EFR 733: Sunlight vs Blue Light: MYTHS and FACTS + How to Improve Your Sleep and Eye Health with Matt Maruca

0:00:00 - Speaker 1 just how significant light is for health.

0:00:02 - Speaker 2 And then it's really taken more of a spiritual turn, and I don't think this is by mistake, and what I think a lot of people should hear, is the life that you want, the answers to your questions, and the next question to your first question lies once you actually make a choice about what you wanna do for your life.

0:00:16 - Speaker 1 Clear lens. Blue light blocking glasses don't work. They don't block the wavelengths of light coming off LEDs and screens. What can we do, given the current restrictions, to allow people to have healthier, super high quality lighting? Hey everybody, I am Matt Maruca and this is Ever Forward Radio. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us today. ["metro"].

0:00:44 - Speaker 2 Well, Matt, welcome back, man. It's good to have you here. Thanks so much, brother. How are you? I'm great, I'm great, and I was thinking as we're about to sit down. I have a lot of synchronicity with a lot of my guests when they come back on for the second or third time. This is your second time on the show, almost exactly three years to the day, Episode 361, July 29, 2020. So I'll tell you again when are you now in episode count?

0:01:09 - Speaker 1 What was it being?

0:01:10 - Speaker 2 724.

0:01:12 - Speaker 1 Wow 724.

0:01:13 - Speaker 2 Congratulations, brother, that's impressive Haven't stopped.

Keep going, it won't stop. We're here with you again, yeah. Yeah, before we kind of get into what I think a lot of people might know you for what, we're gonna really make the crux of the conversation with the light diet and understanding what is going on with that big ball of gas in the sky and actually how it has immense healing and health power for us. You've been on this world tour for quite a while, yeah, and besides having FOMO, I'm curious, as a guy who's been traveling the world to some amazing, historical, beautiful locations around the world, what has been your solidification? What has been a recent travel solidification for you about the way humans live in other parts of the world and how has it maybe solidified a way that you choose to live and create your world?

0:02:06 - Speaker 1 Such a great question, man. Wow, I really appreciate it right off the bat.

So the first thing that comes to my mind is that when I travel, I feel like everybody in the world is just trying to do their best. Everybody's just genuinely, I think, a good person at their core trying to do their best. Now, of course, someone could say, oh well, there are plenty of people who aren't good people. Right, you could say that I've taken more of the mindset that, at the core, everyone is a pure soul. That's kind of the spiritual way to look at things. I would say Pure light maybe. Yeah, exactly, and we're, in a sense, all derived from the same oneness or same source. So being able to see that in so many different cultures whether it's the Indonesian people squatting on the side of the road on a hot day with their rice farmer hats, just working hard or eating their lunch, and they all sit in their squats and just chill and their flexibility and their hips is impressive.

They can just chill in that squat position for hours, eat, sit, like that's how they sit in these cultures still, and whether it's the person working at the cafe serving espressos in Italy or Spain or wherever, I just feel like there's this amazing, beautiful power behind everyone and everything, and I do think you can see it wherever you go. You don't have to travel around the world, but it's only for me, emphasized- and when.

I've seen so many different places and so many. I think I've seen a lot at this point. I've joked with friends like if God decided it was my time to go, I'd feel like I'd be ready.

0:03:40 - Speaker 2 Cool dude, I've seen everything you did. Yeah, I mean, be careful.

0:03:43 - Speaker 1 I gotta be careful what I say, but I've had a great degree of experience. So, as far as how it affects how I choose to live, on one hand I still have a desire to travel. I feel like there's a bug they say the travel bug that I've caught and it's still very much infecting me. At the same time, there's a part of me that has more of a desire to develop roots right. There's a study I was told about. I haven't even read it in thorough detail, but it's a famous, I believe, harvard study, or maybe.

0:04:12 - Speaker 2 Stanford study yeah, yeah, yeah, the long study on happiness Exactly 82, 85 years ago. Yeah, I think it's Stanford actually.

0:04:18 - Speaker 1 I recently had one of the co-authors on about that. Oh well, there you go, so people can reference the episode from your show.

But actually my marketing director, my company, he loves to read about this kind of thing and he said it's all about community. And I felt that way Because as I got to certain places, even just arriving in Austin recently after being out of the States for 351 days and just kind of landing in that afternoon, I went straight to Barton Springs. If you've had been, oh yeah, yeah, you know, it's like the spot Perfect this time of year and it's soup, the water's always. 68, 69 Fahrenheit.

0:04:46 - Speaker 2 It's a good, magical, cool spring.

0:04:47 - Speaker 1 Yeah, because of the Edward's aquifer just pumping out it's like 30 million gallons a day or something crazy. But the water's cool and everybody's just hanging and everybody's just chilling and everybody's having a great time and people are just loving life.

And I was like man this is amazing that we can connect with this and I felt this call in my heart. You know community, and that's apparently that was the finding of the study that the quality and quantity of relationships is so important for us. So that's another thing that I've seen, whether it's in Europe in particular, where they have strong family values in Indonesia they have many places, they have very strong family values, maybe many places more than the United States, probably most places more than the United States, probably because of the nature of our culture being more independent, focused, individualistic let's go work, let's go produce. And so I've seen, I see the positives of that, like I started a business when I was 18. I could travel around the country and connect with people then around the world.

I might not have done that if I grew up in a village in Spain or Italy. Right At the same time, I can see how, from the psychological development of a human being perspective, it's valuable to have parents that don't get divorced, which is, you know, 50% in the US, I believe, or more now, and probably it's still pretty high in even Western Europe as well. But in general in Europe, I feel, and from people I've met, there's a stronger sense of connection, right Stability, even Stability the grand. But they take care of their elders, they don't just put them in a nursing home.

And I understand people have kids, they have their life, they have a job. So I'm not judging anybody who puts their parents, you know, decides that their parents have to go to a nursing home. But at the same time I'm just sharing that I can see the value and taking care of your parents until they pass or they're in their final days, you know it's yeah, it's one thing that they go to a hospice or wherever when they're ready to go and you know you're visiting them, versus just like 20 years or 15 years, they're just living in it. Yeah, just put them away somewhere. Yeah, and again, no judgment, because you know, I don't have, I don't have, oh, I have parents, of course, but they're not in their elder ages yet. They're very much capable and active. So, but anyway, I see the value and also for the grandkids, not just to see grandma and grandpa like once a year, like I did growing up, but you know, basically seeing them every day and having them sort of be the ones passing wisdom down. So that's definitely influenced the way I think about my life on the whole and how I felt like wherever I end up. I would actually love to try to get my mom to live there, you know. You know people think, oh, I don't want to live with my parents.

Someone who I'll talk about more on the episode is a good mentor and close friend of mine. He's an Ayurvedic doctor I've connected with and the light, the progression of the light diet, has been one of going from diets and food to as we talked about in our last episode, then learning about just how significant light is for health, and then it's really taken more of a spiritual turn, and I don't think this was by mistake. I think my journey was set up to show me about how we are beings of light, but not in a woo-woo sense, but very scientifically speaking, and how there's a lot of spirituality.

