[00:00:00] Luke: So I think it was on Twitter or something, I saw you posted this hack that you found on someone's site with these iPhone widgets, and I'm going to put it in the show notes for those of you listening. It'll be lukestorey.com/matty. So everything we talk about today will be in those show notes. 

[00:00:19] But yeah, I think I saw it on your Instagram, or Twitter, or something, and it's this widget you can install on your iPhone or Android, for that matter. It puts four little buttons on the top of your phone and allows you to instantly kill switch all the EMF or the blue light on your phone. It's amazing. So thank you for finding that, and I didn't want to forget, so we will put that in the show notes.

[00:00:40] Matt: This is the one that's not mine.

[00:00:41] Luke: I know it's not yours. No, I know it's not yours. 

[00:00:44] Matt: I maybe shared it.

[00:00:45] Luke: But you shared it.

[00:00:46] Matt: Yeah, yeah.

[00:00:46] Luke: Did you? Or was it the other dude?

[00:00:48] Matt: I think it was the other guy who shared it. Yeah.

[00:00:50] Luke: All right. 

[00:00:51] So backstory here. There's a dude called, what is it?

[00:00:56] Matt: The Blue Light Diet, yeah. 

[00:00:57] Luke: Okay. And I don't know who this man is, but he--

[00:01:00] Matt: I think Robbie something.

[00:01:02] Luke: Okay, so Robbie, God bless. But your social medias are @thelightdiet. That's so funny.

[00:01:10] Matt: I know, yeah. There's a good background.

[00:01:13] Luke: Okay. So when I'm on Twitter, you guys, and, uh, being on there way more than I should, especially considering I have no followers on Twitter, but that's where I get my news and current events and stuff. So I think Matty posts this thing about the blue light, but then I also see him posting all this shit posting to Jack from Twitter, Jack Dorsey. 

[00:01:38] And Jack Dorsey is friends with our mutual friend, Rick Rubin. And I was looking at those tweets, and I kept seeing them like, dude, Matt is going ballistic here on this guy who's a friend of his friend. I was like, I guess he has conviction. He gives zero shits. He's just doing it.

[00:01:55] And then I texted you, and I was like, bro, what are you doing? And you're like, that's not me. It's the other light diet account or whatever. So that solves the whole mystery. Regardless of that fact, uh, we will put that amazing phone-- and it's free. You just have to go to this blog post and essentially just do what it says to do on your phone, and just trust me, you guys, you're going to be stoked to be able to turn your phone red and turn off the EMF at will. 

[00:02:22] Matt: If I may, I remember when I first had the name, The Light Diet. So I don't recall for sure who had the light diet first. I think this guy, The Blue Light Diet, actually had that before I had The Light Diet. But I had this idea, the light diet. I want to do this. And then that was how it came to be. And I remember you said, you were like, maybe you should make it the sunlight diet because people are going to think it's like about eating salads. I remember very clearly, you said that to me.

[00:02:54] And I was thinking to myself, yeah, but then as time went on, actually, I realized that it wasn't meant to be just about sunlight. And so I'm glad I followed my gut on that one, that it shouldn't just be sunlight. It should be general light. Because everything in my own experience has shown me that there's more to light and life than just sunlight, than just the external approach to light. And so that's been the journey.

[00:03:21] Luke: 100%. I can't wait to dive in that. I know you've been getting into, for years now, the mitochondria and the mitochondria-produced light, and the food we eat is actually light. Yeah. I think that's smart. When you had that handle, I read it the way you meant it because I knew you and I knew that you're really into light. That's how we met. But what I thought it sounded like was, what do you been eating lately? It looks like you lost a few pounds. I've been on a light diet. Just like I'm eating lightly, that kind of thing.

[00:03:52] Matt: Well, the irony of it is that I do think there's an aspect of that, which I didn't expect. But, uh, in English, yeah, light and light have the same word but two meanings, as in, of course, light, electromagnetic waves, but then light, lack of mass. But in other languages, it's not the same. In Spanish, loose is light, and ligera or ligero means light, in mass. 

[00:04:18] Luke: Right. The opposite of heavy. 

[00:04:20] Matt: Yeah, exactly. So it's different. But in English, it happens to be the same, which is very fortuitous for my purposes because as I explored a little bit more, um, a good friend of mine is an Ayurvedic doctor, somebody I've been learning from a lot recently. And he was the first person actually who told me about Dispenza, years ago, and also about Yogananda. 

[00:04:41] I didn't listen at the time. This was in 2019. I was in the mindset that sunlight, artificial light, that's the thing that matters. That's what controls our physiology. I was following people in the space who were really gung-ho about that. And as much as that had benefited me physiologically, certain symptoms, let's say, uh, reduced significantly, even more than when I was just on the food craze, doing the paleo, and the autoimmune, and all this stuff I did prior to discovering Jack Kruse and discovering light, at one point, I realized how empty I felt inside.

[00:05:17] It was apparent, but it hit me, like, I must not have a complete model of understanding. The model must not be complete if I'm not feeling the way I want to feel. Because if I knew everything, then I would have this figured out. If you truly understand life, not just biology, but life as a concept, then you should be able to be happy, I would think. And I wasn't. 

[00:05:40] And so I had to really evaluate my beliefs and assumptions about the people I was following and all the information I was getting and thinking just because I'm in the sun, and styling my circadian rhythm, and blocking blue light, my brain chemistry is going to work, and da da da. So I should feel great.

[00:05:57] Even if the tests look good and the everything looks good on paper, I actually didn't feel the way I wanted to feel. And it was interesting because, of course, I started this business, making blue light blocking glasses, which I still believe in, of course. And there's tons of science behind it. And as I mentioned, the partnership with Oura only reaffirmed this conviction that it's actually changing lives.

[00:06:20] I mean, we had people, side note, a woman who is the founder of a medical practice that helps people with autism get a diagnosis, recognition, treatment, care, all the things they need, um, in that world. And she said, basically, that she had declining sleep for decades, it sounded like, or several years.

[00:06:43] And she had just attributed it to aging and menopause. And she said, but I realized it wasn't aging and menopause at all. And she said, I backtracked and realized that my exposure to screens had just increased progressively. And that's where my sleep started to get trashed. 

[00:06:56] She said, thank you so much. I can't wait to share this information with my millions of monthly website visitors. I was like, well, first of all, thank you. That's great. More importantly, this woman's life was changed. And she screenshotted her sleep scores, and we had dozens and dozens of people actually send us screenshots of their sleep scores and significant improvements.

[00:07:13] So that being said, light is still relevant, just like eating good food is relevant, and drinking clean water is still relevant. But the thing that I came to experience was that if you're doing the right things from an environmental perspective, but you're not taking care of your inner light, so to speak, then I don't think the environmental stuff can outdo the lack there.

[00:07:39] So in other words, I mean, this isn't a foreign concept to you, obviously, but I think it is for a lot of people who are chasing the next biohack, chasing the next diet, the carnivore diet, the keto, whatever the next variation is-- um, everybody's on this thing. From my personal experience and observation of people who I see are in a similar space, many people are chasing. Chasing that somehow this diet is going to heal them. 

[00:08:09] And it's so much so that people-- and I did this. I know it because I did it. People actually build a whole identity around their diet, a whole community and tribe around their diet. And in my case, it was as if I was trying to create more reinforcement of this identity outside of me with my brand, or whatever I was talking about, or, for example, the community I was surrounding myself with, especially when I was in the paleo world, but also the stuff about light.

[00:08:40] And as if to cover up the actual internal lack of conviction and feeling like there is more, and my soul knows there's more, but I'm just going to get super gung-ho. And that's at least my perception of what's happening with all the people who are obsessed about the different diet or the next thing.

[00:08:59] Luke: That's so good. There's so much in there. I mean, really, that's the basis for this podcast. So we talk to people all the time that have healing technologies, different ways to eat, supplementation routines. People who have great products, they come on and talk the products. I love it. I use all that stuff. 

