0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, fire nation. JLD here with an audio master class about the 20 year old who built a million dollar business to drop these value bombs. I brought that 20 year old on the mic. His name is Matt Maruca. He's a founder of RA optics making science based blue light protection glasses preferred by leading health experts. A reality. He teaches about how sunlight is essential for optimal health and how indoor technology based lifestyle is responsible for the epidemic of chronic disease. So fire nation, we're gonna be talking about how light affects your body, how that indoor lifestyle is impacting your body and health.

0 (45s):
What are those implications? What can we do? And so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors, did you know that 97% of text messages get opened and 90% are opened within three minutes. You need to be texting your customers and podium can help for a limited time sign up for 20% off your plan at podium.com/fire. Matt say what's up to fire nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. Yeah,

1 (1m 16s):
I'm a triplet. So I'm one of three children raised in the same womb and born within two minutes of, yeah.

0 (1m 23s):
Now all boys, couple of girls in there wants to deal myself two girls. And are you guys fraternal or identical for a turtle?

1 (1m 31s):
You can't be identical if you have a mix of the sexist. Okay,

0 (1m 34s):
Kidding. Yeah. That makes total sense. Now that I thought about that girls too. They're fraternal, but yeah, very, very cool. I did not know that about you. Well, listen, I gave the introduction of what you've done so far in this world in a very brief and concise manner. And we're here to talk about how you've built a million dollar business as a 20 year old. Who's just turned 21. So what is your story?

1 (1m 59s):
Thanks for asking John. I was born and raised in Philadelphia and began struggling with various health issues at a fairly young age allergies, gut issues, headaches, migraines. I was, it was pretty challenging for me to say the least going into middle school and high school and just having chronic gas, bloating, headaches, allergies, all kinds of random times when I didn't really know what was causing it and accepted it as just my genetic destiny. Eventually when I started getting breakouts of acne and I vanity became a concern for me, I then started to actually decide, I want to take my health into my own hands. I must be able to do something about this because the standard medical paradigm hadn't really been working for me very effectively.

1 (2m 46s):
So I learned about many diets that are out there today that are utilized by a lot of people, such as the paleo diet, the keto diet, there's all these great diets that help people to do a lot of things. And I got some great results which opened eyes to this new idea of epigenetics that we are, what our environment affects our genes to become. And so I learned that I could actually do things to change my health by changing my environment, my inputs, my diet, the thing was that the diets didn't take things quite far enough for me and my analytical mind, because I wasn't getting the results that I knew were possible. I just had this feeling that there was more out there and after a couple of years, and this is early in high school, I was just doing a ton of reading.

1 (3m 30s):
I learned about mitochondria, which are the cellular engines in ourselves. There's about a thousand per human cell of which there are approximately 50 to a hundred trillion. So there's a lot of mitochondria in the human body, a lot more than we have cells. And these engines actually are responsible for our existence, essentially because they make all of the energy that makes us different. From inanimate matter, like dirt, we have energy flowing through us and the mitochondria are the center point of that. And it turns out the reason they became relevant for me is that this transition to an indoor lifestyle that we've undertaken as a society in the last 150 or so years since the advent of electric lighting and just a general transition away from farming and outdoor work to indoor types of work, industrial work, and now more work in a white collar sort of office building style.

1 (4m 23s):
For many people, this transition has tremendously impacted our mitochondrial function because light happens to be one of the most powerful drivers of mitochondrial function. So we've gone from full spectrum sunlight, which drove biological evolution to artificial light, which is very, very different from full spectrum of sunlight, kind of like the difference between a whole food and a processed food, but much greater magnitude and scale. And so this is causing our body. Our bodies really collectively as a species to devolve to match the energy available in the environment for complexity, we evolved in a much more energy, rich situation.

1 (5m 4s):
We evolved certain levels of complexity in our organisms that were allowed by that energy. And now that the energy level has dropped, we were declining cognitively physically to meet that complexity. That's allowed kind of like a government with, let's say a $10 trillion tax base that gets cut in half. And now has all these programs that built up that required that level of income. Now have to be cut in half because the income is no longer there. And that's really what's happened since moving to an indoor lifestyle. So I learned this, it fascinated me and I started learning well. Okay. If our engines are destroyed by this indoor lifestyle is fixed, is eating a healthy diet, going to be able to fix that.

