What an amazing experience to catch up with Matt Maruca, a wondrous young expert in all things ancestral health. Matt has focused his efforts particularly on the wide-ranging harmful effects of blue light exposure and how you can mitigate it starting right now.

Only 20 years old, Matt has been on a six-year obsession to reclaim his health, which started to decline in middle school with routine diet-related suffering such as digestive pain/gas/bloating, acne, and recurring migraine headaches. You will be inspired to learn how a member of the younger generation has leveraged the power of the digital age to overcome the hazards of the digital age amongst today’s youth and instead go deep into self-exploration, progressive health practices and even starting a thriving virtual business that he operates amidst his frequent global travels.

I caught up with Matt at his most recent home base of Tulum, Mexico, tee’d him up and turned him loose. If you have young folks in your life that you can urge to listen to a podcast about health, choose this one. Matt puts some amazing pieces together starting with trying to cure himself after striking out with mainstream medical approaches; making some important intuitive observations about people with less technology and more natural health practices in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hint: the women have more attractive figures, especially breasts); and exhausting his attempts to optimize diet and then turning his attention to blue light exposure as the missing element of healthy mitochondrial function.

Early in the show, Matt offers an important insight that really stuck with me: if something is wrong with your mitochondrial function, you won’t burn fat well, and you’ll default back to a carbohydrate dependency diet. Mitochondrial function is believed by many progressive experts to be the essence of health and longevity, or alternatively the origin of your demise. Hence, beyond diet we must investigate all ways to optimize mitochondrial function, especially becoming more closely aligned with our natural circadian rhythm. Simple takeaways from Matt’s message:

1. Follow your own passions and honor your own voice; the traditional path of industrialized education is not for everyone.
2. Align with your circadian rhythm by getting direct sun in the morning, not too much artificial indoor light during the workday, strict protection from excess blue light in the evening, and honoring digestive circadian rhythm by not eating too much at night time.

Matt’s company is called RA Optics – named after the Egyptian god of sunlight, RA (pronounced “Rah”). Check out the stylish pairs of both daytime blue light blockers and evening blue light blockers, including prescription options! I just started using RAOptics evening blue blockers with my computer vision prescription and the experience is exquisite. Previously, I’ve tried to be devoted to using inexpensive orange or yellow tinted UV lenses after dark, but the cheap lenses cause a bit of distortion – tough to use with a computer! With my RA Optics prescription computer lenses, I have more compliance with my goal of using evening eyewear, and can enjoy a mellow computer use experience early in the evening and not disturb my melatonin production later. Visit RAOptics.com to learn more about his unique daytime and nighttime blue light blocking eyewear, and use the discount code “Brad” for 15% off your order!

TIMESTAMPS:

Matt shares his struggles as a very young person with health issues and talks about his early journey into using natural solutions to solve his health problems. [07:15]

When he was doing the paleo diet, in just one week of trying to clear up his acne, he actually had a complete elimination of his gut issues, allergies, and headaches. [09:55]

As a young man who was running 20 miles a week, he had to learn to slow down. [14:04]

Looking for a cure of his acne, led him to his discoveries for his other physical ailments. [19:04]

While fixing his diet, he learned about the artificial light exposure problem. [21:42]

It is not easy to do this switching over, even when you try very hard. [25:28]

Some people don’t even know what good health feels like. [27:13]

Mitochondria are the cellular engines and play a more important part than we realize in your health. [28:29]

Sleep disruption and artificial light are the main drivers behind sleep disruption. [35:18]

When Matt was living in Bosnia and eating their cultural food, he realized he wasn’t having gas and bloating. [39:27]

Women with healthy bodies are not only more attractive, they are in better able to have healthy pregnancies. [42:38]

By Matt’s senior year of high school, he was able to have a start-up for optics. [46:53]

So just by being exposed to artificial light after the sun goes down or not being exposed to sunlight in the morning, we’re completely disrupting this against circadian rhythm. [50:52]

The time of day that you eat your meals is affecting your circadian rhythm. [57:12]

The RAoptic lenses are blocking the blue and green component. [01:00:38]

Spending time under fluorescent lights and LED is stressful. [01:08:45]

Light drives the function of our cellular engines. [01:14:49]

LINKS:

• RAoptics.com
• Mark’s Daily Apple
• Epigenitics: the science that says your environment turns off and on certain genes.
• Rob Wolf
• Chris Kresser
• Dr.Jack Kruse
• Dr. Douglas Wallace
• Dr. Sanjay Panda

LISTEN:

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author, an athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit and happy in hectic, high-stress, modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge, and expertly balance that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.

Brad (00:02:57):
Listeners, behold the wonderous whirlwind guest named Matt Maruca as you will soon find out. This gentleman is only 20 years old and it’s been on an incredible health journey since the age of 14 when he was like a typical teenager having all kinds of crap happening to him like allergies, asthma, gas, bloating, acne, and he took matters into his own hands, utilized the internet and went down the rabbit hole of awakening and self discovery. And it’s just an absolutely fascinating conversation where we get towards the end a deep and wonderful education about the scientific aspects of blue light and the harmful effects of blue light that are trashing our health and messing with our mitochondrial function. And Matt goes to town as well as anybody who’s ever explained it in a beautiful way that you can handle in layman’s terms.

Brad (00:03:56):
But I want to get into his life story, his journey, because it’s so fascinating to see what they, the youth of today have the world at their fingertips like never before and he’s actually taken advantage of it and done something about it and forged his own path. So I caught up with him down in his new home base of Tulum Mexico. He’s a world traveler and he pulls up roots when he feels like it. And so now he’s down in Mexico doing his thing, running his wonderful uh, business remotely where he sells custom, uh, blue light blocking eyewear for both evening use and a different style for day use. And that’s a really interesting new innovation that he describes just why you might want to use a daytime blue light blocking eyewear in your harmful indoor environment to kind of mitigate the harmful effects. And then of course, the evening blue light blocking eyewear that we’re so familiar with and Oh boy, what a fantastic show.

Brad (00:04:54):
I made a joke at the start that I, uh, turned the windup key on his back and then turned him loose and yep, that’s what actually happened. So I got to sit back and get a wonderful education and also become inspired and really touched by, uh, what the world is like for an ambitious youth who’s driven by making a difference, making a change, solving a health problem that he started with himself and now wants to share his gifts and his inspiration with others. So please enjoy this wonderful show with Matt Maruca and check out RAoptics.com and guess what? I think he set us up with the discount. If you type in the discount code, Brad, I think it’s a 15% off these wonderful lenses. Uh, any questions you can tell them you heard about, uh, the discount on the podcast and they will totally hook you up.

Brad (00:05:48):
He got me a wonderful pair of evening blue light blocking eyewear, but these are prescription so I can actually use the computer cause I’ve had to go back and forth trying to dutifully wear my blue light blocking glasses at night. And then if I have to work on the computer and it’s kind of tough to read when I’m just wearing the orange. So now I am dialed and I put a picture on my Instagram so you can see how cool I look with their stylish frames. Matt Maruca, here he is.

Brad (00:06:15):
Matt Maruca. Joining me from Tulum Mexico bien venido.

Matt (00:06:21):
Gracias, amigo.

Brad (00:06:22):
So you are an interesting dude. We only hooked up recently. Uh, I’ve heard about your story from other people and I want to get into all kinds of things, especially your, your passion and your area of expertise, of the, uh, the, the, the harmful effects of, of blue light, how to combat this horrible health destructive thing in modern life, but also your fascinating story, uh, of health awakening and this journey that, uh, still as a very young person, you’ve, you’ve traveled very quickly to the, a position to be in the hot seat for the podcast, man. So I’m going to wind up that, that little dial on the, on your back and then, uh, turn it loose. And you’re going to tell us all about the world of Matt.

Matt (00:07:09):
Yeah. Well, have you wound the dial yet? Shall I have.

Brad (00:07:13):
the dials? Wound? Man dial is wound.

Matt (00:07:15):
So in short, I was like your typical teenager when I was going into high school, about 14 years old, except that because of the modern world that we’ve built up today with the diet, the food, the chemicals, vaccines, and things that I wasn’t aware of until later on, such as electromagnetic radiation and blue light and a deficiency in sunlight. You know, basically the indoor lifestyle, we’ve created sort of the perfect storm for the body to not work. And so whereas in the past, you know, people would age slowly and their body’s function would decline or they would at least get diseases in older age. I started having, we could say the precursors of diseases at a really, really young age. I’m like, when I was again, between seven and 13 I was having chronic allergies, chronic, you know, just to pollen and seasonal allergies and dust, these kinds of things.

