Joe Rogan podcast checking out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day.

All right. Very nice to meet you, man. You too. Thanks for having you. And thanks for doing this work, because you want to talk about a subject that's confused so many people.

Is the sun good for you? Is the sun killing you? Why does it give you vitamin D if it's bad for you?

Why do people get skin cancer if it's good for you? Yeah, it's super complicated and the messaging has not

sort of admitted that and that was, yeah, a big impetus for the book. What was your opinion of sun exposure before you started writing this?

So I had, you know, I had inherited the conventional wisdom from the institutions that it was really bad.

At the same time, I'll admit that my instincts were that maybe it wasn't as bad as they

were leading me to believe, because whenever I was in the sun, I felt good. And I live in Vermont.

By the time winter was reaching like month six, I felt bad, right? So I was like, there's more here

than we're being told. Yeah, that was my wife's opinion. It's like, the sun can't be bad. It always feels good when you go out there. I'm like, oh, well, it's a little more complicated than that. But that is the instinct. Like, it feels great when you're in the sun. Like, ah, it's like your body wants it. Your body wants it. I mean, we now know that it literally triggers the release of opiates in the brain, sunlight.

So, yeah, your body wants it and your body rewards you when you get it.

So what is the issue?

Well, let's go back to the beginning.

So you had this idea that sun exposure is probably giving people cancer and sunscreen is good. You need more sunscreen.

Stay out of the suns. So when you started going into the research, what made you shift your opinion?

So it really started for me like seven or eight years ago. I was on this like science journalism

fellowship. So I was just doing research. And some of those studies hit, the one about

opiate release in the brain, other studies showing that when light hits skin, cognition actually

improves. Like your metabolism cranks up a little bit when the body feels sunlight coming in.

And I thought, that's interesting. That's all good stuff.

Then I came across a couple other studies that seemed to indicate that sunlight could lower

blood pressure, which was really interesting. So then, you know, I still had the sense,

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