[00:09:22] But I, too, went through the trap of thinking that, and this is just diet, and lifestyle, and everything, all the biohacks, if I just became physically vital and healthy enough, that I would feel mentally and emotionally fulfilled. And it's a trap. To your point, it's a double-edged sword, though. 

[00:09:46] Because it's like if you're eating seed oils, and aspartame, and glyphosate, and all this shit that's in our food every day, and think that you can just-- and I might be wrong here, uh, based on Joe Dispenza and things like that, but thinking that you can meditate your way above eating poison all day, every day, it's probably a lot harder than going at it from the gross physical material inputs because as you start to limit your blue light, and EMF, and eat a clean diet, you do start to feel better physically, and it does improve your mood.

[00:10:26] But I think that many of us, like you have, and I certainly have too, get lost in trying to fix ourselves with something out there when the real issue is the way that we think and the way that we feel. And for many of us, and I don't think this is your case, from what I know about you, but I think the number one thing that makes people sick, above anything, is unhealed emotional trauma. Personally, that's been my experience. 

[00:10:52] Matt: I came to conclude, at the first Dispenza retreat I went to where we were together, that that was likely the case for myself as well because I had so-- well, it made sense to me. I had tried all these diets. So my main issues as a kid were gut issues, in particular, um, really, really severe, just like gas, bloating, etc.

[00:11:17] And I would get headaches, migraines, which are probably related to the gut in some way. Leaky gut, and this kind of thing. And also pretty strong, uh, seasonal allergies, which are also linked to leaky gut, most likely based on the available evidence, the immune system, the way it responds, etc, with leaky gut.

[00:11:35] So the gut was seeming to be the core, and I had tried all these diets and had some improvements by removing some of the poison, of course, and eating more nourishing, nutrient-dense foods. And then I got into the world of light, and I started doing all sunbathing and circadian rhythm practices. Stopped drinking fluoridated water. Started grounding. All these components of what I would say was The Light Diet 1.0, which is where I was focused the previous years. 

[00:12:11] And again, was still feeling pretty empty to an extent that was actually affecting my health in the end. And on the beach, at one of the walking meditations at this retreat, I remember feeling so much wholeness and so great and just thinking this is all I've ever been looking for. I've been searching for something for years, and it's just this feeling of wholeness which is all I want.

[00:12:38] Luke: You're searching for yourself 

[00:12:39] Matt: You could say it that way. Yeah.

[00:12:41] Luke: I think that's what we're all looking for, is the truth of who we are.

[00:12:45] Matt: Yeah.

[00:12:46] Luke: And there's a lot of ways to get there. I just made the assumption that you didn't have a traumatic childhood and things like that, but I'll also say that I think, um, trauma is very subjective. So it's like, I know people that have some emotional limitations, uh, and they might have been the middle child. They were just ignored. And so there was neglect. So the abuse was in the form of--

[00:13:17] Matt: Neglect and ignored makes a new word together.

[00:13:19] Luke: Something that was missing. It's like sometimes trauma, or these acute emotional or even physical injuries that happen to you, is a little more insidious, and that there was something that you were meant to be provided with, which you were not. Love, affection, attention, approval, community, friends, family, closeness, all that.

[00:13:43] Sometimes it's that. And so I don't ever diminish people's trauma because I think mine was worse because I was abused. Or someone was abused more violently than I was, therefore mine doesn't count. I should just buckle up, man up, and handle my life. But what hurt you when you were young?

[00:14:00] Matt: Yeah. I would just say, I think my parents, they always did their best, um, as most do. Everybody's trying. Um, but just briefly, about myself, my parents, again, tried very hard to, uh, do the best to be really great parents, and they ended up being divorced just because things didn't work out between them. And I think just that alone has a huge impact on a developing child, especially when you're really young.

[00:14:32] Luke: How old were you?

[00:14:34] Matt: Uh, two or three.

[00:14:34] Luke: Oh, yeah. Me too.

[00:14:35] Matt: So I think that, um, and this is just an idea of mine. I haven't dove deep into the psychological research about divorce, but from everything I've gathered about energy centers, we're developed with a masculine and feminine channel, so Ida and Pingala. I actually don't know which one's masculine, which one's feminine, but according to Ayurvedic medicine and yogic science, we have these two channels. And Sushumna is the middle channel. 

[00:14:59] And so, intuitively, it makes sense, from what I've studied about light and electromagnetism, that essentially, in the same way that when you rub a dog, you're actually giving it energy, in the same way that when you give someone your attention, you're giving them your energy, when you hug someone, you're giving them your energy and affection, in a similar way, a healthy whole human being develops with a masculine force and a feminine force being imprinted onto them.

[00:15:23] And so I was raised primarily with the feminine force because I grew up with my mother, uh, for the most part. My father was out working hard, providing for our family, doing a very, I'd say, masculine deed, but we didn't get as much time with him as maybe we could have. But again, he was doing his best, and so I really honor and respect that, and I know he tried really, really hard, and I think he did a great job overall. I'm so grateful for my experience. 

[00:15:45] But just observing it, not making it about me at all, I think it's very hard to have a healthy child develop under divorced parents, just because you're not getting the full balance of masculine and feminine. That's your literal connection to reality. You see the union of opposites, uh, plus and minus, masculine and feminine. Positive and negative.

[00:16:09] You see those two, and it gives you, I think, a foundation upon which to approach the entire world and all of life. The balance between masculine and feminine. When to be soft and affectionate, when to be directive, and so on. And, um, I mentioned to you, I recently watched this really great interview that, uh, we don't need to get into detail about, but that really struck a chord in me. 

[00:16:30] And, uh, anyway, so when I met this Ayurvedic doctor friend of mine, his name is Balaram, he did a pulse test, and he told me I have to work on my masculine feminine energy balance. I had too much feminine going on. And I could understand, especially in retrospect, how I was approaching my life like a victim. 

[00:16:45] I was looking at things that would happen. And even though I had started a business and was traveling, you could say, to some degree, there must be a bit of a masculine force behind that, and certainly there was, at the same time, a lot of what I was doing was from a victim mindset.

[00:17:01] For example, I was the victim of the bad food, and the EMFs, and the blue light. And it was more of a survival tactic than it was a, I feel whole, and I'm going to go out and expand from there. So anyway, uh, I can see how the challenges I was facing derived from having an imbalance in masculine and feminine energy. 

[00:17:26] Being a man, so with a man's body and a man's genetics, we're designed to operate as a man in this lifetime. And so if we have too much feminine energy, we're going to feel like something's off. We're not able to fully express our proper purpose, basically, from a biological standpoint and from the traditional wisdom, the traditional Ayurvedic and yogic science.

[00:17:48] And so, yeah, I could see how these challenges I was having, feeling like a victim, were related to this imbalance. It's not like you just flip a switch and eat some herbs or something and it fixes it. You actually have to overcome, like Dispenza talks about, overcoming emotion.

[00:18:02] So I believe I've had to, for the last few years, overcome and overcome each step of, uh, different emotions to discover what it means to be a man and what it means to be masculine and what it means to be confident. For example, and even still, I found myself, especially in the past, but again, even sometimes still resistant to stand up for myself or to say something that is maybe disagreeable.

[00:18:29] And that's something that's a very strong quality of being masculine. So anyway, I found this to be a really interesting, um, concept to dive into, to look back at my upbringing and think-- again, God bless my parents. I love them. They're amazing. And just divorce alone, not to mention there was there some worries about money and finances that were bled in, but I think a lot of people have that issue.

[00:18:54] I, personally, have such a strong conviction that divorce is a really bad thing, uh, for society and, in particular, for children because of my own experience. And it's not that these people have ill will, people who are getting divorced. Obviously, there was a cultural, uh, not a taboo, but a principle that people abided by. You get married, you stick it out.