Matt (00:08:15):
And then I was having the same thing but in the form of headaches. So just daily migraines that going into high school and I was having gut issues that was like really frustrating. Bloating, gas every time I would eat. And so eventually it sort of came to an, it came to a peak when I started getting acne breakouts and I was thinking is a freshman in high school, like I can’t deal with this. Like this is just not, not cool. And I had already. And so that actually led me to look for solutions and the Primal Blueprint, Mark’s daily Apple was one of the first things that I found when I learned about how to heal a damaged gut. And that really kinda got me going into the whole, my whole idea that the thing that got me into healing a damaged gut, cause I was literally just Googling at 14 years old was that maybe my gut was damaged.

Matt (00:09:03):
And that was the reason why when I would eat greasy food, I would just get a total acne breakout. So it was simple as that, that how to heal a damaged gut. Just this light bulb in my head led to this whole paleo world, which ultimately led me into the stuff that really fascinates me. But the reason, you know, people typically will ask like, why didn’t you try Western medicine? Or did you, and what was your experience? And most people listening to this probably know how that goes, but the gastroenterologists prescribed me Tums to try to ease my stomach symptoms. Yeah. It’s like pediatrician would say for your headaches, just take Advil every day. And then for my allergies, of course it was like take Claritin, Zyrtec and so on. So I saw a natural, a natural path. The kinesiologist at one point did a whole yeast cleanse and that sort of helped a bit, but it never really looked a little deeper at the underlying issue.

Matt (00:09:55):
And so then I was doing the paleo diet, and in just one week of trying to clear up my acne, I actually had a complete elimination of my gut issues, my allergies, and my headaches. So things that I actually thought were genetic and couldn’t be affected by my own changes that they were just genetic totally were turned onto their head. And this was again largely because Mark was writing such interesting work saying essentially epigenetics is this new science. You know, it was the first time I’d ever heard of epigenetics and it’s the science that says that basically something like your environment or your lifestyle or your diet can turn on and off certain genes and basically cause you to express or not express what we would call diseases. And that was pretty much how I got started. I basically had this total turnaround that just said, you aren’t the product of your genes, you can actually change these things. And so once that happened, the floodgates were essentially opened. And then I was just basically sent on a what is now six year quests leading up to where I am now of constantly trying to optimize and figure out what the variables are.

Brad (00:11:09):
So you’re, you’re 14 years old and you sit down to Google and type in how to heal a damaged gut. That was your starting point?

Matt (00:11:16):
Yeah. More or less as far as getting into all this stuff. And again, it was my mom had told me that if you have a greasy foods and you’ll get clogged pores, so I didn’t know the mechanism about that. I still haven’t tried to figure out. So actually it’s funny that like whether there’s actually validity to that. Obviously refined seed oils and these kinds of things and you know, carbs, refined carbs aren’t going to be good for skin and acne, whether it’s that the oils are actually directly leading to clogging of pores, I think is a bit off.

Matt (00:11:48):
But nonetheless, it was like, okay, my, my gut must be damaged, stuff must be leaking through. And sure enough, that light bulb that you know, I don’t know whether it just came from my intuition, God, the universe, whatever it was. That was enough to see first the whole 30 and then I was like, well, I don’t have any money so I’m not paying for this program. Like what is this thing? And so eventually I just realized, Oh, it’s just about the same as the paleo diet. And then came across primal. Rob Wolf, Mark , Chris Kresser, and just sort of dove in and yeah, I mean when you’re that young and let’s say naive and, but you know, people, especially me, I would say I thought I knew everything. So when it became exceedingly clear to me for the first time in my life that I actually didn’t know everything, in fact that there was so much I didn’t know that it was like incomprehensible then it was, it was probably one of the greatest things that could ever happen to you because then I just became so curious and I didn’t get off Google, you know, paleo hacks forum, the blogs, until I literally knew everything possible.

Matt (00:12:57):
You know, I devoured everything I could. So that was sort of how I got into it. Yeah.

Brad (00:13:02):
So where were you growing up?

Matt (00:13:05):
I grew up in a suburb outside of Philly called Narberth, Pennsylvania.

Brad (00:13:09):
And I guess, I mean in many ways you’re an average 14 year old because these health problems are so common. Most kids are out there with digestive issues and getting acne in their teenage years and having headaches. And I remember having all kinds of health problems in high school and college and a lot of them were related to over-training and running, but I’d be, you know, a doubled over with stomach pain and you know, crawling over to the student health center saying, Hey, I’m really, really hurting here. And you know, they, they’d send you away with a bottle of Maalox or some of these things that we’re so familiar with. But, uh, the interesting thing is that when your curiosity kicked in, and I’m wondering if you had like, I dunno, a family background or some sort of influence where you were more free thinking like a, maybe like a homeschooling or something that was clicking differently than the next kid who’s going to go home and take the Advil like the doctor told him.

Matt (00:14:04):
Yeah. So really great question. Well, in regards to the over-training, I was running the mile in seventh and eighth grade, which was leading up to ninth grade when I sort of really hit the wall and cross country that fall when I just totally hit the wall. And, uh, that definitely contributed because my body was obviously very, uh, let’s say damaged and weak in some way. So to just be going out and putting on like three to five miles, you know, every day, five days a week, I mean for seventh and eighth grade running 20, 25 mile weeks was like quite a lot. And I ran the mile. I think 05:17 was my best when I was like 12, 13 years old. So I was pretty stoked and I was happy about it. But, but uh, yeah, it was not helping me out. So Mark’s blogs about the risks of chronic cardio really made me see like, Whoa, this could be just aging my body really quickly. So that was a huge plus that I learned that and, and slowed down, but the damage was done from all the other factors in my life.

Matt (00:15:05):
So I think as far as free thinkingness, it was the fact that my mom was always slightly alternative in her mindset. That was awesome. Like she, again, after the conventional mechanisms sort of had failed. She did try to take me to a local naturopath who did some kinesiology and a yeast cleanse and essentially I just eliminated like a bunch all the sugars and carbs from my diet to some extent, or at least the simple sugars. I probably still ate oatmeal and these kinds of things. But uh, and I don’t really remember that making a huge impact. It definitely didn’t fix the issues. I was probably when I was nine or 10 years old, but my mom definitely, no she didn’t. She attempted to keep us from getting the full schedule of vaccines and so on, which was pretty great I would say. Although we still got some and uh, yeah, that was great. And then my mom’s sister, she always ran like a natural health food store and was always interested in that stuff. So I did have some exposure to alternative methods of thinking. My uncle was a runner and he always used to run and kind of pursue alternative methods to improve his health. And so I did have at least a bit of unconventional in my, you know, exposure in my view of the world, my window of the world, thankfully.

Brad (00:16:18):
So now you’re off into the, the wonderful rabbit hole of the, the internet and the exchange of information. Were you able to sit on your butt in a traditional high school experience and go through this mundane educational track? I mean, it sounds like you’re taking off in a whole nother direction.

Matt (00:16:34):
Your, your questions are awesome. This is perfect. It’s like, um, I could not know. I was so, it was, yeah, it was freshman in high school when I had transferred to a Jesuit Catholic school in Philadelphia out of my public school with all my friends going into high school because my dad thought I would have more of a challenge there. And you know, I wasn’t particularly religious or faithful at the time. And so I just thought, well, you know, the Jesuits, they said that the, the, the, the intellectual people of the Catholic church. And so, you know, they’re focused on really great education. So why not try it and see what I learned. And I, so I literally put on a suit and tie every day coming from, you know, tee shirt and sweatpants and public school and uh, but I thought it was cool, you know, I always wanted to do things that kind of one made me stick out and two, like I was open to a new experience.

Matt (00:17:22):
So it was cool. And um, there I was studying, working really hard, but as soon as I got into this stuff, it was just about the time when I was all of this, all of this culminated together like the really increasing symptoms of my gut distress. Again, chronic gas and bloating after my meals. It was like miserable to be in class and just have a gut full of gas and bloating. It was just terrible. Um, and to be having headaches. There was actually one time in the fall of 2017, I believe it was. No, no, this was those year I graduated high school, so it was the fall of 2013, uh, when I had a migraine that didn’t go away for like several days. In fact, it was a chronic headache for almost two weeks. Uh, and I don’t know how, you know, where they draw the line between migraine and normal headache, but it really was terrible.

Matt (00:18:13):
And so I eventually came home one day just in tears and my mom brought me to the ER and they pumped my blood with like a saline and some drug and that, that got rid of the migraine. But again, like it didn’t, it didn’t do much. Um, looking as far as addressing or looking at root issues. So after this whole thing, I did transfer back to my public school and from there on I pretty much all the time I spent sitting in class, all the evenings I just was reading and researching about my health. You know, it was like, it was awesome cause it just filled all my time. So I would still get my homework done. But for me it was like so inconsequential because I felt like I was literally, you know, balancing the weight of the world on my shoulders. Like, not only do I have, you know, want to solve my health issues, but I started to feel this sort of obligation like, Oh my gosh, everyone around me is asleep and we’re all dying, you know, because we’ve been deceived and I’ve got to do something about it.

