Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.
Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Brian Richards. Brian is the founder and lead product developer of SaunaSpace, an innovative company doing remarkable things with near infrared saunas in order to help others discover the pathway to natural healing.
In this episode, we discuss how Brian fully healed his toxin related acne, brain fog, adrenal fatigue, and more with the power of incandescent sauna therapy, full spectrum near infrared light and heat therapy. We dig into the science behind Near Infrared Saunas and discover how we can use this technology to optimise our own health. Over to Brian…
Audio Version
Questions we ask in this episode:
- What are the main benefits of infrared saunas?
- Is EMF a concern with infrared sauna use?
- What are your thoughts on mixing infrared saunas with cold therapy?
Get More of Brian Richards
- https://sauna.space
(Use code 180SESSIONS for a 5% saving on all SaunaSpace products) - https://www.instagram.com/saunaspace/
If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview:
Full Transcript
Stu
00:00:03 Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the health sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health wellness and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.
Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We’re into whole food nutrition, and have a range of super foods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.
This week, I’m excited to welcome Brian Richards. Brian is the founder and lead product developer of SaunaSpace, an innovative company doing remarkable things with near infrared saunas in order to help others discover the pathway to natural healing. In this episode, we discuss how Brian fully healed his toxin related acne, brain fog, adrenal fatigue, and more with the power of incandescent sauna therapy, full spectrum near infrared light and heat therapy. We dig into the science behind Near Infrared Saunas and discover how we can use this technology to optimize our own health. Over to Brian.
Hi, guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I’m delighted to welcome Brian Richards to the podcast. Brian, how are you, man?
Brian
00:01:30 I’m good. Thank you. How are you doing?
Stu
00:01:33 Yeah, very well. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time. Before we get into the questions, I’d love it if you could just share a little bit about yourself for our audience that may not know or have heard about your work, please.
Brian
00:01:46 Yeah, of course. So, I’m the founder of SaunaSpace. We manufacture incandescent infrared saunas is a very special type of sauna, it’s a very special type of infrared called Near Infrared. But my story is, I think, similar to many people nowadays. Six years ago, over six years ago now, I had what I eventually understood to be adrenal fatigue problems. I had mind racing, insomnia, I had this weird acne that was only in my torso. I was also kind of negative and irascible and low energy kind of lethargic. This was at the end of my college career while I’m still young but at this point I felt like there was something intractably wrong with me.
I went to the dermatologist and they prescribe Accutane, which it turns out is a horrible thing. And all the other pharmacological approaches as well. So I said, “No, there’s got to be something else.” I got on the internet, like everybody does nowadays and I searched for an answer, for my own answer. And I kept encountering sauna and detoxification and this idea that environmental toxins are a core contributing factor to disease and these other things, all these problems. So, sort of at the end of that I stumbled upon this really unique type of sauna. It’s called it it’s called the Incandescent Sauna, what SaunaSpace does. It was actually invented and pioneered by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in 1891. So, for those of you are not familiar, Kellogg’s cornflakes, this is an interesting aside.
At that time, in the early 20th century, out of control male libido was thought to be a problem. So they thought, oh, well, we’ll feed the all the adult males this bland food that we call cornflakes now and it’ll lower male libido. So fast forward today, and they have achieved their goal. So, funnily enough though, this guy had really, he was very avant-garde. He was doing some very unique approaches, alternative healing approaches in the early 20th century. One of them was this. He said, “Hey,” three years after the labels were invented, “Let’s use them for sauna heaters and we’ll heat the body and we’ll heal people.” And so you can see in 1910, he wrote a book called photo therapeutics. So here we have light therapy been understood over 100 years ago, and it was not just him, but he pioneer this, he called the electric incandescent bath, you can actually see photos of these big victorian looking cabinets from that era there. They’re insane. And so there’s there’s a modern book called Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing by Dr. Lawrence Wilson, to whom I’m eternally grateful for re-popularizing the concept. And so I said, “Hey, I’m a tinkerer. I’m a builder, I’ll build my own.” I built my own. I did a session right before bed, and then another one right before bed the next day and it was like, boom, my insomnia was completely gone. I slept like a log and I woke up in the morning and I felt truly rested. Instead of, normally, I would sit in bed and just stare and my mind would be racing. So I thought that intrigued me. That was the initial thing that intrigued me so quickly, how could this be? Subsequently, I used it for six months with discipline, 45 minutes a day. And this is before I understood any of the science and any of the things that we’ll talk about.
But essentially, it was out of self interest. I had health problem, I wanted to fix it. I stumbled on this and I had an amazing recovery. So, six months later, I realized, ” Oh, that’s what adrenal fatigue is.” I was qualitatively better. I was less irascible, I had more patience, more energy, a qualitatively better mood, just more of a go getter like more ready to just concentrate and complete tasks and complete things, and how do you measure this? For me, it was priceless. The change. And yet, if you met the old me six months prior, you’d say, “Well, what’s wrong with you? You look fine.” And so I kind of figured it out on my own. It started slowly but I built a few for this, and that and my friends and family and it slowly became SaunaSpace.
I got my own business loan, that was six years ago, and I started with a very bricolage kind of garage project to now, it’s a completely custom made, custom designed to make a commercial properly designed, safely designed product that anyone can use at home. And it’s been a long journey from there to here but I now have like 24 employees. You can see behind me, this is our new shop, we just moved into. It’s huge. [crosstalk 00:06:47]
Stu
00:06:46 Yeah. It’s so [inaudible 00:06:48] there in the background for sure. Wow.
Brian
00:06:50 … Yeah, that’s just a portion that you can see, but we are just scrambling to meet demand. We’ve always shipped worldwide, but certainly, and certainly a majority of our business is in the US, but we have increasing interest abroad and we do ship now routinely to Australia, Western Europe, and really anywhere. And we’re just pioneering this thing that it’s like, there’s so many saunas out there. There’s a sea of sauna products, and we’re this little tiny sauna company and yet we’ve disrupted the market completely, and I think that’s what we’ll talk about a little bit because that fundamentally forget the design which is killer, and our quality is amazing. Therapeutically, this technology is a better way to do sauna. Hands down. And that’s because of a better way of heating the body with the Near Infrared, and then this light therapy stuff too which people understand more and more. It’s called Red Light Therapy. It’s this principle that we’re beings of light, we’re bioluminescent, and we eat light, we’re literally eating light, and not just for energy, but it has cellular healing effects. So.