[00:19:21] When you say, I do, you mean it. To have and to hold, through sickness and health, and whatnot. You mean it, and you actually stand up and-- it's this idea that love isn't something that just magically appears. It's something you're willing to work for. And I think most people just think in this modern pleasure culture, like, oh yeah, if it's no longer fun and enjoyable, I'm out.

[00:19:42] Of course, there are exceptions. Who am I to speak about this? I haven't been married. I'm just speaking from my own experience. But if everybody just gets divorced, which I think is more than 50% now in the United States, it's like there's no foundation upon which to have even a solid culture.

[00:19:58] And that's part of why I appreciated this interview we discussed recently, on top of so many other things I've been reading recently. I mean, I've traveled around the world. I was out of the States for the last 350 days. Uh, I've been to Bali, all over Europe twice in the last year, um, Australia. I went to Russia on a previous trip. Um, I've spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe, and it's shocking just to see how much the United States is degenerating.

[00:20:27] I'm not a fan of being a pessimist or anything like this, but the way, on the whole, there's the, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls it, the agency capture of all the regulatory bodies in the government, the FDA, the EPA, the FCC, they're supposed to be regulating the industry, they're not. They're actually supporting the industry and putting more glyphosate on the crops and more 5G. And how other countries are actually still in survival mode. They don't have a choice to be focused on some of the more, let's say, artificial, created structures and concepts that are big political subjects in United States.

[00:21:09] Luke: Like fighting over pronouns and stuff?

[00:21:11] Matt: For example. They're have to be focused on surviving.

[00:21:13] Luke: You have to be a very privileged society if that's what you're worried about.

[00:21:17] Matt: Yeah. So anyway, these are some of the things I've been observing. I learned, actually, from Joe Dispenza, that it's not really useful, a lot of the time, to focus on the past. I can just analyze it from a higher level. Uh, but that is my view on my experience. And I wanted to mention to a point you made prior, that people can actually heal ourselves from external efforts that we're doing. 

[00:21:43] I've had the experience where no matter what, at certain points, and always an ongoing process, that if I set my mind-- there are certain things I've set my mind on, for example, whether it's with, uh, eating, or with training, or something like this, where I can say, yeah, I want to do this, or I'm going to do this, but then I don't find myself doing it. I'm asking myself, well, geez, first of all, I must not be cultivating enough discipline that when I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it.

[00:22:11] So a friend of mine, uh, not long ago had texted me and asked, what are your diet goals at the moment? And I thought about it actually, okay, what are my diet goals? Because I've been pretty lax traveling around Europe, just eating what I consider to be generally healthy. But, uh, also not always, sometimes overindulging and not really feeling great after it. And questioning, okay, what am I really doing, right? I know it's important to eat healthy in addition to doing all this other stuff. 

[00:22:36] And then I thought about my response to him and very honestly said, more than anything else, I'd love to cultivate a state within myself that I only make good decisions for my health because I'm at a frequency, let's say, where eating whatever, that's not good for me, is going to make me feel bad isn't on that frequency.

[00:22:59] In my personal experience, I have found that that is more effective than trying to mentally manipulate, or force, or coerce, or persuade myself into doing something that I have to do. In particular, because a lot of the time, when I look back, most of what I was doing for my health for the longest time was out of fear. And anything that's done out of fear, I think, will genuinely only keep you stuck, to some extent. 

[00:23:27] As I've gotten out of living in chronic-- because I lived for years in chronic survival, and I think that's why I had the health issues in the end, to that point. Because how can you be healthy? How can your digestion work if you're chronically in some survival state? The first few years running my business, I look back, and I'm like, I literally didn't relax for any point that I could remember. I was constantly wound up because I was so concerned that I was going to die if I didn't eat the right diet, or block the EMS, and all this stuff. Seriously. And so I've had to reevaluate-- 

[00:23:58] Luke: I'm laughing because I identify.

[00:24:02] Matt: As I felt so much better about myself and who I am and grounded in myself, I've actually understood, very viscerally, why friends my age don't care at all about what they eat. Because they just feel good. Why would you waste your time? If you feel good, who cares? Honestly. And I actually believe there's something to that, whereas back then, I was like, oh, they're all going to die. They're eating this. And I'm like, no, they're doing it right.

[00:24:25] I was the one being orthorexic, as a term you've used before, and I think is very applicable here. I was the one obsessing about that, the one who was unhappy, trying to tell them they should do this and that, but from a place of being empty and miserable. There's lot there, but the point is that I believe that we can actually change the most. And this is exactly what Dispenza teaches. It's also what people have taught for thousands of years in traditional Eastern philosophy, that we can actually change by first changing our inner state.

[00:24:54] And so I do believe that people could potentially make ourselves strong enough to be resilient even to more of these toxins. There are people in our society, not many, but I think there are probably some who are just so happy and healthy that they push these things off to the side. I think there must be a balance. There's such an onslaught of chemical exposure, EMFs, and this and that. 

[00:25:20] I think the other way to look at it is, why would you waste your energy defending from that stuff if you could do the right thing from a food, and water, and EMF, and light perspective and then save all that vital energy instead of from defending yourself, so to speak, just enriching your own field? I think there's something to be said. That's my current understanding of the interplay.

[00:25:39] So we should do the right things from our external environment perspective, but if the internal state, as was my experience, is somehow sufficiently, significantly degraded and not cultivated, living in stress, living in survival-- there's tons of evidence this creates disease, then no amount of the tweaking outside will fix that. That's what I'm trying to say.

[00:26:02] Luke: 100%. 100%. Yeah. It's an interesting balancing act. I remember many years ago when I interviewed Bruce Lipton, and I had just been living in the-- I'm sure I've told you the story. I've told it on the podcast way too many times, but it was a huge moment, when I got radiation poisoning basically from living under these cell towers unknowingly. And I just moved out of that house to my other place. I don't think you ever came to that--

[00:26:30] Matt: I don't think I've been in LA.

[00:26:30] Luke: You ever to the house in LA? No.

[00:26:32] Matt: Uh-uh.

[00:26:32] Luke: So anyway, I asked Bruce Lipton the biology of belief. Very similar model to Joe Dispenza and to your most recent point here that we can actually affect our biology positively by our emotional state, and our mental state, and our connection with ourselves. And just how we believe about something makes it more powerfully healing or deleterious. And so I asked him about the cell towers, and I was like, all right.

[00:26:57] So we were deep into the conversation in his whole perspective, and I said, so if I was living under two cell towers and had a strong enough belief that they were completely harmless or even a positive input in my life, do you believe that was true? And he said, yeah, 100%. And I do believe that's true. However, how many of us have that level of conviction in our belief? 

[00:27:24] It's like when I drive around, and I drive by a cell tower, I feel myself contract. My God, there's a 5g tower right there. And it's like, okay. Cool. In that moment I can go, you know what? I'm impervious to that radiation. I'm strong. I'm vital. Boom. And I can just take a breath and just deflect it energetically. And I'm sure that that is possible, but you're talking about a lifetime practice to get to that point where you can disarm your ingrained beliefs and the factual data that you've acquired in your education.

[00:28:01] So it's like you interview enough people about how bad cell towers are for you, like I do, and I have physicists, biologists, MDs, brilliant people in the sciences going, here is the data. EMFs will kill you. And I know that they're telling me the truth, and they have the research to back it up, so it's like, okay, how do I take that information and also the information that I do believe is true, that if you have a strong enough belief, you can render almost anything, externally, harmless?

[00:28:37] But that requires a lot of practice. That requires probably thousands of times of driving by a cell tower and going, zzzz, putting up my force field. That does not affect me. But to really own that and believe that, when you're armed with information to the contrary, is a practice. It's not just a switch that one can hit like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to worry about anything anymore because I don't want to be in fight or flight about EMFs.

[00:29:00] Matt: Yeah.