1 (5m 47s):
In other words, if you have your car, I don't know what you drive, but probably something pretty cool. If your Sparklets are all worn out, you know, you have all these warnings. You great, great engine, all this stuff, but your spark plugs are worn out now and you're driving. You're having problems. Would it make any sense to go to the gas station and say, well, I'm putting in regular. Maybe if I put in premium, it's going to fix all these problems I'm having because of my Warnock's worn out spark plugs. The answer is, of course, it's not going to work because your spark plugs are still broken. You're just fixing the gas. Well, that's the same thing everyone's doing when everyone's saying, well, let me go, Quito, let me go, paleo, let me go vegan. Let me change my fuel because our spark plugs, our mitochondria are, have been fundamentally damaged by the transition to an indoor lifestyle.

1 (6m 29s):
More specifically deficiency of full spectrum, sunlight, particularly red and infrared light, which many people are familiar with from red light therapy, saunas, and additionally blue light toxic from excess exposure to blue light unbalanced by healing red and infrared light, which is the situation for anyone who looks at a screen for any period of time throughout the day, when not also simultaneously outdoors exposed to full setup, full spectrum sunlight. So in a nutshell, that's sort of the evolution of my story. And I became very passionate about, you know, how can I learn more about this? Because there's so much more than I ever even imagined was out there. And of course being, you know, 16 at that point 17, when I was learning about this and a good friend of mine, a couple years older handed me the four hour workweek, the lean startup and zero to one, and the hard thing about hard things.

1 (7m 21s):
And I was like, okay, well I know something the rest of the world, doesn't at least I think I do. There's gotta be an opportunity here that I don't have to live off my father's money and go to college. Like most of my peers do and be able to start a business. So I thought about it for two years in high school. And while I was abroad my junior year and senior year back home, and eventually, you know, things kind of came together when I saw the right opportunity and I sort of took advantage of it. And I've been building it up for the last three years and there's a lot further to go from here, but it's been really great so far,

0 (7m 52s):
There's a lot further to go, but it sounds like, you know, at 21 years old, you have about another 150, maybe 180 years to live, you know, at the, at the rate you're going, because I mean, man, it's just like, you're doing all the things right now at such a young age, you know, just the, all the cool anti-aging stuff that's coming out and you take care of yourself and the telomeres and all this jazz. And of course you being so knowledgeable mitochondria and all those different things. I mean, it's really a really fascinating, and you know, it is just one of these things where like, I just love diving deep into these areas as well. Like when you think about, Hey, what did humans like specifically homo-sapiens do for 99.9% of our existence? Well, we were outside, we migrated, we did this, we did that.

0 (8m 35s):
You know, it's only the past few hundred years that we haven't been doing what we've been doing for the past tens of thousands of years. And so like, what are we missing because of that? Well, we're missing all that outdoor exposure. We're missing that natural vitamin D that comes from that full spectrum light that you're talking about. And I mean, that's, you know, I mean, I'm taking baby steps and I'm still learning, but you know, that's one thing where I'm now just committed to taking my dog on a walk every single morning. So I get up and, you know, I'm getting outside, I'm looking up at the blue sky. So my eyes are seeing that my cortisol spiking back up and I'm having the sun hit my face to really get going in the morning in the right direction. And then when 6:30 PM comes, boom, I'm tossing all my blue blockers. If I'm watching TV, if I'm looking at my phone, if I'm doing all the things that I try to minimize, but of course I can't completely take them out of my life in a lot of areas, but you know, those blue blockers are on.

0 (9m 24s):
So that starting at 6:30 PM as the sun source has sat down here in Porto Rico, my mind starts to, you know, adjust to that sun setting and not continue to get the cortisol spikes from the blue light. That's all around us everywhere, every single, you know, second and screen that we have in front of us. So there's so much to take away here. You already mentioned, you know, about some ways that light does affect our body. Let's dive a little bit deeper into how light affects our body and how this indoor lifestyle really impacts our body and health. Like, I love that analogy you gave about the fuel. That's super cool. And let's just kind of go a little bit deeper about light affecting our body and indoor lifestyle, affecting our body and health.

1 (10m 9s):
That's a fantastic question. I'd love to go deeper. So if we think about, like we said earlier, what is life and helps, you know, and we're talking about how the body works and everything, it does actually help to ask that question. What is life? So from my research and the most advanced research done by various scientists around the world, who are the people who I naturally am inclined to study from life is this series of ongoing biochemical biophysical reactions that are basically catalyzing things in the universe that want to happen, but can't happen without an investment.

