredible power but doesn't let them fall into the other side of the double-edged sword of addictive abuse of these technologies and i'll try to answer your previous question about like how i even got going with this the basic idea is i was just super cynical about technology because i went to looking valley i thought it was about innovation and impacting the world and it wasn't uh that's what i deeply wanted to do i come from a family of doctors and something built into my dna to want

to like help people and that's a place where i got pleasure and it wasn't that and so i was like fucking technology man it promises you the world and doesn't deliver on the bill of goods i had really bad eye strain i'm super adhd so i'm always getting distracted i feel like shit to use a computer i'm like i'm gonna write this essay and then three hours later espn i've learned how manny pacquiao creates so much power with his left hook like what am i doing right i feel like because somebody's like oh you're gonna get that to me tomorrow i'm like yeah and then i'm like it's like 2am and i still haven't just that was my life and the seasonal affective disorder you know just i lived in fear of every winter it was horrible i would get really depressed

and so i was like i wanted to do a fuck you to technology uh i wanted to get revenge because it hurt me my self-esteem my actual physical health i needed something that would actually allow me to be a little bit healthier because it was it was really grim at times and um i don't know i became fascinated with trying to understand like how humans work and um here's this concept called evolutionary mismatch which is the way humans are designed and the way our modern environments are are mismatched and so the impulse to want to eat sugar is actually not a problem because in an ancestral environment there was so little sugar you wanted it to be like if you saw some honey you went after it because it's really high dense calories it's

our modern environment has artificially over concentrated sugars and made them way too available and so what used to be a feature is now a bug and so the basic idea is you can look at a computer from top to bottom and you can all the problems or a significant portion of them can be categorized as evolutionary mismatch your fingers hurt because your hands were never meant to be like this doing that you're always like this right um it's easy to get distracted because those red dots that's danger that's a berry that you need to look at and they're utilizing the color red in a way to manipulate your attention little dings and dongs that's also specifically sound engineered to take advantage of what's an orienting response for danger or stuff like that

the fact that um the light the light is not natural light the fact that it's unbalanced blue light the fact that leads to circadian problems sleep problems metabolic health problems dopamine problems and even more is because that's not how we were evolved there was no random blue light at 9 p.m blasting you in the face right and that's an evolutionary mismatch because no one when they built computers knew human physiology mental health evolutionary history all those things and so the questions behind daylight bringing all these threads together is if you were to create a computer today from scratch and you prioritized it not fucking up an adhd person it not being so distracting it not being so addicting

it not screwing up my physical health by forcing me to be indoors if i could use it in the sun if i could get rid of the blue light if i could get rid of the flicker what would that type of a computer look like um and that is basically even now still the motivating question if we were to redo a computer with our principles and be willing to compromise so it's not some high you know highfalutin idea but something that would actually solve a problem something that would be useful to me what would it be and at the time i was just reading so much i read all these white papers i still have an annotated copy of my original bitcoin paper that i printed out that's been like it's been like two weeks going deep on it i like googled

every little thing yeah so um um yeah it was just like i wanted something that could help me investigate and learn deeply and to me a tablet is just a fat piece of paper it's a it's a it's a digital printout and so that was the first product i pursued it turns out it's actually the right way to build a new computer company because essentially everything else in computing is a permutation of a tablet a phone is a small tablet with a radio in it a laptop is a tablet with a keyboard attached a monitor is a bigger tablet you know you can kind of go down the list and so it turns out it's so hard to do this if you get the sequence wrong because every aspect of it is just insanely complex no one has any idea how complex it is and the proof of that is

there's basically very few new computer companies like oculus was the last new computer company you could argue and so the hope is make a healthier distraction free sovereign computer that's immediately useful that you can use instead of your ipad you can improve your health spend more time outside eliminate blue light get rid of eye strain and flicker and things like that hopefully it actually makes you more productive hopefully it upgrades your consumption hopefully your kids don't get autistic or adhd or all the the impacts from that and from there we can make a phone with this we can make a laptop we can just go down the list of personal computing and do it with our value set and hey you may not agree with

your value set and like that's totally okay like our product is probably not right for my mom because my mom's number one computing value is can i play candy crush as a black and white display sorry mom it's gonna be hard to play candy crush right so it's that's okay that it's not the computer for her but it's the computer for my dad because he reads all the time and you know the blue light affects him and so quick break here freaks this rip is brought to you by gradually than suddenly a framework for understanding Bitcoin is money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the forward to the book. I'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero to one primer. If you're looking for a logical explanation of why Bitcoin obsoletes all other money,

buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends. Go to the safe house.com slash gradually. That's the safe house.com safe spelled S A I F the safe house.com slash gradually use the promo code tftc for five dollars off at checkout buy it now freaks the price of bitcoin is going up you need to understand it this is the best zero to one primer back to the show when it comes to the psychological effects of these products and particularly when you're designing daylight how much of it is the physical aspects like the screen the lack of blue light the lack of the flicker versus the actual operating system like how much of the design of these operating systems lead to the distractions and the tendency to fall prey to your adhd right it's a good question the short

answer it's both the longer answer is it is surprising how much of the problem you can solve if you do zero on software and just do the changes on hardware so like we have we're we're still building it up but we have two modes for the tablet for the operating system you have kale mode and cocaine mode so kale mode is totally locked down it's only you can read on it you can write on it you can type on it you can you can take notes you know you can listen to podcasts audiobooks music that's like basically it cocaine mode you can do whatever you want it's got a browser you can download any app you want and so when i use our thing in cocaine mode um i'm surprised by how little like twitter i consume on it i'm like surprised by how little like youtube

i consume on it even if i have unfettered access to all of it there's something about removing the flicker uh making it paper like a reflective where it doesn't feel like a computer um if you spend more time on it i think that might be one of the most interesting subjective aspects is it feels more like a piece of paper or a book or looking at a dinner menu it just doesn't feel like you're looking at a screen and something about that just like your brain is put into a new relationship with the stuff um the black and white uh you put that in the lack of blue light and there's like some interesting science around like the blue light is putting you in a particular low dopamine state and then you're craving it so it's like the software is supplying what the hardware is trying

i like take a take from you and um yeah i wonder if there's like this also like i mean it's becoming uh really in your face now literally with uh apple's new vision pro um but like it does the blue light in the screens that have become normalized over the last 15 years like is there something subconsciously where we think we're like observing another world that is somewhat addicting because it's like completely foreign and the fact that a daylight screen looks like a piece of paper or something in the physical world does something subconsciously where since it's like i don't know if i'm describing this right but like since it's like in our physical world it's not as doesn't pull you in well i think the further we deviate from

nature it's like the more stressful that environment is for us and the repercussions of that over a long period of time is just damage whether it's eye damage you know where that's you know mental health issues from neurological damage like psychological issues because if you're in this constant state of stress your body is not going to be able to handle that over a long period of time and it's really that simple i mean all we're trying to do is better emulate the natural world having a light spectrum that is more you know similar to sunlight or having technology that brings you outside you know that's you know something andre mentioned multiple times but that might be the most important aspect of our of our company of our products is that you can get the

benefits of being outdoors far easier while still being productive and that's to me one of the biggest detriments is that we live indoors and you know then you're more susceptible to like seasonal affective disorder you're more susceptible to all these things because the main energy source the main environment that our biology is tuned to has been stripped away and replaced with these you know artificial items that are completely different like the pulse nature of light i mean that's sending your brain and your eyes in a frenzy and you can't even see it visibly but it's there you know hundreds of thousands of times per second these leds are switching on and off that doesn't exist in nature that doesn't exist and we have no response other than that other

than high stress to that sort of environment so and you wonder why people are just walking around on edge all the time and then like i said we're just fed into the social media aspect and then it's like oh like you know we're so primed to be held captive by those types of uh applications It's funny you mention getting outside to use these devices. I think of in the summer I go to the beach in the Jersey Shore. My room has a deck out back, and it's facing northeast, so I can't work outside until it's like 10 a.m. because the sun rises in the east.

And then if I try to work out there with my laptop, the glare is so bad. And even if I put my laptop facing east, it's just not worth it. So something as simple as that, like being able to get outside a couple hours earlier. and actually work on the back deck, which is much more preferable to the kitchen. And I think what's cool about these is principles are transcendental.

Like even what Tristan's talking about, like the light on your MacBook, the light here, they're all fake. It's an illusion. They look like they're constant light, like what you get from the sun, but they are literally switching on and off like 200,000 times per second, more or less.

Because the way they change the brightness is they change what's the percentage of time it's on and off and so you this is crazy people don't realize this if you shoot it in slow motion you would see that be like on for like two milliseconds and then off for one millisecond and on for two milliseconds and off for that and then the illusion because it's happening so fast is it looks like it's at 60 brightness and then if it was on for three seconds and then off for 0.1 second and on for three seconds and off for 0.1 it looks like it's at 99% brightness and that's literally how they change brightness by changing the illusion i had no idea that's how it's crazy nobody knows this and so when we say flicker free