[00:29:00] Luke: So it's like what I'm always recommending to people listen to the show, because this show is not to scare people, but to spread awareness about things like EMF. So for me, it's like finding a balance of educating oneself, having an awareness, taking the practical steps that you're able to take to fortify yourself against these threats in our environment, and then just accept that most of it you can't control. 

[00:29:28] We've built this house, for example. I mean, a bunch of the bedrooms are all totally shielded. Faraday cages. The lights are all dialed in. There's no blue light, there's no Wi-Fi, there's no smart shit anywhere. I mean, it feels really good in here. Everyone that walks in is like, wow, it feels good in here. I go, well, yeah. You've probably never been in a building that doesn't have a bunch of EMF, or at least in a long time.

[00:29:48] Yet still, if I was going to nitpick, I mean, my cell phone still works in this house. So there's a cell tower a couple miles away. It's going through my body, and your body, and his body right now. But I literally cannot control that. So I'm just going to focus my energy on the fact that there's a much lower level of EMF in this house than there is in most places in a suburban, and especially in an urban environment.

[00:30:15] So this is just something that I'm always toying with myself, is like, where's the middle ground where you do the best you can on your food, your lighting environment, your EMF, your water? You do your best to whatever you can afford, however much time you want to put into it. And then there's the point where you just have to surrender and know in a couple clicks, we're all dying anyway.

[00:30:36] Some of us are going to die more painful deaths that include more suffering than others, but that's one thing you can't control. We're all going to check out. So it's like, am I going to spend my life freaking out about cell towers, or I'm going to spend my life going, I did the best I could? Put some money and effort into a home that is energetically more safe and more coherent, and then you just let it go.

[00:31:04] That's it. You can only take it so far. If I've taken the gross physical actions, then it becomes a matter of, how can I refine my inner practice of what I believe? This is the stuff you're describing and finding yourself in, which is so cool. It's been so fun to watch your evolution as a man. I met you, what? You were 19 or something?

[00:31:30] Matt: Yeah, actually, uh, just turned 18. It was six years ago actually.

[00:31:32] Luke: You had just turned 18. Okay. 

[00:31:33] Matt: Yeah. It's a long time.

[00:31:35] Luke: Yeah. And for those listening, Matt's been on the show a bunch of times, and we'll put those all in the show notes at lukestorey.com/matty. But, um, I met you, and you had graduated from high school the year before, and you were really into, as you said, all the physical, uh, interventions. And specifically, the light, which is so smart, and the EMF, and all that.

[00:31:53] So it's really been cool running into you at Joe Dispenza in Florida. We did a podcast there just, uh, spontaneously, and I'm watching you on social and stuff and just seeing how you're really going on that inner journey and finding your own way to have that balance of how much of it is what I think about, the feelings that I entertain, and how much of it is the physical inputs.

[00:32:16] I love watching you live your life, man. I'm like, dude, if I had the flying schedule that you had, I would be toast. So it's like, take advantage of it while you're young and resilient to travel, going through customs, and airplanes, and all that shit, man. Alyson and I were talking about this the other day.

[00:32:34] She's like, you never want to go anywhere because you don't want to go on long flights. I want to go somewhere. I was like, fair enough. You're right. So we were talking about going to Bali before this pandemic started. She loves Bali and has been there a few times, and, uh, it's like, yeah, let's do it. And then I went on to book the flights, and I started counting up the hours. And I was like, can we go to Mexico? It's like, that's far, man. 

[00:32:57] Matt: I think they have a direct flight from Houston to Singapore or Dallas to Singapore.

[00:33:02] Luke: Oh yeah? 

[00:33:02] Matt: They'd be 18 hours, and then you'd have a connection to Bali. It's three hours.

[00:33:07] Luke: You're 24 now?

[00:33:09] Matt: Uh, I'll be 24 in a month.

[00:33:10] Luke: Okay. Yeah. Up until I was about 35, I flew all around the world. No problem. And coach seats. 6'2 to sit in there. This is great. I'm going to India or whatever. When I went to India, it was 36 hours from leaving my apartment to checking into the hotel. Thirty six hours, bro. But I could hang. Back then I could hang. I was probably 32, or 34, something like that.

[00:33:33] Matt: Well, you can still hang, of course. 

[00:33:34] Luke: Maybe, yeah. Anyway, I digress. I'm talking too much. But I appreciate the philosophical framework here. You're about the smartest person I know when it comes to light. And to me, both light and EMF. It's actually one of my pet peeves. It's super irritating that in the wellness space and the wellness influencer space, that everyone is so goddamn obsessed with what the right diet is, and to your point earlier, people become-- and I'm not saying I've never done this. If you spot it, you got it right.

[00:34:08] Matt: Amen. 

[00:34:08] Luke: But it's like when you hear someone say, I'm a vegan, or I'm keto. It's like, no, you're a human being that eats a certain type of fuel that you enjoy. It's like saying, I'm unleaded or leaded. No, you're a Ford Explorer. It's the field that goes in. But there's so much bickering and debate about what the right diet is, and I'm like, these are all people that are probably staring at their cell phone with this blue light blasting in their face all day and night, living in a house with 16 smart appliances and 8 Wi-Fi routers, and everyone's worried about your diet and having the blue light in the home, the flickering light, fluorescent bulbs everywhere in your office and at your home, and you're tripping out about how many calories something has or whether or not it came from an animal or a plant, and it drives me nuts because I know that we can do so much good for our health by monitoring our light hygiene and EMF hygiene.

[00:35:11] I'm probably going to title this something around light, so I want to make sure we get into that, but I do have some other questions because you're hella smart. Grounding. Maybe 15, 20 years ago, I got into this concept of grounding, earthing, where you go outside and walk around in your bare feet. 

[00:35:28] And then started getting all these grounding mats at my desk and sleeping on grounded sheets and all this because it made sense to me, uh, thinking about every living being on the planet is grounded 24/7, has been for all eternity, with the exception of birds while they're flying. Every other creature that has a heartbeat on the planet is grounded and has been grounded 24/7. So there must be something to that, right?

[00:35:54] Matt: I would think so, yeah. Birds even collect energy while they're flying from the air around them. Something to do with--

[00:36:01] Luke: Like the ether or something?

[00:36:03] Matt: Uh, it's actually a very physical process. I want to say static electricity almost, but just the motion of oxygen over their surfaces creates some, uh, charge differential, which--

[00:36:18] Luke: Whoa.

[00:36:20] Matt: I believe Gerald Pollack's book actually talked about this, the fourth phase of water, that that motion, um, with the air around could actually charge the EZ, let's say, liquid crystalline water in their cells. So anyway. 

[00:36:33] Luke: Oh, that's very cool.

[00:36:34] Matt: They're also actually getting something while they're drifting. 

[00:36:37] Luke: I never thought about that.

[00:36:38] Matt: They just fly, and they just hang out high up in the sky. Even though they're maybe not grounded to the earth, receiving electrons in this way, they're actually getting some kind of energy up there. You'll see birds flying really high in places often where there really is no prey. Maybe they're surveying the land, but the way, I believe it was Pollock, explained it, there could be the potential that they're actually just charging, let's say, in the sun and in the air. So anyway, to your point. 

[00:37:04] Luke: That's interesting.

[00:37:05] Matt: There's energy coming off ground.

[00:37:06] Luke: That reminds me of bees. I was seeing something on bees the other day, how they fly using some magnetism. It's not the velocity of their wings flapping. They create some little magnetic field that makes them float. Have you seen this shit?

[00:37:19] Matt: Uh, I haven't, but I've actually heard that, very much related, that people who work around bees have been studied to have better health or lifespan, something like this, than other different types of jobs in maybe, I would assume, similar areas, whether it was agriculture or something like that. Uh, again, I haven't looked deep into it, but I saw some evidence of that online, and I thought, that's very interesting. It makes sense, especially given what you're saying there, if they're putting out some energy field.

[00:37:46] Luke: They're like little tiny PEMF coils.