1 (10m 51s):
So life's kind of like an energy investor. There's all of these, what they call redox couples in science that are all throughout the universe. And the second law of thermodynamics is that all things in the universe tend towards a state of increased entropy, meaning like chaos, but it doesn't always necessarily appear that way. When you actually look at things like life, life appears to be defying entropy because we are not disordered chaotic systems. We're actually highly structured. However, we're only temporary. And the reason we're able to exist in a state that appears to defy entropy or chaos molecularly, which would a great example of entropy would be like, if someone, for example, farts in a room as time elapses, those molecules of gas will spread equally throughout the entire room dissipate.

1 (11m 54s):
And I hopefully dissipate further. Yes, correct. So, but we're not doing, I mean, we, we do after we pass, but for at least, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, or hopefully much longer like you inferred to w w we aren't doing that. And so that's, again, that's because of energy that's present in the environment. That's what allows us to be alive and to basically do this energetic investing. So with, with humans in particular, our form of investment is to make water. So we take hydrogen, which has been split from water by sunlight, and then held on a carbon backbone by a plant or an animal that then ate that plant.

1 (12m 35s):
We take those hydrogens, we input and investment of energy. People can think of like any kind of capital investing. We put an investment of energy into that hydrogen to break it free from that carbon backbone, by chewing it and digesting it with enzymes. And then it goes into our mitochondria and ourselves, and it's broken down further into something that can donate. It's basically the, the, the purest form of hydrogen, just like, you know, something like jet fuel that you can easily burn. But anyway, we put that energetic investment and we break these hydrogens free. These hydrogens are then reacted with oxygen that we're breathing in from the air and the two form to make water. But rather than in the case of a fire where hydrogen and oxygen freely react, which releases all of that energy just out, we actually make the reaction very slow.

1 (13m 25s):
And while it's quite fast, but it's more slow and controlled and it's specifically more controlled. And so we're able to extract all of that energy that we would see in a fire from reacting, hydrogen and oxygen. We do that inside of us, and we make water just like fire does, although on a fire, it just all evaporates in us. It hydrates ourselves. And that basically is our investment. And so that's how life really began was doing this kind of thing at the bottom of the ocean. In these, in these events, it was just a reaction that kind of perpetuated essentially. And so energy and light in particular to your question, which is in effect, a free form of energy for the taking, it's almost like free money. That's just there. When this investment, this, these energy investors, these primordial organisms were exposed to this free form of energy.

1 (14m 11s):
It offered an opportunity for them to be able to build more complexity and drive more complex reactions and build more complex structure, simply because it was a free form of energy and energy allows systems and physics to do work, which is basically to make things move and make things happen. So at the most fundamental level, the reason I go through that description is because light is really what life is. So in other words, if you have something that's dead, or that was never alive in the first place, like a rock, it doesn't have any energy coursing through it that makes us alive, and that makes it alive.

1 (14m 54s):
So in us light really is that energy that basically keeps us kicking. You know, all energy that we're consuming is effectively coming from the sun, whether it's direct or indirect through plants or through an animal that ate a plant. All of that energy originally is coming from the sun. So light effects the body, obviously in a tremendous way, being that it gives us life. And it drives whether directly or indirectly every single process in our entire body, because as we made clear, anything that happens in a system requires energy to do work otherwise we're inanimate.

1 (15m 35s):
And so I think the best way to SIM to answer your question is truly light affects the body in literally every single way, but we can definitely get into a little more detail of what specifically does it affect because we've touched on here already, how indirectly through food light gives us energy for our mitochondria. But the thing that the big mistake that's been made, that I hope throughout my lifetime, to be able to bring light to you notice upon is that, you know, people have people have come to believe that the only way that we get energy is through food and that's really not true, but that's what we've been led to believe from the reductionist biochemist model biochemical model of life, which also has led to this absurd situation where it is believed in Western medicine, that the only solution for diseases is a pill because you're genetically determined to have this disease.

1 (16m 36s):
So you can't do anything about it. So you take a pill and it will address your symptom, but then you have 50 other side effects and you have to take 20 other pills and you never get better. And you just, you know, you're dying, but you've already been dead for 30 years and almost you get the idea. So that's, that's what I'm hoping to shy away from, by educating about the research on light. So again, light affects the body directly in an, in a number of ways, besides just indirectly through food, we can go through the different areas of the light spectrum of the solar spectrum that reaches earth, that reaches earth in large quantities to elaborate and give a little bit more detail for people. So, first and foremost, I, what comes to mind for me is blue light blue light, which is something we're maybe going to talk a little bit on.

