LED lights are DEVASTATING our bodies, here's why | Redacted w Clayton Morris

Let these words sink in. LED lights are devastating. Devastating to our health. Those aren't my words. Those the words of our next guest, which I'll introduce here in a second. But think about how much our lives have changed over the last few decades. Think about now when you go to sleep at night. All of those little LED lights that are surrounding you while you sleep and the smoke detector, maybe on a television at the bottom of the screen. Maybe you've got an air filter with multiple LED lights. Maybe your phone is sitting next to your bedside table with an LED light surrounded by these artificial lights. Devastating to our health. Again, Mark Baker is the founder and president of the Soft Lights Foundation. Those are his words. And I've been wanting to do this story for a long time here on Redacted. So many people have been asking us, please have Mark Baker on, have somebody from the Soft Lights Foundation to come on to talk about how devastating these lights are to our health. And so your wish is my command. And Mark is our guest. Mark, welcome to the show.

>> Hi Clayton, thanks for having me on this show.

>> My pleasure. I think, you know, I think people don't want to face this and so we kind of, I maybe compartmentalize it like we're able to look at other things in our environment, you know, we don't want lead in our water. We don't want these other things in our environment as we go through our day, but we just sort of accept, oh, LED lights and lights are just kind of part of it, so I'm just not even going to face that. I'm not even going to look this in the eye because it's just too much. Um, do you, do you, do you, do you think you see that from a lot of people when you first start talking? Do their eyes sort of glaze over?

>> Yeah. So, I have been told that, Mark, you're taking on too much, this, uh, this issue of LED lights is overwhelming. And I kind of agree that it's overwhelming. So, we, uh, now we see the LED headlights in cars. We see the LED street lights that are blue rich. We see, uh, this conversion to LED general service lamps that we put into our house. We see the intense LED indicators on washing machines and refrigerators. And, uh, so these LEDs are now everywhere. I left out, uh, emergency vehicles, which many people, uh, really find debilitating. They have very intense flashing LED lights. So it is a big task and, um, people, it's easy to ignore or not want to deal with it because it's overwhelming and I have found it to be overwhelming for our bureaucratic officials because they too don't know how to solve that and so we are trying to push them to get this problem solved.

So, we have a lot to unpack and I want to just have a great conversation with you today on this. Before we get into all of the mechanics of how it's terrible for our bodies and what you're pushing with members of Congress on this, can you walk me back? How did you come to this subject? And I hate to say what was the—I hate to use a pun here—but what was like the light bulb moment for you when you said, th—this is devastating and I need to take this on?

>> Yeah. So, um, I lived in the Silicon Valley of California. Um, and I was a school teacher and that, and around 2015, 2016 is when the LED lights really started to come out. The highowered, highintensity LED lights. So I started to notice them on cars. The headlights became something really weird to me. Uh, blue rich lights. They would capture my attention. They would make me agitated and angry. As a middle school math teacher, by the time I got to work, I was upset already because it was really affecting my psychological well-being. Um, then I would come home and my, my town had switched from high-pressure sodium street lights, the nice amber glow, to the 5,000 Kelvin blue rich LED street lights. I happened to live in an apartment on the second floor. I came home, opened my door, and my apartment was flooded with this terrible light because it was at second floor level. I had to close the blinds and try to block it out, but even then, it's so powerful, it seeped in. So, that's when I really started to become an activist, uh, because, wow, this is really bad. I met with city officials to try and find out what had happened and that's when I started to learn the bureaucratic process. But, um, because it was so debilitating for me is that I, I started to fight it. Um, I ended up at the point where it was so impactful that I had a mental breakdown at school. Uh, where my school district had said, "No, we're not turning off those, those LED lights. You're just going to have to sort, somehow live with it." And I really couldn't take it anymore. So, it was so bad that they came and took me away and put me in a hospital for four days. And it was not an experience that I'd like to go through again. Um, and it really affected, changed the direction of my life. I was already advocating for fixing this LED problem. But that was really the end of my—that was the end of my teaching career. I could not go back to teaching because you have to have patience and with a mental breakdown, you don't have patience anymore. So then I became just full-time advocate, learning the physics, learning the government bureaucracy, learning how, how these lights are regulated, all these different issues, and connecting with many people around the world who are suffering as, uh, similar to me.

>> Can you go back to this mental breakdown? Do you think you were like isolated? Like this was—I mean, I guess at the time I, I'm just trying to picture myself. I'm trying to put myself in your shoes like if I was—did you have this awareness? Did you know this is exactly what's causing the problem or did you think it was a confluence of things, other things in your life, and you just weren't able to pinpoint it? And did you feel like isolated? Like are there, are there other people out there that are having the same experience? Because we hear from viewers all the time that say, you know, when they live near electrical wires and things like that or 5G towers, how debilitating it is for them and then other people can just go through their day normally and they don't have any of these issues. Did you feel like you were on an island?