0:07:48 - Speaker 2 That's in my notes yeah, we're on the same wavelength. I want to hit that as well.

0:07:53 - Speaker 1 And so I met a guy who's now been a close friend and a mentor to me, who studied Ayurvedic medicine and lived in India, studied yoga, studied the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures, for around about a decade.

This young guy 36, I believe now, but great energy. So anyway, one of the things he said to me that stuck with me and I think this is there's some valuable nuggets that you can get from any conversation with any people who have spiritual wisdom, or anybody, if you listen right and discern. But he said to me you know, for me the quality of my relationship with my wife will be determined by how much I can build the quality of my relationship with my mother. So like that will be the main teller of how I end up in my, let's say, marital relationship. Before then, however far I can overcome my own challenges, otherwise I'm gonna have to work them out with my partner then, because it's like our relationship as a man to the feminine is with our mother and then with our partner. I thought that was pretty valuable and interesting. So, speaking of you know, in Western culture it's like well, wait, you'd wanna like live with your mother, like have her around all the time with your wife and your family like why are you crazy?

Yeah, right, exactly, I mean there's and there's and there's, you know, there's a little truth in every joke, but really that there's that caring energy right, and so I thought that's a beautiful insight, and I believe it applies for women as well in their relationship with their father, and so I thought that's pretty interesting. So there's a lot of different angles there, but let's say one of the main ones is this super high focus on families and community, which, not that my parents didn't try to instill that, they actually did. Even though my parents were divorced, they did what many people wouldn't do, which is came together on Christmas day and came together on Thanksgiving, you know, for us to have that family experience.

And I'm so grateful just for those experiences and we always made the effort to get out to grandma and Nana and Papa, even though they're we're in Philly growing up and we had to fly all the way once a year out to Idaho, but it was. It was so worth it just to have that week or so with them. So I love that about Europe in particular and Indonesia, pretty much everywhere actually.

0:10:01 - Speaker 2 I mean just again, like watching where you're going and just the travels.

On top of that I, as someone who has done this quite a bit, there's something really unique and beautiful and this level of intimacy I don't think you can get in any other way of solo travel. And that could be just a weekend trip by yourself, maybe just out of your zip code, to another state, but to another country you know around the world. I think there's just it's one of the big reasons I love travel so much in general, with anybody my wife and friends going to a new place, getting dropped in the middle of the city, figuring it all out, but you know you're together and it's new and exciting, but you have other people to rely on, right. You have other people that you can lean on to kind of help. You know I'm going to navigate, you're going to find a restaurant, so we're going to go get help here. But when it's you, I mean there's this level of self love and self trust that I have developed that I think I could not get in any other capacity. Amen brother.

0:10:58 - Speaker 1 I felt that for sure. I just had a really cool experience recently. I've documented it, not so much on Instagram, just a little, but I towing with a vlog and a lot of content I filmed in San Hal. Use that footage. So I went and walked this Camino de Santiago. Have you heard of this? So there's a pilgrimage path in Northern Spain that about a half a million people walk every year. In fact, there's several. There's a book by Paulo Coilo, who wrote the alchemist, called the Pilgrimage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he writes about this particular journey.

0:11:28 - Speaker 2 This is the place. Yeah, this is the place.

0:11:29 - Speaker 1 There's a. Santiago is the old Spanish name for Saint James, or Saint Jacob. It's in English Saint James the elder or Saint James the great. It's one of the 12 apostles. He's one of the 12 apostles of Jesus. He was the first to be martyred and anyway, the legend has it that his bones his while he was beheaded after some time over in the Iberian Peninsula now Spain and Portugal, he was basically teaching and educating, spreading the word of Jesus, and then he brought, he went back to Palestine, back to the Holy Land, let's say after a few years, and then he was ordered to be beheaded by one of the, I believe the Roman king or the Roman emperor at the time Sounds pretty on brand for Roman time.

0:12:08 - Speaker 2 Yes, correct.

0:12:09 - Speaker 1 And then they apparently his. The legend has it that his disciples stole his body because he had his own followers as well, and then they brought it back to Spain where he had preached, and he's the patron saint of Spain. But anyway, the again the legend has it that his bones were buried in sort of a miraculous way. There were these bulls that kind of appeared and carried his corpse. So it's a very, let's say, mystical tale, but anyway it is formally accepted as the true doctrine, in the Catholic church at least. And so his bones remain at this place called Santiago, and I think they were undiscovered for several hundred years. But then a farmer saw these lights and reported it to the local, let's say, priests or monks, and then the bishop, and then the king of the first the proper religious chain of command.

0:12:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, exactly the chain of command.

0:12:55 - Speaker 1 And then they basically designated a holy site. And now this area of Santiago, it's a city, santiago de Compostela, and it is the capital of Galicia, this region in Northwestern Spain, just that top left corner, you could say just above Portugal, where Portugal takes up this kind of chunk of Spain from your perspective here and then there's this little bit of Spain I should say it's not a chunk of Spain, it's the chunk of the Iberian Peninsula, but then there's this chunk above which is Galicia, anyway. So it was a really cool experience. And there's these pilgrimage paths all over Spain and even Europe and there are people who walked two, three months together.

I walked, so I walked for a month. I walked 30 days every day. You walked for a month, walked for a month, 500 miles, about 15 to 18 miles per day, wow. And I did this because I had read a book, to make a long story short, about a young guy when he was 18 who got kicked out of private schools, worked in London for a while, a British guy and then so you know what, I wanna walk across Europe and he actually walked about 14 months from, took a boat from England to the Netherlands and walked from the Netherlands up the Rhine and then down the Danube all the way to Istanbul.

0:13:53 - Speaker 2 So he crossed the continent. It's like Mike Posner, the musician here in the States. He did this walk across America. Wow, about years ago. Okay, I think he made it very, very close, but I'm pretty sure he got bit by a snake or something One of the house people. I almost died, but he was doing this walk across America. That's amazing. That's very similar yeah, it's amazing.

0:14:12 - Speaker 1 The States would be really cool and difficult because there's so much open space Europe. There's so many more settlements along the way, so you could actually pretty much go town to town for the most part.

You might need a tent for a couple of days and some long stretches, depending on whether you follow rivers or roads or just cut through countryside or forest. But anyway I had this desire and I thought, okay, well, if I wanna do this which I kind of still do something long distance for like a year just walking. But I thought, well, I should try something a little bit more of an introductory. So I thought, a month across Spain on this well-defined path, with lots of accommodation, lots of places, and to your point about solo travel, I would say it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done, just from a perspective of management of myself, because I was still running my business. That was the idea For me. Okay, it's easy to just take a month off and go walk. I mean, yeah, physically it's a little demanding, but like it's easy enough, but to continue to run my business at least for some of our day, but to still have priorities and obligations Exactly, and to fund the walk, yeah, well, yeah exactly Just to keep the.