1 (17m 23s):
The dangers of is actually essential for health blue light is one of the primary components of sunlight. And it actually fluctuates significantly throughout the day, especially in the early morning and late evening. That's why your sunrises and Puerto Rico and sunsets are probably so beautiful because the atmosphere filters out so much of the blue light when it's on the horizon, because blue is higher energy. And because of this thing called rarely scattering, higher energy, wavelengths of light are scattered more than lower energy wavelengths, which is why the reds and the infrareds and the oranges and yellows are coming through at sunrise and sunset. And so the sun looks like that as the sun rises, the blue is not filtered out as much as it is when it's on the horizon. So that's why the sun is more yellow because as it rises, it's even more white in the middle of the day because the blue is filtered more on the horizon and less as it rises because the higher the sun goes in the sky, or the more direct its angle of inclination, the less atmosphere it's passing through to reach us

0 (18m 17s):
Now, real quick, I bought like the blue sky itself. Does that have anything to do the blue sky with like our just evolution, our evolving of like in the morning, during the day, like seeing the blue and the blue sky and like having that cortisol spikes and just having it be higher energy.

1 (18m 34s):
Well, so that's the thing is, is when this rarely scattering occurs when the light is when the sun is at a lower angle of inclination and passing through more atmosphere, therefore, because if, again, it's, if it's dead on the horizon, it's going through a lot more atmosphere to reach us. Then if it's directly overhead, that's why they say, when you can't see your shadow, because it sounds overhead, you could get burned easily because there's the least amount of atmosphere. So the most, the least amount of scattering of not just blue, but of ultraviolet, which is what can burn us if we get too much, but ultraviolet is made to be bad in the mainstream. It's actually not really, unless you get way too much, but anyhow, yes. So the blue, what happens when these blue wavelengths are scattered causing the sun to be, to appear more yellow or orange or even red when it's on the horizon, they're scattered, but they don't disappear.

1 (19m 17s):
They go into the well, they basically go into the sky. And so that's why the sky, the sky is blue because blue light is filtered or scattered more than the other wavelengths of light passing through the sun.

0 (19m 30s):
Wow. I mean, this is so fascinating. Fire nation. There's so much on this topic. There's so many rabbit holes. We could go down. I want to kind of pull this back a little bit, Matt, because, you know, we want to keep the focus on and foundation. We have so much more about this. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, according to a recent Forbes article, working from home could transform the job market and create global competition for every role. This means that if you're an employer you're competing with even more employers to find the best candidates for your job. So how do you get your company and job to stand out, start with ZipRecruiter by trying it for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. When you post a job on zip recruiter, you can tag it with labels like actively hiring or remote in order to help you attract the right talent.

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They're so confident that if podium doesn't make your business better within 90 days, they will send you a $150 Amazon gift card by your nation. Visit podium.com/fire to get started. That's 20% off if you visit podium.com/fire. So now we're back and it's so obvious how passionate you are about this, how knowledgeable you are about this. And of course, fire, nation's going to have a chance to follow you and learn more about you and consume the content you've created on this topic at a deeper level. But let's talk right now about what we can do as human beings. And I mean, you know, some people, you know, say like you only need food for energy. Like, I really kind of pulled that part up that you said earlier before the break. And that kind of just brought me to thinking about how, like, there's actually people who are called like sun eaters or sun worshipers, where they just literally don't eat food.

0 (22m 20s):
They just like go out to the sun and just like, you know, consume the energy coming at them from the sun and you know, our bodies as well. Like they, they like regenerate every, every few years give or take like maybe, you know, the exact number on that, but it's just like, of course we can reprogram our bodies when we're doing all the right things over a long extended period of time. We're consistent with it. So what can we do? Talk to us about that

1 (22m 44s):
There's so much we can do to the point, to your point about sun eaters. That's, you know, we were talking about blue light and basically that affects our circadian rhythm. It affects the timing of all the systems in our body. That's why that sunrise, you getting that morning. Sun is so essential. And that's why you wearing your blue blockers at night is so essential because if you have that blue light, after the sun goes down, you have an issue. So what can you do for blue light to get the right blue light, where you want to get out and watch the sunrise in the morning, ideally right, when it's coming over the horizon, which again, depending on which side of Puerto Rico you live in, you know, live on, you could maybe see both sunrise and sunset and just that exposure in the early morning hours in the late evening hours can really set our circadian clock more effectively than anything else, because we can actually look at the sun directly when it rises, if it's coming fresh off the horizon for about 15 to 20 minutes directly at the sun, because like we said earlier, the UV light in addition to a lot of the blue is, is filtered out.