[00:37:49] Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:37:51] Luke: But anyway, to the earthing and grounding, I'm still a supporter, still do it, but I've interviewed some people around the topic of EMFs, and it's pretty conclusive amongst all of them that grounding when you are exposed to an electric field is less than ideal, and maybe even not great. Bad, I mean. Um, because you then become the ground or the conduit for those fields.

[00:38:19] So if I'm sitting here on this chair, and I'm touching a grounding mat, you could test my skin voltage, and it will be zero. So you're like, this is amazing. I'm not getting any voltage. But if there's a power strip right here that's creating an electric field, the reason that I'm going to zero voltage on the skin voltage meter is because that electric field is using my body as a ground, and it's going down through the grounding mat into the wire that's in the wall. 

[00:38:45] And the other issue is with dirty electricity traveling up the cord of your little grounding mat or grounding sheet and actually electrifying you with EMF. And I remember when I first met you, we were talking about grounding in New York City, aside from the cockroaches, and dog shit, and whatever you might find on the street. But you were like, oh, dude, a lot of the ground here has an electric current. So you don't want to be barefoot on it. And I think you told me, or it might have been Jack, that someone was even electrocuted in New York City. Do you remember that?

[00:39:16] Matt: I recall hearing something like that. Yeah. It was a long time ago.

[00:39:17] Luke: Or they got shocked or something because of the wiring under the streets and everything. 

[00:39:21] Matt: Yeah, exactly.

[00:39:22] Luke: I said all that to ask, what's your current perspective on earthing, grounding, doing it outdoors, indoors while looking at the sun? What's your whole take on it if you have one?

[00:39:33] Matt: Yeah. I would say I definitely do. I mean, it seems like a no brainer, let's say, get outside and be barefoot. I think it's really important. Absolutely. Period. Also about grounding indoors, I'm just intuitively skeptical about the grounding mats and everything indoors just because of the risk that you do pick up something that you wouldn't have picked up otherwise. For example, when I would hardwire my computer sometimes, I would measure it with my, um, Cornet, EMF meter, which I would travel around with everywhere, uh, until recently, but I downsized to a-- 

[00:40:10] Luke: Why? Because it was too depressing? 

[00:40:11] Matt: It's funny. I didn't use it very often. I almost never use it because I thought, I'm never going to use this if I'm just staying in a place for a couple nights because I book the place in advance. I'm not there to test it in advance. So if I get there, test it, and it's bad, am I just going to lose all my money and leave? I guess I could do that, but that might end up me just bailing on places and not having a place to stay very frequently. And living my whole life around that, I decided I didn't want to live like that.

[00:40:35] Luke: Good call. Sometimes having an EMF meter when you're traveling is a bummer of that situation. You're like, oh shit, it's really bad in here. And then you try to go to sleep, and in your subconscious, you're like, I'm being fried right now.

[00:40:47] Matt: Yeah, so I wouldn't do that exactly. The only time--

[00:40:50] Luke: Oh, I got to-- sorry.

[00:40:51] Matt: Tell me, please.

[00:40:53] Luke: Because of that issue, I got this thing called, uh, Faraday Labs, and it's a portable Faraday tent that I throw in my suitcase, and when I check into Airbnb or a hotel, I don't even care what the EMF is. I just stick a hook in the ceiling and hang it over the bed, and then it has a pad that goes underneath the mattress. It takes about eight minutes to set it up. A pain in the ass if you're traveling a lot. But I've gone inside there and tested it with my meter, and it's like, zzzzt. Zero. 

[00:41:19] Matt: Faraday cage. Yeah.

[00:41:20] Luke: Green light. No whistles on the meter. It's like, ah, it's so cozy.

[00:41:26] Matt: That's great. Yeah.

[00:41:26] Luke: It's a 1,000 bucks or something. Super light. Smashes into a tiny little ball. Easy to put in your suitcase. So that was my travel solution.

[00:41:36] Matt: Yeah. Absolutely good.

[00:41:36] Luke: Especially in cities. Out in the country, if I stay somewhere remote, I'm not that worried. But cities are freaking brutal.

[00:41:43] Matt: Yeah, of course. The EMF is bad. So grounding is definitely a great idea. I mean, just connecting to nature. I'm still more and more of the mindset, uh, as I've learned more about this sort of energetic approach to life. I already had studied Dr. Robert O. Becker, and I had studied these different books in the field of energy medicine when I was several years younger now and came to understand that we are these beings of energy. 

[00:42:10] And so then when I went to the more, let's say, spiritual approach or Eastern traditional way of looking at life, uh, largely directed through Dispenza, inspired by his work, and then looking, uh, further as well, I've come to be really interested in this idea that there is this energy that's, as Joe says, within us and all around us. 

[00:42:37] You could call it the quantum field, you could call it God, you could call it spirit, source. Um, there's prana, chi, for sure. And there's different meanings of each of these terms, so I'm sure I'm not using them all properly in this case, but there's an energy that's around us that we can actually tap into.

[00:43:00] And somehow, for example, in the process of meditation, by taking our attention off of ourselves and putting our attention on, as Dr. Joe does, nothing or on space, that we can actually connect to this energy. And for me, this work, this meditation work, took on a whole different level of meaning because I had this background knowledge about bioelectromagnetism.

[00:43:24] I think it's beautiful that a lot of people go in and just have faith. They're like, yeah, this makes sense to me. And Dr. Joe, to his credit, explains tons of the science. I mean, a massive amount of science for people to understand, but doesn't make sense necessarily to go into every single little detail.

[00:43:44] For anybody who's read The Body Electric-- if they haven't, I recommend it. To understand that really, the body is electromagnetic, cells regenerate using electromagnetic fields, and communicate using electromagnetic fields, and it's how cell signaling occurs, it just changes the perspective about life.

[00:44:04] And so, for me, it made sense on an intuitive level that we could, because our mind is the way we influence field, just by changing our mind, basically, in a meditative way, we could actually connect to more of this energy and potentially even be healed, for example. So, uh, this is what's happening at these, uh, week long retreats with people meditating and, uh, healing from all sorts of really, really severe illnesses. 

[00:44:37] And so for me, I've gotten really interested because I thought, well, yeah, I can do grounding, and that's going to connect me to this source of energy from the earth, which I think is super important. Yeah, I can, and should go in the sun, and so I love sunbathing.

[00:44:50] I watch the sunrise on a regular basis, sunset, or if I don't watch exactly the sunrise, I'll get morning sunlight exposure, afternoon sunlight exposure, um, to set the circadian rhythm. I'll sunbathe regularly. So all the things that are really important from a sunlight perspective.

[00:45:06] But I've found more and more interest in actually connecting to this greater energy, again, simply because I did the sun religiously for such a long time, and it didn't change my fundamental, let's say, experience of the world at an absolutely earth-shattering level. It was significant to go from being an indoor living person, not aware of the power of the sun, to someone aware of the power of the sun. It's definitely a big shift. 

[00:45:38] I would say it's probably one of the biggest shifts somebody can undergo in this physical world, going from being an indoor human who just doesn't realize the sun's important, who wears sunscreen, and sunglasses, and a hat all the time. Well, hats are the least bad. They, in fact, can be really beneficial if the light's too bright instead of sunglasses. 

[00:45:55] But the sun was a huge shift. But for me, again, as I mentioned, I just struggled mentally. I was having a hard time, going into age 20, 21. And so this idea that we can actually connect to this energy, for me, it's fascinating that people heal from that. People become whole just by surrendering something of themselves and letting this energy in. 

[00:46:22] And the idea that we could just do that at any time, just by really practicing, opening our energy up and removing contraction, for me, that's fascinating. That's what I'm most interested in now when we talk about anything related to grounding, and electromagnetism, and energy and cells, for me. 

[00:46:43] Another way to put it would be, how relaxed can we get? I think at least I had this mindset like, yeah, I'm moderately relaxed, let's say. If I were sitting in any moment, okay, this is just relaxed. But how relaxed could you actually get if you just relaxed more, and you relaxed more, and you relaxed more, and relaxed more. What would happen?