I wanna keep the train moving. I could take a month off, but I wanna keep things in motion that are in motion. And so to wake up every day, 5.36 am, walk literally five, six, sometimes seven hours, sometimes more, sometimes a little less, again 15, 18 miles, and then call it a day, and then, where everybody's just chilling, I'm like I'm gonna keep working, but for me it was really cool. So, to your point about solo travel, just the level of, I would say, discipline and also mental organization. I'm sure I could be more disciplined in many ways there's always room for growth but the level of discipline and organization that I've had to develop in my mind, I do find it to be a very valuable asset. Not only when I'm traveling am I managing. I'm managing my business, first and foremost, and that's my priority, the mission, but I'm also where am I going? When I'm doing it? It forces me to ask a lot of questions about life and it's been really, really useful Cause I've had to ask, for example, when I go certain places. Sometimes I go places just cause I'm like, oh, I'd like to just go there, but after five, I've been traveling since I started my business. I finished high school 2017, started the business in September and it's been almost six years since I've been doing that. So almost nonstop travel. I mean three months here, a month there, a few weeks here da, da, da, da da. Covid.

I was mostly in Idaho and then San Diego, as things eased up a little bit with family and then friends, and then I kind of got after it again, and so it's forced me to ask a lot of questions about life, like, for example, like what do I value? You know, when you're faced with unlimited choices, you know and effectively, having started this business, I had this four hour work week goal that I want to have this freedom to do what I want. Right, I'm not yet in a position where I'm going to buy a private jet and fly all around. That's not something that particularly interests me, but if it's part of my path one day, sure, right, but just to have the even basic level of freedom to say I want to go here and I can, just to be able to kind of live on the road and not having set up so many obligations in my life after high school, that I really have a specific pole to be in one place.

I don't have a pet, you know this and that I don't really have a particularly strong community that I developed since high school, other than the six months in San Diego. That's like I really want to be back there with my people, because I, you know, that's another thing about American culture. It's like, at least where I grew up, and Philly, the suburbs, everybody. Maybe it's different in the inner city where people maybe have this closer connection with their family and their grandma and aunts and uncles, but in the suburbs it's more of this like, okay, everybody's going to go off to college and some people go from Philly to Boulder, some people go to Syracuse, some go to LA you know what I mean. Some go to Austin and then they don't really go back. Not many people go back.

0:17:58 - Speaker 2 I have a few friends who stuck around Philly, so compelled to leave home.

0:18:00 - Speaker 1 Yeah, why leave the nest? And? And that's the culture, right, and I think there's something beautiful about that, don't get me wrong. There's something about, you know, the idea of like go West young man or young woman, like travel and explore and see the world, and in some ways, I think that's how things evolve and evolve and develop. So I've had that natural flow, so I haven't had anything pulling me back and anyway. So I've had to really ask the question like what is community? You know, okay, I have a global community. I have friends practically everywhere I go in the world, which is pretty cool. What do I value, what matters in life? That's been a pretty big question For me.

One of the main things I've circled back to, even really recently, is my mission and I was thinking to myself well, I did this walk across Europe. It was amazing. I'd kind of love to walk eight months and walk from, let's say, paris to Jerusalem. That sounds really cool, like a really cool life experience. That might be hard to do once you have a wife and kids, but like why yeah?

well, I mean like, and for me, why would be? Just ultimate adventure, just pursuing the spirit of adventure? That's something that actually interests me. But then I think about that and I think, well, yeah, but there's a lot of other things I could do. I could also just stay in one place and focus on really growing my company or really building a community.

0:19:11 - Speaker 2 There's just so many choices if you open up to it, if you make a choice right If you sit down long enough to think about your opportunities and choices and why and how you wanna reflect, where you wanna keep, where you wanna alter. If you choose first. I think, ultimately, what I'm hearing, and what I think a lot of people should hear, is the life that you want, the answers to your questions and the next question to your first question lies once you actually make a choice about what you wanna do for your life.

0:19:39 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm with you and that's what I've been coming to as well that having it's very valuable, I believe, to have a mission, because I felt for many years just like a rolling stone you could say and I've enjoyed just kind of okay, go with flow, see what life has to offer me, and I believe there's something very valuable about the concept of just surrendering right and, at the same time, I believe there's a way to surrender with combining surrender with intentionality. That's been a really big question for me over these years. Okay, well, there's these spiritual teachers, and I've been following a lot of different spiritual teachers.

I've read a lot of great books from people like, for example, paramahansa Yogananda, of the autobiography of a yogi, and he was a yogi master who came from India, was sent by his guru to the west to preach 100 years ago and he set up the SRF Self-Realization Fellowship. And they have locations on Mount Washington up in Pacific Palisades. They have the Lake Shrine down in Encinitas is where he lived, so Encinitas they were the first major landowners in Encinitas. Srf SPOT SWAMI's beach that's called SWAMI's because the monks live there. That SWAMI is monk in India, so it's very cool. So, anyway, they have this organization that's very popular and I imagine, if you haven't read it, you've heard of the autobiography of a yogi at least yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, so, anyway. So that's somebody I've read. So then there's Michael Singer, who is also sort of a follower of Yogananda, as well as many other great masters. Maybe you've heard of the, or even read the Surrender Experiment, the Untethered Soul yeah, absolutely so.

Phenomenal books. And so there's this idea of more from that traditional, more, let's say, eastern spiritual tradition, as well as Christianity, of sort of surrendering to God and Islam. Islam means surrender, actually. So that's one, let's say, side of the coin that I've experienced and learned about. And then there's this other side that's about Manifesting, like, for example, dr Joe dispenser, who I've followed very closely, gone to a lot of his events, gotten to know him and his team and their amazing people. I believe they are super on target. They're changing, transforming so many lives with their work, to say the least. Yeah, yeah, exactly right, and he'd be a great guest for your show if he has.

0:21:45 - Speaker 2 I think we could make it.

0:21:47 - Speaker 1 So anyway, on this hand at least, where Joe Started or where when I first became aware of his work, I believe he's also shifting. But it was a lot more, as I interpreted it, manifesting, creating your reality, you know, creating the life of your dreams. And there's many others in that, in the spiritual world, who Teach about drawing the things you want to you, and so I actually asked this doctor friend of mine. Now to just full disclaimer, joe has, in my experience, shifted a lot more to surrendering to the unknown. In fact they used to at some of the week-long retreats I've gone to of his. In the beginning people would actually create what's called the mind movie, so it's sort of like a vision board. It's like a movie vision board, so images of something that represents a dream and with text, like I am fully healthy and healed with the music. So your brain sort of gets programmed to the image and To the music and to the one thing to think it.

0:22:40 - Speaker 2 But like, the more senses we can incorporate in anything exactly solidifies, it makes it very real and the brain goes from projection Vision to oh, like this exists.

0:22:49 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so like a vision board but a movie. So it's a really cool thing. So they would do that. But then eventually they kind of phased it out of these resheets. I think it's still a valuable practice for you, but absolutely they fill out that's on school.

0:23:02 - Speaker 2 It is like a movie vision board.

