Nathan Siles survived retinal cancer at eight months and testicular cancer at twenty-four. He has spent over a decade studying under Dr. Jack Kruse, Gerald Pollock, Doug Wallace, Nick Lane, and Patrick McKeown to build a complete biophysics framework for health that begins with one non-negotiable: light first. He is the founder of Biospectral Systems — the company building the glasses, light bulbs, and EMF protection products designed to bring ancestral light biology into the modern world without requiring you to move off-grid. He wears his own Luca Nero frames daily. He has worked with thousands of patients across eleven years. Part 3 is inevitable.
I have to be honest with you. These two conversations with Nathan Siles — and the conversations I have been having with Dr. Jack Kruse's work separately — have genuinely shifted my priority stack. Not slightly adjusted it. Shifted it. Light health is now my number one priority. Not nutrition. Not training. Not supplements. Light. Sunrise first, blocking blue light after sunset, grounding, a proper sleep environment — dark, cool, and free from EMF. These are the foundations. They were always the foundations. The modern world just buried them under a supplement industry that profits when you don't know that the thing you are deficient in is not in a bottle.
The message of this episode — and the message I am aligned with, fully and enthusiastically — is actually the most optimistic health message available: you have more control over your health than you have been told, the tools are simpler than the biohacking community wants you to believe, and most of them are free. Sunrise is free. Grounding is free. Nasal breathing is free. A dark, cool bedroom costs nothing beyond the decision to turn the screens off.
I am proud to be partnered with Nathan and Biospectral Systems. What he is building — the glasses, the light bulbs, the EMF protection infrastructure — is the practical bridge between the ancestral light biology he teaches and the modern world most of us actually live in. The mission is aligned with everything this show stands for. And I am genuinely excited about what they have coming.
I Was Wrong — And I Cannot Be the Only One
I opened this episode by saying it directly: I was wrong. Not about everything. But about the priority order. I have spent years talking about nutrition, training, supplements, and recovery modalities as the levers of midlife performance. They matter. But they are downstream of something more fundamental — and I had the sequence inverted.
Nathan's framework, reinforced by Dr. Jack Kruse's work and verified by my own experiential learning over the last several months: light governs hormones. Hormones govern everything else. So if your testosterone is declining, your recovery is compromised, your energy crashes at two in the afternoon, your sleep is non-restorative — the first question is not what to put in your body. It is what is happening with your light environment, your morning routine, your evening habits. The answers upstream of the supplement aisle are almost always more powerful and always more permanent.
"If your body's not synthesizing its own testosterone — where is it broken down in the chain? A lot of the time it's not a mineral. It's light. It's frequency. It's an energetic programming you're not getting in your environment."
— Nathan Siles · @nathan.siles · Biospectral Systems · biospectralsystems.comThis is the reframe that changes everything: symptoms are navigation tools, not endpoint diagnoses. Low testosterone is not a testosterone problem. It is the body telling you that something upstream — in the light environment, the cortisol cycle, the EMF exposure, the timing of food and activity relative to the sun — is not aligned. Fix those things and the body, which was designed by millions of years of evolution to produce optimal hormones when the inputs are correct, will fix the rest.
The practical starting point Nathan gives for any 40-year-old man with low T who has never considered light as a variable: see the sun within forty minutes of sunrise, eat a protein-rich breakfast of thirty to fifty grams in that first hour, touch the earth, breathe through your nose in a green space, and stop looking at artificial blue light after sunset. Do those five things for thirty days and run your labs again. The results will speak.
The Cortisol-Testosterone Theft: Why Your Morning Screen Time Is Costing You More Than Sleep
The biochemistry is elegant in its logic once you understand it. Testosterone peaks between 8 and 9 AM. This is not arbitrary — it is circadian, governed by the light signal that tells the master clock in the hypothalamus what time it is and what the body should be doing. Cortisol also rises in the morning — this is appropriate and necessary. But when cortisol rises unnaturally high, it steals the precursors needed to produce testosterone. They share the same upstream biochemical pathway. When cortisol spikes from artificial light, EMF exposure, phone scrolling, or unnatural activity before the light signal has been properly received — testosterone pays the price.