Matt (00:19:04):
I felt like like and and to S to a great extent still do and probably always will feel like a character in a movie whose job it is to somehow like get the whole message out there. So just, you know, school fell into the back burner and that was, that was it. The interesting thing is that when I went to this public or this private Jesuit Catholic school, what I didn’t know when I had signed up was that in order to prevent students from smoking weed, they would do hair drug testing starting my year. And I was quite a fan of, of doing that kind of thing when I was in high school or I should say in my last year of middle schools around age 12, 13 which is really young for someone to start doing that kind of thing. But I think part of it is that everyone in our generation or so many kids in my generation had such like a damage dopamine system and so on.

Matt (00:19:55):
And it’s still even more present today where kids were looking for these kinds of fixes, whether it was alcohol, pot, uh, now today the big thing is these little nicotine vapes, like the Juul, these little things that people are always hitting and blowing out that uh, cloud. That’s the, the, the rage. And it hasn’t been for the last few years now, but that’s what I think that was. But anyhow, so when I had to stop doing that for a semester, I was no longer able to sort of self medicate and soothe and ignore all the issues that were really starting to grow on me. And so between that and then again, the, the, the funniest part in some way or the most interesting part is the fact that I, all of the pain and suffering didn’t motivate me to actually look for a cure. It was really just a vanity thing about acne that just by chance led me to starting to have improvement in all these other things that I didn’t think could be cured.

Matt (00:20:49):
So it was really in some way, an accident. You could say that it even happened the way it did, but it totally worked out in my favor. So yeah, the rest of high school was just like my health. My sophomore year was actually, I would say quite a, it was quite a challenging experience because once I found that diet was the thing that I could use to modify, you know, cause that one week, two weeks when I first started the primal and cut out dairy, gluten, grains, sugar and legumes and refined seed oils and all that stuff, went full paleo in a week or two. I mean, I felt so great that I literally thought I had conquered the world, but then I started having some of my allergy symptoms still lingering and I knew, well, no, that isn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t natural. So then I basically went on to an autoimmune protocol and I started cutting out, and again, this is, I’m like 14 years old, going on 15 cutting out every single little food.

Matt (00:21:42):
And then eventually I went to the gaps diet cause I was still having certain allergenic symptoms, certain allergic reactions here and there, energy swings and so on. But then when I went under the gaps diet, I just felt totally dead. Like no matter how long I pushed, how hard I tried, I could just not get over the keto flu of, you know, basically just having low energy. So this is where the story got really interesting and brings into the whole light side of things. It took some time, but I could not figure out for the life of me after now having been trying different variations of paleo for about a year and basically being in my head all day, every day, just trying to figure it out cause I was so just consumed by it, I just couldn’t figure it out. And so basically I then learned about this, uh, Dr. Kruse this neurosurgeon blogger who is putting out all this information about mitochondria, light circadian rhythms, and started to read on those subjects.

Matt (00:22:36):
And what I came across eventually 15 going on 16 years old, was that if I’m living in a, in a toxic environment, meaning not just my diet, not just the chemicals, not just the vaccines, but I’m never getting sunlight because we have such an indoor lifestyle and I’m living under artificial light most of the time wrecking my sleep because of the disruption of the body’s, you know, circadian rhythm. And to make matters worse, being exposed to tons of Bluetooth, wifi, all these, let’s say non-native, non paleo, non primal frequencies that disrupt all of these, they’ve been proven to disrupt these processes in our body. The mitochondria, oftentimes we’ll have a really hard time burning fat because it’s a more, let’s say it’s a more complicated and demanding process. And so that basic idea that was then introduced into my field of reference was once again, it was earth shattering because I’ve been trying to fix my issues with diet all this time, having great success, but then still not able to get as far as I wanted to get. So then when I heard this idea I was like, Oh my gosh, it was just another about a year and a half later, it was another like, Oh my gosh, what else don’t I know now? I thought, I thought I knew everything. Now I have, I don’t have a clue. And so that just got me going down. Then that basically led me the next two, three years or two years of high school and then the two, three years since then

Brad (00:24:03):
Coming into the, the, the big focus on, on light. But I want to back up a little bit cause you said some really important things. One of them was this, uh, idea that the, uh, the mitochondria is not burning fat, uh, successfully due to all these unhealthy lifestyle influences, especially the artificial light and digital stimulation after dark. Uh, but just for the listener to slow down. Uh, that’s, that’s really interesting to put it that way because, uh, if something’s off in your energy processing system due to, uh, assorted modern, uh, offenders, then you’re going to default to the easiest and lowest octane burning fuel, which is the standard American diet. Nasty ass carbohydrate.

Matt (00:24:45):
Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And that’s what I had, I had no clue about. And so that’s really probably the most important piece to that I could possibly get across when discussing these things with people, is that if we are in this modern world where we’re again disrupting our sleep with artificial light exposure in the evening, we’re not getting healthy, adequate time outdoors in the sun, especially in the summer. And if we’re exposed to a bunch of artificial electromagnetic frequencies, these undermine the mitochondria’s ability to function properly. So like you said, we’re going to shift to the cheap fuel sugar, sugar burning essentially. And it’s, it’s very interesting.

Matt (00:25:28):
For example, my dad gave me a ring the other day. We were just chatting about all kinds of different things. One of the things he points out is that he just can’t kick his carb cravings, especially in the evening when he’s being exposed to blue light, which sort of stimulates the body to, you know, want to stay awake. And then we need fuel to power staying awake. So then of course he’s going to crave carbs going into the evening. But also in general, like his body when he finishes up his carb meal is going to, you know, again, be stored away as fat. He’s gonna burn it in his blood for a little while, but then his blood sugar is going to drop and he’s going to want another hit. And that’s just how it is. And so, and then the, the key point being that even when he tries to Keto adapt and go low carb and he does it for weeks, it’s like really challenging. So the thing that I think a lot of people in the health world take for granted is, is that, you know, all it takes is grit to get keto adapted. And that’s actually just not the case. That’s what I’ve realized and I’ve, I’ve been totally trying to re cause being so young and having inflicted so much damage on my cells at such young age that I was already, how can I say, expressing such fairly severe health issues that at 14, it’s not like I just flip the switch

Matt (00:26:44):
and be, you know, healed right away. It takes a lot of time. And so I’m still working through that process of optimizing, dialing in my cells, dialing in my hormones and so on. So, um, but yeah, that’s, that’s sort of like the key, the key takeaway that struck me and got me looking at, okay, now how do I, in addition to optimizing my diet, how do I go into dialing in my environment and what’s around me so that I can be functioning at a higher level and able to burn optimal fuels and so on and so on.

Brad (00:27:13):
So Matt, I’m wondering, with reference to your peer group, do you think that you were this particularly, um, fragile, vulnerable guy that had the sensitivities? Or do you think it’s sort of the norm and we’re just walking around, uh, sort of in a daze with, I mean, teenager and person in their twenties or their early thirties is, is running on, uh, these natural fumes where the health problems aren’t going to catch up to you like someone in their fifties or sixties. Uh, but I’m, I’m wondering, you know, people that come to this movement are oftentimes, especially the leading voices in the movement, are often coming from incredible pain and suffering where a lot of people are going through their day with not major, huge complaints that they can’t sit in class due to the gas and bloating. But they have minor gas and bloating, minor brain fog that subclinical and they have no idea what fantastic health feels like because there’s no reference point. But I’m just curious, what did you, what have you seen with like your peers and people, people of a young age going through life, um, smoking weed, taking the dopamine hits from their, their mobile device their entire lives, which is so tragic cause, uh, I’m rambling but I’m looking back like I have some something like half of my life where there was no digital stimulation whatsoever, you know?

Brad (00:28:29):
And so I have that reference points in that memory of growing up with outdoor dominant lifestyle or social engagement as our main form of entertainment. And now it seems like that dopamine pathway has been hijacked for anyone who was born, you know, around the new millennium and beyond. There’s no reference point of anything except constant overwhelming stimulation, hijacking that pathway of, of what, you know, happiness, potential and contentment and all these things that are destroyed by dopamine hits.