0:23:03 - Speaker 1 So so if it was phased out and I was thinking, yeah, it seems like there's more of a focus on Surrendering to the unknown, surrendering to the mystical. It sounded the way that that he mentioned it. It sounded like more and more people just want the unknown, because when you're already happy and feeling whole, you don't necessarily want anything. And that's a really good point. That's a really good point. He says how can you want when you feel whole, you're not in separation or lack your whole? So how could you want? Like the act of wanting is sort of putting yourself in separation.

I'm so grateful that I've learned that intellectually and have practice embodying it again. Lots of room for growth always. But I truly have felt in my own life with a few years, even just a few years, and not even like I'm a monk meditating 10 hours a Day. But I've noticed a huge difference in like I don't really want a lot of things and there are things I do want. I want peace probably more than anything. Peace, calmness, joy, right, but I'm not like I want this or I even want my business to make you know X amount of money, because I kind of would rather just be happy and If any of those things that I think I want, or society I've led myself to believe that I should want because of this or that, aren't gonna, let me be fully happy. I should question this. Anyway. There's this other side of the coin, of sort of intentionality versus surrender and balancing those two.

So this, this Ayurvedic doctor friend of mine, his name is Balarama, who I mentioned earlier. He I asked him this question. I said well, what's your perspective, you know, coming from the again more Eastern perspective? He said well, there is a lot of value for people, especially in the Western world when we live in such a materialistic culture, to realize that through spiritual practices you can Actually draw anything you want to you. You can basically create anything you want.

Doesn't mean you want to do work, but through combining intentionality with Elevated emotions, with some degree of effort and consistency in practice, you can create what you want. And he said to me that's actually if, even if somebody wants to get rich this is a sort of Me translating what I understood from this, this part of the scriptures that this well studied friend of mine shared, but basically that it's actually sanctioned in these ancient scriptures to Even use spiritual practices to make a lot of money, because usually what happens when somebody makes a lot of money through a spiritual Practice is they end up using it for good because they've evolved so spiritually. Maybe they make a lot of money, but then they're like well, I feel so good that I just either would rather give it away, I would like to continue.

0:25:32 - Speaker 2 Continue to create more good. Exactly, allow more good to like survive and thrive.

0:25:36 - Speaker 1 I thought that was okay, that's really fascinating, and so, for where the Western world is in particular, that is a really admirable and high quality use of spiritual principles to help people achieve the things they they want or think they want. And At the same time he said to me but you know, according to the ancient scriptures and sort of, the way the great masters typically approach things, the highest form is Surrendering our will because, at the end of the day, if it's true, which I've come to believe, it is that we are all one. We don't have necessarily we don't have control over the ultimate plan, quote-unquote.

0:26:14 - Speaker 2 And we, because what happens when we do try to control the plan? Mm-hmm, it doesn't. Doesn't usually work out.

0:26:20 - Speaker 1 We could try all day right, and so there's something really value about surrendering our will to a greater consciousness, and you know, for example, whether it's Islam, again, which means surrender, or Judaism, or many of the major great religions, hinduism, buddhism, etc. It's like surrendering our will to a greater will is a common thread, for example, and in the Lord's Prayer, it's I will be done. You know that's. It's not my will be done, it's I will be done. So, for example, that's it.

0:26:45 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the more that we can shift focus away from ourselves while still in pursuit. Let's be honest of ourselves. What I guess I'm trying to say is really highlighting your point of surrender. It's like we want growth, we want more for our life, we want to move forward in life, we want to have abundance, we want to have success, we want more. I think it's a very innate human characteristic, but I think where we get in trouble and I can definitely relate to this is when we keep us as the center of that success marker.

We want more for us, for the sake of us, for our growth, for more money, for more things for me, me, me, iii. But when we collectively and again I can speak to this shift, that focus from, I still believe in the work and I want the growth and I want what I know all of that will yield fruitfully for me. Taking that burden really off of Me and putting it on us I think elevates the entire experience and I think allows more for more abundance along the way. When I've done that, I definitely find myself working Collectively, working together, working in some capacity with more people, instead of just staying so like shut off to the world. To kind of our point earlier. You know I keep community along the way and it kind of just seems to, I guess I would say, happen haphazardly, but it's got to be part of the plan as well. You know, if I'm in pursuit of my highest potential through the lens of how can we all win?

0:28:11 - Speaker 1 Well, of course it's gonna take us to get there, you know, of course, yeah, and I think it's really important for us to make a distinction between Self, with the lowercase s, and self with the uppercase s, one referring to the ego self or the limited self, and one referring to the greater self and Great masters, even like Ram Das, whose was is a Western, or who went to India and found a guru and really opened up to love, and there's great documentaries about him on Netflix, I believe it's called becoming nobody, and I recall him saying I think I even saw an Instagram reel the other day with his voice on it Saying that the deeper we go in words, the more that we realize that the eye who's you know when we say I am the one who's speaking is the same one that's speaking when you say.

I am, If you go deep enough so, at the end of the day, yeah, to pursue Something for ourselves, it's like you're gonna end up finding Nothing or accomplishing nothing, so to speak. If, in other words, if we come from a place of Illusion or delusion from the get-go, I Don't believe that the outcome can be one of realization necessarily. Even Sadguru you know another very popular master who I've Gained a lot of wisdom from. I haven't spent time with him personally or even gone super deep in his teachings, but he's very big on social media and I listened to a podcast and he was sharing that one of the greatest challenges people suffer from is what he called limited identification, so in other words, identifying as me, me II, I versus One with the entire universe.

Now, of course, that's not something where you necessarily maybe some do but just wake up and say like I'm gonna be the entire universe today. They'd be pretty cool if you could expand your consciousness. Is so like, for example, somebody crashes into your car and you're like, oh, it's all good, cuz it's all gonna work out. That'd be a pretty, I'd say, high level of development and I'm proud. You know, I want to work on that. I'm working on that every day myself yeah right.

So, like the hardest situation comes, and it's almost like asking for Challenges in some way, not for the just for the sake of them, but to be able to approach them with higher consciousness. But so this idea of limit I limited identification struck me to our former point, thinking, okay, if I just, for example, it was in the context, it was funny because a a Competitor of my company at the time, someone who I really identified as a competitor, had actually sponsored that episode, the specific podcast episode, and I was like, oh my gosh, why didn't we? You know, I was just guilty myself.

0:30:40 - Speaker 2 Why didn't we do that? Oh my god.

0:30:42 - Speaker 1 Yeah, like just, and it was just going deeper, and because it's really wasn't even about that instance, it was more about like personal insecurity and like I'm not doing, I'm not good enough, whatever.

0:30:51 - Speaker 2 It wasn't about them and the competitor. Actually, it was all about you and that's you.

0:30:55 - Speaker 1 I think that's almost always how it is when we face, because they say we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are right. So, alma, I would wait, I would, I would say I would argue the point that any experience we're having in the external world is just an experience in our internal world. And you know, there's this indiscriminate sensory information coming in. It doesn't really have an eight meaning. We're assigning meaning. So in this case, I had this perception of competition and I just thought, as I listen to podcasts, and I was really triggered. I was really having a hard time as a long drive, dark Road, everglades of Florida, for two hours and nobody, nobody answered the phone. I, you know you will try. I noticed in that moment how I was trying to call people, trying to distract yourself.