our thing is a light is a light is a light it's just a light it's just constant now that's considered an old technology because every led is slightly different you know and if you do it the flicker style when you go to 10 brightness on one tablet and then another it'll be the exact same with ours 10 one is going to be slightly brighter than on another because every led is slightly different it's like what the truth was like like real organic produce they're all kind of different it's only the you know the like factory farm gmo stuff where everything's the same and so we're bringing that same principle here is like that's an illusion there's this convenience and this sameness and this like i guess it works and it makes the engineer's life

easy it makes the supply chain easy it's an illusion it's not real that light is not real and so how do you reset a computer you gotta start to what's most real like if you're going to decentralize things you need to centralize around transcendental truths whether that's devotion whether it's light is light or even color when you're looking on your ipad or iphone and it is purple it's not actually purple it's a little red it's yet a little green and a little blue in such a proportion and because those little red and green and blue are so small when you look at it from distance which is what you're doing it looks like a purple dot there is no purple at all and so color at the deepest level when it comes to computers it's a fucking illusion

that's pretty crazy i didn't realize that either holy shit so when you see purple in nature it's actually purple sure you have rods and cones and there's some principles that are similar but the fact that these you get these peaks that are different and so um yeah when you think you're looking at something you're actually looking at a green peak that's like this and a red peak like that and it then your brain interprets that as okay it's yellow so it really is all fake yeah and so in a way even if black and white seems like a reduction to me going back to something real even if it's smaller is better than having everything but it's all fake so and so our thing that's this it's real when you're looking at it it's real so how hard is it building a hardware

company oh don't do it i mean that's one of the the most tried and true truisms of the modern days like you like you said don't do it you get highly advised not to get into hardware oh yeah i mean just like start stacking up the great filters like hardware company already super hard make that like a consumer hardware company even harder then do it in a category that has the world's biggest companies is competition microsoft amazon apple google like even harder create your own custom componentry like even somebody like oculus they just use off-the-shelf parts they use cell phone displays they use lenses that were used for other stuff we actually invented our own display technology that could have been a startup in itself we didn't

need to build the software and the computer around it even harder the last time there's been a new display company was in 2008 pixel chi and they went bankrupt right so you start stacking all of this up and you just end up with like zero minuscule odds you look at some of these other hardware companies that got funded often they had a rich dad or the person had a track record or they funded it themselves whether that's framework or remarkable tablet or skydio or something like that it was my first big you know first real company so how to get this far i don't know man all those odds stack yeah i mean yeah so what was like the process like what was like the first physical piece of hardware that you yeah and build on top of the truth is i think we made it

because um we got really lucky like super lucky i could just rant for 10 minutes about all the insane coincidences that had to happen i i'm very interested to hear okay i can bring up a couple of them i think i have a high pain tolerance so i think it helps that i didn't give up um and i think um i think just starting from principles like i wasn't chasing a trend i wasn't trying to do something that's this so there's something about if you can stick it out long enough like print and you're right about this is the the principles that others also care about i think it starts to cohere like other people want you to succeed it starts like other people want to help like

i think the reason we got investment is because um folks were like i think i'm going to lose every dollar i put into but uh this is the computer i want for my kids so if nothing else i'm paying a hundred thousand dollars to get my two kids a computer that won't kill them and so it was stuff like that along the way that uh made a huge difference yeah what's because i imagine we're building this from scratch new components the supply chain is not as robust but 2018 until 2021 to make the first working prototype yeah oh just uh horrendous one of those uh primordial dings i got what's going on i know i feel like it's such a contradiction i'm like distraction free technology i have two phones in my pockets and i don't know my sperm count might be low these

days yeah but all that like what's like how is it uh on the supply chain supply chain side of oh i mean that was one of the hardest parts of this is like um if you want to make if you want to make a new display you go to these guys they first say get out of here and you you try long enough and they say okay we could do it but your minimum order quantity i.e the minimum number of screens they'll make is 500 000 units and you're like okay two hundred dollars times 500 000 units where the hell are we gonna get that much money this is why nobody can ever make a new screen because it turns out making a new screen is like the worst industry ever because there's no way to prototype the effort it takes to make one screen is basically like 97 of the effort to make like

a thousand screens which is like 98 of the effort to make 10 000 screens because it's actually the same process as if making a new chip and if you know anything about making a chip that is expensive and complicated a screen is just a big chip it's actually worse than a chip because with a chip if some of the transistors what makes up a chip doesn't work you kind of route around it you're kind of like okay we don't use that guy we do this and that on a screen if one pixel is dead even a four-year-old kid would notice it what that means is you can't make mistakes and what that means is the manufacturing process has to be insanely dialed which means they're going to be extremely conservative yeah no i mean that's something we deal with a lot in the bitcoin

