Jonathan is 21 years old, already followed by researchers and doctors across the health and longevity space, and in this conversation with Mirit Moon he makes the case that sunlight is one of the most underrated variables in human health. He opens by dismantling the idea of a midday "circadian dead zone," walking through the real mechanism: light hitting melanopsin in the eye signals the brain's master clock, and both morning light and light exposure throughout the day play distinct roles in keeping that rhythm strong.

The conversation moves into a piece of medical history many listeners won't know: heliotherapy, sun-based treatment that hospitals worldwide used successfully against tuberculosis, work that earned a Nobel Prize, and Jonathan's account of how and why that practice largely disappeared from mainstream American medicine. From there, he and Mirit cover the real difference between sunburn and a normal sun response, why melanin functions as the body's original sunscreen, the connection between UV exposure, nitric oxide, and cardiovascular health, and the gap between vitamin D produced in the skin versus taken as a supplement, including a widely discussed claim about a calculation error in the original RDA recommendation. Mirit shares her own account of recovering from a serious 2024 health crisis through sunlight, grounding, and diet. The episode closes on a personal note: Jonathan has never been vaccinated, a choice that made completing clinical rotations in a US medical school essentially impossible, and reshaped his path toward research instead.

Topics covered:

• Why the "circadian dead zone" is a myth, and how light actually sets your internal clock
• The history of heliotherapy and its disappearance from mainstream hospitals
• Sunburn versus normal sun response, and melanin as natural sun protection
• Nitric oxide, UV exposure, and cardiovascular health
• Vitamin D synthesis versus supplementation, and the RDA controversy
• Why an unvaccinated 21-year-old can't complete medical school rotations in the US

This is not medical advice. Vitamin D dosing, sun exposure decisions, and vaccination choices should be made with your own doctor.

This psychiatrist, who has worked inside both the pharmaceutical industry and academic medicine, lays out what he calls "capture," the financial and career incentives that push researchers toward pharmaceutical funding over independent sources. Publications, conference travel, and research grants from drug companies are, in his words, "a thousand times easier" to secure than government funding, and early in an academic career, that becomes the fast track to promotion. He argues this has entrenched a model of mental health that reduces most human suffering to a chemical imbalance, at the expense of the body, mindset, and relationships he believes actually drive wellbeing.

He points to one statistic as evidence the current system isn't working: suicide rates are up 40% over the past 25 years. His own three-part model for mental health, body, mind, and what he calls the spiritual, relationships, meaning, safety, is the framework behind the clinic he and his wife built to help people taper off psychiatric medication safely, rather than being told a pill is the only path forward.

Topics covered:

• Why researchers gravitate toward pharmaceutical funding over government grants
• The historical models of mental health (Freud, Pavlov, biological psychiatry) he says all missed the mark
• His body-mind-spirit framework for mental health
• The rise in suicide rates over 25 years, and what he thinks it signals about the current system
• Why tapering off psychiatric medication safely requires more than going cold turkey

Before he became a critic of how psychiatric medication gets prescribed, this guest was inside the machine that builds it: a clinical development team at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen, then the FDA's division of psychiatry, reviewing the drugs that end up in nearly every American medicine cabinet. In this conversation, he explains why 15-minute appointments turned mental healthcare into a symptom checklist, how SSRIs like Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft work by blunting emotional range rather than addressing root cause, and the mismatch he says doctors rarely disclose: no antidepressant clinical trial has ever run longer than a year, while most patients stay on them for a median of two years, and some for decades.

He also gets into what he says he witnessed firsthand: patients whose medications stopped working over time, personality changes tied to long-term use, and cases where worsening symptoms were treated as a new diagnosis rather than a side effect of the drug itself. Six years ago, he and his wife, also a psychiatrist, left conventional practice to build a clinic focused on helping people safely come off psychiatric medication and learn the non-drug approaches to mental health he believes should have been offered from the start.

Topics covered:

• Why 15-minute appointments reshaped psychiatry around a symptom checklist
• How SSRIs actually work, and what "numbing" versus "root cause" really means
• The gap between how long these drugs are studied and how long people take them
• Personality and emotional changes tied to long-term antidepressant use
• Why he left a career at Janssen and the FDA to build a clinic focused on safe tapering