[00:47:04] That's, of course, what a lot of meditation is, just relaxing, opening up. Anyway. And you mentioned about, uh, of course the diet. Everybody's focused on diets, and, uh, many people neglect light. I think one of the most significant concepts for me when it comes to this whole, uh, light research is that there's this idea, I haven't shared this a lot on podcasts, but I think it's fitting because we've done several, that, for example, we need to eat meat to be healthy. 

[00:47:37] Now, this is an interesting one because I don't have anything against meat, but as I've learned more from this more spiritual perspective, it's made sense to me that if we cultivated our energy field to the greatest extent, then maybe we could live on less food in general. Not meat, for example, but, um, just less food. And there's very solid evidence that one of the top ways to extend lifespan in regular research now is calorie restriction. 

[00:48:16] 30% calorie restriction, 30% increase in lifespan. That's really well documented. And if you think about it, that's very, very significant. But it wouldn't make sense for anyone to just go from eating a huge amount of food on a daily basis to no food or very little because they would feel like they're starving themselves.

[00:48:35] What I've experienced just from doing the light stuff, sunbathing in particular, but also just more time meditating, I've gotten less of an interest to eat really dense food, so I've actually dialed back meat consumption not because I think there's anything necessarily wrong with eating meat, but just because I've personally felt this. And I don't know if it's temporary or permanent, but that's something that's interesting to me. 

[00:48:58] And I would go as far as saying that when we look at the carnivore diet, so the carnivore diet's a mainstream diet, obviously, trend, which is considered In the health and wellness world to be the superior way to eat, in fact. It's replaced paleo. It's the gold standard now. And people actually revere the carnivore diet in that respect. 

[00:49:18] And again, I don't have anything against that necessarily, but from what my experience of the world has shown me and all the things I've been exposed to, which I think are unique in many respects that many people have not been on the same path. I don't know a lot of people who have really studied this stuff deeply, except anybody who followed Jack Kruse.

[00:49:34] And even then, they're still generally in the mindset that the more materialistic approach to health is utilizing light. But the external approach is what I mean. So what I'm getting at is that I have this idea that if somebody is really, really dependent on meat, for example, there's a lot of people in the carnivore world who have very severe autoimmune disease, and so they remove everything except, let's say, beef, salt, and water, the classic ultra-carnivore diet. 

[00:50:06] Or they remove everything, uh, except maybe meat, organ meats, and then some fruits, but they still avoid anything with any vegetable matter, fiber, because there's this theory in this world that basically plants are full of plant toxins, oxalates, and all sorts of other things which are ultimately detrimental to the gut. And it goes back to this gut theory--

[00:50:29] Luke: Lectins.

[00:50:30] Matt: Exactly. Lectins. You damage the gut, and you create problems. And I'm not saying that's not real. Of course, it's real. There's evidence of these substances. But people have eaten them for thousands of years. Of course, they would maybe prepare the grains in a little bit more of an intelligent way. They weren't roundup ready, GMO corn, and wheat, and soy, and whatnot. So I'm not a fan, and I don't recommend anyone eat these things, of course.

[00:50:50] But to go to such an extreme to say, okay, well, yeah, we have all this toxic wheat, corn, this and that, and say, all wheat ever is really bad, and actually humans are meant to eat only meat, when people have thrived, not just lived, but thrived for thousands of years, and arguably, you could say, significantly better physical form and condition, health, and, wellness, and shape, and function-- old soldiers from ancient cultures like Greece and so on, they ate meat, of course, but, um, they also ate plenty of grain, and they were still very vital people. So what I'm getting at is, this might seem a bit out of left field, but are you familiar with Harry Potter? Have you ever seen the movie Harry Potter?

[00:51:32] Luke: Only by name. I've never seen it, no.

[00:51:35] Matt: Okay. So anyway, this might seem way out of left field, but basically, there's this character who's the villain. And he is half dead because he tried to kill, uh, Harry Potter, actually, the main character. And basically, the story goes, like, Harry's mother's love for him protected him.

[00:51:55] So she died on his behalf, but it actually deflected this killer curse and caused this, uh, supervillain guy to be in this half-alive, half-dead state. And he actually had to live in this state on the blood of unicorns. That was what he had to survive on in this fantastical, uh, fantasy film.

[00:52:15] But it was interesting for me to see a parallel, feel free to reject it, and to the listeners as well, that somebody who, literally, if they eat anything besides meat, their immune system reacts like crazy. They have a blueberry, spinach, whatever, their immune system goes crazy. In my view, just how I look at the world, you haven't treated the root cause. You haven't cured the condition. 

[00:52:42] If you have a sweet potato, or a blueberry, or spinach, and your autoimmune disease flares up, you still have the condition at the core. Poo-poo Western medicine for treating symptoms. That's what I believe most of functional medicine does too. It's just instead of pharmaceuticals, they're just using supplements and all sorts of things. 

[00:53:03] And I know so many people have gone through tens of thousands of dollars of supplements, or more, and treatments and still are spinning their wheels. I just met a guy recently who had an autoimmune condition, and he's looking for answers, and he has tons of cash to be able to meet all the doctors, and nobody really has the answers.

[00:53:23] Nobody has the answers for autoimmune diseases. Um, they might say they do. They all say they have the solution. Anyway. So people in these conditions, if you still have this reaction when you have food, you haven't healed. And so that's all I'm trying to say. When it comes to these diets, everybody's going on these ultra-strict elimination diets.

[00:53:46] And the assumption, I know this because I did it, the autoimmune protocol paleo diet, the GAPS diet, the idea, the fundamental premise, is that you will remove all the inflammatory gut-inflaming lectins and antinutrients, and all the oxalates, and all that stuff. You cut it out, and that the body-- this is the implied statement. And it's generally stated explicitly. Sometimes it's just implied. But the body will heal itself. That's what's implied.

[00:54:15] And what I want to know is how does that work? And is there a way to stimulate that process directly? That's what I want to know. Because it's always assumed that the body will heal itself. But like, what if it doesn't? What about all the people like myself who tried the autoimmune paleo diet for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months, and GAPS, and all the bone broths, and everything, and still had issues? There must be either something wrong with me or the diet. 

[00:54:38] And for a long time, I just thought something was wrong with me, but then when I'm like, well, I'm no longer going to accept that there's just something fundamentally flawed with me that's causing me to not respond to these different treatments. Maybe this just doesn't go deep enough. Maybe the issue is fundamentally deeper.

[00:54:53] And so I'm now circling back to where we started, where, eventually-- you can imagine when I finally got to Dispenza and just opened myself up, I felt so much love and energy gushing through me, and I felt myself becoming more whole. I'm like, maybe this is all I needed. And Joe says, people feel wholeness. They cultivate wholeness within themselves, and then they heal. 

[00:55:18] What? Why is nobody talking about that? So for me, it's a really interesting, um, no offense to the carnivores to compare them to Lord Voldemort living on, um, unicorn blood, but, uh, I think it's worth noting that the Ayurvedic doctor friend I mentioned, Balaram, who's been a great influence for me, he's not particularly public, but he's a very influential guy. 

[00:55:36] He's one of the first people to teach Ayurvedic medicine and have a clinic in Russia, and works with some of the top executives and people all over the world, including Western, Eastern, Russian politicians, as well as American people. Doesn't discriminate. Works with everybody, any race, any creed. Generally, these people have a good amount of wealth because it's not cheap to work with such a high-level doctor.

[00:56:00] But that being said, um, one of the things-- when I first met him, he mentioned he was vegan. And I was all paleo. I was like, okay, so you're crazy then because vegans are crazy. That was my mindset. And to some extent, I still, coming from that world, can resonate with the average carnivore or paleo person in the understanding that, yeah, people who are vegan, there is a lot of mental illness, uh, a lot of, uh, sickness in the average vegan person or vegan community.