1 (23m 39s):
Now as the sun rises, it's really important to be outside a lot throughout the day as well because the sunrise sets our circadian rhythm, but as we are outdoors throughout the day, our brain registers the change in time throughout the day. And that's also very important for a variety of systems in the body. Whereas what most people do, we sit inside all day on a computer or at an office. Coronavirus has been great for this, to be honest, because even though people were at home, you know, it's mostly staying inside their houses. What people can do now that this remote work opportunity has opened up for so many is work outside on your deck, as opposed to inside just being behind windows and glass, just like sunglasses and contact lenses and glasses are harmful to the body because they block the full spectrum of sunlight.

1 (24m 24s):
Yes. I said, sunglasses are bad for the body. It's true. We can talk about that one a little bit. So, but we'll get to that. But so just in the same way that those are damaging because they filter out and distort the spectrum of sunlight, which alters our body's natural response to the sun to be prepared, to receive the light energy or protect from it. The same thing happens with windows and glass in general, especially in the modern world where they're trying to make them more energy efficient. I should say they're blocking more and more of the healing and energy producing red and infrared wavelengths, which like you said, effects of light. That's one of the others red and infrared light allows our body to essentially make free energy in our mitochondria, without the use of food electrons, which is why red light therapy is blowing up, because it is so effective for people who live in indoor lifestyle, same with infrared saunas, near infrared saunas.

0 (25m 9s):
I'm in when, everyday, by the way, 30 minutes, seven days a week, infrared sauna. I have one in my gym. Now it's called massage. I'm obsessed with it. How does it make you feel when you get inside of there? I love it. Like I get inside there. I feel the red light on my body. And then, you know, of course during the 30 minutes, I'm just sweating and, and I get done with it. And I look out and I just see like the pools of sweat, the bottom of the theorist AAJ. And I'm just like, man, that was all like, not all of course, but there was some toxins in my body. They weren't able to be expunged by that. And it just feels great. Take a shower to that, man. You're good to go.

1 (25m 42s):
Yeah. A hundred percent. And again, that's the red and infrared light obviously heating you and causing you to excrete toxins. That's another benefit of something that hot, like a sauna. But additionally, part of the reason we get this amazing warmth and just, we feel so great is because red and particularly infrared light is able to penetrate so deeply into our body. And it affects the water in ourselves in a very positive manner. It causes it to become more of what they call structured water in the scientific literature, which is very different from water in a glass. It's able to actually basically hold electrical charge the structured water. There's a great book about it called the fourth phase of water from a researcher up in Washington state named Gerald Pollack, really, really fascinating, and a huge subject in the health world right now.

1 (26m 26s):
But the water in ourselves can actually store light energy, which is sort of where this whole conversation is trending. Ultimately, because what the research implies is that like we've touched on, we aren't just getting energy directly from food. We can actually essentially photosynthesize we can make or not make necessarily because energy isn't created or destroyed, but we can take energy in and actually utilize it. And people might often notice if they do go to the beach and they practice the things that we're sharing here, getting the sunrise, watching the sunrise directly right off the horizon. Yes. That means waking up early. It's really good for people. And I'm sure, you know, so many of the most successful people in the world wake up really early often, well before sunrise and do their meditations and their thinking and reading and study.

1 (27m 9s):
And they're up at that early hour. If, if they just would look at the sun or be exposed to that light, which they generally are, even if you're inside, it's not optimal, but you're still getting the stimulus much more than if you were actually asleep with your eyes closed still much better to get outside, but that's so important. So as far as what we can do, really the biggest steps of what I call the light diet, which is sort of my more personal focus beyond my business of educating step one is go to sleep with the sun and wear your blue blockers after the sun goes down. And when I say go to sleep at the sun, it doesn't mean the moment it sets, but within two to three hours

0 (27m 44s):
Now, now Matt, you are 21 years old. Are you telling me you're going to bed by eight or nine o'clock every night? Actually, most of the time, yes. I love that. It's cause you know, I'm 40 and I'm going to bed at nine o'clock every night. And I feel like an old man, but to hear that a 21 year old is doing that, like that makes me happy. Listen, it depends on the female situation. That's another podcast that is another podcast. Yeah.