Stu
00:08:07 Well, I’m so keen to get into that. And specifically from a light perspective as well, because we’ll get into that a little bit later. But I’m aware that people are bathing themselves, perhaps with the wrong type of light as well at different times, which is really disrupting our biology. But just rewinding a little bit to your saunas at the moment and the tech that you use. So, from a layman’s perspective, there could be confusion in terms of you’re talking about far infrared, there’s near infrared, there’s traditional saunas, and there are steam rooms as well. So, how does what you’re doing differ from perhaps just a traditional sauna then?
Brian
00:08:52 Yeah. Well, let me say, first off, any sauna is better than no sauna. And so all of these are… they’re better approaches in my opinion and in most conventional medical offerings, but within the world of sauna like, what are we doing when we do sauna? What we’re doing is called hyperthermic therapy, and it’s full body. So we’re heating the body up and at the cellular level we have these, basically these things called heat shock proteins that are produced by the nucleus. They’re really fascinating. They do detoxification and they also do protein refolding.
So with these two different roles, they are cleansing the cells in the body and then they’re rebuilding the functioning. The proteins are like, they’re like the little line workers in the body, they’re doing all of the work inside and outside of the cell. They’re the fundamental worker. And if you’ve ever seen a protein model on a computer, it looks like a watered up piece of tissue paper with ribbons coming off of it. It’s a very complex molecular construct. And so, it turns out that one or two miss foldings in this really complicated folding pattern can disrupt functioning or lead to a completely malfunctioning protein. And that has real effects on the whole body on disease.
So, sauna therapy, anytime we heat the body in any fashion for a sustained period, and we’re doing it passively, so we’re not responding to the environmental stress, we’re letting the body rest and digest and heal the parasympathetic state. We’re getting these restorative regenerative benefits. So, then the next question come should be, well, how should we heat the body? It gets in a hot, we could be out in the sun, you could be in a Finnish sauna. The difference with sauna space and doing using incandescent technology, which is primarily Near Infrared, is the way in which the body is heated. When we use near infrared wavelengths, these are the wavelengths that have been shown to penetrate most deeply into the body and one study up to well, in 23 centimeters in the metrics system, that’s like 79 inches. On average, though, it’s always going to penetrate much deeper into the body than, say, a far infrared wavelengths. So, it’s a big difference between far infrared saunas and near infrared saunas.
Stu
00:08:52 Got you.
Brian
00:11:44 Far infrared saunas are low energy wavelengths, they’re 100% absorbed by water and since our bodies are primarily water, the tissue penetration of far infrared is not deep. So far infrared saunas are here in the body, more or less like a Finnish sauna, a wood sauna, and that’s by heating the air around you. And then this warm air around you conductively heats the body up. In contrast, with a near infrared sauna using these incandescent bulbs that are, these are over 40% near infrared emission, we get wavelengths that penetrate deeply into the body and we get what’s called radiant heating. So we heat the body from within. And since we do it radiant, more efficient heating, the air temperature is lower. So a Incandescent Sauna SpaceSauna runs at like 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s, I don’t know what that is in Celsius, but it’s just slightly above body temperature.
So it’s like a low gentle pleasant air, temperature is warm and soothing, but it’s not oppressive. It’s not hot. And far infrared saunas will run at 151 60 Fahrenheit, typically a Spanish, a wet sauna, maybe 180, maybe 200 degrees, even Fahrenheit. So, these types of saunas, a lot of people can withstand that type of heat. Whereas the near infrared, not only overheating the body up more efficiently and getting a sweat response faster, we’re doing it in a gentler more tolerable environment. So that’s the number one difference from the sauna heat therapy perspective. This is a radiant, more efficient way to heat the body, and it’s at a lower temperature and general like, if we’re going to look at all these different ways to heat the body, let’s do it in the most efficient fashion. Nobody has any time for this healing stuff anyway. So the most efficient way to heat the body is the best.
And if we look kind of historically, at the use of incandescent bulbs, how are they originally used. They were used to heat livestock. So you can see that in old Philips… And there’s a big misnomer in the sauna history, hey, far infrared penetrates deeper. That’s a common claim out there. But this has been well understood for hundred years by farmers. And you can see it in the Phillips light bulb data sheets, that they would be selling them to farmers, hey, NIRA, the near infrared band penetrates deeper and they have a little tissue penetration graph versus wavelength.
So, it’s very well understood for a long time, it’s very well understood in physics, the optical window of the body within which wavelengths penetrate the most deeply is really the red and near infrared band. And what’s interesting about that is, there’s some coincidences here that you can kind of tie in. Sunlight is, but if you look at one study or another, it’s between 43 and over 50, or even over 50%, of sunlight submission is near infrared. So that’s like the largest plurality, or maybe even the majority of the sunlight in our experience with the primary light source in nature, it’s all near infrared. It’s only a 4% or 5% or something ultraviolet. So the healing nutritive component of sunlight is near infrared, and the largest and the [inaudible 00:15:07].
And then the next fact that you should recognize is what I just said, the optical window of the human body is created by hemoglobin and water. Hemoglobin absorbs most everything below 600 nanometers, 400 to 600 nanometers. So the high energy light, UV, blue, and so forth. Water begins to absorb light at 1000 or 1200 nanometers, by 1500 it’s very strong absorption. So this optical window that’s about 600 to 1400 nanometers, that’s visible red light we can see, and near infrared light that we don’t see, those are the only wavelengths that really get deep in the body. And the deepest ones are the near infrared at about 830 nanometers.