- Sunrise within forty minutes of waking — outdoors, no glass. This is the master switch. The SCN clock gets set. Beta-endorphin releases. Cortisol is modulated. Testosterone can peak at 8–9 AM as designed. Nothing substitutes for this. A sunrise alarm or a red light panel is not the same thing. Get outside.
- Thirty to fifty grams of bioavailable protein in the first hour of light. The mitochondria are most active in the morning — they digest, process, and utilize food faster at this time than at any other. A protein-rich breakfast aligned with the circadian signal produces fundamentally different metabolic outcomes than the same meal eaten at noon or later. Eggs, breakfast meat, full-fat dairy — real food. Not a shake with synthetic amino acids.
- Touch the earth — barefoot grounding. The earth connection reduces cortisol, provides electrons that reduce oxidative stress, and contributes to the circadian signal. This is the piece most people dismiss as the woo-woo element of the protocol. It is not. It is physics — electron transfer through the skin from an electrically grounded surface that has been receiving photon energy from the sun for millennia.
- Nasal breathe in green space. UVA light hitting the nasal mucosa and skin during morning outdoor time stimulates nitric oxide — a vasodilator that improves circulation and oxygen delivery. Patrick McKeown's work on Buteyko breathing is excellent. Nathan's addition: combine nasal breathwork with UVA outdoor exposure and the nitric oxide benefit increases by at least fifty percent over indoor breathing practice alone.
- No artificial blue light after sunset. This is the cortisol brake at the other end of the day. Artificial light after dark signals the system that it is still daytime — cortisol stays elevated, melatonin is suppressed, testosterone synthesis during sleep is compromised. Blue-blocking glasses (Biospectral, Luca Nero frames — yellow lenses during the day for screens and LEDs, orange lenses after sunset) are the minimum viable intervention when complete screen avoidance is not possible.
- No Wi-Fi, no phone in the sleeping environment. EMF exposure during sleep disrupts the recovery cascade independently of light. This is not separate from the light protocol — it is part of the same environmental correction. The bedroom is a sanctuary or it is not working.
Buteyko vs. Wim Hof, the BOLT Score, and Why the Disease-in-an-Oxygen-Rich-Environment Claim Is Backwards
Nathan gave me the most complete breakdown of the breathwork debate I have encountered — and he managed to honor both modalities while being precise about what each one actually does and does not do.
The Buteyko method (named after Christian Buteyko, popularized for the modern world by Patrick McKeown) is hypercapnic breathing — training the body to become less sensitive to carbon dioxide, which allows more oxygen to actually reach the mitochondria. The more CO2 tolerance you build, the more oxygen gets pulled into productive cellular use. The result: better sustained performance, lower oxidative stress, more water produced in the mitochondria, and — for the grapplers in this community — the ability to have a genuine conversation while rolling hard while your training partner is gasping.
Wim Hof — technically called Tumo breathing — is hyperventilative. It floods the blood with oxygen acutely, creates an altered state through the breath hold, and has genuine therapeutic applications for releasing trauma stored in the nervous system through somatic work. Nathan's experience with a somatic breathwork session under a thirty-five-year expert — vomiting, crying, accessing belief systems from infancy — is the most honest account of what this breathing can unlock at depth. But it is a therapeutic tool, reserved for that context. As a daily training modality, it does not produce the long-term CO2 tolerance benefits of Buteyko.
"No disease can exist in an oxygen-rich environment — we absolutely had it backwards. Your body becomes more efficient with more CO2. Just like when it gets cold, it gets more efficient. Any hormesis makes the body get more efficient. Too much of anything good leads to weakness."
— Nathan Siles · @nathan.siles · Biospectral Systems · biospectralsystems.comThe BOLT score is the practical measurement tool — Body Oxygen Level Test. First thing in the morning: one natural breath in, one natural breath out, then hold the nose and time how long until the first urge to breathe. A score of 10 seconds means approximately 25 breaths per minute — associated with chronic disease. The global average is around 18 seconds. Patrick McKeown considers 40 seconds optimal — eight to ten breaths per minute, which is where elite athletes typically sit. Nathan went from 20 to 30 seconds through six months of consistent Buteyko practice. The research: ten breaths per minute less correlates with ten years of additional longevity. The math on moving from 25 to 8 breaths per minute is extraordinary.