[00:56:33] So anyway, I was just like, okay, veganism is crazy. And then he explained to me, and I didn't believe any of this at the time, but that even though-- so eating meat, if you wanted to build a healthy human body because we are animals, part of us-- we are part animal, also part something, let's say, higher, part divine-- as humans, that makes us a bit different from regular animals, but, uh, if you want to focus on the animal part in particular, then it would make sense to eat animals because you will naturally put on more muscle.

[00:57:04] When I stopped eating a bunch of meat, I lost around almost 20 pounds of lean mass because I was just basically taking it for free. Again, nothing wrong with this, but it was just like I was eating tons of meat, and so I just gained all this muscle, even though I wasn't really actively training. Maybe it wasn't 20. It was 10 or 15, but it was a significant change in my physiology. I was like, oh, if I'm going to eat less meat, I should train more to earn it. 

[00:57:29] But so, again, what I'm getting at here is that what this doctor was sharing with me is that from a spiritual perspective, I'm not talking about physical, if somebody wants to be absolutely shredded, in ancient Hinduism, in ancient India, the warrior class, the Kshatriyas, were actually, let's say, sanctioned or suggested to eat meat because they needed that energy to go out and kill. That was the caste that were the warriors. So it makes sense. 

[00:57:58] But for everyone else, anybody who wanted to have a higher, let's say, spiritual focus, it was not necessarily recommended as much. And I thought that was really interesting. It's just a taboo because in the paleo world, it's like, oh, meat's the best thing ever. And again, I have nothing against eating meat. I ate pounds of meat for a long time. But it's this perspective that we could cultivate our inner light such that we wouldn't only be dependent on animal protein to take good care of ourselves, but that, I think, there's something behind the whole idea of breatharianism. I'm not there.

[00:58:36] But there's a really solid basis in the understanding, both what I've gathered together and then the science that's evolving, that I've been following, that people could not only live on less food and not feel like they're starving all the time, but that we could actually live in a lighter state. And I think that's a very interesting idea. I haven't heard anybody talk about that.

[00:58:59] Luke: I love it. Um, yeah, just thinking of the podcast, it might've been Alec Zeck's, The Way Forward, the show you were just recently on. He was on this show recently as well. I think it was on his podcast. He had a woman, lives outside of the United States, and she's been a breatharian and teaching people how to live that for 30 years.

[00:59:23] And I listened to the whole thing. I was convinced she was not lying, and she was not delusional. And she is living in the way that you just described and teaching masses of people for years and years, decades, how to do it. And it's a really interesting thing because, um, I've also been around specifically some mystics from India who, for no apparent moral reason, don't eat animals, but more so because they don't need to.

[00:59:54] And because of what you described of, uh, the density of eating meat interferes with their frequency. And they've raised their frequency to a point where their body is able to be vital and healthy without having all of that protein, and animal fats, and things like that. And I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and I totally fell apart.

[01:00:13] My teeth rotted out. I was a disaster. I was unhealthier when I was an addict before that, but when I got sober, I was like, oh man, I'm going to detox, do colonics, and go vegetarian. And I saw this vegan propaganda film. I think it was called Earthlings. I watched that movie and didn't eat meat for years after that because it was all about factory farms and things like that.

[01:00:35] Matt: Yeah. Of course. 

[01:00:36] Luke: But anyway, I'm always in this place where I meditate a lot, and I'm cultivating my prana, and I'm doing all these practices, so why do I need to eat meat? And I still just feel the best when I eat meat. If I eat other foods, I start feeling funky. I don't follow any diet, I think. For me, diets are goofy. Who cares? Just eat what you feel like.

[01:01:01] Matt: Yeah, and I'm not suggesting anybody be on specific diet. I'm not totally vegetarian, although I've leaned more that direction just as how I feel recently. And again, is it temporary? Permanent? No idea. But I'm just totally going with the flow. And more and more, I see that I'm in an experimental phase in my life where I would like to try different things.

[01:01:24] Um, but again, the reason I bring it up is because nobody's talking about, or at least I haven't heard people talking about, that we cultivate our inner light. Other than maybe these breatharians. And they're on what I would consider an extreme in the sense that, again, it seems so out there to the average person to just go from eating to not eating.

[01:01:46] And I feel very fortunate to have seen, okay, there's a science, Dr. Joe Dispenza talking about the quantum field, connecting to energy, and being able to basically become more whole from frequency. Okay, there's that. Okay, there's Ayurvedic medicine, which also teaches in its traditional form. There's Western Ayurveda, which often is skewed and, uh, recommends even drinking alcohol or meat in moderation, and this and that, which is, again, fine, but that's not the traditional Ayurveda from India.

[01:02:15] Um, but so there's this understanding that we can enhance that spiritual state. I think that's very interesting. Um, then there's people who want to also obviously be in this world. I have friends who are like, I did that. I know that. I just don't want to do that. I want to eat meat. I want to have that energy for the things I want to do, and more power to them. 

[01:02:36] But I think it's interesting that there's this whole range of choices that people have, and coming from being super, super, super, super, super paleo, gung-ho for years, like vegans are maniacs, anybody who would raise their child as a vegan is a child abuser. That's how I thought. And now I realize that it's so interesting.

[01:02:55] I've met people, like this friend of mine, who raises his child completely vegan other than breast milk, and the child is the most robust, healthiest, fast-developing human. And I'm like, okay, the model is just incomplete. That's all. I just want to make the model as complete as possible. Not just for myself, but for anybody who's interested in having a more complete model. 

[01:03:16] In other words, conclusion, it's not about the food. And this is so great because it's something Jack Kruse talked about, to his credit, a lot, but he made it like, oh, it's all about sunlight. And I think that's a huge part of it, but the internal light, I think, is maybe a bigger part than even the external. 

[01:03:35] So I know we spoke about it now at length, but to me, again, it's just fascinating, the idea that-- as you said, I think there's a lot of empowerment. I think the audience, anybody who is listening to that, can feel when you say, yeah, I'm just going to be resilient to this electromagnetic radiation, a cell tower that I'm driving past right now. There's so much power in that, I think. 

[01:03:54] Of course, also, I was talking to Nicolas Pineault. I did a podcast with him recently. The guy who wrote The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs. Very popular book, uh, in that space. He said, if you know the fields there, okay. It's having a biological effect if the research is correct, whether you like it or not. So by shrinking, and stressing, and contracting, and getting into fight or flight, you're only making yourself significantly more vulnerable.

[01:04:22] So for me, um, a really fascinating concept has become resilience, just the concept of our capacity to be resilient. Again, I don't have it figured out. It's really early. I look forward to our conversation in two or three years, next one, whenever that is, because that'll be evolved even further. 

[01:04:39] We have this innate capacity to be resilient. And it's like in the same way that people are focusing on the, for example, elimination diet, carnivore diet world, people are focusing on cutting out everything that could possibly, in the slightest way, inflame their gut or stimulate the potential for inflammation, cutting it all out, and just being fully pure, but then, again, there's that assumption that the system's just going to heal itself. 

[01:05:05] And if I had to take a shot at it, I would say the healing energy, it's electricity. It's light. It's the energy that Becker studied, that he proved that it's not even a gas. It's not even, I should say, a wild speculation. It's very well-found in the evidence that the healing energy is electromagnetic. And so we can use sunlight. We can go ground, to your question. We can block blue light at night. Uh, we can drink unfluoridated water. 

[01:05:30] These are all the core steps of the original light diet, 1.0, that we talked about in the first episode, Extreme Biohacking Millennial Edition. Best title ever, by the way. Even though I wasn't a millennial then. I still am not.

[01:05:42] Luke: He's talking about the first time he was on the show. It was great marketing.

[01:05:47] Matt: Yeah. It was great. 

[01:05:48] Luke: It was accidental. I didn't actually know what a millennial was.

[01:05:52] Matt: I was close enough. 

[01:05:53] Luke: What is your generation? 