mining industry is focusing on tsmc and samsung and i know way more about renting foundry space than i ever thought i would 10 years ago and so there's a similar that in the screen space exactly you need to rent so you're like hey i have this idea me and a japanese professor have worked on this for years we have here's a working prototype we think that this could be really helpful uh we always pitch them like in asia they have so much myopia so we're like this is a myopia a free computer we think that's appealing in japan and taiwan and china uh hopefully it's obvious too that there's a market for this and um could you make it for us and they go okay you're gonna buy 500 000 of these when we make it for you and you're gonna pay 20 million dollars up front to

develop it we're like uh yeah and that was me for like years and then it was just a super lucky coincidence both in the industry and in me meeting the right person it somehow allowed us to strike the deal of a lifetime and so on the supply chain side that was the most crucial thing is our display manufacturer is willing to have our first batch be a thousand units really yeah and we need to do 20,000 units the minimum otherwise they'll cut us off but uh 20,000 units instead of 500 is why any of this is possible i could have had all the same people all the same ideas and none of it would have worked what pushed them to be confident to allow you to do this oh man it's a story i mean do you want to hear it yeah uh okay

um so there's one there's only two manufacturers in the world who can build our technology they're both japanese and one of them went bankrupt so there's one i spent a year with the one that went bankrupt and i was like oh shit okay this is not gonna go so the other one told me the beginning that they're they're unable to make this display technology i was like there's no way you guys i've like i know my research i've read the papers and everything and so i spent years every three months being like hey do you want to see the thing you want to time i just like and they just ignore me or they would just say like oh we can't do this i went to japan i was supposed to meet one of the he was an alumni from my school i was supposed to meet him for an hour

he left after like six minutes he was just like get get out of here like you're not going to be able to do this do you understand how difficult it is to make a new screen um but the core idea was basically i was able to resurrect a really old screen technology that was completely thrown out into the dump that a bunch of random japanese professors had spent like 30 years sitting there whacking away at the flaws with it there was a birefringence problem there's a parallax problem there's a dichroic diet you know just all material science and then like in 1998 they had a breakthrough in 2003 they had a breakthrough in 2009 that you know it's just like random but it's one of those things where the difference between having a bridge that is like

99 complete and 99.9 complete still is zero because you can't cross that bridge right but you get that final brick and then you get the you get the credit of all of it so it was like this technology was just like solving flaws but it was never getting there and so um i just got super lucky i found this japanese professor's research one of the papers that was the final kind of plank to complete the bridge came out in december 2018 i started in you know july 2018 and so i was just deep in the research and i was like whoa and i put it together with a couple other papers and all of them collectively came out in 2015 2018 2012 earlier kind of solved the key problems of this technology and so um i started working with that professor and some reason he

was open to work with me i didn't have any money with him he just wanted his life's work to make it into the world so i spent time in japan and over covid tried to do it all remote it was insane and we finally uh fall of 2021 had a working prototype that showed that we could make this kind of um fast refresh rate uh reflective paper like screen technology and um i would try to show to the manufacturers and they just wouldn't bite but i finally finally got lucky in early 22 where i emailed the guys that guy just throw me a bone there's a display conference coming up soon just like give me like two seconds of time he's like okay dude like i don't know he god bless him if it wasn't for the random people here and there that decided to do the right thing

like none of this exists for whatever reason he always wished he was an entrepreneur but he was too scared to do it he decided that he's like you know this guy has the balls i never had i'm going to support him so um if it wasn't for that person none of this would be would be here and so we went there we got her two minutes to pitch all these japanese people did all these nods and then just like ushered us out and then uh i don't know whether the woman there wanted to be nice and like here get some cookies and some bottled water you know this was at a display conference and so we're sitting there and we're just like trying to eat as many cookies as possible because we're like broke you know and um believe it or not the next customer that was going to see

the display manufacturer was tesla and if you know anything about cars is they went from having like no screens to cars today are like covered in screens so of all areas this is the ones that the manufacturers because their sales were crazy during covid and then it crashed and they were desperate because they already own their factories whether their factories are 90 utilization or 20 their cost is basically the same the marginal cost is nothing so they're desperate for any incremental demand and so like getting tesla is like the biggest deal for these guys so it turns out the top the top of the top people of this manufacturer were there for that Tesla meeting and they came over to get some water and me being my precocious self I started

to chat the dude up and it turns out he's the CTO of the entire company and the most insane coincidence is I took the prototype out of my pocket and showed it to him and he started asking about i started i was like how does he know so much about this it turns out the japanese professor whose paper in 2018 was this dude's student and he was actually at that same university 30 years before innovating some of the foundational technologies that made these guys the only manufacturer who could do it and the fact that his student was the person who made the paper who's now a professor that made this possible just felt like serendipitous the most insane and synchronicity and um uh the reason this manufacturer could do our manufacturing because