0:31:31 - Speaker 2 Get away from it. To get away, and I was like that's just me and my emotions.

0:31:34 - Speaker 1 I got just listening to this podcast, but thank God it was a spiritual wisdom.

It's a comfortable feeling that exactly, and the wisdom from this podcast help me, because I just thought, wait a minute, like if I were, if I really wanted to embody some of these spiritual principles I've been hearing about, I had actually better try to to do it.

You know, not just think or talk about it or talk a big game, but I should try it in this moment and say, could I see this, this supposed competitor, as Part of the same team? Because at the end of the day, I'm gonna die, they're gonna die somebody, everybody's gonna die, theoretically, and it's like what will the end result be? What? I rather live in a world where I'm just in competition and there's not enough for me, or would I rather work on changing my mindset where there is enough and we can be successful? So, anyhow, really interesting stuff for me, and I believe it's important for us to make this distinction between the limited self, the greater self, and all the great spiritual Traditions seem to lean towards Surrendering our limited self to the greater self, and that that is sort of the spiritual journey, the journey of our life and the test that we're here to face to kind of bring it to.

0:32:39 - Speaker 2 I Know is another big part of your mission and really kind of the crux of the work we talked about last time on the show Understanding light and being outdoors and with the Sun before a lot of other reasons, you know, besides improving circadian rhythm, which is a very trendy right now. But I'm curious what takeaways did you get from traveling the world and tapping into these other communities, or maybe even expansion of your own beliefs and what you had found to be scientifically proven for the Sun and the light and influence on human biology and health? What was, what was a way? Maybe another culture, another religion, another community was leaning into the sun and the power it has on our daily living, compared to maybe where we're missing the mark here in.

0:33:30 - Speaker 1 America, yeah. So two examples that come right to mind. The first is Indonesia, Bali in particular. So a culture basically on the equator, very close to the equator, very tropical, very strong sun year round, 12 hours of light and dark. So they have sort of we could say it's an advantage of this circadian stability, so they have 12 hours of light, 12 hours of dark, basically throughout the entire year, whereas, for example, you go up to Northern Europe or even Northern United States, there's a lot more seasonal variation which our system has to adapt to, which we're designed to adapt to, but instead what we're doing is just using artificial lights at night and not adapting. We're just extending our days artificially.

So there I noticed that people are very happy and very positive. I don't think it's just because of the sun, I think it's a big part, though they don't generally wear sunglasses, they don't generally wear sunscreen. Yeah, there were a shirt, there were a big rice farmer hat, like the Chinese rice farmer type hat that people are familiar with, made of straw or some kind of bamboo probably. It's very wide and it really protects their whole face. They just seem very happy. I think there's also component, as we discussed earlier about the culture, the family, culture, et cetera, but people there seem happy and, in general, thinking about tropical places where people get a lot of sun and they don't necessarily go out and seek it too actively, but they also don't necessarily avoid it. It's just kind of part of their life People seem happier.

Costa Rica would be another example. I haven't been through much else of Central America. Mexico might be both an exception and a follower of the rule, in the sense that there it is more developed, like the United States to a great degree, and they do have a lot of the issues of the industrial, military, agricultural, pharmaceutical complex of North America in general. So there is a lot more diabetes, obesity and disease in Mexico. I would imagine, though there are places that I have not been to where people are more connected to the land, probably further south or in the countryside, where they have this similar energy like Costa Rica that I have been to. I did see something similar when I was in Ecuador, but that was six or so years ago.

0:35:35 - Speaker 2 I got very similar vibes to what you're talking about in Cuba. I was in Havana and Columbia a few times. It's like very spot on to what you're talking about.

0:35:43 - Speaker 1 I think we can observe it. It's pretty natural. Now, that's one example. Now, totally opposite example in some respects Norway, sweden, finland. I've been in Norway in particular, the most of these places. So what's interesting is that they have some of the least light of anywhere on earth throughout much of the year as far as hours of daylight. Side note, fun fact is that everywhere on earth I didn't even know this until a couple of years ago, even having studied light for a while but everywhere on earth has the same amount of hours or number of hours of light throughout the entire year, so it's just the distribution that's different. So, for example, north Pole, on the summer solstice, has 24 hours of light. On the winter solstice it has zero hours of light, so the sun doesn't rise, so it all comes full circle.

So it all comes full circle Now. But the difference is the intensity of the light, so the hours of light is the same. So, for example, the Equator's 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, the entire year.

0:36:35 - Speaker 2 Effectively maybe, but it like the proximity to the sun is so much more intense and closer to that Exactly.

0:36:39 - Speaker 1 So the intensity is much higher. So the ultraviolet distribution, so the intensity of high well I should say short wavelength, high frequency, high powered light is not the same, but the hours of light is the same. So anyway, all this is say everyone on earth gets the same. So, for example, the distribution is just different. In Norway they're gonna have in many places 18, 20 hours of light and then four hours of darkness, but then the opposite, four hours of light and 18 to 20 hours of darkness in the winter. So it's just the distribution Anyhow.

That being said, this is a culture that has evolved there for tens of thousands of years, presumably since, you know, before the Vikings. And these people innately know from these long dark winters that when the sun comes out it's their friend. Like they should go out, I imagine, given the public health recommendations in the West which I'm pretty sure we discussed on our last podcast, the flaws with the recommendations about skin cancer and sunscreen and so on, but anyway, at least the traditional theory. But basically there must be some degree of that influence there. But from the general cultural standpoint, I talked to people and they said, yeah, my parents just throw us outside when they're like get out, it's sunny.

You know the sun's not here that much, and so a lot of the time I'll see Norwegian people or Danish. They tan really well, so they're, of course, more pale in the winter because they lose the melanin to make more, to absorb more of the light at the time, but then a lot of the time some of the most beautifully tanned white-skinned people I've ever seen are from that far north, so somehow they live a very healthy lifestyle in general, yeah, and then when the sun comes they get out, and so I think that's another example very different from a place where they have constantly strong sun throughout the year. Well, I should say in Bali, costa Rica, they also do have a rainy season where there's clouds, but the sun's still the ultraviolet index is still very high through yeah, through the clouds, but up there it's cloudy and very low intensity sun and a lot of darkness, our lack of hours of light.

So they get in the sun and there is something to be said for that. As far as the physical health, they're beautiful people. I don't know if that's just because of their diet. There must be many factors to their diet extremely clean air, low deuterium water, lots of sun. They also have strong family culture, community of course. But then again, from the evidence I'm familiar with, there's also very high rates of seasonal effective disorder or seasonal depression in those countries which, from what I've studied, I would liken that to the fact that in the winter, when we're designed naturally, that would have been a time to almost hibernate right More hours sleeping, more hours in words, more hours relaxing preserving energy, Exactly well, what do we do as humans?