- BOLT score — take it tomorrow morning before anything else. One breath in, one breath out, hold, count seconds to first breath urge. Track it weekly. Progress is the goal.
- Daily Buteyko practice — nasal only, reduced volume, outdoors in UVA where possible. Feather breathing: imagine a feather on your upper lip that must not fall. Extend the exhale. Build CO2 tolerance over weeks and months, not days. Nathan's walk protocol: hold nose for 50 steps, breathe gently through nose, repeat 10–15 times per morning walk.
- Feather breathing exit from any breath hold. After an apnea or retention, do not gasp. Slow nasal exhale, then slow nasal inhale. This preserves the CO2 that was built during the hold. Losing it in a gasp eliminates the benefit of the hold itself.
- Wim Hof / Tumo — reserve for somatic therapeutic use. Under supervision of an experienced practitioner. Not as a daily optimization tool. The acute oxygen flood has limited productive cellular benefit without the extended CO2-building practice of Buteyko. Both have a place. They are not interchangeable.
- UVA + nasal breathing outdoors simultaneously. The nitric oxide benefit of UVA light combines synergistically with nasal breathing to produce fifty percent greater NO release than either practice alone. Morning grounding + nasal breathwork outdoors is the most efficient protocol stack available — and it costs nothing.
The Supplement Industry Has You Looking Downstream. The Answer Is Always Upstream.
This is the section that produced the most honest self-examination on my part during the recording. Nathan and I both follow conversations with Dr. Jack Kruse, and Kruse's position on synthetic supplements is clear: they raise deuterium in the body. Synthetic creatine monohydrate — the most studied supplement in the world, the one every gym culture holds up as irreproachable — is, from a biophysics standpoint, extra mass the body has to process, a shortcut that creates a dependency because it is replacing something the body would produce naturally if the light and frequency environment were correct.
This does not mean throw everything in the bin tomorrow. Nathan is clear: he is not willing to say steer clear of everything regardless. In certain situations, certain supplements from high-quality natural sources can help. But the framework is the thing — and the framework is that if your body is not synthesizing its own testosterone, glutathione, melatonin, or DHA, the question is not what supplement addresses the deficiency. The question is where in the upstream chain something has broken down.
"If you can't do that because you justify your morality, then having a few supplements may help a small amount. It will never move the needle. You'll always be searching for the next astaxanthin or coenzyme Q10 or metformin or peptide. What's going to move the needle is training your body hormetically to be stronger. Going back to your primal blueprint."
— Nathan Siles · @nathan.siles · Biospectral Systems · biospectralsystems.comOn supplements he does use: Himalayan shilajit, fulvic and humic acid from a verified source, and salt — Baja gold or Fleur de Sel from France. He stores his water in glass, sources it as Icelandic spring (glass bottled where possible), and vortexes it from the top — not the bottom, which Nathan and Viktor Schauberger's work suggests actually reduces the electrical potential of water. On salt, he steers away from Celtic sea salt — which has had documented heavy metal contamination issues — in favour of properly tested sources.
The deuterium-depleted water section is the most technically dense in the episode and also the most practically useful. Nathan's home protocol from twelve years ago: freeze water in stages, pour off the unfrozen portion (which is deuterium-depleted) three times over six hours, reducing deuterium content from approximately 150 PPM to 141 PPM. Commercially produced deuterium-depleted water (DDW) reaches 10 PPM through vacuum distillation and electrolysis — expensive and technically demanding. He is working on a more accessible version. Watch that space.
Greco Gum, Meckel's Cave, and Why Chewing Is One of the Most Underrated Practices in the Protocol
The mastic gum section of this conversation is where Nathan connects several things that most people have never considered together: jaw mechanics, trigeminal nerve activation, vagus nerve function, cerebral spinal fluid flow, and deuterium depletion from the brain.