because some of his stuff he came up with this cool thing called micro reflective structures and it was like his life's work in academia before he went to the commercial side and he had found there was no practical use case for it except our thing and so he is like oh you might be able to bring my life's work into the world and so he uh he like talks to me for like 15 minutes and then i ask him you know would you be able to build this for me would you be able to build this for me he turns around there's all these japanese people like 25 of them they're all like and he goes what do you think guys in japanese like i learned this afterwards like what do you think guys do you think we can build this for him and i didn't realize this at the time

but culturally when the shogun the big boss says something like that like you have to say yes or you lose your or you he loses face so by putting them all on the spot in front of me he forced the guy who like runs the division to say yes holy shit and if that didn't happen even if they were interested it would have been like a 12 month 16 month process that's how bureaucratic they are and so they had to say yes and then for the next hour everybody's clamoring around losing their shit being like holy crap like cto san just told these guys that we're gonna build this for them like what the hell and in the next three months was just this insane mad dash and the whole time the guy who ran the division hated us because he's like i never

got to choose to work with you and so there's some other stories about the way that you know things got messy and this and that it's a it's a fun story but if that didn't happen if i if we didn't like sit there and try to like scarf down more cookies if i didn't take that prototype and show it to that guy if somehow the insane coincidence that the dude who's the cto of the company was a professor of the professor that made this possible none of this if tesla didn't have if tesla didn't have a meeting next if that guy didn't have us go right before tesla so honestly it's like when people say like congrats or like good job on the success like i just think about all of this and i say dude this is out of my control man yeah the universe

wants it to happen it'll happen if the universe wants it to fail it'll fail like we're just along for the ride so well that's the one question i had like this is something that's been worked on for decades the cto started yeah the project seems like as an academic so was all this growing research over the decades purely an academic endeavor yes yeah because you have the proliferation of the incumbent screen technology exactly today yeah it was purely academic yeah it's because there was no use for it you go talk to any of these experts and that's what was my interaction in the beginning you go talk to them they're like oh it's a dumb idea because of xyzdd i'm like well this paper says that's not on this paper and they'd be like yeah but you know and i'm like

wait you're not giving me specific arguments right so i sat down i was like okay problem one solved problem two solved problem three solved i mean that 2018 paper i was like whoa problem three and four are solved like damn that's enough and so it's like there was people who believed in this and they kept at it in 2005 some of the crazy folks kept out in 2010 like at a certain point you're just like dude what it's been 20 years like this thing is done for and so society has no good way to look at things that have been bad ideas for a long time that suddenly become possible right and there's great analogies to to different you know bitcoin or other crypto things as well you know schnorr signatures and rsa and things like that have been there for a while

so um yeah i just feel like sometimes uh it all comes together at the right time if i started this in 2016 i'd be screwed yeah if i started it even in 2020 i'd be screwed because i timed it right because all these manufacturers they make a lot of money on lcd displays but apple decided to change some of the iphones from lcd to oled and in one day you lost 100 million units so they're like what do we do with these machines and we just got really lucky that our screen technology can be manufactured on lcd machines so these dudes are like dude we just lost like 70 percent of our business on this it's free money for us to make these guys a screen on this because otherwise there's no business for that everybody's switching to oled that didn't happen they wouldn't have

worked with us there's no way we're getting you know 20 000 moq so yeah and going back to like this being an app it was an academic problem for a while uh working towards the solution like what was like the cto from the company that eventually manufactured these screens for you what was his initial like if we can solve this problem here's what it will enable for them i think it was more academic i think he's like oh cool optical effect with sub wavelength you know yeah yeah it's called metamaterials so i think it's uh i think it's so cool that it wasn't that they had an idea of how it can be useful they were more like this is really cool and hopefully one day it's useful it's kind of fun that that that's how it led to this stuff yeah then you're just eating cookies

like yeah i think it could be useful yeah we just put all these things together yeah that's crazy the snickerdoodle did that that's the trick you know when i was eating the chocolate chip didn't really work but the snickerdoodle saw the future that is uh that's an incredible story i should show you a photo i probably can't see it on camera but uh i i i didn't think i was getting anybody's time at this event i it was like there's no chance that you know so you should see the way i dressed for this so it's that guy look at the way i'm dressed you look like you're coming from silicon valley oh come on man i tried so hard to be different wow it turns out i'm the same that's amazing and they were just laughing their ass off because