So, that’s fact number two. This is the most of the light in nature, this is our natural light that we’re exposed to. This is the light that gets deepest into the body. Near infrared is the only wavelength that has been shown to significantly penetrate bone tissue. And then fact number three, the mitochondria. So, the cytochrome c protein in the mitochondria, it’s the magic of light therapy. So, it absorbs near infrared and red wavelengths of light and upon their absorption, it activates a lot of healing cellular properties. Reduction of inflammation, epigenetic repair, regenerative effects, metabolism increasing effects, vasodilation effects, and since we have mitochondria in almost every cell of our body, this is a specific healing system. It’s like something that all cells and all tissue types benefit from. Nerves, kidneys, blood, bones, you name it.
So, the same light, that’s the largest chunk of sunlight, is the same light that gets the deepest into our body, is the same light that uniquely and exclusively activates mitochondrial healing systems. What we call red light or photobiomodulation therapy. So, it all makes sense. Like, we obviously got a big dose of this in nature, and so with these lamps, we get that same dose in the sauna. So, it’s a whole different additional therapy that we get only because we use incandescent technology. [crosstalk 00:17:28] So it’s really unique to Sauna SpaceSauna, and I think it’s a real game changer. It makes the detox more effective, less stressful. It gives us more energy to do things. There’s even, we can get into a little bit, there’s definitely cellular synergistic effects of the two.
Some wavelengths of near infrared have been shown to accelerate the production of heat shock proteins. And there’s certain systems in the body that require heat and near infrared light at the same time to function optimally. It’s not just like, heat therapy does its thing light therapy, does it. No, these are two actors that in nature we got together an alliance of light and heat.
Stu
00:18:11 I am sold. Send me everything that you’ve got. Stop production, just send it over, I want some of that.
Brian
00:18:18 Yeah. Get in line right now, we’re going back up.
Stu
00:18:22 Get to the back of the queue. So, I’m keen then just to talk a little bit more in depth about the benefits, the main benefits really about the infrared sauna. And you spoke about, like mitochondria health, and for everybody out there doesn’t know about mitochondria, essentially the power plants of the cells. So, they are our cellular batteries. And when we’re not functioning optimally from a mitochondrial perspective, we’re going to feel naked. So, I’m really intrigued as to why people purchase your products and what they’re hoping to achieve. And we mentioned like detoxification and heat shock protein, which I’ve been reading a lot about lately, which is really, really quite interesting.
And I’ve also been hearing about human growth hormone. About the increasing production of human growth hormone as well. People have been liking sauna sessions to the equivalent high interval intensity, or high intensity interval training sessions as well, because of blood pressure and everything that’s going on in the body. So for cardiovascular health. Tell us a little bit about the main benefits that people like me, Joe Public would say, “Yeah, I want some of that.”
Brian
00:19:41 Well, from a bird’s eye perspective, how about reducing all cause mortality? So, let’s reduce the risk of dying of everything, which means we can live longer, healthier, one would think, more fruitful happy lives.
Stu
00:19:55 Yeah. That’s a big one.
Brian
00:19:57 That’s a 20 year Finnish human studies that came out about three or four years ago, that’s probably the most dramatic. But if we look at other saunas studies, we see, with human studies not just cell cultural studies, human studies with marked reductions in risk of Alzheimer’s, risk of stroke, risk of Parkinson’s. So, it seems to work in reducing the incidence of almost every disease for which it’s studied. It’s one of the most widely studied natural modalities really, and I think it’s no coincidence if we get away from the studies and we look at human culture, almost every culture has some kind of sauna or sweat lodge tradition or the Korean hot pools, everybody is doing this for a long time. If we look at it now, now it’s so well studied. It’s because it has that twofold effect. On the one hand it’s cleansing and detoxifying, but on the other it’s rebuilding and re-sculpting. So,
00:21:00 You have increased BDNF protection in the neurons in the brain. That’s like Miracle Gro for your brain cells.
Stu
00:21:07 Yeah.
Brian
00:21:08 You have the proteins that are not working well, are fixed and refolded and corrected and moved around, too, so that they’re in the right position and right location. That’s called proteostasis. There’s optimal levels of certain proteins here and there inside and outside the cell.
But, yeah, basically, if you look at, and I, of course, make no medical claims. Let’s just look at what the customers report. Our customers primarily, although we are more mainstream now and we’re well known, they’re primarily people with serious illness.
Stu
00:21:46 Yeah.
Brian
00:21:46 And serious health issues. And they’re coming to this, you know, with not just one problem, but many problems. And quite often after having tried conventional approaches and having failures, and maybe even getting worse, or just not getting any better. Our customers, you know, you can just read some of the hundreds and hundreds of reviews online, everything from autoimmune issues to cardiovascular issues, to just aches and pains, that type of stuff, to neurological, neuropathic issues, like TBI and neuropathies and edemas. And all these weird things that people have now a days. These diseases of civilization. That you name it, there’s a new name for it.
Like autoimmune, in America, is now one of the top five killers of Americans. It’s not like people are living with autoimmune, people are dying of it.
Stu
00:22:42 Yep.
Brian
00:22:43 All these things, cancer rates are exploding and autoimmune is exploding and what do you do? And if you look at, there’s actually an interesting infographic I just saw. I don’t remember if it was in nature or science, but it had an infographic of the top 10 most profitable pharmaceutical drugs.
Stu
00:23:03 Yeah.
Brian
00:23:03 And then it had little human icons for reported success rates. And, the number one most successful one was successful in like one out of four people. But most of them were reported like, one out of 20, or one out of 50 reported improvement in symptoms.
Stu
00:23:22 Wow.
Brian
00:23:23 We’re spending incredible amounts of money and these things are not just, they’re not just, apparently not working well and have very low success rates, they actually come with a lot of baggage. A lot of side effects, and other things.
And that’s really what’s interesting about sonar, about light therapy. If you keep it to a low dose, a low save dose, so you sit in our sauna, you sit in there for a half hour, an hour maximum per day, you do what’s called hormesis or hormetic stress, where you have a beneficial health response by getting a measured dose of this stuff.
What’s the right dose? What I just told you, but also look in nature. You look at light therapy. You want to get an ancestral dose of near infrared light. That’s 40 to 60 milli watts per centimeter squared on the equator, I think. Is about what you get. If you hit that, you’re doing what, in the scientific literature is called, low level light therapy.