1 (28m 6s):
Yes, absolutely. But generally speaking, yes. If I'm on my own, I would love to go to sleep by eight or nine on an average night.

0 (28m 13s):
Let's whip through these other points here because I really want to get to RA optics. Yeah,

1 (28m 17s):
Let's do that. So then number two of the light that I'll just share the first three out of eight steps. So that's step one, go to sleep with the sun, wear your blue blocking glasses. After the sun goes down to his wake with the sun. So get up before sunrise, if you can't set an alarm, if you have to in the beginning before sunrise. Yeah. Like the, the meditators, Joe Dispenza, the ancient monks and yogis, they all know that if you wake up at 4:00 AM 5:00 AM and do your meditation practice, then it's the most effective. Now I'm not quite on that level, but I generally, so I'm not getting up two hours before sunrise, but maybe 20, 30 minutes when the lights coming up, waking up and then I'll do my meditation and then, you know, I'll watch the sunrise or go in there. Yeah.

0 (28m 55s):
And Oh, by the way, that will really help you be asleep by 9:00 PM at night. When you do that.

1 (29m 0s):
Exactly. Now it's not just the fact that you woke up early. It's also really interesting that the morning lights stimulus that we're getting, and this is why it's so important to try to be outdoors, not just for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes in the morning, although that's a great start, but really just as much as you can because the inclining light, especially as ultraviolet light becomes present, which is depending on where you are on the earth and the season, which varies a lot, but say averaging two to three hours after the sun rises, there's going to be ultraviolet light, which is very powerful. And you utilized by living organisms to create melatonin, the hormone melatonin, which ultimately when we go to sleep or when the sun goes down, put on our blue blockers or we avoid bright artificial electric lighting.

1 (29m 45s):
That's when melatonin is then secreted. So the stimulus for its creation is in the morning, the secretion is in the evening. And that's the same with a lot of other hormones. Like you said, court, while her hormones, neuro-transmitters cortisol, dopamine serotonin, all of these hormones and neurotransmitters are actually stimulated by sunlight and serotonin in particular being a large one, that's responsible for wakefulness and consciousness and so on, but the others too. So that's step two, get that morning light. And step three is live outdoors during the day. As much as you possibly can, again, working on your deck, you don't have to be in direct sunlight, but I always recommend people, especially if you're really pale, start with five minutes a day and build it up of actually direct sunbathing, especially in the summer, especially in a place like where you are.

1 (30m 27s):
It is as long as you don't wear sunglasses all the time. It is really, really good for you to be where you are in Puerto Rico. Because in the modern world where we have so many energy drains being able to recharge with full spectrum, strong sunlight, like you have down in Puerto Rico all year is amazing among other amazing things about Puerto Rico.

0 (30m 47s):
Well, listen, Matt, let's end with a bang brother. I love those three points that you gave and of course, foundation can follow you to learn more about the total of the eight steps that you're going to break down for fire nation, for those people that do follow. But I want to just end with a bang here. Let's talk about your company, RA optics. You know, you identified that most blue blocking glasses are just plain old gimmicks. So you launched RA optics. Give us the story behind that and you know, be concise because fire nation could be able to go and find out more about you, but let's end on this note. The,

1 (31m 20s):
The biggest issue that I learned about was that most blue blocking glasses on the market actually aren't blocking the right wave length. So there's companies out there like Barner brand, Felix gray. I'm kind of just calling them out by name there's many others. What about Swan? Wax swung, which is one of the better ones. But so basically these other companies though, if they have a clear lens, if your blue blockers have a clear lens, even if it has a slight blue issue or a slight tiny yellow shoe, it is not blocking blue light. That's coming from screens. And it's, it's crazy that they're allowed to actually sell these. There's not a regulation like there is with sunglasses yet, but so these glasses aren't blocking it. And then there were other ones that are blocking it before Swanwick and true dark. And some others came out that are just ugly safety goggles, Swanwick doesn't block the optimal spectrum based on my testing, they, they don't block quite enough to have the maximum effect.