everybody else was wearing suits and shit and they're like this guy looks like he's they're pretty formal over there like very traditional yeah that's amazing yeah that's uh i've never been to japan oh amazing amazing totally worth it yeah yeah they they have an interesting dynamic right because like financially they're running like the highest debt to gdp ratio in the world but they can somehow have a very structured organized it's kind of like everyone's on the same page what's the honor culture yeah exactly she know the um i forget who i discussed this with that'd be like six months ago on this show but that's what people always point to japan their debt to gdp they were the first country to really embark on quantitative easing like

monetary policy in the 90s uh and they still have a compared to the u.s like a high functioning society in the sense that the gap between the rich and the poor isn't anywhere as pronounced as it is here there's not as many homeless people it's very clean yeah very tidy efficient um and while we have a similar financial predicament here in the united states like the the social outcome is completely different because of you know what they have they have culture yeah i mean seriously like i think that's very underrated aspect of it and yeah we don't have anything to cling on to anymore it's also like go back to the northeast like versus like maybe the rest of us the west is like like you're saying you're brought up an irish catholic household and you

know a lot of other similar families like you feel a big draw to that like you would fight for your community and now that's been absent for quite some time um so it's not a you know a strong foundation anymore when that gets kind of ripped away no no it's a big problem here and i think it all comes back to the money here in the u.s at least um all of us yeah even the tech right like we we just had lunch with jimmy song the first time i talked to him he blew my mind on just like tying that all back it's like if you actually think about there's been no innovation at the tech level really like compared to what there could be like what i'm just saying is like there were all these great leads people gave up on and then they just went with you know what the popular

choices and what worked and what was exciting and pretty and then i mean what innovation has apple really had in the past 10 years they're kind of just fiat farming on the monopoly they have so there's no incentive for people to really have a disruptive company or yeah and i feel like apple all the major giants particularly hardware have gotten complacent new life ends are like their innovation is vr companies man yeah they got moms in jakarta indonesia using their iphone you think if you try to totally reinvent the thing they'll understand what's going on they're just captured you know they're so big and if you meet people at apple they're actually brilliant they're creative they read similar books to us they just can't do anything and so i think they're waiting for

initiatives like this to be a better channel for their creativity and that's what i like to say it's less that we're innovative about technology that i think made this possible it's more we were brave about values i think if apple or any of these guys wanted to do what we're doing they could do it they had a thousand i go to display conference the entire thing is covered in apple and samsung people they could do it like as much as i feel like i found a cool little glitch in the matrix like maybe they wouldn't have found it maybe they would but i think the real thing was i spent the time to look because i was so convinced health matters i spent the time to look because i was so convinced realness matters i spent the time to look because i was so much in

pain and i feel it was validating my experience and validating my values enough to actually bet my life savings on it to bet all this time i think that is the core thing that drives this not some genius technical insight or something like that no it's funny to go back to uh the facade of value-driven initiatives in silicon valley like apple with like the apple watch like we care about your health it's it's what is it it's like greenwashing for for health you know it's like oh the new apple watch the rings i completed my rings if you uh you know if you have a heart attack or fall we'll call 9-1-1 it's like okay but like you know you could be the reason for that heart attack or like the decline of my health over like a multi-decade period but

they're never going to admit that right like how can they just go back and admit they're like yeah sorry guys their screens are actually like you know lowering your dopamine and you know ruining your circadian rhythm your sleep which is you know causing premature chronic disease so but we got these better ones now so don't worry about that it can never happen and they don't have to And it's a perfect timing, not only from everything in Anja's story and the company's story, but also people are waking up, right? Like people are becoming aware COVID was extremely helpful. Huberman has 20 plus million followers and tens of millions of listeners. And he's talking about light.

He's talking about the importance of sunlight. People are distrusting the organizations and centralized authority giving health recommendations. Why? Because it's not fucking working. And then because of the age of the Internet, we can actually go back and see undeniable proof that, you know, the sugar industry funded this. And, you know, the American Heart Association had this conclusion because of this funding and all so much research. You just go scroll the bottom of the paper was paid for by parties of interest. And, you know, after the vaccine rollout and big pharmaceuticals, like people are just distrusting that at an all time high.

and then you couple in the data privacy of like google and apple and facebook and people are they're hungry for something else but there just hasn't been anything yeah and like it's almost beautifully poetic how like the idea that the innovators dilemma it comes into play because you can imagine a world where like you just mentioned people are becoming hyper aware of how technology is affecting our health health foods affecting our health how medicine is affecting our health um and going back to your important like bravery like having the balls to actually do this like if you're apple trillions of dollars of cash just sitting there like if you had the bravery and the will to stick your neck out there and say hey it's pretty clear