These are not laser beams, and they’re not even like LEDs. They have LED light therapy where you’ll stand in front of a red light panel or something, for a very short period of time, five or six or seven minutes, and that’s as much as you can take. And you actually have … It’s almost like a conventional medical approach to things. It’s like, let’s give one wavelength in a really high dose and get the thing done.
Stu
00:24:51 Yeah.
Brian
00:24:52 But the body needs time. You do things slowly and carefully. And that’s what sauna does, and that’s what this low level light therapy does from incandescent light. Is that slowly but surely, cleanses and rebuilds the body from the cells up. From the inside and the outside up. From literally, from, the electromagnetic quantum level up, this light therapy stuff. And the heat, as well. So that, it really doesn’t matter what your lot is in life, and what your symptoms are and what you’re complaining about, if you can maintain a discipline of using this, all the reports are and all the science supports that you will get better.
It definitely comes in … You have to commit to it a little bit with the use of it, and also changing your lifestyle. If you’re eating at fast food everyday and smoking and drinking all the time, that’s going to counteract the effects that we’re trying to achieve.
Stu
00:25:48 Yes.
Brian
00:25:49 But it seems like our, just as our health declined in western civilization, and civilization in general, is come from getting away from nature and being in this really weird, artificial and modern environment all the time, so too is the path in the opposite direction, the solution. We need more natural light. More natural food. More natural environment, and then we can use these tricks.
If you sit in front of these lights, you trick the body into thinking that it’s getting near infrared light, the beneficial light from the sun. And if you heat the body in a sustained fashion, but in a limited duration, you get it to heal itself. You give it a little bit of a boost to heal itself. Just like your doing it, your trying to exercise at the gym, like you mentioned, you’re doing this hormetic stress this, where you’re trying to do a limited high intensity thing to get these beneficial results. But you don’t want to do too much.
Stu
00:26:45 Yeah.
Brian
00:26:45 What’s really interesting, though, and probably more important than the sauna, is the restorative, rejuvenative effects that you get. More is not better, and people, a lot of people want to go to the gym to look and feel better, but what they really need to appreciate is the body needs time to rest and restore, as well. That’s what they call, in high school biology, they call it fight or flight.
Stu
00:27:09 Yeah.
Brian
00:27:09 Rest and digest.
Stu
00:27:11 Yes.
Brian
00:27:12 It’s rest and digest and heal. And the ancestral human was, most of the day, in that rest and digest state. And he was healing, healing, healing most of time. And had a little bit of high intensity light environmental stress response.
Today, we have flipped that equation and absolutely to our detriment.
Stu
00:27:31 Yeah, no, crikey, I could not agree more. We are tired and wired 24/7. I’m keen, then, to talk about the specifics of how we’d actually use the sauna to benefit our busy lives. Now, you mentioned that it was 30 to 60 minutes, but how often would we do this? Can we do it once a day? Can we do it everyday? And when we use it, is there an optimal time? I’m thinking first thing in the morning versus last thing at night.
Brian
00:28:03 For me, I had insomnia issues.
Stu
00:28:06 Right.
Brian
00:28:06 You get a pair of sympathetic relaxation response when you sit in a sauna and when you do light therapy. For me, in the beginning, it was key for me to do it right before bed.
Stu
00:28:16 Okay.
Brian
00:28:17 And that was like … Especially, if you have sleep issues, use it right before bed. You’re probably severely unsympathetic dominance, and you’re all … You’re like this and you’re laying in bed and your body’s completely geared incorrectly for going to sleep.
Stu
00:28:29 Yeah.
Brian
00:28:30 If you have sleep issues, use it right before bed.
Stu
00:28:32 Okay.
Brian
00:28:33 If you have energy issues, or just overall other energetic or just general health issues, you might want to do it in the morning. I love to do it the morning, because it really calibrates me for the day. It honest to god, makes you want to live a healthier, do healthier things, have healthier habits during the day. From what you eat to just how you’re speaking to people. And whether you’re going … You’re like, I don’t know if I have enough energy to go to the gym afterwards, or go to that yoga class. It’s really, it centers me and puts me in a flow state, to do it in the morning.
I do it every morning. I sit in my favorite A sauna for 20 minutes, with these new bulbs, actually, that get you a sweat response so fast. And then I scrub off in the shower, do a bristle brush scrub off for lymphatic activation, and then I go on about my day. But, since there’s no blue light at all, these incandescent bulbs don’t disrupt this. If you look at this, this is not a clear incandescent bulb, it’s actually, this is the new Sauna Space bulb coming out very soon. It’s red stained glass. There is no blue emission here, at all. That means this doesn’t mess with your sleep cycle.
Stu
00:29:49 Great.
Brian
00:29:50 That’s why you can use it before bed and you shouldn’t have, it shouldn’t disrupt that at all.
But, I say, use it when it works in your day.
Stu
00:30:02 Yeah.
Brian
00:30:02 It is a commitment. You do need to use it, so wherever it fits in. If you are going to work out, you would want to do this after your workout. Because in your workout you’re doing this high intensity stuff for the growth hormone effects, and other beneficial effects, but you’re absolutely pushing your body into a fight or flight, excited state. We want to relax after that. Especially if you go to work and then you work out at the end of the day. You follow up with the Sauna Space sessions after that, to calm the nervous system, to get it ready for the evening. And eventually for sleep.
Stu
00:30:33 Okay, no, that’s good advice. And your thoughts then on perhaps mixing the infrared sauna sessions with cold therapy, as well? Because I know that on the other end of the camp, we’re hearing lots online about the benefits of cold exposure, cold therapy, in terms of start the day with a nice, cold shower. If you finished your sauna, jump straight into the cold shower. Have you tried that? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Brian
00:31:01 I do. The classic finish routine is hot cold hot.
Stu
00:31:07 Yes.
Brian
00:31:08 And so, absolutely. It’s called cold thermo genesis. And, it’s interesting that the cold has a similar effect on the mitochondria as the heat. You cool the body down so much that the mitochondria and the cells start producing heat to bring the mitochondrial proteins closer together, to make energy production and energy transfer more efficient.