Matt (00:28:58):
I think you’re, I think you’re spot on to be honest. I would say there’s probably, there’s probably multifactorial in my case. So I was probably both a hypersensitive in some sense. So I was first of all conceived in vitro. So in other words, what that could tell the astute listener is that my mother’s mitochondria, so the her cellular engine, so the way that mitochondria, these cellular engines are passed down is via the maternal line. So my mom’s mitochondria obviously weren’t very good because when they’re not, one is infertile, they have a really hard time getting pregnant. And so as a result of that, they had to do in vitro fertilization. My parents now I’m like, it’s again in terms of infertility and not being able to have children, it’s the natural question is how do, how do I know it was my mom, not my father. And generally with males it’s, or I should say an infertility and people being able to, uh, being unable to get pregnant, it’s usually the woman. The reason being that, that all it takes is a little bit of sperm from a man to be able to impregnate a woman. It’s not, it doesn’t require much. Even if a man has very low sperm count and that slow sperm motility, they can still get the sperm from the guy usually. But the thing is because the mother doesn’t just pass down half a set of DNA. The mother, a mom, mothers and women in general, they pass down all of life because they pass down the other half of a set of DNA, but they also pass down a ton of mitochondria.

Matt (00:30:29):
So an egg cell, a single egg cell has thousands and thousands of thousands of these mitochondria, which end up being the engines for the entire new organism. And that’s why there’s two sexes. There’s male and female because mitochondria needed to be passed down just by one so that they’re not being mixed. Like our genes are designed to be mixed every time that we mate in order to create more genetic diversity for survival. But with energy production, it’s a much more fine tuned process where if it was, if it, if the mitochondrial genes were spliced, then the organisms would die cause it, it needs to be very finely tuned and calibrated. So anyhow, my mom’s mitochondria were not good. Basically that’s what we can know. For me having been conceived in vitro. And what that means is that my mitochondrial weren’t very great coming into the world. In other words, there’s a researcher out of Philadelphia who, one of the key researchers I came across throughout this sort of next wave of research into the deeper mitochondrial science.

Matt (00:31:25):
So it was first the first wave was like food, uh, ex exercise, but particularly the paleo authors, researchers, but mostly bloggers and, and, and researchers. And in that sense, um, then it was like into the mitochondrial stuff, much less well known guys, let’s say. Cause this stuff is still not reaching the forefront quite yet. So one of these huge researchers, Dr. Douglas Wallace from the children’s hospital of Philadelphia, he’s basically shown that all of the diseases that we’re facing today, like cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases, autism, pretty much every chronic disease we could name that isn’t like a, you know, an actual genetic disease like Tay Sachs or sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis or something. These are mitochondrial diseases. In other words, they’ve clearly identified in his lab that in all of these chronic diseases, the, the mitochondria, the cellular engines aren’t producing energy properly.

Matt (00:32:22):
So we just can’t carry out all of our functions. Well. So in my case, well I should say in addition to that, the key thing is there’s this thing called percent hetero plasma. So the percent of the mitochondrial DNA, which is mutant leads the higher the percentage, the higher risk essentially of having some sort of disease. And the reason higher percentage of mutant mitochondrial DNA leads to diseases is because the mitochondria can no longer construct their respiratory proteins properly and they’re basically energetic machinery appropriately. And so when we can’t, they can’t make energy as effectively and when they can’t make energy as effectively and efficiently, then it’s sort of like a government essentially that has, let’s say it needs a hundred units of, of funding to carry out all of this processes, but now it only has 60 or 70 and so basically they found that below a certain we can, we can tolerate a certain percentage of this mutant mitochondrial DNA.

Matt (00:33:24):
But once we get past a certain point, our energy production is so affected that we begin to express clinical symptoms. But like you said, everyone has a certain level of this, let’s say mutant mitochondrial DNA or hetero plasma or another term, again being just decreased energetic function or energy production that even though they might not be expressing type two or type one diabetes like an autoimmune disease or a metabolic disease or obesity or Alzheimer’s or cancer, they could just be expressing chronic low level brain fog that they’re not even aware of. And this is where it gets really interesting to this. The thing I mentioned earlier, the nicotine vapes that everyone’s using the Juul and so on. Anything like this cafe coffee, um, even pot to some extent but in a different way, but especially the stimulants like nicotine, caffeine and so on. Those being the two biggest, um, I would say that that I’m aware of at least those actually act on improving mitochondrial function acutely.

Matt (00:34:25):
So everyone is constantly using these like temporary hits to improve these systems. But yeah, what is the longterm cost? Probably really, really substantial as far as you know, affecting our STEM cells and just our day to day function as well. So basically I would say I was both sort of compromised coming into the world with a higher rate of hetero plasma, you know, this decrease in my mitochondrial function, basically mitochondrial damage and lowered energy production. So that’s why I was, even though my friends and peers were living a very similar lifestyle, I was expressing these symptoms a lot earlier than everyone else, which obviously led me, thankfully the internet exists, so at least I was able to go out and Google and try to figure out what was going on. So that led me to where I am now. I would say that my peers are not far behind.

Matt (00:35:18):
In other words, they probably, depending on how healthy their parents were, some came into the world with more or less damage. But because of just how toxic our life is becoming, again, so many factors influence that. I, I believe one of the biggest now is, you know how well the research shows that one of the biggest is sleep disruption and artificial light is the main driver behind sleep disruption. So that’s a huge issue. Lack of sunlight and then exposure again to manmade frequencies we use for communication and electricity. But then diet chemicals, all these other things in the environment are just totally accelerating it. So I think everyone is, especially now my peers are definitely hitting that point, that sort of critical point in the next five to 10 years when they’re supposed to be going into the workforce and like maybe raising a family, maybe bearing the responsibility of a full time job. That’s when we’ll start to see like some really, really strange things going on where like, and they’ve already started to see it, that millennials in the workplace like just don’t function as well as people used to. Like they just can’t be relied on. They can’t carry out work as well. They can’t focus. So it’s very interesting to say the least. Where this terrifying

Brad (00:36:33):
You said it, not me. So, uh, you know, that’s, that’s pretty heavy. People listen to this. We’re getting like a, a college level health science lecture from a college age person here. But you chose, I guess you you chose out of the college path, I guess when you graduated high school, I mean then, then you then, yeah, I guess you really took off on this quest even further when you had, uh, all your time and energy. So let’s, let’s keep going with the storyline.

Matt (00:37:03):
Yeah, absolutely. So where I went from high school into college was very interesting. Like, well, you know, at first actually I’m, you have sound editors. Can they maybe pause, I’m going to pause. I’m going to turn on my air conditioner because it’s pretty hot in here and it doesn’t affect the sound too much, just background. No, it’d be fine. Brian will fix it. All right, Brian? Yeah, Brian. Awesome. Yeah, usually I’ve done a lot of podcasts with Luke Story and you know, he just clapped and says, sound editor. Cut this out. Um, let’s see.

Brad (00:37:46):
I just listened to him this morning with John Gray. Pretty pretty trippy show. It’s fantastic. Talking about John Gray’s past, you know the author, the relationship author?

Matt (00:37:57):
Yeah. Yeah, we were, they recorded it. We were together at the London summit. So now just the air conditioning’s on. Do you hear it sounded like that’s a cool thing. I have a very directional mic, so it’s great. All right. Anyway, so do you want to ask the question again or should I just roll with the answer?

Brad (00:38:15):
Yeah, you can roll. Yeah.

Matt (00:38:16):
All right, awesome. So pretty much after high school it got really interesting and even so it was my freshman year was like my halfway through that going into the winter was my dive off into health. Then my sophomore year was sort of diving deeper into autoimmune, the gaps diet out that I couldn’t do ketosis and then getting coming across Dr. Jack Kruse and the research on mitochondria circadian rhythms and then diving deep into all of those researchers such as Dr. Wallace and and so on. And then my third year of high school I went on a foreign exchange program. So this is where I got super interesting. I was, like you said, totally checked out of school. So I was already miserable. I was miserable. So during my sophomore year, so in my, let’s say misery, I attempted to uh, apply for a foreign exchange program just to go somewhere else. That’s where my body was calling me for before I even learned about this mitochondrial stuff. So I went from a private Jesuit Catholic school to a public high school with my friends again. And then but I was gone thankfully from that long enough that I could, that I stopped, you know, using let’s say crutches and drugs and substances to self medicate so that I was already on this path.

Matt (00:39:27):
And then I wasn’t really into that stuff anyhow because now that I was in my head, it was like, well, I don’t want to be inhaling smoke and doing these things that I know aren’t good for me. So then the third year, I’m now in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this X Yugoslav Republic in Eastern Europe, which was like so trippy because I always wanted to travel the world and I had only gone to Canada up until then. So I was super frustrated about that. So now I’m a junior in high school, living in Europe and not just like some France or England, but like literally Bosnia. I mean this country I’d never heard of before. Uh, you know, one country inland from Croatia for those who know Croatia on the other side of the Adriatic sea on the right hand side of Italy. And it was torn war, torn country and back in time, especially as far as their technology goes by a bit and especially their food supply.