>> Well, uh, so at first, uh, it's—what is this light? It's so bizarre. So there was, um, a woman in Chicago who had started a Facebook group called Ban Blinding LEDs. So around 2016, I think late 2015, I joined that Facebook group. I didn't know anything about the LEDs. So, uh, this is where I started to learn that other people were feeling these same effects, that this was just too sharp, uh, and really not something that we wanted to be suffering under. And so, we learned about color temperature. Um, I didn't know anything about that before. And so what happened is I got so invested in it that, uh, they encouraged me to start my own Facebook group. So I did that. So we have the Soft Lights Foundation, um, Facebook group, but they're kind of twins and we have—me—people that join both groups. Uh, I had a person that I was a lawyer that I was talking to told me that I should be a foundation. So I made a 501c3 foundation for the Soft Lights Foundation. But when I was initially going through this and, uh, I was kind of battling my school district, they had a 5,000 Kelvin LED light on the roof to, supposedly, for security. And so it would strike me in the eyes as I came to work. So one day, uh, my principal came in and, and just told me, "Well, Mark, you've asked to have that turned off, but they, they need it for, quote, security." And I had been struck so many times by the LED lights. This was in 2019, so I had already been working on it three or four years. And the, just the accumulation of being struck so many times, I snapped. I've never had anything like that before, but I knew exactly what it was. I, I was, I fell down on the floor. I was screaming. I was saying, "LED lights. It's not the students. They're not bothering me. It's the LED lights." So, I—yes, I knew exactly what it was. Uh, and, and dur—and when they took me to the hospital, I was trying to explain to them, but I was kind of out of my mind. They gave me a lot of drugs and stuff like that and try to just calm me down. But, uh, yeah, so, um, it is—you are on an island. We do feel, uh, that, you know, nobody's fixing this, but we also share, uh, um, camaraderie with all the people around the world that are suffering similar to me.

>> So there are a lot of people that have similar circumstances then to what, what you experience. You, you were not alone. There were a lot of other people experiencing something similar to you, right?

>> Very much so. So, um, people with sensitivities—uh, it's not really the greatest word. It makes us sound weak, but we have a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation and for me it's maybe blue rich light at nighttime. It's really, really strange experience. Uh, but other people are suffering, uh, epileptic seizures from the LED lights. There, uh, people are suffering—a lot of people are suffering migraines from the exposure to the LED lights. I've had people contact me and said they're suicidal because they just can't take these LED lights anymore. Um, and so there are a lot of people with sensitivities and people who have disabilities that would qualify for the Americans with Disabilities Act. So we're kind of like canaries in a coal mine. But then with driving, a lot of people with a stigmatism have signed our petitions and let us know—it, with people with a stigmatism are having a lot of trouble driving because of the LED headlights. So there's a lot of conditions and what I've learned is that people are very different. Everybody has different sensitivities and there are certain people that can just go through life and they feel nothing. It doesn't—bo—this light doesn't bother them at all. So we have to be aware of both, both types of people. And I was—and I guess we'll get to this in a little bit, but I would think that the people that maybe go through their life where they don't have any sensitivities that they know of outwardly, maybe inwardly they're—it's affecting their sleep in a deep way and they probably don't know that it is. They might just say, "I don't have any problems." I'm sure if—probably many people watching this are like, "I've never noticed an issue at all." That we're going to have a lot of people that are going to leave comments on this video that are going to say, "Thank you for speaking about this because I've been suffering from this for years." So, do you think that that's true? That maybe, you know, it's affecting their sleep. They just don't know it. Right. Is—how would you pinpoint? You wake up groggy. You go through the day kind of grumpy. You're just not—don't have the energy. But how would you know why?

Um, so previously a lot of the country was lit with highress sodium street lights and that have an amber color. Uh, I don't think there were a lot of complaints about that. It is light pollution, but when the switch to light LED street lights happened, they changed the color temperature and these street lights became blue rich. So there is a spike of blue wavelength light at night. Now it produces high glare and now that's coming into the windows of people and we have thousands of complaints of the street lights being too bright and the cities switched to street lights to save money but, uh, ignored all health impacts. So scientists are now putting in their papers that this blue rich light is an environmental carcinogen. And typically people will get upset when they hear that something's carcinogenic. The government would act to try and reduce the harm from this. But in this case they're, they're ignoring the situation. But people are being exposed. Even tiny amounts of light, artificial light at night are interfering with our circadian rhythms, interfering with our sleep. And it's a cellular process. That sleep is an important part of our lives. So when we—u—go to sleep, when the sun sets, our melatonin, uh, hormone is suppressed and then a repair process occurs. Cells that got damaged during the day are repaired or, or absorbed and, and killed so that we have a healthy system. When we're exposed to light at night, um, then this, this repair action is not occurring because the melatonin hasn't been suppressed and that whole process is, is interfered with. So it's very important to, uh, to get back to a natur—as close to natural, uh, night as we can.