Well, we just turn on the artificial light and just grind ourselves through the day. We manipulate exactly.

0:39:18 - Speaker 2 To stay comfortable or to have perceived comfort.

0:39:22 - Speaker 1 Exactly heating. I believe using a fireplace is great because it's natural near infrared, but heating's a little bit different. It's not quite the same cell. It doesn't give the same cellular benefit of the near infrared light from fire. It's just heating the air, it's kind of warming you up, but it's not warming the cells and giving them the power which fire gives you, which is what's also coming from the sun, near infrared light, which is also very deficient in the winter. So you could actually use a sauna, which is where these cultures, they created Saunas in Finland and Russia. They have called it Banya, and Russia and Norway and Sweden, they use these saunas to warm themselves through the winter and I think that's a very good practice.

Anybody asks like well, what should I do in the winter? Well, I would just tell them, generally speaking, from a light perspective well, do what your ancestors did get out in the sauna, of course, get out in the cold if you can get an ice lake or do you know? That's very good for the immune system. They found not overdoing it, but just a dunk and cold, cooling off and getting back in the sauna. For example, less exposure to artificial light at night. Of course, don't burn the candle at both ends. That's where we basically trick our brain to think that the sun is still up. So we sort of ask more of our body and demand more of our vital life force, so to speak, but without the full power of the sun, which, when you have that blue light which is stimulating, you usually have near infrared which is powering our metabolism. But most modern lights they say, hey, blue light, let's wake up, but then without the power, so you're sort of just draining your reserves.

0:40:43 - Speaker 2 It's a trick and we're also taxing ourselves without you know. Up until now, listen to this Most people don't really know that. But actually right now I do wanna kind of shift into, I think, that the whole circadian rhythm and the power of light. Sunlight in the morning, you know ever since you know God bless him, I love him. But you know Hubertman has popped off with you know, talking about circadian rhythm and getting exposure in the morning and you know, keeping the lights, you know, below eye level in the evening and all this stuff. I feel like it's become very trendy because we finally have I don't know, call it some authority in the space or just call it more public interest whatever, or Stanford.

Yeah, you can, I'll argue with that. Where do you think? How do I ask this? Where do you think the general public is right now in actually absorbing pun intended, I guess the right information about sunlight as it relates to its real power in our health, our daily living, our sleep? Where, maybe, do you see some things that are it's like this is just a trend, this is like maybe not Actually what's going on with light and it's not actually having these benefits? You know, are we grabbing hold of something that's true or just grabbing hold of something that is just passing through?

0:41:59 - Speaker 1 This is such a great question, brother, very skillful interviewer here. So I would say that I'll kind of go rapid fire on a couple. So, for example, clear lens, blue light blocking glasses Don't work.

So that's, something that we so we make let. The reason I started my company six years ago and that it's still around and thriving and growing and people are interested is because I Understood from the research that when you have a clear lens, what that means is that the light that's passing through the one side is passing through the other, the visible light. Well, it turns out that blue light that affects our circadian rhythm is the same blue light that we see as the color blue. So if you have a clear lens and you know that all the colors that you can see are passing through, that's the only way it can be clear. Otherwise, if you remove some of the blue, then it's actually gonna start looking more yellow and can't be fully clear. When, unless, there's no blue light in the environment, then you could say, okay, well, there's no blue light around, so it's clear letting these colors through. But if there's blue in the environment, possible like, well, you could just have orange or red lights.

0:42:55 - Speaker 2 And it might be clear.

0:42:56 - Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. But so basically, when we have blue light, we take it out, the lens starts to appear yellow. The more blue you remove, generally, the more yellow the lens starts to appear, which is why our daylight lenses are pretty yellow. Not, I actually should have my own. I lost them recently. Oh yeah, I didn't. Yeah, I've been traveling like out of the country and I just got back and I was like I'm gonna order, you know, I probably know I lost and I lost, but yeah, exactly I lost it before I got on the plane.

And Austin I know the guy, yeah, in our productions in San Diego. So I gotta pick up a pair of my my sunset lenses here. But I thought you know what I don't want to be enough, I don't want to be in full orange, right?

0:43:24 - Speaker 2 now and I'll get.

0:43:26 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll start getting all sleepy though, so these are for night, but anyway. So, anyway, the clear lenses they don't work, and in fact there's a lot of there's a flat out don't work.

0:43:35 - Speaker 2 It's not like they don't work as well or they don't flat out.

0:43:39 - Speaker 1 They don't block the wavelengths of light coming off LEDs and screens. So what they claim to do, they don't do. So they say we're screen glasses. So if I measure with my spec digital spectral color meter, I point it at the light source of an LED or a screen, a phone, any LED. I do this and the LED spike is centered at 455 nanometers. Blue goes from about 400 to 500 more or less, and that blue lights bike from LEDs is about 430 to 470, give or take. So the clear lenses, they have what's called a UV 420 coating in the industry. It blocks UV light, which is something the Sun emits, and blue light up to 420 nanometers, and something the Sun also emits. But LEDs don't emit any light until about 430 nanometers and up until about 470. There's a blue spike if I measure it. So what that means is the clear lens is blocking some blue light that comes off the Sun, but not from, not the blue light wavelengths that are probably common light.

Not probably, but definitely so yeah so I've literally and I have a video on YouTube called clear lens blue light blocking glasses exposed. It's from like three years ago, so I probably seem like a dork, but it was really funny.

0:44:35 - Speaker 2 I mean we drop that yeah.

0:44:37 - Speaker 1 We is. That's literally. We measured like 10 or 12 of the top leading brands and it was like they just literally didn't block the wavelengths. And some of them literally said screen glasses and I'm like your lenses don't block the wavelengths from a screen. Now, especially after getting into the work of dispenser you know he has a great book called you are the placebo. I've understood that there's a huge value in the placebo effect, so I don't love to be the bearer of bad news and like say, listen. From a scientific perspective, these lenses do not block the what they claim to block and therefore, based on the mechanisms and how we understand that Melanopsin in the eye, which is this photoreceptor that speaks with the circadian system in our brain. It doesn't wire to the visual centers. It actually wires to this other part called the hypothalamus, which controls our whole metabolism and including our circadian rhythm in this one region called the Superchiasmatic nucleus, which is what all this.

0:45:24 - Speaker 2 Jumble it up. I'm like the super dial, yeah, superchiasmatic.

0:45:27 - Speaker 1 SCN for short, and so that wires that Melanopsin and that these cells in the eye, called intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangly cells, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or IPR GCs for short, this is well studied. These mechanisms they wire to this part of the brain which is a. It's a non visual, so it's not like in the back, the hindbrain, the image forming centers. It's a non visual system which we could argue is probably older than our vision and it's our color vision. It's more likely, most likely, that this system evolved first. In fact I can almost say that definitively, that that's circadian.

0:45:59 - Speaker 2 It's because they exist, virtually every organism.