Matt (00:40:11):
Like they even, they even um, you know, have their, their grains and wheat and so on was not GMOs. Like totally different. It was fascinating. So when I was over there, because I was again on a foreign exchange program with a host family, like I could have probably stayed full paleo. But for the purposes of the exchange program, I did have some bread here and there, you know, and my host parents would cook dinner. Like they didn’t understand what it was to not eat bread cause like that’s such a foundational part of their culture. So I would have that here and there and certain local dishes and I noticed that I wasn’t having the gas and bloating that I had learned was caused by gluten most of my time. The gluten was the main, I should say the main trigger in my body doesn’t mean that the, and this is where it gets interesting, the immune dysfunction that was proceeding, that symptom was not caused by gluten.

Matt (00:41:06):
Gluten wasn’t like at the root of the issue per se. It was more mitochondrial dysfunction in my immune system was what I was learning due to my disconnected lifestyle due to the, you know, issues coming from my mother. And then all kinds of, you know, other factors that just sort of weakened the body. But then gluten was sort of the trigger because it’s so inflammatory. You need to have a really healthy, strong body with a super strong gut, which you know, way back in like for example, Julius Caesar’s time, I recently read his autobiography, all his men ate was corn. I mean they ate meat when they could, but like they ate corn but they conquered all of Gall, like they marched weeks without like days without sleeping. They, they fought to the death with all their strength for night, like days and nights. They built massive war fortification,s and these people were eating corn.

Matt (00:41:52):
You know, like all the time. Of course it was way better corn, but it sort of started these things, these ideas I was learning about, they poked some holes in these theories of, of the, you know, or not holes I should say, but they added perspective basically telling me like, wow, you know, humans way back when we’re a lot stronger now in the modern world. It’s like the paleo diet is almost sort of a necessity because almost no one is healthy and strong enough to thrive eating these really lectin rich and anti nutrient rich foods. But back then thousand years ago before all this stuff we have in our environment today, that’s against us. When we had perfect sleep or great sleep and whatnot, I think people were able to get away with it quite a lot. You know these, cause again like the whole premise of paleo is that 10,000 years ago our decline started when we started eating grains.

Matt (00:42:38):
But really like these chronic diseases have only exploded in the last hundred years. So which correlates a lot more with the move to an indoor lifestyle, complete absence of sunlight, total destruction of our sleep than it does with a consumption of, you know, the consumption of grains. You know, it also correlates a lot with the consumption of totally refined foods like seed oils though, which haven’t helped. Of course, they’re all, all these different factors playing in. So being over there like I saw the world in such a different way. All these theories I had learned about were just so strengthened. In other words, for example, the first thing that struck me were the women like, and this, this is going to sort of sound crazy, but in some way, but the women there were just on average, so much more physically attractive than the girls that I was going to high school with and it was no surprise to me.

Matt (00:43:28):
It made perfect sense because, but it probably sh you know, it always, every time I walked into school, it still did shock me anyway. Like the women there, they looked like real real women. What I would imagine maybe girls were like when you were in high school or even before that, like you know, they had proper basically a proper physique with the breasts and the bottom. I guess the behind, I don’t know what the proper term is that for term Germans here, but, but anyhow, the, the glutes and everything, like everything is basically fit for optimism. It’s an external expression of fertility. When, when someone looks very healthy in their physical structure essentially in general, not always, but in general it, it, it would be. And so, you know, if someone’s like very skinny and pale and sickly, they’re not, we’re not going to be physically attracted to them because evolutionarily the body saying that person isn’t going to be the mate that’s going to be able to bear healthy children.

Matt (00:44:25):
Whereas there’s evidence indicating that, you know, uh, the DHA stores, DHA being the essential Omega three fatty acid for the construction of a growing human brain, the DHA in a woman is largely stored in her breasts. And so having like properly formed breasts and healthy breasts is very likely related to, you know, DHA, this molecule, which a baby would need to consume a ton of which is going to ensure optimal survival of that child. So I was just sort of putting these pieces together thinking maybe it’s the case that these people growing up with way less use of cell phones. They got them at way later ages and their networks at the, at the most advanced are on 3g, whereas the States have already been using 4g and are working on 5g even, you know, when I went over there, um, they have, you know, all of the key being that they spent so much more time outdoors.

Matt (00:45:18):
These kids from very young ages like they didn’t have, they would never spend their days playing video games except for a few kids and they walked everywhere and it was just so, and then of course there’s the benefits of a much healthier diet and they were much more connected with their community. But the differences in these two groups, the men and the women at my high school in the States versus those in these, in this country, Bosnia, X, Yugoslav Republic just couldn’t have possibly been explained by genetics because I had learned about epigenetics. I knew it had to be something in the environment. So that was just like further strengthening. Wow. There’s still people on the world, even in the 21st century who are much healthier. And in, in general, I see this in Europe and Europeans, they have a much lower rate of obesity. Um, and so on.

Matt (00:46:07):
You know, there’s just to them being overweight is a lot less common. It’s still very prevalent but not even like close to like the USA as far as obesity goes. So I saw that and that just blew my mind. And then I came home to the States for my senior year and I was just like, Oh my gosh, what a contrast. The life we’re living is so fast paced, so stressful, so full of toxins and indoor, we always in our cars was one of the things that stuck out to me that wasn’t walking anywhere. When I came home I was like always in a car. So that was just boom. And so then at that point I had learned all this information and thankfully I had had exposure to some really great friends that I met, let’s say, basically through Facebook and online who were also interested in this stuff, who basically said, you know, introduced me to Silicon Valley and startups.

Matt (00:46:54):
Cause I was from Philly. I wasn’t from San Francisco or LA or something like that where people are thinking like this. But a friend handed me Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week book, well virtually handed it to me, a book called The Lean Startup about you know, building a startup in the most sort of economical and efficient way. And basically these two books and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book, uh, founder of PayPal. These three sort of startup books got me thinking, wow, I can build a business and sort of live like the new rich and live wherever I want and have my income through the internet and be location independent. And then I have the tools, how to it, the process, the methods. And uh, so from there on I was like, well, I have that. Plus I have all this knowledge about health that a ton of people don’t know about. How can I combine these two things together? So that was my senior year of high school finished up. I was fascinated by travel, saving money, landscaping everyday to travel. And as I was pushing a lawnmower every day, I was just thinking like I know way more information and can provide way more value to the world than just pushing a lawn mower. So

Brad (00:47:55):
I thought your landscaping was some term, like a, a startup term that I wasn’t familiar with from Peter Thiel’s book or something. So all was landscaping my assets and my spreadsheets. Oh no, this dude was landscaping, man. He was landscaping people. That means you can do it too. I love this. All right, man.

Matt (00:48:12):
Exactly. But that was the startup. The landscaping capital was the startup capital for me to put raw optics together in addition to go take a gap year in Europe. And that’s sort of where that story launches off. I basically went over to Europe to take a gap year, but at the same time my business for optics was starting in my garage with one of my little brother’s friends, basically doing tinting of lenses. And it was like a really small thing. It was basically for Dr. Jack Kruse’s his community who wanted fashionable blue blockers. So I took their advice to find a niche and to focus on that. And it takes some unique information that I know that the rest of the world doesn’t really know. And, and that, that sort of just grew way, way beyond what I really expect that, I mean I wanted to be the grit. I, you know, people always say set your sights high so that even if you miss that you still do really well. So like I couldn’t accept any goal less than to be the greatest, you know, most fashionable, world’s finest blue light blocking glasses and so like, and, and to grow that and become the most popular blue blocking brand in the world. And we’re not the most popular blue blocking brand in the world. But you know, as far as grabbing traction and positioning, it’s, it’s sort of on the way there I would say.

Brad (00:49:24):
Yeah, this is RAoptics.com and it’s a really beautiful shopping experience. There’s a lot of information on there. So I’m very impressed that you started this thing up in your garage during a gap year after high school. It’s actually mind blowing when so many people are dreaming of such a thing. But clearly you put those pieces together where you had the, the true knowledge and experience, even though you’re a young dude, uh, to, you know, to, to step up and say, Hey, this is, this is going to be me. This is my contribution to the world. So, uh, congratulations on that. We’ll do a huge plug for the listener here. You’ll probably, you’ll probably throw them a discount or something just to, just to keep it real. Yeah. So check it out. People.

Matt (00:50:03):
It’s raw. So we go, not just RA, but we actually, RA is the, is the Egyptian sun God, so the God of natural light and also the God of healing and medicine in ancient Egypt. And so part of my whole message with this is to re as, as one by one people become familiar with RA. Once again, this ancient mythological, um, people will become familiar with the healing benefits of the sun again, because that’s really the key. And so the lenses block out the frequencies of modern, artificial light that really disrupt all of our… Basically our circadian rhythm, our biologic clock. So it’s so that it’s a little bit more like natural sunlight or at least less disruptive to our body. But yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate the praise. It’s been a really fun journey.