>> All right. So let's go into some of the mechanics here and, but first I want to maybe you can just educate me, educate our audience: what are LEDs?

>> So LED stands for light emitting diode. It is a solid state lighting, SSL. Um, it's a circuitry. It requires some kind of a driver electronics to make it happen. It's a flat—well, I guess they're inventing new things now, but I used to say it's a flat surface and through the physics of that flat surface these photons are emitted. It is not a burning element. So an incandescent light bulb—>> u burns. Yeah. It's a chemical process. This is—this LEDs are an electronic process. So we consider this LED light like a digital process. It kind of comes out one photon at a time in different directions. It's not a—it's not a sort of a smooth process. And, uh, because of the electronics we might have digital flicker. It might be—you might have seen this, um, in certain bad lighting that the lights are flickering. That didn't occur, uh, as drastically. So, with incandescent—so incandescent may have, if they're on household current, they may have a sine wave flicker at around 6%, um, and most people could tolerate that. But LEDs, uh, can flicker on and off, completely on or off and on or off. And if the drivers are not done properly, and there are no regulations to make sure they are done properly, then it can flicker. And then because it's a flat surface, uh, the light comes out in a beam. It's not all around. It's not spherical. And so it's directional. And the Department of Energy acknowledges this. Well, we've got to imagine that life is somehow different if we're under a spotlight. The engineers try to maybe make the light come out in all the directions, but really it's kind of a messy light. So all these different characteristics. I think I left out spectral power distribution, which is the, the energies at each wavelength—the blue wavelength, the green wavelength, the red. And one of the drastic differences is that LEDs have eliminated infrared light. The Department of Energy claims that this infrared light is something waste. They call that wasted heat. So, LEDs are so great because they eliminated this waste. Well, in the last few years, many scientists have now figured out that this infrared light is very beneficial and people are already making products. People can buy masks that have red LEDs in them to somehow make your skin better. And so they recognized the benefits of this infrared. So the switch from incandescent lights, which was this pretty much healthy light, to a really hazardous toxic LED light with no infrared, but lots of hazardous blue, was probably the one of the worst decisions ever made.

>> It's remarkable. I just—in a little citing anecdote here—back when I used to do a show called Fox and Friends on Fox News many years ago and this was all rolling out at the time. I think it was under Obama where I guess they were starting to eliminate incandescent bulbs and so forth. I, I'll never forget because I didn't really know much about it. I just—I thought that these were highly inefficient. You know those old incandescent Thomas Edison bulbs, right? They cost a lot of money. So, everyone's getting those CFLs and, and LEDs and they're going to save a lot of money. You know, your, your electricity bill was going to plummet because it just took a lot less. And I remember my friend who—my co-host at the time, Tucker Carlson, said, "I don't want these LEDs." My—so, he bought—he just like stocked up on so many incandescent bulbs. He just had like a garage full of them, 'cause, you know, they're like impossible to find. And I just sort of laughed at it and I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." Like, in case you don't care about saving money, you know. And, uh, but now like in hindsight, it's—was a really smart thing to do. And I mean, they started to eliminate incandescent bulbs, did they not? I mean, they made them illegal if I'm not mistaken.