that we're all becoming aware this is affecting us negatively like we're going to provide products that take us in another direction in a healthier direction you probably have a lot of success but it's too bold of a move for them and hey we might still have egg on our face like we might be wrong and we we still may fail i think there's still a good chance of that the record for computer new computer companies is low but i think it's fine i took a swing on something i believe i can never be i can never go wrong that way and if we fail and so um i think it's kind of cool to build a company not from a place of fear how okay not leaning into a place for fear i was going to say like how could you guys how could you see daylight failing what is the avenue to success for

you going in the other direction yeah uh i think the biggest one is just it is so expensive to get something new into the world especially when it's like a new computer screen like once again they want you to sell $500,000, there's scale. If you're trying to do $20,000, each thing is going to go up the wazoo. I still don't know how we got the price we did. It's expensive, but our price is high, $799. It's a premium product, same price as an iPad Pro. You could argue, what's the price of your health? This is cheap versus all the metabolic health, ADHD medication and all that stuff. So I think if you look at it the right way, it's totally worth it. It's a steal. But if you look at it from a different way, yeah, on paper, it's expensive. And so I could see a lot of people

resonating with her mission resonating with her vision being super into it but struggling to get out of the frame of my ipad pro 729 it does so much more and so i think if we run into that psychological frame in that philosophy i could see us getting a lot of attention but not converting enough into sales let's say we only sell 10 000 of these our manufacturer cuts us off and then we're done there's only people in the world that could do it so it's like goodbye and so that's why I like to, I like to appreciate folks like yourself because it is you going out of your way to educate and pioneer people think differently, act differently, like these different philosophies, these different psychologies, you know, more time massage,

less tummy ache. If it wasn't for you folks leading that and educating, no one's going to buy our thing. Why would I pay more money for something that doesn't have fucking color? Wait, why would i pay more money for something that's like that does less what you're telling me it does less and you want me to pay that much money the only way we can start this different philosophical thing is if there's people who are actually pioneering that and educating people so well that was cool to see you guys walk in and you interact with paul and tony because they're e-ink nerds that really think about this stuff and like they're like the prototypical archetype of your end consumer who's like, I want this and compare it to, I don't know,

it shouldn't, you had a competitor's product out and you were comparing the, the reaction time and it's night and day and that may like, there's some, an objective product comparison. Like if you can compete on that little reaction time, what you lack in blue light flickering, you make up for and being able to react faster than the coming products like that's a leg up that i could see people easily forking up money to get access to and that's just the product level right i think we're a success when we have tens of thousands of people coming on board you know supporting us for the greater mission the greater vision right this

is just the first product we can do so much more like we we want to do so much more we just need this to be a success and then we can go do that we're probably you know the only company that's making computers handheld devices that's actually prioritizing the health the sovereignty of the end user at the very first step of our product development you might be convinced that other companies are doing that and they're not and if you really buy into that vision you know that we're admitting yes screens are harmful for our biology yes being indoors all the time is harmful we want to bring you to a place that's better for your entire wellbeing so that you can succeed. Because if, you know, that allows for better, better productivity, better mental health,

you're going to become a better person. And with the amount of time we're spending on devices, to me, that's like the, it's invaluable. Right. And you would want such a mission to succeed. I, I mean, that's, I literally dropped everything I was doing because I was like, this is the most important company in the world to succeed if we actually want to have a better future a better alternative and we can only because i was on his podcast yeah afterwards he's like we need to talk i was like we're talking tomorrow like there's no choice because i would drop everything i'll sacrifice all my time so that we have a better future for the next generation and we talk about you know children just thinking about them because they're so much more susceptible to the harm so

what sort of future do we want to create and it was impeccable timing because if you know this was five years ago even with all the screen technology breakthroughs people you know we wouldn't have this conversation we wouldn't have the support from this community they wouldn't be as aware and you know it's coinciding with a lot of the things you talk about freedom tech you know bitcoiners supporting that we now have like an upper hand in actually having some finances some money that's hard so that we can support better technology because it is expensive it does take a ton of effort and that's what a real success looks like for us when we get a big community supporting us and behind us because then we can go and do whatever you ask for in terms of

technology yeah that's like how you want to like that's how a product should grow at the end of too it's like organic focus on the community that gets it aligns with it it's asking for it have them battle test it like all right here's what we need iterated on then go get it in the hands of the rest of the world i mean you can either have the ghosts of daddy steve jobs and cupertino telling us all what we need and want or we can build it ourselves grassroots bottom up learning from each other and there's always a push and pull but uh bottom up and top down but uh uh, yeah, it's like decentralized to me is about taking responsibility and, uh, you know, decentralized health to me is crucial. So you're not reliant on somebody else who gets to decide