Brad (00:50:52):
Right. So the spell, the spelling, it’s RAoptics.com, and you pronounce it rod, the Egyptian God of course, of course. Raw. That is so raw man. Yes. Okay. So I think a lot of listeners are likely somewhat familiar with the importance of using these, uh, some sort of a strategy against blasting their eyeballs with artificial light. Uh, especially after the sun sets when we’re supposed to be having more mellow light sources. I’ve talked about it on a lots of shows. You’ve got to go get your orange light bulbs and change those out for the, the regular, uh, blasted white ones. They have a software, we were talking about Iris software offline and efflux and things like that. Uh, but with the lenses, there’s some awareness out there for that too. And you can find the, uh, for, for years I use the, uh, you know, the $10 pair that you get at Home Depot and then you go shopping and see that there’s some premium. Uh, there’s a premium experience like you offer. So I want you to maybe talk me through the distinction of what we’re looking for in a blue light blocking lens and then how to best use it.

Matt (00:52:00):
Absolutely. So, um, what I would say is that yeah, blue blockers come in all shapes and sizes. And the first thing that people need to know about blue light blocking glasses is like, well why would we use them? And I like to provide even greater context. So we’ll get into the blue blockers and, and you know, in a little bit, but I want to, I want the, whoever’s listening to this to really like know a bit more about what I’ve been getting at. Cause there’s all this sort of theory, but I want to give the little actual takeaways at this point. So the key thing regarding this whole mitochondrial function that I came across was that sunlight’s really important. And I did a podcast with Ben Greenfield about a two, two months ago now where I went just purely deep into the science of light and how sunlight is actually not as bad as people thought and actually really good and blue light artificial light is actually really disruptive.

Matt (00:52:54):
So like all a ton of research on that. But the best way to sort of put it across simply is that sunlight is what powers all of life on earth. So all food even is actually just matter that is energized by light from the sun. So if it’s a plant, that’s how it works. And then if it’s an animal, the animal ate plants and that’s where it got its energy from and from the sun directly as well. Cause all animals, except humans live outdoors. So you know, they’re not blocking the light with windows and glass, and clothing and so on. They’re exposed to it. Even if they have their fur on, they’re still getting the infrared wavelengths through that coat. And even still ultraviolet to a certain extent, especially they’re getting lots through their eyes, which is our natural light receptacle. So you know, sunlight drives.

Matt (00:53:39):
One of the key things it does is it drives our circadian rhythm. So this biologic clock that we have that controls a ton of our hormone pro hormonal processes is basically stimulated every single morning when the light inclines and if we lived in nature and the forest camping, like I’m sure you’ve gone camping and probably do on a regular basis, Brad, you seem like that kind of dude. So maybe not, maybe might have guesses wrong.

Brad (00:54:03):
trying try and.

Matt (00:54:05):
so you know, you know that when you’re getting, like if you’re camping and you’re in your tent, that light comes up in the morning, even if it’s 6:00 AM or 5:00 AM in the summer or seven eight in the winter. Once the lights up, it’s pretty hard to stay asleep very long. You know, you can’t really sleep until like 10 11 like a lot of people do today. You’re going to be up when the light comes up in general. So that’s sort of the way that the sun works and the way it always has. Birds are up chirping at first light or even just before it. But now, uh, today we don’t really get that because we’re indoors in our, our caves and we’re able to just completely be disconnected from the rhythm of the light. So that’s sort of the key thing that the sun does, is sets that whole circadian rhythm, which controls the secretion of cortisol in the morning and then keep pituitary hormones. The pituitary gland, you know, it secretions control pretty much all of our bodily systems directly and indirectly in general. The hypothalamus I should say is more of the energy, uh, controlling center of the brain. And the hypothalamus is also governed by light. So we have these visual axes which go for I should say visual and non visual pathways that go from our eye into our brain.

Matt (00:55:22):
So it was always thought that the eye was this, uh, camera essentially that would just project images into our head from the light we see. But the most fascinating finding over the last hundred years in the fields researching the biologic effects of light is that the eye is actually not just a camera. It’s actually more of a clock. In fact, the clock function came first. So the eyes initial purpose was when it wasn’t even they, when they weren’t even eyes, they were just primitive photo receptors to receive light was literally just to know is the light out or is it not? And so in that sense it isn’t still, it’s still an eye, but it’s more just is it day or is it night? It’s a basic sensor. And so we still have these systems in our eye that we have different photo receptors, there’s rods and cones for vision, but there’s third photo receptors called retinal ganglion cells that were discovered about 30 years ago.

Matt (00:56:20):
Well, I should say that the pigment inside of them called melanopsin, which is the key, which people will be hearing more about in the next 10 years. But melanopsin is a blue light photo recepting pigment and it’s in these retinal ganglion cells which have connections directly to the hypothalamus in the brain. Specifically this thing called the super charismatic nucleus, which is this master timekeeper in our brain. But the point of all this is that these, the circadian rhythm isn’t just set by all light. It’s specifically set by these blue wavelengths, they signal to the brain and say, is it dayers at night? So, and that literally drives a huge multitude of processes in our body, especially our sleep cycle. So just by being exposed to artificial light after the sun goes down or not being exposed to sunlight in the morning, we’re completely disrupting this against circadian rhythm.

Matt (00:57:12):
If someone wants to Google, they can go up and check out the details of the circadian rhythm. But this doesn’t just control our sleep and wake. It controls our entire metabolism, how we process food. So for example, if, if we’re in, if we’re not in the sun in the morning and we’re eating, if we haven’t gotten the morning sunlight stimulus to turn on, you know, basically set our circadian rhythm and turn on our brain and everything. Not only are our hormones going to be off and delayed and dysfunctional or even depleted and diminished because we haven’t gotten the right signaling. Also, the metabolism isn’t going to work well. So this you could eat the same meal every single morning, but the body’s going to be able to burn through it more effectively if we’ve been out in light in the morning versus if we haven’t. Or for example, there’s a really interesting researcher who lots of podcasters have been having on like Dave Asprey and uh, Ben Greenfield.

Matt (00:58:01):
Maybe you guys have even had them on or you totally should, is named Satcha Panda and he works down in San Diego and he’s wrote a great book called the circadian code. One of the most amazing studies they did was on basically meal timing. And they showed that if an animal eats in general, animals have certain times that they’re designed to eat. So if you’re nocturnal, you’re designed to eat in the early evening or during the evening and the night. If you’re a diurnal, meaning you know, like awake during the day, like a human, then you’re designed to eat during the day when the light is out. So what they did is they had nocturnal animals that would eat healthy meals when they’re not supposed to be eating and then eat unhealthy meals when they are supposed to be eating and the animals that ate the unhealthy meals at the times their metabolisms were active and they’re supposed to be eating, had significantly lower rates of metabolic issues compared to those who are eating healthy, healthy foods times when they’re not supposed to be eating.

Matt (00:58:58):
So that is very interesting because what they’ve taken from that in studying it over and over and over again and then looking at similar data regarding humans is that if you eat basically a healthy paleo meal at 10 at night or nine at night, or even seven at night when the body’s supposed to be getting ready for sleep and you’re now going to be disrupting your sleep, if you eat after five or 6:00 PM at the latest, you’re going to have a more negative impact from that healthy paleo meal or primal meal than if you ate potentially than if you ate a negative unhealthy meal in the middle of the day. Now this doesn’t go. It doesn’t apply for every single little nuance because people are going to jump on that. You know, if you have, if you’re allergic to gluten and you eat gluten in the middle of the day, it’s not going to be good for you, it’s going to harm you.

Matt (00:59:43):
But the whole point is if you’re within a realm of foods that the body isn’t directly reacting to, if you’re disrupting your sleep by eating late, it’s having a much more negative consequence on the metabolism, sleep, circadian rhythm and so on because the body doesn’t get into proper sleep and repair mode. So the next day we’re running off of old unrepaired faulty proteins. We’re basically getting into a chronically fatigued state, lower energy production, the mitochondria, getting back to that key piece, these engines, the mitochondria, the key mechanism for them to be repaired is through melatonin production. And the way we make melatonin is by setting our circadian rhythm with early morning sunlight exposure and being outdoors throughout the day, exposed to ultraviolet light in particular when it comes out in the middle of the day or in the, I should say the late morning and then we, we’ve had the signaling that that leads to the initial production of melatonin.