>> Yeah, that's quite a story. That's exactly what has occurred. Tucker was right to, uh, stock up. It was—it's a much healthier light. So, backing up a bit, um, way back, 1973, we had an energy crisis in the United States and an oil embargo and people were lining up to get gas. And that's the first time that Congress in the United States sort of recognized that, well, um, unlimited energy sounds great, but here we're learning our lesson. We don't have unlimited energy. We're kind of, uh, dependent on on on how much we have and where it comes from. So they started to look in ways to save energy and, um, energy conservation or energy efficiency is a different term. They started looking into how can we do that. So one of the first things they did is start applying energy efficiency rules to vehicles. And so you had to start getting a certain miles per gallon. And, um, as long as the car is still going, uh, just as far and just as fast and just as safe, uh, energy efficiency is perfectly fine. You're actually saving money. Instead of 10 miles per gallon, you're getting 20 miles for every gallon and no change in your car. Why not? That sounds great. But then they started applying it to everything else and to refrigerators and all kinds of things. And then they applied it to light and this was a big mistake. So, in 2005, they passed the Energy Policy Act and directed the Department of Energy to go investigate. Hey, there's this new solid state lighting, these LEDs. They look great. We can save energy. So, go find out if we can use LEDs to replace the incandescent light bulb. That's what the law says. 2005. By 2007, everybody had gotten so excited. Oh my gosh, this is great new technology. Yes, we can save all kinds of energy. And, uh, they—the Congress directed the Department of Energy to set—establish a rule that the minimum luminous efficacy is 45 lumens per watt. So any light bulb for your house had to meet that criteria. Incandescent light bulbs are around 10 lumens per watt. So incandescent light bulbs wouldn't meet that standard. So, LEDs would and so, uh, this is what the cause—and it's gone through multiple administrations, Republicans and Democrats. So, it's just some train wreck that's gone through all administrations. But, so this was the cause of everything. And so, when the, um, when they implemented that rule, then that was the phase out of incandescent light bulbs. Um, the problem is the Department of Energy was required to collaborate with the Food and Drug Administration to make sure that this new light was safe. The Food and Drug Administration regulates electromagnetic radiation for all products. Doesn't matter what it is—X-ray machines and microwave ovens and lasers and it would be LED lights. So, DOE and—and in in the law, they're required to collaborate. Well, that never happened. So, nobody ever established any performance standards to make sure that this LED light was safe. So when it came out and your friend Tucker said, "Wow, I don't like this LEDs." It's because there were no standards. Uh, the only standard was lumens per watt. How much light can you get out? Is the light safe? Ah, nobody check that out. Is the light meet quality standards? Does it have low flicker? None of that occurred. So we were—it was pushed on us. Maybe, you know, maybe not—uh, they weren't trying to kill us initially, but, um, but it happened—one of these things and it was like my own negligence and then it was just the ball started rolling and now nobody knows how to extract themselves out of this problem.

>> I want to come back to the idea of negligence but also maybe intentionality of them trying to kill us in a second because my brain—I've covered too many stories to think that it's just, you know, this is all a coincidence. We'll get there in a second, but maybe you can talk about some of the mechanics of LEDs and what it's actually doing to our bodies.

>> Yeah. So, I'm not an expert on biology, so, um, it's—I, I'll do what I can, but light is fundamental to how we function. Turns out that we have photo receptors throughout our body, not just our eyes, but in our skin, even inside, um, in in our blood vessels, um, in our fatty tissues, there are these proteins that will capture and or detect light and the light can penetrate through our skin and it—there's even—they've even found these detectors in our brain. So these—they're called obssonins and these detect light and especially they're, they're tied to blue wavelength light at 450 nanometers around there. And so that blue light is fundamental to waking us up in the morning, making us energetic, making us hungry or sleepy, the lack of blue light. And so that's really important. And so if you—if we've altered that by introducing LED lights, which if you look at the spectral distribution typically has a large spike at exactly that 450 nanometers. Why did they choose that? Because it was the way they could make it. It was the cheapest way. They've been working now for a decade to change it, to improve it, to make it sort of come out like an incandescent light bulb. So that's what's occurring. But all these lights that we've been suffering with for a decade or more have a spike of that exact blue light that is probably something you don't need, especially at night. And so we have found that we are sensitive to the whole spectrum. We're sensitive to the missing infrared. We're sensitive to maybe missing green. Uh, we're sensitive to the high blue, etc. So, um, this—the mechanics of the light is really important. The spect—spatial distribution, how it lands on our body is important. The time of day that we're being exposed to certain wavelengths is important. The, the flicker and so all of those things are impacting our mood and the diseases that we might be at risk at. And all of it's important. So what we need is the most quality light that emulates the natural world as possible. And LEDs are about, about as far away from the natural light as you can get.

>> So incandescent are closer to that—mimic more closely the natural world.

>> Right? So if we look at the sun, it's something burning and it's far away and that's really, uh, driven life on, on Earth here. And then we have, uh, maybe a campfire. It's got the warm colors, the reds and the, uh, yellows. And that's close to a sunset. So, uh, but we feel—most people feel warmer and happier around this kind of, uh, reddish amber light. And then when Edison came out with the electric light, uh, it had a coil. It's tungsten. It's a filament. It's burning. And it generates a natural type of light. And, uh, so it was, um, it has the incandescent spectral distribution—is very low blue and then it ramps up to higher in the reds and then most of it is this—what the Department of Energy called heat—wasted heat—but most of that incandescent light is this warmth. So, uh, those were all natural. Then came things like fluorescent light bulbs. I have found out that many people have suffered under fluorescents. I never cared for them but they—they weren't devastating for me, but many students had suffered through school because it has a spiky spectral distribution. It may have a flicker to it. So a lot of people like students are suffering in school because they had poor lighting and then compact fluoresence came about which, u, I found to be okay as well, but a lot of people really, really didn't like compact fluoresence and then the LEDs came out. So it's kind of this downward trend towards worse and worse light.