And that’s what the heat does too. The heat liquefies the cell, brings the proteins together, and has a beneficial effect. What I would say, though, is that traditionally, my understanding and I think the research supports this, is that you always follow cold with hot.
Stu
00:31:46 Right.
Brian
00:31:47 Or ideally, anyway.
Stu
00:31:49 Yeah.
Brian
00:31:49 You an either do hot cold hot, or cold and then hot and then you get this, the cold and then the hot, you get this amazing stem cell release and all these other benefits too, that the cold helps out with. And it also, it makes the sauna session afterwards so glorious, right?
Stu
00:32:05 Yeah.
Brian
00:32:07 But, what’s interesting about the sauna is, I’ve measured this myself and I’ve had other people measure it, as well. When you do a Sauna Space session for, and you get a nice sweat response and your body’s warmed up three degrees, it will take several hours to drop back down to resting body temperature.
Stu
00:32:07 Right.
Brian
00:32:25 That whole time you’re getting some kind of healing goodness going on, well after your sauna session. I highly recommend, if you’re going to do cold, to follow it up with hot. Some people will disagree with me, and that’s cool. Some people are like, okay, if I’m going to take a shower I always take a cold shower, because I mine as well get some cold therapy while I’m in there.
Stu
00:32:46 Yeah.
Brian
00:32:46 And some people follow up the hot sauna session with a cold shower. Sometimes, if it’s warm out, and it’s summer and I still, I love doing sauna all throughout the year for the benefit and for the clarity of mind that I get. It is fun sometimes, to do cold shower afterwards. I’ll admit that I’m not as disciplined with cold as some people. Some people say, okay, you got to do below 52 degrees fahrenheit and it’s got to be really cold in there, right?
Stu
00:33:16 Yeah.
Brian
00:33:16 And some people, they have chest … They buy a freezer, fill it up with water. I find that if you just build up to that, just for, just start out with regular, tepid tap water, tepid temperature, and just get in that, that’ll feel really cold. And just do that for ten minutes. And then get into the sauna.
But I highly recommend it. It’s just, I think for most people it’s a little bit of an issue with time.
Stu
00:33:42 Yeah, I think so.
Brian
00:33:43 You’re doing hot cold hot, or cold hot, it becomes a very long investment of time. And if you don’t have time for that, I would still recommend the sauna for the unique benefits of the light and heat therapy.
Stu
00:33:54 Got it.
Brian
00:33:54 But if you have the time, you have the space … If I had more space at my home I would probably have a chest freezer and do it that way. Which I know Luke Story is doing that and others. There’s a lot of innovative ways to do that.
Stu
00:34:06 Yeah. No, that is good advice. I do have a friend who actually plunges himself in a chest freezer once a week. And, yeah, to everybody that isn’t aware of that kind of stuff, it always looks so bizarre, to be crawling into that. But, yeah, I hear that there are many amazing health benefits coming from that.
I was also interested in your thoughts on three letters. EMF. People now are starting to become aware of magnetic fields and wireless radiation. Things like that. And, typically then, I might think of a scenario where I’m getting into a traditional, perhaps, infrared sauna, where you open the door and you climb into this glowing box. Your thoughts on EMF as a concern for general sauna use? And I guess how it stacks up with your products, too?
Brian
00:35:03 It depends on who you ask, right?
Stu
00:35:03 Yeah.
Brian
00:35:05 If you read the New York Times just recently, they had an article that was titled, it was like, 5G Cellphone Technology Won’t Harm Your Health, but the Russians Want you to Think So. As if it’s some kind of Russian conspiracy to take over the world and destroy everybody’s health. It’s mocked, right?
Stu
00:35:27 Yeah.
Brian
00:35:28 In the mainstream. And yet, at the same time, there’s literally, in the US, federally funded studies that are … There’s one in particular that showed a very serious production and development of carcinogenic tumors in rats using 2G and 3G technologies, and estimating like a 10 year dose rate.
But then they say, oh, well, humans are bigger. We can handle higher doses. And we’re not going to get carcinomas. Excuse me. The problem is, all of the safety studies are based on whether it produces a thermal effect.
Stu
00:36:05 Yeah.
Brian
00:36:06 If it doesn’t heat up the body and the tissue then it’s not damaging anything, right? The answer’s wrong. No, it actually is. You can look up, for those who want to dive deep into the research, you can look up Dr. Martin Paul’s work. He’s done the seminal work of showing that there is biological effect of non-ionizing, non-thermal radiation. What happens, is basically two simple things. We have voltage systems in our bodies. The primary, most ubiquitous one, is probably the voltage gated calcium ion channels.
For those of you that don’t know, calcium is not all about your bones. Most of your calcium’s in your bones, but the most intriguing, fascinating role for calcium in the body, is called calcium signaling. This is cellular communication, inside and outside the cell, that’s involved in cell motility when you flex your arm to just the cell communicating with the mitochondria has implications in causing cell death or preventing cell death. It’s, you know, an evolutionary communication system, that’s at the cell level, and it dates back to the incorporation of the mitochondria into the body.
Every cell of the body uses this system for various purposes. What happens when you’re exposed to even a low level of electric field, think about a cell phone signal from a tower, hitting your body. Regardless of whether you have a phone on you or not. And what happens is, the voltage gates open and millions of calcium ions flood into the cell. And that causes way too much reactive oxygen species to be produced, including free radicals. And then there’s a cascade called the proxy nitrite cycle, that leads to, basically, way too much oxidative stress and free radical formation.
For those of you who … The tie in is, hey, all of a sudden we have a clear, cellular mechanism, by which non-ionizing radiation is causing free radical formation. Free radicals damage the DNA. They cause mutations. That’s what x-rays do. And a couple days of having a cell phone on your body on and transmitting all the time, is in one study I read, was shown to be roughly equivalent to getting an x-ray. This is something where it’s not something that kills you in a day, but it does effect you. And since you, there’s almost no where you can’t get a cellphone signal, this is a 24 hour stress.
Stu
00:38:40 Yeah.