Matt (01:00:38):
But in order to secrete it and for it to actually be utilized, we need to have an absence of light for three to four hours before we’re going to bed. Or I should say just several hours after the sun goes down. In other words, once the sun’s gone, we shouldn’t have a bunch of artificial light around. If we do, it should be candlelight light that’s low in blue wavelengths, so candles or red or orange light bulbs. And if we have to go out, that’s when blue blocking glasses become super handy. And that’s why I started the business because it was like the lowest hanging fruit of, cause. I can’t sell morning sunlight, can’t bottle that up and sell it, but you. But again, I can sell or create a product to at least alleviate the disconnects we’ve created in the modern world. So you know, I can, you can only sell information and get people back into nature in some way.

Matt (01:01:22):
But when we’ve created all these disconnects, there’s so many opportunities of ways to mitigate that. So that sort of to give the background on blue blocking glasses and to get, I guess to your question, the key thing is to have blue blockers that block the wavelengths that are disrupting sleep. So there’s a lot of clear lens glasses that call it claim to be blue blockers or people will buy, like for example, they’ll go to their optician or optometrist and they’ll buy, they’ll get this blue light coating. And here’s the key thing to know. Light comes in wavelengths, which is just like colors. Um, and so you know, for those who study physics or know about this stuff, they’ll be familiar with those who don’t. Then we’ll take it a little slow. But essentially the blue color that we see is a, is a range of wavelengths between around 400 and 480 up to 500 nanometers approximately.

Matt (01:02:11):
And so there’s all different shades of blue within there, but the, the blue light that our melanopsin receptors in our eye that signal our circadian rhythm and said all of these hormones just from the light going through our eye every day are sensitive to a peak sensitivity around 479 480 nanometers. So, and there’s diminishing sensitivity in both directions going down to 450 and up to 510 and so on. But the key thing is that these blue light clear lenses that are being sold and the coatings are being put on people’s prescription glasses, they block all the blue light up to only 420 nanometers. And then beyond 420 up to 440 they might block between 20 and 50% by the time you get to 455 nanometers on the range of wavelengths, people can look up the electromagnetic spectrum or the color spectrum and see what I’m talking about here.

Matt (01:02:59):
You’ll get a great picture on Google. Essentially by the time you get up to 455 nanometers of light, which is the wavelength where the emission from LEDs. So basically all modern lighting is centered around 455 nanometers. These lenses block nothing. So it’s like a total gimmick there. And they’ll even send out a little blue light laser with the glasses sometimes so that people can shine it through and see that it’s blocked. But the laser’s admitting 400 or 500 years, but the screens them at 455 nanometers. And so do the headlights of cars and the streetlights and all the lighting we’re using in our houses today pretty much, especially in California, LEDs are not like legally mandatory at least to pass inspection. So it’s pretty insane. And so this is a huge issue. So we need blue blockers that block the right range. And so we have, there’s two types of blue blockers.

Matt (01:03:47):
Also, there’s blue blockers for day and blue blockers for night. So blue blockers for night are the key, cause they regulate your circadian rhythm more than anything else. And these need to block everything up to about 500 or even ideally to 550 nanometers, which means all the way deep into the green range of light. Cause green is also more energetic than the colors that are found in fire, red, orange and yellow. And so our lens is like the ones you have, Brad. They block up to 550 nanometers of light, which basically is all completely all of the blue, like 99.9%. As much as you can legally claim as possible to be blocked and then up into the green range, still blocking the vast majority of the green wave lengths up to 550 nanometers.

Brad (01:04:29):
So the green, your sleep, the green is not visible. The, the reason we see like a blue sky or blue ocean is because that’s the visible spectrum that we can see. Uh, but, but, uh, it’s still energetic when you’re talking about green, uh, even though it’s past our, our visual field or

Matt (01:04:46):
so actually that’s the cool, the interesting thing about this is that all of the colors that I’m talking about right now, when I say them, I’m referring to the, to the visible color. So the thing is like for example, when we have like a, a white light, people, people relate to the uh, Pink Floyd dark side of the moon album, I believe that was the one with the, that’s the one with the prism on the cover, right? With the, uh, so there’s a prism, basically there’s a white light and then the prism breaks apart the light into the colors of the rainbow. So basically every bulb that we see has that full, generally not full spectrum, but those different color components, especially blue, green and red. So our lenses are blocking both the blue and the green component. Our night lenses I should say, are blocking those components.

Matt (01:05:36):
It’s the same in the sun. Like there’s green, red, orange, yellow, green and blue in the sun. So if you put those lenses on, you’ll be able to see, if you look at something that’s green, if the green that it’s admitting is above 550 nanometers, between 550 and570 you’ll be able to see the green, so that’s like for example, green lights on traffic lights. Those are somewhere between 550 and 570 but green between about525, 30 and 550 but that green you won’t be able to see. So if you put it on again our night lenses and you look at something blue, it eliminates its color. It just looks gray or black because you’ve eliminated what our eye perceives as blue. Now that’s the cool thing about these glasses is that because the circadian rhythm, these photo receptors in our eye that govern the clock and drive all of our hormonal processes and sleep and so on, we have to thank God or the universe or whatever that that we’re not that we’re not sensitive as far as our circadian rhythm goes to all the colors.

Matt (01:06:34):
It’s just that sort of tight range of blue and a bit in the green range. Because this way we can still use light at night. You know, we don’t have to go live in a cave and basically, you know, stay inside our houses and you know, to, to have a normal functioning circadian rhythm. All we have to do is block pretty much the blue and the green a bit. So yeah, that’s why these night lenses are particularly exceptional because they block all the right wave length. And the key with RAs also is that, you know, if someone has an ugly, uh, like you said something from home Depot, that’s like a space cadet type of glasses, you’re not really gonna wear it when comply. It’s like just with the drug, if compliance is low, then it doesn’t work. So we have to have really attractive glasses so that people feel cool and I go out with my glasses on wherever I go and people compliment them.

Matt (01:07:20):
So it’s super awesome that I was able to do that. The incentive for the business being the fact or in some way being the fact that I would go to parties in high school and I would look like the Terminator with some crazy safety Goggle looking glasses, blocking blue light, trying to, you know, apply all this stuff and optimize my health cause it was my main priority. But you know, being like total weirdo in some way. I mean I was friends with all like the cool kids I guess you could say. So people just thought it was funny but you know, I really wanted to have something that was still a good conversation starter but not just like downright insane. So anyhow, um, that’s the key about the night lenses to block all those ranges. And then for day lenses, because it’s okay to have blue light during the day, people always ask like, why would you want to block any blue during the day?

Matt (01:08:02):
The key thing to know is if you’re in an office under fluorescent light that isn’t the same blue as if you’re out on the golf course or out swimming or doing whatever. When you’re outside, you’re getting the full spectrum of sunlight, including the non-visible portions, which are sort of what you were alluding to back there. The UV and the infrared. These non-visible parts of the light spectrum that we don’t see but are still there. They drive a huge amount of processes in our body. So these are critical for optimal health and that’s one of the reasons why I’m moving to a totally indoor lifestyle. Probably that is the main reason why moving to an indoor lifestyle is such a huge threat because we’ve eliminated key frequencies, sort of like key vitamins that drive a ton of processes in our body. So we can talk about that separately.

Matt (01:08:45):
But basically the fluorescent, the blue light coming from fluorescents and LEDs, it not only is is a big spike that’s not balanced by the rest of the spectrum, especially like the healing red, but it’s just, it’s basically like blue is more stressful and wakes us up and it’s good when it’s balanced by the healing red frequencies and the wavelengths in that range. Like people know about the Juve and the red light panels and red light therapy and how healing it is. The key thing that I try to impress upon people I’m speaking with in general is that it’s not like the Juva these panels are doing something that’s like new and beneficial. It’s like it’s what we’re supposed to have all the time if we live outside, but now that we live indoors and we have way more blue, we have an imbalance way more blue and less red cause our lights have less red.

Matt (01:09:33):
So these panels will give a huge benefit to someone who works in an indoor setting or doesn’t get as much time outdoors. I spend all my, almost all my time outdoors, whether I’m in the shade or in the sun, I’m still getting the full spectrum so we don’t have to be in direct sun to get the benefits. It’s just about being outdoors outside of glass, outside of windows, cause glass and windows and walls block the full spectrum or they distort the spectrum. At least glass does. So I don’t feel an effect from using red light therapy and Juve panels. But if I worked in doors and lived in doors or it was winter and I didn’t have much sun at all, then that’s when you feel like a huge effect and that’s what most people are doing. So huge benefit there. But so for daytime lenses, the point being modern indoor fluorescent lighting has way more blue and way less red.

Matt (01:10:19):
So they just blue daytime lenses as we call them. We have night lenses and day lenses or computer lenses and sleep lenses sleeping for night, computer being for day. These just reduce the blue about 40 to 50% our lenses reduce the blue wave lengths about 45% the most harmful spike so that you’re balancing it out with the red wavelengths that are admitted by the lights inside. But the cool thing about our technology is we use these pigments that basically block the wavelengths in a sort of, how can I say, a very nice fashion, very balanced fashion so that it may, we maintain relative color perception that is undistorted. So the night lens is because we need to block all the blue, there’s going to be what we would call color distortion or just a color change, meaning the lenses are like a pretty deep red orange as the ones that you just were trying on.