You know, it's fascinating. You talk about the warmth of, you know, like a campfire. Everyone—no one feels bad sitting around a campfire. It's kind of interesting, right? And when people are out in the sun, they're also—their mood is lifted, right? Most of the time. And we know even my daughter's been dealing with influenza A over the past week. And I've told her, you know, go out at noon and sit here for 10 minutes in the sun. We get this beautiful Colorado sunshine, you know, sunniest state in the country—like sit here and get, you know, 10 minutes of vitamin D in this noon sun, you know, to, to make you feel better, get better. And even the Norwegians and the Danish have a term for that cozy lighting atmosphere called Hoa, I think it's pronounced. It's spelled H-Y-G-A or E. I think all my Norwegian friends and Danish friends, forgive me, but it's a term for having that cozy atmosphere. And so they—the Danish, the Norwegians—take lighting very seriously. Like it's a very important part of their living rooms because it's, you know, cold and dark. And so when you get together with six people—I think them, I think the number is even six. Like if you have more than six people at a gathering, then it's not considered ho. Um, they have a name for this like cozy atmosphere and the lighting is so important to that cozy atmosphere with gathering six people. Um, anyway, my, my European friends told me about this and there's books written on Hoa and it's all—it's really fascinating, right? If you have more than six people at a gathering, then it's not considered cozy. And so they take their lighting very seriously and, and I would imagine that that having that warmth of those certain lights is important to that entire atmosphere. Would you say?

>> Yeah, I like that story. I'm, I'm half Danish. I don't—the word for sure, but I, I know the concept and you're right. And so I like that. Um, yeah. So this—this we—we have to realize then that light is affecting our mood. So if the, the government and the Department of Energy came along and strictly ordered—required lights to just simply meet 45 lumens per watt as a minimum luminous efficacy without considering the impacts on our mood—that was a big mistake. Why should we be forced to—we're not—it—let me back up. The idea was to, of course, uh, conserve energy by being more efficient. So, um, the problem is, of course, that they didn't really think it out properly. They didn't set the—they didn't test it. They didn't make sure it was safe. And then they didn't make sure—the idea was that there would be a one-to-one replacement. So if you had an incandescent light bulb, you'd go to the store now. You'd pick up an LED. It would supposedly last longer and you'd be saving money. But they didn't realize that the manufacturers and the engineers and the physicists would invent all kinds of new LED lights. And so now we've got LED lights everywhere where we don't need them. So did we end up saving energy because we did a one-to-one swap? I don't think so. I think we ended up with way more lights, way more, uh, e-waste and light pollution as it's a major consequence, uh, to our health and to our ecosystem health. And so I think it was just a total disaster even if the intentions were good.

So we need to get the—the re—there's tons of research. So we need to get that research into the hands of the officials. And my big push is against the Food and Drug Administration. We need to get them to listen and start, uh, evaluating the situation. And we need to undo the, the effective ban on incandescent. We need to allow people to start, uh, be able to buy these incandescents again because they're healthier for us. And we need, um, to eliminate and, uh, some of this—these hazards that are built into the LED lights.

>> Can you even buy incandescent anymore? I mean, are there any manufacturers still cranking them out?

>> Yeah, so there are ways to do it. So there are lots of limits but you sort work around. For example, uh, there—there is a type of—they—they didn't ban it on, on all light bulbs. So, specialty light bulbs you can still purchase. You can purchase an oven light, for example. That's an incandescent. And an oven light might be 60 watts, not too bright, but it would be an incandescent. Uh, rough service is a label for light bulbs that allow them to maybe be outside in the winter or something like that, so they, they're more durable. You can still buy rough service. So, if you go online and you need a light bulb and you, and you don't want an LED, look for these specialty bulbs. Um, I bought a bunch from a store that these bulbs were made in Hungary. Um, and they were at the store and it was a discount store. They have a little bit of H—hallogen gas in there and it's a little bit sharp, so it's not my favorite, but I bought a bunch of them just in case. I have LEDs in my house, so not all LEDs are bad. Um, at—as far as the color temperature at 2700 Kelvin, for me that's about sort of the limit of that—sort of as a label of how much blue it has. I'm okay with that as long as it's not flickering and stuff. It's not a bad light for me. But anything beyond—above 2700K I just really—I can't tolerate it. So I—um, there are ways—many people have found it necessary—Christmas tree lights. Um, we would recommend buying that—you can—I just looked online yesterday—there, you can still buy the old style incandescent Christmas tree lights and I would recommend buying those because they're gentler and softer and they don't have that sharp, "ow, my eye hurts because it's too sharp." So yeah, there are workarounds for it, but it would be better not to have the rule. And Senator Mike Lee of Utah has introduced in the Senate, uh, it's called the LIT Act, LIT—liber—I think it's liberating incandescent technology. Um, I don't know if it's going anywhere, but I think it was around April of 2025 he introduced that. Uh, just cross out all these energy efficiency things. And we support that. The Soft Lights Foundation supports that regulation because it was done wrong in the first place without regulations to make sure the light is safe for us, comfortable for us. Uh, it was a bad, bad rule.