Brian
00:38:41 24 hours a day you have this subtle electro-smog that’s opening your calcium channels and causing oxidative stress. Causing free radical formation. And that’s the cellular effects that are now clinical associations to disease. To cancer, heart disease, insomnia, and depression, schizophrenia.
It’s no coincidence that the highest density of voltage gated calcium ion channels is in the brain. And in the nerves. It makes us psycho. It makes us insane. And it aggravates neurological disease. And it’s definitely associated with it. But it’s not something that, it effects you in a day. That’s why it’s so tricky, it’s so pernicious. And at the same time, here in America they passed a law in the ’70s that made third party law suits due to adverse effects on your health, due to cellphone signal exposure, they made it against the law to sue the telecom manufacturers.
Stu
00:39:42 Right
Brian
00:39:43 There is no legal recourse, even, where there was in the case of big tobacco, for example.
Stu
00:39:49 Yeah.
Brian
00:39:49 They’ve already got the regulation locked down. And now it’s becoming more and more pervasive. And you could say, well, we’re getting 5G now, so we’ll have little transmitters with more bandwidth and higher frequency, so we’ll have less wattage, less signals. But that’s not what happens.
What they’re planning is not to turn off 4G technology and turn on 5G. They’re basically adding 5G in, and then they’re taking the 4G LTE frequencies and they’re doubling and tripling and quadrupling the wattage.
Stu
00:40:21 Right.
Brian
00:40:22 What’s the dosage level at which the straw starts to break the camels back? We don’t know. But something that’s not even been studied. And there’s clear indication that at the cellular level, and already growing indication in animal and human studies, that there are adverse biological effects. Without belaboring the issue too much, it’s certainly something you wouldn’t want in your healing space, right?
Stu
00:40:44 Yeah, yeah.
Brian
00:40:44 You’re trying to do sauna, to heal, restore your body, and you wouldn’t meditate in a polluted environment.
Stu
00:40:50 Yeah.
Brian
00:40:50 But you’re going to do healing in sauna in a polluted environment? No. Ideally you wouldn’t have that in there. That’s kind of the case for trying to mitigate it and remove it from the sauna situation.
We’ve done that. We’ve done that in two ways. One, we’ve completely locked down the technology itself.
I can show you real quick with a meter, if you want. Anything that’s electrical produces a voltage.
Stu
00:41:18 Yes.
Brian
00:41:19 And we basically use shielding and grounding principles to prevent the voltage that’s inherent in the electricity, from reaching the user. I have a little electric field meter here. It measures volts per meter.
Stu
00:41:32 Yeah.
Brian
00:41:33 If I measure this inside of the Faraday guard we’ve created, you get voltage.
Stu
00:41:39 Yeah.
Brian
00:41:39 You hear the click, click, click. You have the voltage. If you surround it in a grounded Faraday guard, you really have nothing. And then … Again, if you get in there, and get close, it’s there.
Stu
00:41:52 Yeah. Got it.
Brian
00:41:53 That’s what’s going on in here. We have, basically, use all shielded internal wiring, a shielded power cord, a grounded
00:42:00 … a Faraday guard. And for those of you that may say, “Oh, well how can that be a Faraday cage?,” it’s got holes in it. It’s just a wire form guard. Well, electricity runs at 50 or 60 hertz. That’s the frequency. And the wavelength of that is like 22 or 23 feet. That’s, whatever, six or seven meters. So it’s super long and it doesn’t get out of there.
And so what we’ve done is we’ve been able to completely remove any internal EMF issues from the sauna experience. But unfortunately, that’s only half of the game, that’s half of the solution. The other half is what about the environmental EMF.
Stu
00:42:38 Yes.
Brian
00:42:39 And I’m talking about non-native EMF. You have it from dirty electricity, from microwave signal, Bluetooth, radio waves, telephone, you name it. There’s so much flying around. I watched this in a … I heard this in a Doctor Mercola talk. He said that there’s a billion, billion times more signals flying around the earth in the gator hertz range than there was a hundred years ago.
Stu
00:43:05 Wow.
Brian
00:43:05 So it’s just a massive amount of stuff out there, and so ideally you would be able to create a protective … you can protect the entire sauna space from that. And so we’ve done that with our Faraday liner system. We’re using basically a second generation now, stainless steel grounded liner that’s on all five sides and it’s built underneath the bamboo of our mat of our sauna and it’s all connected together and grounded through the light panels ground system to the wall. So as long as you plug it into an outlet that is grounded, you have an almost complete attenuation of all of this wireless EMF that’s flying through the air, so all the electric field.
And doing that is not a trivial thing. It was really tricky to do design-wise and get it to work right. But in terms of the therapeutic experience, it’s just really game-changing. When you go inside, it’s like … it’s almost quiet to the senses. You feel like … it just is quiet. It’s not audibly quiet. It’s sensibly quiet. It’s really almost strange the first time you experience it. And I think that’s because we have this all day long.
Stu
00:44:18 Yeah, yeah.
Brian
00:44:19 Just all day long, everywhere. And our bodies are accustomed to it. You get accustomed to these habits, and the high stress environments and the high stress things we do are actually addictive in a way. And so we get used to it. We trick ourselves into liking it, but it’s not our natural human environment. And so when you get back into that, the body’s like, “Wow. This feels amazing.” It’s just super meditative and zen inside. And certainly, I think the sweat response and the healing is much better. The body is not … For the first time ever in what we’re doing here, there is zero nervous stress, there’s zero sympathetic stress in the environment. The only stimulus inside of the Faraday sauna that we created is this parasympathetic stimulus of heat and of healing with light.
So it’s super awesome. And obviously, it’s strange that we’re like … Nobody in the sauna world is even dealing with the internal EMF stress. And I don’t want to toot my horn too much, but this is really game-changing to take the entire environment, protect the entire environment. And you feel it inside. Even though it’s a new product for us, we feel like it’s fundamentally better. And it takes this sauna and this light therapy that’s already something that helps everybody almost with everything it seems and it makes it even more effective.