0:46:01 - Speaker 1 So this? So our eyes. Someone I followed some years ago and really introduced me into this space Would say that the eyes was first a clock, before a camera and, and in many organisms simpler organisms, it still has that predominant function. A controls the light passing through the eye, controls our circadian system. It controls a wild thought that's an amazing thought Wow. 80% of our visual, of our conscious sensory input, comes through our eyes. So if all of our senses touch, smell, taste, touch, feel, hearing, you know what I mean all the five senses.

You don't have them listed out, but vision is something like 80% of the information, but then there's way more information that we're not consciously aware of, which is setting our circadian rhythm, setting the production of key hormones and Neurotransmitters, the stress hormones to keep us awake. Darkness comes and we're making meltdown. So, anyway, the clear lens, blue light blocking glasses just from a mechanistic, pure mechanism and science perspective, they don't block these wavelengths and in fact, the studies done with clear lens, blue light blocking glasses, they conclude yeah, these don't work, blue blocking glasses don't work. And I'm like well, how are you gonna conclude that when you're doing a test with lenses that don't block the blue light that comes off the screens, the test, the studies, that the limited studies that have been done there's not many with amber lenses actually show more positive result, which makes sense because they're actually blocking blue light. What I'm interested in truly, after learning more about the spiritual perspective, is you know, we used to just transparency as a brand.

When I learned about this, the Mindset I got into was that we should market about these products in a way like if you're exposed to blue light and you don't have these glasses, you're gonna get this or that or that, you know like kind of traditional marketing, like if you don't have this, you're gonna have a problem, we have the solution for you.

You know, there's something to be said about educating people about an issue and and providing solution. That being said, I've shifted in the sense that I don't want to make people feel like they're gonna die from blue Light, right, like you're probably not gonna die. It might affect your health negatively, but what I, what I prefer to do, is say listen, there's just this opportunity, like it's just more of a positive frame shift of yeah, I think that's the right term a shift in the framing of everything that basically we could actually use something like blue light blocking glasses or this product specifically, or just candles in our house at night to Improve our health by not being exposed to the wavelengths of light that have been thoroughly studied to disrupt, yeah, body's natural production and melatonin. And and I love that because now it feels like we can go out of the world and say listen, whether you have health issues or you're already healthy, there's this really cool mechanism that science has discovered within the last really 30 years in detail, and there's these things you can do to improve.

0:48:30 - Speaker 2 A lot of people are familiar with it now, so it's kind of like you're not trying to convert people. You already have people's interest and curiosity. Now to say here's more Information, yeah, exactly.

0:48:38 - Speaker 1 So so other you know items to your question about where society is maybe going wrong and maybe could could be doing a bit better. Light boxes, so bright white light boxes, generally are just blue enriched LED lights. So you just sit in front of this blue enriched white light box, which we know Will stimulate the brain and kind of wake you up, kind of like a cup of coffee, very, in a very similar way From a light perspective, could be our new cup of coffee. It could be. However, these white light boxes are just they're enriched with blue light, so it's sort of like coffee, it's like straight caffeine, to be honest.

Coffee we absorb by watching.

0:49:15 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:49:16 - Speaker 1 The issue though?

The issue is that when you have the blue light without the near infrared, you also which is the issue with modern LEDs you predispose the eyes to retinal damage.

So when we it's similar in a similar way to how we have blue light when we have blue light without near infrared, from a cellular standpoint for power, we sort of drain ourselves, from a retinal health standpoint, from the eyes. If you have a lot of blue light, there's actually evidence to suggest that the blue light increases the production of reactive oxygen species, is sort of damaging biological molecules free radicals exactly and near infrared for a variety of reasons, because it assists cellular metabolism and energy production, actually offsets and, in many cases, balances out this damaging effect of blue light, and incandescent bulbs or, for example, the sun, have lots of near infrared, generally more on a percentage basis than blue light, but they have a lot of near infrared and incandescent bulbs. If you looked at the curve, there's a little bit of blue but a lot of near infrared. So there's a natural balance in incandescent lamps, and you can feel the heat coming off of an incandescent. Well, there you go.

They banned them because they use too much energy. So, according to the belief that so this is another place where society is going wrong, and this ties into the light box there's this belief in the mainstream mainstream right. The alternative may be shifting in the next five or 10 years, but it's not there yet. But there's this belief that light and this goes to what we mentioned about the clock for the camera that light is something that we see, and that's it, and that's it. And it's pretty interesting because the research that I've come across indicates that light is something that we are, and it's not just something that we see, and so it's something that interacts with every single piece of our being.

0:50:56 - Speaker 2 It controls all of our skin, all over us. It's not just our eyes absolutely.

0:51:00 - Speaker 1 Humans lost our hair for a reason which is interesting. There's different theories about that, but one was that we basically in Africa, became these more solar-powered beings. There was an evolutionary advantage to developing sweat glands all over our skin, unlike other mammals.

To keep us cool, yeah, to keep us cool and also to absorb more light. We were able to absorb more light with really dark skin in particularly in Africa. Lots of melanin allowed us to charge. So there's theories like, oh, humans evolved by eating more liver or organ meats. Then there's other theories like we evolved by eating more seafood.

Another really interesting idea that could combine with any of these theories is that the evolution with the power of light that drove the evolution of the human brain. So anyway, that's all a little more theoretical, let's say wild. But what we know is that this near-infrared light balances out the exposure to blue and modern lights. They subtracted out the infrared because the regulators, the politicians, those involved with this decision-making around light regulation and energy consumption said well, all this near-infrared light is just wasted energy, it's just wasted. You're just using this electricity. It's just heat, it's lost. But again, that's based on the understanding or the idea that light is just something we see. But when they understand that light is something that actually powers our biology, that near-infrared light, you could argue, is the most important component of that light for our biological health, absolutely, and they've taken it out.

They made it Wow. So we work with it raw. I know you mentioned you want to touch on maybe some of these things and if we have time we can. But we work with this German doctor who's the number one photo biologist in the world. Maybe something I would recommend, somebody I would recommend having on your podcast. Very curious, his name is Dr Alexander von Tsch. He's been on some of the big shows like Bulletproof with Asprey and Ben Greenfield and Mercola, just a couple Luke Story, the Lifestyles as well. He speaks sometimes and he's universities and that kind of thing. But anyway, one of the things he said to me is it's actually effectively illegal to have healthy lighting now because of the regulations. It's not explicitly because in fact they didn't say incandescent lamps are banned, but they said bulbs that use this much energy are no longer meat.

So they're effectively banned by the energy threshold being reduced so significantly that no incandescent bulb could meet that threshold. So, anyway, there's a lot of things that we're working on as far as innovative. So we make blue light protection eyewear. That's what we've been doing for the last six years. For me, especially starting out of high school, I feel like it was a sort of, in some respects, an opportunity to just learn about business and running a business and also creating a great product and optimizing everything We've done really well. We had a great partnership with Aura, the maker of the Aura thing.

0:53:28 - Speaker 2 It was awesome to get the product out.