>> What about sleeping? Because as I mentioned at the beginning, now we're sort of surrounded at night by—maybe you've got an alarm in your house. It's got a little green light on it. I know we have that. You know, your, your smoke detector on the ceiling has a little LED light. There's all these little LED lights surrounding your bedroom. Room and I keep hearing stories about how detrimental it is to your health. It can even—create—cause myopia in children that ophthalmologists are fully aware that they can almost tell if a child has been in a room with too much light as they're growing up—they'll develop myopia—which is unbelievable to me—just like a little LED lights in your, in your room can affect your sleep so much. Can you talk about the sleeping patterns with these LED lights surrounding us?

Yeah, I think the myopia comes from looking at close objects, uh, looking at our cell phones. So, if children are looking at devices, I think that's a problem. Um, but, but the light itself—and I've had exactly that experience that you just described. So, you turn off the lights and the lights are still on. Uh, there are little, little indicator lights and it's disturbing. Science has, uh, measured this and has found that even those tiny little amounts of lights are interfering with our sleep. So I try to go around and turn off—let's say if it's plugged into a power strip that has the red indicator. I turn the power strip off for the smoke detector. I painted it over with nail polish. I don't want that thing blinking at me when I open my eyes. Um, what else? There are the—some the sockets now where you plug in your appliances has a little—and may have a little LED indicator. I was putting little stars over those. But then your Wi-Fi router, um, that may be in your room and that may have an indicator and it may be a big bright—they're making them brighter and brighter. So that may have a blue light that's so—turn off the router. Maybe, maybe you don't need Wi-Fi at night. That's probably better for you anyways. So do everything you can to eliminate all those little sources and you'll sleep better. Um, then but the problem is, you know, systemically—you might have a street light outside your window. Now what are you going to do? That's harder. So a lot of people will say, well, buy blackout curtains. Well, that's—you know, you—you want the sunlight to come in in the morning, now you can't open the window for fresh air. It's kind of—that's kind of disastrous. So that would be something like—if you want to get it shielded or something, you contact city manager at your, uh, city and say, "Hey, I want a shield around that. Try to demand an amber color instead of a blue rich light. See what they do." But they're very resistant, these cities. So that's hard. But throughout your own—whatever you can do with on your own house, yeah, turn it all off. Get the natural night as close as you can. Um, and, and you know, maybe you get a sleep mask or something like that, but it's important to, to be aware because what's going on is that's interfering with the whole process and you might—you're more at risk of lots of different diseases. Uh, if you're exposed to this artificial light—diseases like cancer and diabetes and mood disorders.

>> I was going to say, I mean, even with a sleep mask though, right, you—as you pointed out earlier, your body is still receiving the light through the skin. So even if you've got a sleep mask on, that's only just kind of maybe tricking your brain a little bit, right? But otherwise, your skin is still absorbing this stuff.

>> Very perceptive. That's exactly right. So it's sort of a surprise to everybody that, um, wait a second, I thought light was through the eyes. This whole skin thing is kind of new. Only how long ago was it? 20 years ago, they, uh, the scientists discovered these other eye cells as well. So we have cone cells for color vision. We have rod cells for nighttime vision which is gray scale—scale—but very sensitive. And then maybe 20 years ago, IP RGC's that are nonvisual but related to this circadian rhythm and these IPRGC's are detecting the light and controlling things and that's in the eyes. But then further—that wow, these same types of cells are throughout the, the whole body and so, um, we, we—yeah, you're right—we don't want the artificial light touching us anywhere.

>> So you mentioned earlier some LEDs that they're now trying to mimic incandescent, so maybe they were harsh and blue, but maybe we could actually buy LEDs eventually that it's almost indistinguishable. And I've seen some of those like little flickering bulbs, you know, that look—they try to look like and mimic candle light and th—those sorts of things. Are those good? Are those okay? Or are those closer to incandescent so our body wouldn't notice a difference?