the life of you or your child, get back to better food, better water, get back to the sun, get back to grounding and all the different things that can just contribute to your health. And we've talked so much about making the hardware real again, right? That's our goal is to make computers real again so this illusion machine that an illusion of productivity and it just distracts an illusion that it's fine and it's doing all these weird and flickering the lights and the blue light spectrum but the possibility is because we have our own computer we control the entire software stack and so the possibility of what comes afterwards is what you're talking about is what is a real os that respects your attention respects your time doesn't try to hijack you look like what is a real

os that has real software built in hardened software secure software privacy peer-to-peer protocols bitcoin things noster lightning so on so on built into the os and we're not apple we don't got shareholders that we owe a 30 app store tax on right our business model can be cash flow and hardware and so we can have these free app stores these web apps the apps can be composable they can we can build these things and we don't need to have apple pay happy for it to be all lightning or whatever it may be and so that is the optionality we get to if people trust us and like our hardware and i think that's just a magical opportunity because i can't think of anybody else in the world oh you got the solana phone or whatever but why would you buy it right

and so hopefully we're providing enough of a differentiated reason for you to buy this over the samsung tablet or an apple product or in compliment right yeah you know when the sun goes down you put away your macbook and your iphone you take out this thing so it's your wind down computer it's the only it's it's the first thing you see in the morning rather than your iphone so on and so on that's what i need um because i get into my i write often not as often as you say google docs like typing or like right with uh or something both but predominantly for the newsletter yeah in ghost in the publisher oh you gotta try our thing with a magic keyboard yeah well my my writing flow yeah these days is between the hours like 10 p.m and 12 p.m so i'll

write i'll send it out i'll get the dopamine hit of like i think i just read something cool and like it feels good to like publish it and then i get the wind down i'm like yeah i've been staring at my screen for three hours and i can't fall asleep we should get him one with a keyboard yeah it'd be super interesting to see how it fits into your workflow yeah because that's uh something again going back to the double-edged sword like i would not be here for not leveraging this to get the message out none of us we didn't have these fucking blasting lights in their face for the podcast like um and i can feel it again especially since i have a four and a two-year-old now the four-year-old especially like it's becoming very obvious like oh shit he's looking at everything

i'm doing and um i do not want to pass on the bad tendencies of being fucking on my screen right but that's the opportunity we have for ourselves right we've gathered this knowledge we've gathered this mindset now we can go and create that best world for the next generation and that's like thinking extremely low time preference that's what bitcoin enables and that's what proof of work is really all about yeah yeah thank you for building this honestly um because there is like a set here as you can get in talking about cynicism earlier but there's also like this sense of hopelessness that exists out there like we're doomed to the financial not the financial of the digital planet Opticon and we're beholden to the, uh, the whims of Apple and Google

and, um, Amazon, you name it. And that's sort of the world we live in and the way it's going to be, um, particularly in hardware. Like it, it has been hard to see any, I mean, you mentioned Oculus, maybe Purism, something that people would point to, but they just went bankrupt. I didn't know that. Yeah. the uh and so it's it's something that needs to be done and like you said it takes a lot of balls

because it's a herculean effort at the end of the day a true hero's journey but it's worth it i think for the the health and sanity of society because these things are literally driving people insane just telling you i'm trying to get off i haven't been using social media as much because it's just like you go on there it's like holy fuck everybody's going crazy we need to turn that narrative around i mean there is optimism we can create better alternatives you just don't want me to read that yeah last page let's read it so the book's called amusing ourselves to death and the basic idea is so much of modern the modern world and technology is um too much of a good thing is a bad thing right and uh

i think that's what a lot of technology today is it's like junk food tech it's a supernormal stimuli it's hyper saturated it is all the sex appeal and then you're amused to death you're stimulated to death and so let's see if i can find this god i hope it's not like ending it on a negative note or something no it's like this would be great okay look and how's it been staring at that screen all the time poor guy poor guy all right we need to make a monitor all right yeah yeah dude the possibilities where we can take this all right can i can i go yeah okay the book's called amusing ourselves to death by neil postman okay it starts we were keeping her eye on 1984 when the year came and the prophecy didn't thoughtful americans sang

softly in praise of themselves the roots of liberal democracy had held wherever else the terror had happened we at least had not been visited by orwellian nightmares but we had forgotten that alongside orwell's dark vision there was another slightly older slightly west less well-known, but equally chilling. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief, even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophecy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. as he saw it people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that

undo their capacities to think what orwell feared were those who would ban books what hoxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one orwell feared those who would deprive deprive orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we'd be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we had become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble puppy as huxley remarked in brave new world revisited

the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions in 1984 huxley added people are controlled by inflicting pain in brave new world they are controlled by inflicting pleasure in short Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us this book is about the possibility that Huxley not Orwell was right peace and love freaks Thank you.