0:53:30 - Speaker 1 And they had many, many, many thousands of people who got the glasses just as a free gift for referring a friend to buy an Aura ring. Now the amazing thing was that when we started getting all these reviews a couple months later, because they came to our website to claim the gift, they got our review request email. I kind of actually forgot that these customers were all going to get our review request email because they weren't paying. There was a free gift in the end for making a referral and basically we started getting these reviews. Like I was super skeptical. I didn't think this was going to work. I didn't believe the hype that people had, amazingly, in their first night and some guys, like I, literally had the best sleep. I had my first night in months, no shit. Wow, believe the hype, they live up to it and there was many, many, many like that. So other.

0:54:08 - Speaker 2 Great, I use them. I love mine, yeah, thank you brother. Plus another pro is I love wearing them when I'll go to like a music festival or whatever, but I know I'm going to be bombarded with crazy lights. It's kind of like I have this running joke inside my head and like I'm having fun. Also, I'm going to still go to sleep tonight.

0:54:25 - Speaker 1 Yeah.

0:54:26 - Speaker 2 You guys are going to not get the same quality of sleep. It's like this little inner joke bio hack I have. Plus, they look great too With the great lenses. You look very on brand in a festival or anywhere You're staring at lights but, yeah, I love mine.

0:54:37 - Speaker 1 Thank you, brother. Yeah, so in light of this no pun intended we are developing healthier lighting. So we're looking at what can we do, given the current restrictions, to allow people to have healthier, you know, super high quality lighting that's friendly to their life. For example, there's questions like should I? What I'm interested in is reinventing the concept of lighting. So this is where we're headed. Just for example, should lighting even be overhead? That's and Hugh Berman's obviously talked about that especially at night, Especially in the evening. Bring it down Exactly Blue eye level, yeah, Exactly. So there's things like this that we're working on. I can just share sort of the high level. It's a lot of. It's really early stage. There's some really cool therapeutic products we're working on.

So we're working on advancing red light therapy to a new level, beyond where the mainstream has brought it. It's really cool. The interest has grown there and we thought, well, we I would say we have a more particular eye to detail and the science than most of the brands in the space, and so I believe we could make a significant improvement on red light panel. So that's something we've been working on. There's a lot of stuff you can do with colored light actually. So that's something we're exploring into because, basically, since we are beings of light and electromagnetic energy is the source for our biology of power and ourselves communicate with. This is a well documented ourselves communicate with certain wavelengths of light.

Even in the ancient let's say, view, the yogic or Ayurvedic or Chinese traditional medicine view of life, our chakras, or energy centers, have different colors, right From red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, white, oh wow, and we can actually use different colors to impact different systems biologically, and there are systems that have used color or chroma therapy for a long time. So there's some really interesting applications there that we're looking at. So there's a lot of positive stuff. I really my theory because I'm also having gotten into spirituality. I had to go through a deep questioning process of like, well, if it's true that we can heal ourselves with our mind, which I really do believe now and we don't need products, well, I'm running a product company. What do I do with?

this information it was really kind of put me in a bind for a while. Like, what do I do? The first thing was, as I mentioned, well, first of all, shifting the messaging. So it's like this is an opportunity for you, right? I believe there's value in taking spiritual wisdom, meditation, all of this stuff and also combining it with science, so like, for example, I'm not just going to meditate and eat McDonald's all day long. That wouldn't really make sense, right? And so, in the same way, like, if we know that artificial light is something that's not sinking us up with nature and connecting us back to our true state or our highest state, well then, I'm also going to leverage blue light, blocking glasses, or just using candles at my house at night, or a red light headlamp that I just bought on Amazon for 15 bucks, which is pretty much all the light I use at night when I'm in an Airbnb or something. But we're also making more friendly sources, because not everybody wants to square a headlight like I do when.

0:57:20 - Speaker 2 I'm traveling, I gotta say let's leave them wanting a little bit more. Yeah, of course I love hearing the excitement. I know you guys are committed to education and, of course, products, so that's why I've always loved connecting with you and looking at the stuff. But I do get to bring us in to close right here.

0:57:34 - Speaker 1 Thank you, brother.

0:57:35 - Speaker 2 But I want to ask our final question, to kind of sum it up and you've answered this before but living a life ever forward? The whole point of this show, in our conversations, is to help shine a light on people, on certain things that they can take, they can apply to help move them forward in life Right now. How would you define that? How would you describe that? Living a life ever forward? What does that?

0:57:57 - Speaker 1 mean to you. I've had experiences in the last couple of years that have shown me that the things that I was looking for to feel whole outside of me didn't work. So, whether it was a diet, a biohack, even blue light blocking glasses, and that when I started to do more meditation and just open myself up to, let's say, what some would call a higher love or some sort of spirit, and actually equally as important, maybe more important working on letting go of these beliefs I have that I have to be stressed, or things aren't going to work out Somehow, I've been able to experience a level of wholeness and fulfillment that I didn't know existed. And, as Joe Dispenza says, to just throw this in, I think this is some of the most valuable wisdom I've ever heard. So I'd love to end on this that people don't just get rich because they work really hard and then they make money. Some do, but a lot of the time it involves a lot of struggle, but there are people who actually first work on feeling really abundant inside themselves and then generate wealth through this.

And in the same way, I took on this idea. Well, what if I didn't always just have to chase? You know, there's this cliche, like you're already good enough. People say that in spiritual you're already whole, you don't have to do anything. It didn't really connect. It didn't resonate with me when people would say that I was like but I don't get that, that's fair. But what started to resonate with me and make sense was like if I could actually get really good with my eyes closed, sitting and practicing feeling wholeness, like feeling the feelings of wholeness, then somehow that could actually help me to heal and all the stuff I tried to do to heal my body diets, light, sunlight, etc. I had one moment where I felt so much wholeness, just from opening up, surrendering to love. I know it sounds crazy, you have love all over that door there it is right, that's what it's all about.

And I started feeling so good and I actually started to feel a lot of my body like getting better, lighter, less responses to food, for example, allergies and this type of stuff, just by in somehow, some way getting over myself not reacting to people, not, not, it's a really tough discipline and I'm not perfect at this at all, like I'll be the first to say, but when I'm driving and I'm like, for example, today, running a little bit late, just being like, listen, I don't want to do that, I want to plan better, but I'm just going to have to surrender Maybe this is how it was meant to be and just when I noticed every tendency to want to get mad and angry, trying to sacrifice that lower level of motion for a higher level of motion, and I do think in some way, that is sort of the test that we're here to face.

So that's what I've learned and I think that will help people heal physically from their diseases and all the health and stuff everybody's focused on. I think that'll help people heal a lot more oftentimes than all of the different bio hacks.

1:00:50 - Speaker 2 So yeah, so well said, beautiful. Thank you so much for the question, very welcome. Well, like I said, I love Ra. You guys can have all the information down on the show and that's for everybody to check out and even get a pair if they want. You're going to see me wearing mine in the evenings. You're going to set definitely say, hey, man, I'm out at the festival so I can have fun and still go to sleep, but that's a wrap, man, you guys don't want to check out episode.