>> Right. That's a great question. So this is totally fascinating. So here we—u—sort of unintelligently effectively banned a quality light—the incandescent light—in favor of the LEDs. So then we have LEDs for a decade and then we figure out, oh, that was really bad. So the physicists and the engineers are trying to now take that same LED and make it go backwards in a sense, right—to what, uh, incandescent could generate. So, um, there is a, a, a vendor—uh, person I know that makes a bedtime bulb. Uh, that's his—the brand—and he's added infrared. Uh, so that the main part of the light, the visible light, is an LED and then they've added a little something in there that creates infrared light and it's designed for you to use at night before you go to sleep. It's not a very powerful light. I've got one in my bedroom. It's very nice. It's soft and now you've got that—is closer to mimicking an incandescent, uh, by combining these two technologies. There are many, uh, companies out there who are selling or promoting, uh, what they call a natural light, um, that the spectral distribution is—instead of this really tall spike of blue light and no red—that it's closer to natural sunlight which is—natural sunlight has from all the visible wavelengths kind of—they're pretty much even, um, depending on the time of day. So eliminating these spikes and trying to get it more of a just a straight across all energies at the same levels and then, uh, there many companies now jumping into this promoting these health effects of the infrared light. So that's just one aspect. The flicker, uh, you know, there's no regulations but that people are kind of aware of that. The spa—spatial distribution is still a problem because it's coming out of this flat surface. But yeah, that's a trend and it's kind of up to the individual user. If you're purchasing an LED, uh, and you—and it feels fine, okay, you know, it's okay. Use it if you're not feeling any, any ill effects, but realize that at night time, do what you can to turn off that light sooner rather than later. And if you're—if you are being awake, use the warmer color temperatures at night.

>> Interesting. Now, we, you know, we're in a fairly new home here, and so we've got, you know, the cans in the ceiling with the, the LEDs that are way up there in the ceiling with the—whatever you call them—the recess lighting and all of that. Um, it's like, how do you, you know, try to replace all of that? Um, back in the day, I was replacing those all the time, getting up on the ladder, you know, because they were incandescent, and so they would, you know, you could dim them, burn—they'd burn out, you know, after about a year or, or however long. So, I guess it's almost impossible to find manufacturers of, of incandescent for like recess lights and all of that these days, right?

>> Also, I should—I should point out before I let you answer that, I—I know even though they'll clip in—like they, they clip into like a socket. So, they're not even—they don't even have the >> the traditional whatever you call it socket, right? You can't even like screw anything in. And they just kind of clip into a little LED receiver >> and you're sort of stuck with those now.

>> Yeah. So, that's not everywhere. So, we went to a hotel recently and they had 5,000 Kelvin LED light bulbs in the lamps. We turned it on and we said, "Oh my gosh, I can't—there's no way we can handle this." So, we—um, but they had that—those little—um—oh, no. I take that back. That was another hotel. But they had those little plug things. So what are you supposed to do? This other hotel that I started to tell you about had regular screw in the twisty kind. So we un—unscrewed them. We drove across the street to the store and bought some 2700 Kelvin. Uh, they're LED, but we brought those back and they had it much softer and then we could use the hotel room fine. Um, so I forgot what you had just said.

>> Well, the plug ones—I mean, I—yeah, it's like how do you in your home at this point? I mean, I guess just turning them off at a reasonable hour. I mean, I don't feel the effects that I know of. Again, maybe in my sleep with all the LEDs in my bedroom, I'm definitely going to start getting out the nail polish for my wife and trying to put up some stickers to block that stuff. But, you know, I guess in your main living room, if you don't—if you got a newer home that doesn't have any sockets at all, they just plug right into a little, little socket. Um, you know, and you're stuck with these LED systems until I—I don't know what. Maybe there's an invention that can mimic incandescent or something.

Yeah, and that—that reminds me of what I was going to say—when, when we moved into our house currently, that now they're integrating the light into the fixture. This is another very, very poor design choice. So in the kitchen we had 5,000 Kelvin lights, but you could not just simply replace the bulb. And so I—I'm not any kind of a, um, fix it person or anything like that, but I, I got the ladder and I got the hammer and I got the drill and I got all those things because I had to totally replace the entire fixture. So I've got parts everywhere. I'm going to Home Depot multiple times to get the, uh, parts that I need and, and drilling things and just to replace the light.

>> That's—that doesn't make any sense.

>> That's crazy. I guess before I let you get out of here, Mark, I wanted to talk about maybe the insidious, almost nefarious nature of these things. And you mentioned off-handedly like, you know, I don't—I don't know that they're trying to kill us, but that's where my brain kind of goes with a lot of this stuff. We see this with cloud seeding and sort of all sorts of other harmful things, whether it's processed food giving us then medications, then you know, keep—keep eating your processed food. We'll give you statins, you know, on the back—on the back side, right? So, I don't trust these people as far as I can throw them. Um, do you think that there is an agenda here? That there is some sort of an agitation agenda? Because I—if we're all angry, if we're all agitated, if we're all not getting proper sleep—I just—my brain believes, you know, that the government and there's nefarious—we certainly know the effects of MK Ultra programs that we've covered here on the show and the CIA, which are—they're still operating today. We've spoken to whistleblowers, so this is not fiction. Do you think that there's something nefarious going on here?

