- There were a lot of questions about your daily routine. People love this, the morning routine, the daily routine. And while I have to believe that everybody's necessary routine is quite different from the next, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a sense of like the first couple hours of your day, what that typically looks like when you're like not traveling and you're settled into a place.

- It's different depending on the place that I'm in, but typically it involves waking up, going out into the sun as naked as possible to start the day. I try to take slowly, wake up slowly. And probably within an hour of that, I'll leave the house and go for as long of a beach walk as possible.

Or if I'm in a place where there's a gym several days a week, I'll go to the gym instead. But some, I'll do some activity. I would say about an hour after waking up. Sometimes it's an hour and a half. Sometimes it's less depending on the place I'm at.

I also might do stretching before I go on the walk and do just several stretches on yoga mats on the floor or with foam rollers or balls or some different things. I don't start my day until those things are out of the way. I try to avoid any work-related anything.

Now that said, if a thought comes up that I'm excited about, I'll note it. I won't avoid thoughts, but I tend not to engage in any work until probably 11 o'clock, 11 a.m. would be the soonest. And in some days, not until one o'clock. And then I do focused work until maybe six, and then I spend the rest of the night trying to wind down out of work mode.

- So 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. are really the peak, quote-unquote work hours. - Yeah, could be 11 too. Like today we started here at 11 and that felt like, I felt like I'd be good by 11. And I already did my morning walk. I had the argument on the beach.

I was in the sun. I was in the hot tub. I had a whole morning already. - And then what does your evening wind down look like in terms of the space that you're in or trying to create and your internal landscape? - Well, it's only red light. I'm usually wearing, from the time the sun sets, I'm wearing red glasses.

I'm in a space with only red light. I'm 99% of the time home with my family and we talk. I might watch a wrestling or a documentary with red glasses on. We eat dinner together or we eat dinner in shifts, depending on how it's working, but we're all together.

And I find something to occupy my mind that gets me out of the workday. That said, sometimes the ideas still flow and I'll note them. But I avoid any kind of a work phone call or anything that's stimulating or that will get me thinking about it. I aim for sunset.

And then I'm usually in bed. I'm usually in bed by 10 and fall asleep within 15 minutes. - Your relationship to light is fascinating. The sunlight piece makes a lot of sense and will make sense to the listeners of this podcast. We haven't done too many episodes, but we will do more that covers the trying to avoid bright light exposure in the evening.

You're wearing the red lens glasses now, even though it's the middle of the day, that's because we've got these bright lights around us, correct? And have you found that limiting your bright artificial light exposure in the evening has benefited you and in what ways? - Absolutely. And once you've done it, once you've changed and avoid like looking at screens or my phone turns red at night, when I see someone else's phone, if someone comes to visit and their phone lights up at night, it's blinding and it's so disturbing.

And for them, that's normal. They're in this heightened, blown out place all the time. I'm staying at neutral. I'm staying at the more natural, how the world would be if man didn't create all of these loud things, loud devices. - Yeah, I've switched my phone thanks to your input.

And we will have released a clip on this by the time this episode airs on the triple click approach to the phone that you can put in very easily, to allow it to go from regular screen to red screen at night so that you don't have to go into the settings each time you just triple click.

We'll provide a link to that explanation. And Rick taught me that when I was over in Italy, everyone in his home turned to me and said, "Wait, your phone is so bright. "You got to do the red light thing." I said, "I don't know how." And he taught me that.

So it's a very useful trick. - Have you noticed a difference since looking at? - Huge positive difference. I sleep better. There are great data now. 'Cause of course I go then find the data that, for shift workers, people that have to be up at night working, if they put them under red light, the amount of cortisol at that time is suppressed, which is great as compared to when they're under bright artificial lights without red lens glasses, or if they're in red lights, it's far more beneficial, less cortisol.

You want cortisol high early in the day, viewing sunlight early in the day, increase it by at least 50%. And you want it to taper off and on and on. I heard something recently, which is going to make a lot of sense. One thing that's happened in the last 30 years, which may at least partially explain the obesity crisis, is that calories, which are depleted of nutrients, micronutrients are very cheap now.

See, they're very cheap to get calories, but they aren't nutritious calories. In addition, there's been a change in lighting technology so that blue light photons are very cheap. Like when I was a kid, my parents would say, turn off the lights, it's costing us all this money. Now it's very cheap to keep the lights on in a home.

The heat is a different story, but with respect. So we have a lot of cheap photons. So I think of blue light as cheap photons, not the good for you photons, not nourishing photons. - That's correct. - And consuming calories too often or at the wrong times of day, we know is bad for you, consuming photons in the wrong form at the wrong time of day, bad for you.

And I think those two things combined, plus all the downstream negative cascades can largely explain the obesity and in some sense, mental health crisis. - Interesting. - Yeah, so just there, I editorialized again. I realized that we're trying to shift the ratio to more Rick, less Andrew, but- - He can't help himself.

- He can't help himself. And Rick indulges me, so. Actually, there were a number of questions in here that asked me, how has Rick helped you? And I'm refraining from answering those 'cause people want your answers for them. But I do all the things that Rick's referring to. I'm not wearing red lens glasses now, but I have changed a lot of my health practices and or sought out science to test whether or not some of the things that you've been doing for a while makes sense.

And indeed, in every case, they've made sense. I'm not just saying that because you're here, but you and I do a lot of the same things. - Yeah, we're interested. And if it didn't work, we'd probably stop doing it eventually. - Right. - It's like we're testing, Rick. - Right, and I do believe that what starts out as crazy, like Mike Mencer's stuff of low volume weight training with heavy weights, it works so much better than the high volumes.

All that stuff is being shown to be true in these peer reviewed trials. So, you know, that's the nature of science. It often comes, science often follows the practitioners by many decades. You know, it doesn't get there first because it's a slower, more iterative process. But some people need to see those clinical trials to feel comfortable doing something.

I think the creative process is uniquely separated from academic science and academic scholarship in a way that I think has really benefited it. I mean, can you imagine if the ghetto boys had to get a degree in music theory in order to do what they do? - They wouldn't be the ghetto boys.

- Right, or Slayer. - They would not be Slayer. - Yeah, or Public Enemy. - Yes. - Or Adele. - Yes. - Or Eminem, right? It's almost by virtue of the fact that there is no degree for that, per se, that allowed them to do what they did, right?

Yeah. - Absolutely. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)