1 (32m 7s):
Another pair, another company like true dark, cause it's out there blocks too much to be useful. So a lot of their, you know, people who are buying those say this is too dark. So what I did is I created Rob because I want to blue blockers that have the best balance between attractive high quality frame styles that actually block the right wavelengths. And that means having a colored lens because that's what happens when you remove a large portion of the spectrum. And that is allowing the body to be protected from blue light day and night. There's different lens types for different use cases, a little more protection at night and a bit less during the day when you don't need as much. But if you're indoors still need some, because there's so much more blue compared to the red and the infrared that is natural and sunlight. When you are endorsed only on a screen.

1 (32m 47s):
Now, if you're outdoors in the sun, you actually don't need the glasses. Even if you're on your screen because the sunlight outweighs the effects of the screen, but at night you always need them. If you're on artificial lights. So that was the, the whole, you know, the business was just purely, how can I get this for myself and the people in the community who need this? And no, one's really making it correctly based on the science. And it's just grown from there. It started in my garage. And I don't know if you know how you guys usually do with talking about business and growth and numbers and stuff, but we've been able to do fairly

0 (33m 14s):
Well as many numbers as specific as you're willing to share. Go for it.

1 (33m 17s):
Yeah. I mean, so when I started, it was just out of my garage, but we've built up to, you know, last year we had about a million dollars in revenue and this is with no paid marketing, really at all, just some really solid affiliate partners like Ben Greenfield. Who's one of the leaders and a great mentor of mine in the health space and anti-aging and stuff. And again, this is just a real starting point. I've been running the whole thing essentially by myself until the last six to 12 months started bringing on several contractors and now some full-time team members, but it's been a real journey. And I'm super blessed to have, you know, been able to have that health world exposure, but have been able to have one person in particular hand me those couple of books.

1 (33m 58s):
I mentioned, which as you know, you know, cause this is the entrepreneur world, anyone listening to this, it's so powerful. So anyway, anyone who's listening to this, it's great that you're hearing this. I want people to just know the edge that you can get from optimizing your circadian rhythm by optimizing your light diet. The light that you're exposed to which serves to optimize your cellular engines can elevate every aspect of all the things you're already investing your time and energy into so much more workouts. You're doing food, you're eating all of that diets. It's all can be elevated so much just by improving your light environment because that's very foundational to everything else. We do

0 (34m 38s):
Loving all this. Matt, give us a big farewell. How can fire nation find out more about you and consume some more in-depth on the topic of of course, lights of course, experience more about RA optics. Give us a shout out for that. And any other call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye.

1 (34m 54s):
Awesome, John, thank you. Well, so people can go to RA optics.com RA that's RA named after the Egyptian God of sunlight. So Rob dicks.com, we have a blog and we're going to be overhauling the site, doing all kinds of new things, so great stuff there. People can subscribe to our email list. If they want to learn more information over time, people can find me personally on Instagram @thelightdiet. And that's where as things evolve, I'll be sharing more and more content. Our business Instagram is RA_optics. And for people who want more information, the best thing you could really do is just look up Matt Maruca podcasts. Like the one I did with Ben Greenfield fitness, or when I did with Paul Chek recently, or Luke story, this podcast, right?

1 (35m 35s):
LA these are all extremely educational and in-depth on the health side of things more so than maybe the entrepreneurship side of things. So that's really the best thing people can do is when you know better, you do better and highly recommend people try that path

0 (35m 49s):
Nation. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with M M and J L D today. So keep up that heat. If you head over to eofire.com and type it, Matt in the search bar, the show's page will pop up with links to everything that he talked about today. We're talking to the social media, RAoptics.com, all that jazz, you know, his blog as well. So we're going to have links to all that stuff. Of course, you can go there directly. If you go down the route and it decide to make your life better with some added light protection and lights embracing, well, of course, check out RAoptics. And if you do get a pair tag yourself on Instagram to myself and to Matt too, because we'd love to see that give you the thumbs up for sure.

0 (36m 34s):
And Matt, I want to say thank you brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with fire nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Hey, fire nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Matt Inns. Hey, I've created a treasure trove. I mean a literal treasure trove of free courses for you. I teach how to create podcasts, how to run masterminds, how to create funnels that convert and come up with your big idea. All you need to do is visit eofire.com/resources and start learning today. I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Did you know that 97% of text messages get opened in 90% are opened within three minutes.

0 (37m 17s):
You need to be texting your customers and podium can help for a limited time sign up for 20% off your plan at podium.com/fire.