Stu
00:45:49 Yeah. And I would have to guess that most of us, myself included, wouldn’t even know what that feels like in order to shield yourself from all of the craziness in terms of wireless radiation and everything else that’s flying around in our environment as well. And I spoke to a friend a while back who spent some time in Patagonia and he said, “Boy, it’s just a completely different feeling out there because no … you never get a signal on anything.” And he said, “It just felt really, really unusual, very calming.” So yeah, that’s amazing to hear what you’ve done with your systems as well.
So if we wanted to install a system at home, and I can see you’ve got the lamp there and you were showing me some new bulb technology earlier, where would we start? Do we need the complete unit? What does it look like?
Brian
00:46:45 Yeah. So you have to go to SaunaSpace.com to check it out. But basically, this is the targeted therapy product. We call it the Photon. It’s one light, you can use it for spot therapy kind of. You can also use it for environmental therapy, so it cancels out flickers effect which you get from fluorescent and LED lighting. It’s-
Stu
00:47:05 Okay.
Brian
00:47:07 All of these fluorescent and LED light sources flicker many times a second.
Stu
00:47:11 Yeah.
Brian
00:47:12 Imagine it’s kind of like a strobe light in your face.
Stu
00:47:15 Yeah.
Brian
00:47:16 And so people are using it for environmental therapy too, to make our indoor environments less toxic and more natural.
Stu
00:47:22 Sure.
Brian
00:47:23 It’s also a source of blue light-free lighting after dark. So it’s pretty cool. It has a lot of interesting applications. But it’s definitely an add-on to the sauna.
Stu
00:47:32 Yeah.
Brian
00:47:32 So the SaunaSpace sauna looks like … kind of like a traveling fortune teller’s tent or something.
Stu
00:47:32 Yeah.
Brian
00:47:40 It’s got kind of Minaret-shaped door and a curtain on it, and you go inside and it’s got a tribal aesthetic to it that’s really kind of back to nature. It’s very cleanly and simply designed. It’s very lightweight and portable. You get inside and there’s kind of like this steampunk-looking like panels, these four big, huge, 250-watt bulbs that have these … our stainless steel guards on them. And you sit on a stool in there and you basically sit in there naked and you rotate in front of these lamps and sweat and do a sauna session.
And so for those of you who have the space at home and are willing to take the leap, there’s nothing like the sauna. You’re talking about full body restoration, full body effects and benefits. But for those who may not have the space at home or are kind of just dipping their finger into this whole alternative health thing and pretty skeptical of all of it, this provides kind of an amazing entry point.
I think that it’s actually been shown with many of our customers to have systemic effects. So there’s this lady Diane Capaldi. She’s also called Paleo Boss Lady. She has progressive MS and she’s traveling around in a van promoting MS awareness. So she doesn’t have room for the sauna. She just had one of these photon lights. And she has these terrible body temperature regulation problems due to her MS where she can’t … her body heats up or cools down and she’s seemingly not in control of it. And so she just uses this on her feet and her gut and her face, and she’s actually had a systemic response. So using just this targeted therapy, she’s had an amelioration of her body temperature regulation systems. So it’s really fascinating. So it doesn’t replace the sauna, but it definitely gives you a wow effect and gives you an appreciation for why people use this thing.
I’m not just standing here at my office with this as a conversation piece for this recording. I use this every day.
Stu
00:49:46 Yeah.
Brian
00:49:47 It sits here and kind of makes the office environment, looking at the screen less stressful. And so it’s something that … it’s kind of like a portal fireplace as it were, and you can just put it anywhere. And that’s a great way to start out. But definitely if you’re talking about the longevity and all of the major disease reduction implications, those studies are coming from doing … basically sitting in the sauna.
Stu
00:49:47 Yeah.
Brian
00:50:18 And being serious about it, three times a week or more. And so I think you need to have it in your home and have it be convenient and accessible. Some people love to go to the gym, and that’s kind of like the European culture more, more of a social thing.
Stu
00:50:32 Yes. Yeah.
Brian
00:50:34 This is a little different. Our sauna’s more like individual, it’s personal, you’re in your home, especially with the Faraday shielding system. It’s really … I don’t want more … I get enough social environment during the day, I get enough interaction with people and stresses and just everything, all this sensory overload in the outside world, so I really look forward to just having that time by myself. And for those who have ever read or can appreciate maybe the benefits of meditation or of concentration or just being present essentially, they’re wondrous. And so it’s also a perfect time to kind of do that too.
Stu
00:51:13 Yeah.
Brian
00:51:13 Either your Wim Hof meditation or whatever relaxation practice you want to do. So you can sit inside, you can listen to some kind of audio thing if you want. Ideally you don’t do anything, but that’s kind of hard for some people in the beginning.
Stu
00:51:27 Yeah. Just switch off and reset. Absolutely.
Brian
00:51:30 But yeah, you can have something in airplane mode on your home and listen to a book on tape or something. Absolutely.
Stu
00:51:38 Great stuff. So we’re just about coming up on time, but I’m keen to just touch on the future for Inference Solar as well. And I know you were showing me those bulbs that you have in the background as well, and they look like-
Brian
00:51:51 Oh yeah.
Stu
00:51:53 Yeah. Worthy of a conversation. Just tell us a little bit.
Brian
00:51:57 Yeah. So this is really interesting. So SaunaSpace … I’ve actually been working on this for three years.
Stu
00:52:03 Yeah.
Brian
00:52:03 And it’s been kind of a long labor of love, a lot of work to get it done, but it’s SaunaSpace artisan bulbs. So these are … This is the world’s first bulb that’s been specifically designed for human therapeutic use.
Stu
00:52:19 Right.
Brian
00:52:20 Basically instead of just the heat lamp you would buy at the store, which is still very common here in America, what we sold prior to now, this is a … this is totally next level, it’s totally a game changer. So first of all, this is not machine-blown glass. This is actually mouth-blown, hand-rolled glass.
Stu
00:52:41 Oh wow.
Brian
00:52:41 You can look up online what mouth-blown glass is. It’s insane.
Stu
00:52:44 Yeah.
Brian
00:52:45 So these are literally handmade bulbs. And instead of them being soft glass, they’re tempered hard glass for durability.
Stu
00:52:52 Right.