Nathan chews mastic gum daily — not primarily for the gut microbiome benefits (though those are real and well-documented) but for the chewing mechanism itself. When he was eight months old, radiation treatment for his retinal cancer atrophied the muscles and created scar tissue throughout his temple area. The chewing mechanism has been one of the primary tools for clearing that scar tissue and restoring blood flow through the region. He has seen results that no other practice produced.
The mechanism: chewing activates the trigeminal nerve — specifically the trigeminal ganglion deep in Meckel's cave, a pocket inside the brain that acts as a vacuum suction system for toxic lymphatic fluid and deuterium. Chewing the right side activates one branch, the left another. Consistent mastic gum chewing is, in Nathan's framework, a genuine brain detox practice — and it happens to also support gut health, help with candida and parasite overgrowth, and improve the entire circulatory system through the jaw and skull. I wear my Biospectral yellow-lens Luca Nero frames every day on the computer and under LEDs. I am adding consistent mastic gum chewing to the morning routine alongside grounding and sunrise. I am also extremely pleased that Greco Gum is a partner of this show — from the Greek island of Chios, the only place in the world where mastic resin is produced naturally. Use code IAMJOSHBUTTON for 10% off at grecogum.com.
The tongue posture conversation that followed is worth its own note: resting the tongue on the roof of the mouth (mewing) is foundational to nasal breathing, palate development, and airway opening. Nathan expanded his own upper palate fourteen millimeters through a three-year protocol with an osteopath and an adjustable light wire frame — no cranking, no forced expansion, just osteopathic manipulation held in place by the wire and supported by neurology that gradually accepted the new position. No regression. Permanent bone movement. He considers this mandatory for children and highly recommended for adults with narrow palates and mouth breathing tendencies.
The Indoor Revolution: Full-Spectrum Broadband Light Bulbs, Faraday Beanie, and the Products That Bridge Nature and the Modern World
Nathan gave us the first look at everything Biospectral is launching — and it is significant. The underlying principle: most people cannot live fully off-grid, fully disconnected from artificial environments. Biospectral's mission is to make the gap between natural and artificial as small as possible without requiring a lifestyle that the modern world cannot accommodate.
- Full-Spectrum Broadband LED/Incandescent Hybrid Light Bulbs — Launching October 1st. The product I am most excited about. Standard LED bulbs do not produce broadband infrared — which means the red light therapy and infrared sauna time you are investing in gets partially undone every moment you spend under standard LED lighting. These bulbs are a hybrid of LED and incandescent technology, producing 55% broadband infrared alongside the full visible spectrum. They negate the need for a separate infrared panel for people who use them throughout their living environment. Two versions: dimmable (allowing the spectrum to shift with dimming the way natural light shifts with the sun's angle) and day/night switch (for non-dimmable circuits). A combined single-bulb version integrating both functions arrives end of November/early December.
- Faraday EMF-Shielded Beanie — Two layers of 100% silver fabric inside, complete Faraday cage for the brain. Nathan wears his on planes and in cities. The argument: most people spending $75–$250 on pendants, stickers, and phone patches would get dramatically better results from this one product. Brain challenges — anxiety, ADHD, brain fog, depression — are all candidates for EMF mitigation. The beanie provides genuine shielding. The cost is accessible.
- Air Tube Earbuds — EMF protection for the ears without sacrificing function. Standard earbuds conduct EMF directly to the brain through the ear canal. Air tube earbuds interrupt the electrical pathway with an air gap — the sound travels through air rather than wire for the final distance. For people who need earbuds, this is the non-negotiable upgrade.
- Faraday Bags — For phones, laptops, and devices during sleep. Simple, effective, immediate EMF reduction in the sleeping environment without cutting off device function entirely.
- Red Light Helmets and Sleep Lamps — Targeted red and infrared delivery. For practitioners who want specific-application red light therapy integrated with the rest of the Biospectral ecosystem.
- Travel Kit — The complete portable protocol. Everything needed to maintain the light and EMF environment while travelling — when the hotel room is typically the most hostile sleeping environment in a person's week.
- Deuterium-Depleted Water Innovation — In development. Nathan is working on a more accessible, less expensive method of producing DDW than the current vacuum distillation processes. Two and a half years in development with physicists and building biologists. More coming.