Yeah, I'm asked that question quite often. It's, it's complex. The nefarious part is sort of inherent to everything else that's going on. I, I would use a lot of other adjectives to describe the situation. Arrogance, incompetence, negligence, power, uh, money, um, so these different things have come together. Inertia, fear—like in a bureaucratic system there's a fear of losing your job if you, if you do raise the issue. So all these things come together. One of the other things that I have found personally is how the system works is that if I notify government agency that there's a problem, the first thing that will come back to me is how they're complying with all the regulations. So they don't have to do anything. If I push it further like a petition, they will come back and say why they don't have to do what I'm asking them to do. If I push it further and take them to court and I filed many lawsuits, uh, prosay lawsuits, then they will assign it to a lawyer and the lawyer will then fight. So even this—when you want to get it fixed and you point out all the problems, the system that we live in is designed to fight any kind of fix. They want the status quo to stay the same. So is there somebody sort of pulling the strings and saying, "Yeah, that sort of—there is." There are people that want to make money. They don't want to be sued. So, for example, uh, these LED street lights, it's been now scientifically stated that they're—it's an environmental carcinogen. Well, now those companies are liable for having sold this product that's an—a carcinogenic product, right? Well, they don't want to be sued, so they're going to fight. So, anything that occurs now kind of gets on its own, kind of rolls down the hill. There are forces at work that it's very difficult to fight. And, uh, whether they're—they are trying to kill us all, probably not. But are they trying to fix it? Absolutely not.

>> Right.

>> So, you know, that's what's going on.

>> My brain always goes to, well, someone's probably making money off of this—if they now, you know, the melatonin industry or something, you know, trying to help us sleep because they know how detriment—you know, they can make a lot of money off of this. And so, the sleep industry, the, the sleep drug industry probably can make a lot of money off of this. I'm sure there's papers somewhere. Someone knows this and someone's making money off of it. But that—that's the—that's my cynical nature. I've been doing this too long. Mark, >> um, where can people learn more about how to maybe change their environment? Do you have a—on your website—where some resources that people can go, um, if they want to reach out? Maybe someone's been suffering from this for years and just didn't know and this could be, you know, again, a wake-up call moment for them. Where can people go to get more information that you can help them with?

Okay, great. So, softlights.org. It's plural. softlights.org. Uh, on our front page, we have a campaign right now for, uh, especially for LED headlights on cars. And you can sign a petition on change.org. We have over 75,000 people now have signed our petition to ban these blinding car headlights. You can also submit an LED incident report, which we submit to the Food and Drug Administration. We started this in April of 2024. We now have over 400 incident reports. These are very important because it's public record that something's wrong. So, uh, any person listening to the show can fill out an LED incident report. It's simple. Just describe the impacts of the LEDs on your life. The Soft Lights Foundation will submit that to the Food and Drug Administration and we will hold them accountable, uh, to make some kind of regulations or something about this. If you want to learn more about the health impacts, we have a resources section which has—I post lots of scientific articles. So the direct source—uh, you can read through those. You know, those can be difficult. Uh, we have—it's kind of a dense website currently. We're looking to redesign it, make it more accessible, but there's lots of information about the health impacts in different categories—your eyes, environmental health—and you can learn about sort of the history. We have a news section which kind of keeps you up to date, what we're doing, all of our regulatory petitions and our lawsuits, etc. And so, um, and then you can reach out to us. You can join our Facebook group, Ban Blinding LEDs, and, and collaborate with others who are also trying to solve the issue or just there to complain.

>> Well, you know, there's power. There's power in those numbers. I can tell you one thing I'm going to be doing though, which is after this interview, is going to our bedroom and, and putting stickers on all these little LEDs. I've been meaning to do it, and you—you were the catalyst. So, yeah, the sleep masks don't work, and we've got too many of those things in our bedroom. Uh, Mark, thank you so much. I, I, I keep thinking of puns to say that this has been illuminating, but I, I, I should—I should stop myself from saying that. But thank you so much for this. I've been wanting to really dive deeply into this, uh, subject for a long time and hopefully we can have Senator Mike Lee on the show to maybe push this even further and see if we can get some, some eyeballs paying attention to this at the FDA and other things. So, uh, Mark, thank you so much for your work on this and, and this was really, really eye opening.

>> Thank you very much, Clayton. Thank you.