Brian
00:52:52 And instead of it being just … The regular heat lamps are basically dyed red on the inside with a sprayed dye internally. So these bulbs, in contrast, are actually red-stained glass. And so they’re super beautiful and super … the color is perfect on them. But that’s not even what’s really interesting about it. Those are more aesthetic things at the end of the day.
What I’ve done on the inside is all the magic, so I’ve redesigned the filament. I’ve kind of reinvented this light bulb. And I’ve redesigned the filament so that it runs hotter. And for those of you … Maybe you don’t know the science, but incandescence and the spectral emission of incandescence is determined by the temperature of the source.
Stu
00:53:42 Right.
Brian
00:53:42 So the sun is like 6000 degrees, and so it has a bell curve broad spectral emission that has a lot of visible light, a lot of blue light as well. And this is running at 2400 Kelvin or 2800 Kelvin or something like that, but it’s basically running a lot hotter than a regular heat lamp. So not only do we get more heat and you feel it, how much hotter it is, we get a higher percent emission of near-infrared red wavelengths. So we get from this bulb, and I can show you … you’ll see it eventually on the website.
Stu
00:54:20 Yeah.
Brian
00:54:21 These bulbs emit about three to five times the therapeutic irradiance of near-infrared and red wavelengths as a standard bulb. So we get a faster, quicker sweat session and we get more photobiomodulation at the same time. So I think I mentioned it earlier in the talk, I used to do a 35-minute session.
Stu
00:54:42 Yes.
Brian
00:54:42 Typically.
Stu
00:54:43 Yeah.
Brian
00:54:43 Would love that. And it took me that long to really sweat profusely for about 10 minutes. Now, I don’t preheat at all, I just get into the cold sauna, flick the lights on with these new bulbs, and I’m sweating really strongly in like 10 minutes.
Stu
00:54:57 Wow.
Brian
00:54:57 And I’m done in 20 minutes. They’re outrageously awesome. They’re totally next level.
Stu
00:54:57 Fantastic.
Brian
00:55:05 And they’re coming out next month. And I’m actually holding in my hand, this is 240-volt version.
Stu
00:55:09 Yeah, yeah.
Brian
00:55:09 If you can see right there.
Stu
00:55:09 Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Brian
00:55:12 So we will … it will have the same bulb, the same emission, the same quality and color and everything in the American 120-volt version, and then for those abroad, the 240-volt version as well. So you would use there in Australia.
Stu
00:55:24 Fantastic. Very, very exciting. And certainly keen to find out more about that. And so for everybody then that wants to learn more about you and your story, they want to dive into your products and learn about the tech and possibly trial some of the products as well, where could we send them? What’s the best web address?
Brian
00:55:46 So that would be SaunaSpace.com. You can see the product there. You can dive deep into the science too. I’ve written some long, maybe a little bit boorish articles, but a lot of inline citation for folks who like to read the white papers and the literature. So there’s a lot of resources on there. I’ve also done a lot of recordings now. So if you want to dive deep on various things, you can see me on YouTube or just search on the internet for me.
I’m real crazy about this stuff. It’s really fascinating. And definitely in the beginning, I had no idea of any of the science or any of the EMF or anything else. But the more I researched, it just is so fascinating. Some of the things that I’m looking into now, like the … we don’t have time to talk about, but there’s real hormonal regulatory optimization effects of doing sauna, like … There’s also immunoprotective effects where the heat of the sauna is making autoimmune response less aggravated, so it’s being shown to reverse diabetes and calm the immune system and help it deal with inflammatory proteins. And so those have … and the hormone resistance that we mentioned earlier, reducing that. Those are real effects that you’re having on the hormonal system, which is the communication system of the body. It’s just fascinating. And this is pretty hot, pretty new research, but really interesting.
And for those who want to dive deep, you can go to the PubMed and you can search LLLT, low level light therapy.
Stu
00:55:46 Yeah.
Brian
00:57:18 You’ll see 5000 studies on it. You can go there and look up sauna or look up hyperthermic therapy or heat therapy. You’ll see several thousand studies now. So it’s really compelling. But definitely, if you want to … A great place to start is our science page and our research archive that we have and some of the articles I’ve written. And the product is on the site of course. And if you want to try it out, we give a long, generous trial. And not quite free shipping yet worldwide, but we do have a lot lower rates now, just in the last month actually, to the UK and to Australia. So we’re actually really pumped about that. We’re working really hard to make it as accessible as possible.
Stu
00:57:59 Fantastic. Well, look. We’ll put all of the links in the show notes today, and really appreciate the conversation. You’re clearly so passionate about it. For me, it’s so interesting because this tech just has such broad ranging health implications, and it just seems such a serene thing to do at the end of the day or the start of the day, just to sit in there and just chill out and switch off and just absorb all of these amazing health benefits. So yeah, very, very interesting as part of our health toolkit I think. We’re certainly going to be hearing more and more about this as the weeks, months, and years go on. So thank you so much for your time today. Really, really, really excited about sharing this with our audience. And hopefully we’ll connect with you at some stage soon.
Brian
00:58:49 Yeah. We’ll definitely be in Australia at some point, but for now virtually. So yeah, thank you for having me. I’m always here. I love to talk about this stuff. It’s just really … I think I’ve stumbled onto something really different here.
Stu
00:58:49 Yeah.
Brian
00:59:05 And in the beginning I wasn’t sure and all that, but now I think it’s really starting to become appreciated, this different way of doing sauna and dealing with just all these different things that we have to deal with nowadays. And really, at the end of day, appreciating that, hey, natural healing is actually … Let’s use our consumer logic when we look at our health products and services. Natural things like what we do here at SaunaSpace and many other things as well have higher benefit and lower risk than most of these conventional offerings out of there, and that’s a better value.
Stu
00:59:43 Yeah. Always.
Brian
00:59:44 It really is. So instead using natural as a last resort, it should be the first resort.
Stu
00:59:49 Yeah. Every time. Fantastic. Okay. Thank you again, Brian. And we will speak soon.
Brian
00:59:54 Yeah, I’m sure we will. Thank you.
Stu
01:00:00 Okay. Take care. Bye bye.