Matt (01:11:10):
But our day lenses, which we’ll have to get you a pair of as well, they don’t distort the color nearly as much. So you have what we call a near clear lens, but it’s still reducing the blue by quite a substantial amount. So that’s really the key with blue blockers is to make sure you don’t have the clear lenses. They don’t block anything and for, so if you’re going to use day lenses make, they have to have at least a little bit of a yellowish hue for you to know that they’re doing anything. Cause yellow implies the blues being removed. The night lenses, they have to either be orange or red and they have to be verified. You know, you want to be getting them from a reputable company so that you know that they’re not just red but not blocking all the right wavelengths. Cause that’s possible too. So that’s circadian rhythm and blue blockers. And so it show, yeah.

Brad (01:11:49):
Can I do a little test? Like when I, when I put the glasses on, we’re, we’re talking on Skype so you can see me, but I just for fun looked down at my, a familiar Microsoft word icons where you have the bright blue, uh, Microsoft office. So the bright blue w for word and then the X for the Excel spreadsheet. And when I put these night blue blocking lenses on, they both get muted out. Just as you described in to sort of a, a gray issue. They don’t have color. So could that be a simple test If I had an inexpensive pair and I looked at them and they still looked blue and green, I’d know that I’m not blocking those important wavelengths. Be a very good symbol tonight. Let’s talk to Microsoft and get, get them to sponsor RAoptics or something and then you can look at their things. Yeah,

Matt (01:12:33):
yeah. Well we’re, we’re doing some really interesting stuff with, um, with big companies and that kind of thing. Getting the lens technology out to them under their own, let’s say, their own label. So you know, for their people. So it’s really cool because the technology is like, you know, it’s got to happen and no one’s really doing it right now. So it’s, it’s a very few, I should say. It’s, it’s a very interesting, uh, deal. But so yeah, that’s sort of my, that’s sort of the, the basis of the circadian rhythm. Um, something that would be super interesting to touch on would be some of the other ways that, you know, being exposed to the sun drives hormones and metabolism, health and so on. Um, if you want to get into that, but, you know, I just put out a whole like, monologue, so I’m curious what you,

Brad (01:13:20):
Oh my gosh, dude, that was so, I mean, it was very well explained and I hope the listener, if you did get, uh, uh, troubled there, just just replay it because, uh, you know, I, I’ve tried to expose myself to this stuff and learn about it, but sometimes it gets in over your head or it gets confusing. But that was a, a beautiful, uh, travel through the modern life and the extreme disconnect. And I want to kind of summarize, we’re going to have to get you on for part two and get into all those things you just mentioned. Uh, but that, that initial um, thing that you said, it’s going to stick with me a long time. When you said that you, you weren’t burning fat well because you had dysfunctional mitochondria and it was possibly beyond your dietary changes and now you’re starting to think about what’s the influence of the EMF or the blue light exposure and that disconnect right there where you can’t burn energy without eating the high sugar diet that’s going to put stop everybody in their tracks.

Brad (01:14:16):
And so that’s when we have to start looking at other ways to optimize health and other things beyond just eating the right foods such as the timing thing. And Dr.r Panda does great research and then we’re starting to get a bigger picture. Then I think, I think we see a lot of regimentation in the ancestral health scene where people are just checking boxes on a list and thinking that’s the end all. Rather than bringing in a more holistic approach, maybe better attitude, getting outside in the sun more, exercising more and putting all the pieces together nicely.

Matt (01:14:49):
Yeah, I think that this is very important. Um, as far as you know, the whole summary of, of this information, it’s that light drives the function of our cellular engines. And so the analogy that I always like to sort of close off with or sometimes start off with is let’s just say we have a car. The car engine and cars just like humans use, or the car engine uses a hydrogen based fuel source and reacts with oxygen, which makes water and releases a lot of energy in the exothermic reaction of, of hydrogen and oxygen making water. And then that energy is used to push the pistons to make them fire with the little explosions occurring and then move the car. So let’s just say that for whatever reason wear, tear usage, the spark plugs in the engine were worn down. At least some of them were worn down or some of them weren’t even functioning at all.

Matt (01:15:48):
Someone goes to drive the car down the road and it’s the engines misfiring. It’s the car is not starting well or the car just can’t accelerate, for example. Those are some of the things that would happen if the spark plugs in the engine weren’t working well. What one could come to potentially is, you know what, maybe I need to put premium gas into my engine in order to fix this issue because my car isn’t working well, right. So they go to the gas station, they put in premium gas, but the issue still happening because they were using regular and now they’re using premium. So they’re still having issues. So they say, you know what, I might need fuel additives. You know, so they put in fuel additives and they drive, they changed their oil. Even let’s say, and nothing fixes the issue. They’re still driving.

Matt (01:16:34):
The engine is still misfiring. They’re still having problems, not accelerating. It might not even start, right? So they go to the mechanic and the mechanic says, well, you know, the issue is that your, your spark plugs are worn down. So no matter how good your fuel is or what fuel additives you put in or how much you change your oil, it’s not going to fix the broken sparkplug. So let’s get those fixed and then you’ll be on your merry way and it’s going to be great. Right. So that was, that was actually my story. So I had all these issues and I tried Western medicine first, which was akin to taking fuel additives, like drugs and things to sort try to improve things on a surface level in some way. Um, and I would like in that also to a huge amount of supplements that are on the market today.

Matt (01:17:17):
They’re sort of, they’re, they may have certain benefits, but if you have a certain, let’s say, more foundational issue, they might not help. Same thing with, when I got into a diet, I was trying to use premium fuel instead of low octane fuel, but it wasn’t solving that root issue. Still for me, I always still, you know, misfiring and puttering and whatever, you know, blowing black smoke and so on, not accelerating well and whatnot. And then finally I started learning about these more foundational pieces of the engine, the spark plugs. And it turns out, you know, these are the proteins in the mitochondria that allows to channel energy and produce energy and carry all, all carry out all of the functions. Well. And so the spark plugs are mitochondrial energy production machinery. It’s controlled by melatonin, which is controlled by light. It’s a light driven hormone.

Matt (01:18:10):
So if we’ve destroyed our light environment, we’ve destroyed our… We no longer go out in the morning light in the early hours of the day to look at the sun and watch the sun or just be out on the porch to drink our coffee or to walk to work or whatever we would do being outdoors as humans used to live outdoors just a hundred years ago, we’ve, we’ve transitioned to where now 75 plus percent of people work indoors, whereas a hundred years ago it was 75% plus working outdoors. Um, we’ve, we’ve created this huge disconnect. So as soon as I started to fix that foundational issue, then I really was making even more progress. So it’s especially useful for the people who are just spinning their wheels. Some people, their spark plugs aren’t totally broken, so if they just upped their fuel, they’re golden. But people in my generation, like I’ve even spoken with a functional doctor friend of mine who would do treatments with functional protocols on older people who grew up in a much healthier environment and have healthier mitochondria and they would work, they would do all these standard functional medicine protocols.

Matt (01:19:05):
They would do the same protocols and like a 17, 16 year old tech addicted kid and they would see no outcome whatsoever. In fact, the kids still just getting worse. And so he, you know, learn about all this information and came to realize that this is the only possible explanation where, you know, the engines, the mitochondria, the environment, and these foundational biophysical principles are destroyed. So, you know, certain things that used to work might not work anymore. So we need to look at the, at the deeper levels of the engine and yeah, so sunlight in the morning block, blue light at night. That’s the two most important steps of the light diet are two of the most important steps of what I call the light diet, which is what I’m working on teaching.

Brad (01:19:47):
Your contribution to the planet, man. I love it. Matt Maruca of killing it from his home base and to Lou Maaco. Thank you for the great education. We’re definitely going to check out raw optics.com get those lenses on. It’s such an easy fix and it makes such a big difference. So I really appreciate you driving this space and been a big change to my life too. I can, I don’t want to like oversell things, but you can tell a little bit that um, this, this use of the lenses habitually at night is helping you transition into a graceful night of sleep and comparison to these nights where whatever you’re doing, you’re just, you know, blasting yourself with uh, too much light and then you sleep fitfully so it’s, it’s a great way to turn your health around, especially if you’ve looked in other areas. So thanks a lot Matt.

Brad (01:20:36):
We’re going to get you on for part two. This was part one right here.

Matt (01:20:39):
Brad. Thank you. I’m, it is my pleasure across the board.

Brad (01:20:43):
Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at get over yourself podcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop, iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves cause they need to. Thanks for doing it.

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