The light bulb is the one I am telling everyone about immediately. The logic is too clear to dismiss: you invest in red light therapy, infrared saunas, cold plunges, and breathwork. Then you spend twelve to sixteen hours a day under standard LED bulbs that produce zero broadband infrared, actively disrupting the circadian signal and undoing some fraction of everything you just built. One bulb change per room. Replaces the red light panel for people who use the room consistently. And it conditions your cells continuously rather than requiring a dedicated twenty-minute session.
Resilience
Nathan's word in Part 1 was nature makes no mistakes. His word in Part 2 is resilience — and the definition he offers is the one that lands deepest for this community.
Resilience is not the capacity to endure suffering. It is the capacity to remain anchored in unified consciousness when the world around you is chaotic. To be calm on the mat when everyone else is gasping. To feel connected to your children, your partner, your own purpose in a moment when every stimulus is pulling in a different direction. To know that you are good — genuinely good — not because circumstances are good but because the body, the breath, and the light environment have built a biological foundation under you that holds.
"The greatest feeling in the world is what Josh described when he's calm and the world is chaotic around you. That feeling of unbelievable anchoring to unified consciousness — I'm good. That is real health. And it's your birthright. Nature is there to support you."
— Nathan Siles · @nathan.siles · Biospectral Systems · biospectralsystems.comThis is why light health is the first priority. Not because sunlight is trendy or because grounding makes a good Instagram photo. Because the biological resilience that produces genuine calm under pressure — the kind that makes a blue belt ask what is going on while you are laughing in side control — is built at the level of the mitochondria, the water matrix, the light environment, and the breath. You cannot supplement your way to it. You cannot biohack your way to it. You go upstream and you find it where it was always waiting.
Take your health sovereignty back. It is simpler than they told you. It is free to start. Watch the sunrise tomorrow. Block the light after sunset. Ground your feet. Breathe through your nose.
The rest will follow. It always does, when you go upstream first.
The Glasses I Wear · The Light Bulbs I Am Installing · The Mission I Believe In
I wear the Biospectral Luca Nero frames with yellow day lenses every day — on the computer, on the phone, and under LEDs. My orange night lenses just arrived. Nathan designed these specifically for the light biology framework he has spent eleven years building. Not a fashion accessory. A clinical tool that happens to look good. The full-spectrum broadband light bulbs launch October 1st — the single product change that makes more difference to your indoor light environment than any infrared panel. Code JOSHBUTTON for 15% off everything at biospectralsystems.com. I am proud to be partnered with Nathan and this company. The mission is aligned, the products are real, and what they are building next is going to matter.
Premium Mastic Gum · Greek Island of Chios · Jaw Strength · Brain Detox via Meckel's Cave
After this conversation, mastic gum is now a daily non-negotiable in my protocol — and the only source I trust is Greco Gum, from the Greek island of Chios, the only place on earth where mastic resin is produced naturally. The trigeminal nerve activation, the vagus nerve benefit, the Meckel's cave deuterium flushing, the gut microbiome support — all real, all covered in this episode. Nathan chews it daily. I am adding it now. Code IAMJOSHBUTTON for 10% off at grecogum.com.
Highest Quality Grass-Fed Protein · Regenerative Farmers · Real Food as Real Light
Nathan's framework is clear: food is light in storage. The photonic information from seasonal, natural, ancestral sources is what the gut needs to signal the body correctly. Lineage Provisions — highest quality grass-fed protein from regenerative farmers — holds to that standard. Code JOSHBUTTON for 15% off at lineageprovisions.com.
@nathan.siles · nathansiles.com · biospectralsystems.com · BioTra Book · The Learning Hub
Nathan's Instagram is @nathan.siles. The Biospectral Systems website has the glasses, the upcoming light bulbs, the EMF products, and the Learning Hub — one of the most comprehensive free resources in light biology available anywhere. His book BioTra: An Approach to Healthy Living in a Modern World is the complete framework in text form. Email or DM him directly — he is approachable, responsive, and genuinely motivated by helping people find this information. Part 3 is coming.
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