[01:05:54] Matt: Gen Z, I think, it's called. But it's only one remove. Maybe it's a five-year difference.

[01:05:58] Luke: Well, people must have, a, clicked on it a lot because of the title, and then it got shared a lot because, as I told you, your first episode, I could look today where it is. It's probably close to still in the top 10. I loved seeing that because you had never been on a podcast, right? 

[01:06:14] Matt: No. Yeah. One or two maybe.

[01:06:16] Luke: You're 18, never been on a podcast, and I just vibed with you, so I'm like cool, let's do it. And your show, up until, I don't know-- when was that? A year ago, I texted you or something?

[01:06:25] Matt: Yeah. 

[01:06:26] Luke: It was in my top 10. So it was like, Gabrielle Bernstein, Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton, all these big names, and then Matt Maruca. 

[01:06:33] Matt: I remember you'd sent it to me.

[01:06:35] Luke: It's so cool. 

[01:06:35] Matt: Ifmy memory serves me, I believe that it was even the number one for almost a year. And I think you text me, like, Bruce Lipton knocked you off. I was like-- 

[01:06:45] Luke: Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a massive hit. But I mean, even years later, it was still in the top 10. And often, um, Zach Bush is always up there too. 

[01:06:53] Matt: Oh, he's amazing.

[01:06:54] Luke: I don't like going in and looking at the stats that much because I always feel like I'm not doing well enough, but, um, every once in a while, I can't resist, and I peek in there. We're at 12 million downloads. I tell people that, and they're like, oh my god, that's a lot.

[01:07:07] Matt: Congratulations.

[01:07:08] Luke: Yeah. But then I look at someone else's podcast, and I compare myself to them, and they're like, 35 million downloads. I'm like, what the fuck? They started three years after me. So it's like--

[01:07:17] Matt: Yeah, you once told me, we could always compare, but there was--

[01:07:21] Luke: Compare and despair, man. 

[01:07:23] Matt: Yeah. There's plenty of ears in the world to listen, and plenty more people. And you're resonating with people who are a certain wavelength. There's only so many enlightened listeners who are prepared to take your information. You could just think of it that way. Not everybody's ready for the depth.

[01:07:38] Luke: I like that. Well, when the plan-demic happened, um, I don't know, I didn't see my downloads go down, but I knew when I started speaking my mind about what I was seeing and having people on like David Icke and different people that were controversial in their views, um, I did notice on social media some pushback from people. They're like, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist or something, 

[01:08:03] Matt: Oh, for sure. Yeah. 

[01:08:04] Luke: This kind of stuff.

[01:08:06] Matt: Big Trump sign out front. I'm just kidding.

[01:08:09] Luke: Yeah. 

[01:08:09] Matt: It's the running joke.

[01:08:11] Luke: Yeah, totally. But, uh, I don't know that it hurt my downloads or not because you can't really quantify it, but I will say, the people that stuck around at least were like, I agree, or I'm curious to know your perspective on the current events in the world at that time. The people that stuck around, um, I think have become much more galvanized and committed to the work that we do here because I had to make a decision whether or not to just be quiet and blend in. 

[01:08:42] I even got an email from some marketing company. They wanted to pay me to promote the fake vaccines at some point, in late 2020 or something. I remember thinking, first, you obviously haven't looked at my website because there's all these podcast episodes debunking this whole shit. Secondly, I thought, how many wellness influencers and people out there, doctors and what not, are getting those emails, and taking the money, and promoting that shit. Anyway, I digress.

[01:09:13] Matt: It's crazy.

[01:09:14] Luke: Um, so thank you for your perspective. And it is a really interesting inquiry to think about how much of our health and well-being comes from the external world, our environment, and the things we put on, around, and in our body, and how much of it is actually coming from the light within and from our consciousness.

[01:09:33] Matt: I think it's more than we think. I remember being in a sauna in Bali in 2019. So I just was back in Bali three months ago now, the four months prior, from December to March. And four years ago, I was in a sauna at this beautiful place, uh, called Amo Spa where people can go and take ice baths and cold plunge. And it was even there four years ago. It was amazing. 

[01:09:53] Luke: I'm sold.

[01:09:54] Matt: Yeah, exactly. I can tell you all the spots, but basically-- yeah, it was amazing. It's really good, too. The sauna is hot. The ice baths, one of them is like way too cold, even I just can barely stand it. And they have jets, so it's pumping on you. It's not like you just get your little bubble of-- it's pumping like a jacuzzi jet. Not like a little stream. It's pumping. It's so cold. 

[01:10:15] Luke: That's how I cheat in the ice bath as I'm get in there. It's 34 degrees.

[01:10:18] Matt: No cheating here. You're freezing.

[01:10:19] Luke: I sit still, and then I'm like, this ain't shit. And then I'll move around and go, ah.

[01:10:24] Matt: Yeah, exactly. Imagine just somebody going like this constantly.

[01:10:27] Luke: Well, that's why polar plunges are great. When I go to Colorado to visit my dad, we will go way up in the back country, and I'll jump in a glacial melt lake or a river.

[01:10:37] Matt: The rivers, yeah, because they're flowing.

[01:10:39] Luke: Water's moving. It's a whole different game.

[01:10:41] Matt: It is. It just sucks the heat out. So I remember this girl, she had this air of confidence. I don't know her name. Didn't ever meet her really, but she was just talking in the sauna, British accent, and she was talking to her friend, like, 99% of health, of everything, is your mind. And I just remember sitting there almost wanting to say something. I don't think I did say anything, but like, nah.

[01:11:02] I was in this mindset of, nah, that's such BS. It's all about your environment. It's all about what's happening outside of you. And that was just my projection of what I believed and the people I had followed at the time. And again, nothing against that information. As we've discussed, there's still something to be said.

[01:11:18] The evidence shows that these things have an effect, although I wonder, the consciousness of the researchers, genuinely, how that affects the outcome of the study. Because we know that you find what you look for often, even in science. And when they look for the particle, then the particle appears, but otherwise, it's a wave. But then, when they measure it, it's a particle again. 

[01:11:35] So it's interesting to consider that. I have no idea to what extent that influences the research. And just to apply it across everything to show I'm not going to be biased here, to what extent does that apply about blue light? Potentially, to a great extent. I just don't know. I feel really relaxed when I wear my sunset lenses at night. Really relaxed. In fact, I don't enjoy being out at all at night without them because the LEDs on the street in London--

[01:11:59] Luke: Oh, I won't go anywhere with--

[01:11:59] Matt: Yeah, exactly. So I like them, but how much of that is just the meaning I've ascribed to it, Somebody who just doesn't know about it, maybe just doesn't affect them. I don't know. So it's an interesting line of inquiry. And anyway, four years later, I found myself in that same sauna thinking, that girl was probably right, or at least mostly right, and I was this arrogant, oh, I know everything, internally struggling, almost miserable at certain points, like, okay. 

[01:12:26] It's just funny, the ones who seem, or claim to have it mostly figured out often have it least figured out. That's what I've learned. When I would go on podcasts in the past, just full transparency, I try to send love and compassion to my younger self. I showed up. I'm so proud of myself that I had the confidence to ask you, hey, Luke, can I go on your podcast? It's born a great friendship. I think you know this, but your request for the cool glasses that me and my buddy Brian were wearing is what sparked the company, Ra Optics, because that's when I realized, wait, I can do the tinting. I remember--

[01:12:58] Luke: I still have that pair of glasses.

[01:12:59] Matt: Yeah, I should see them while I'm here, but I remember emailing back and forth, because a friend of mine was like, you got to tell the story on the podcast. But really brief, I remember trying to connect you with a company that did the tinting, but it was complicated, and I just remember it being a headache, and I remember, at one point, thinking, wait, I just saw an article about how to do the tinting yourself.

[01:13:17] And I remember just thinking, you know what? Let me just do it for you. And then we just did it, and it worked out really well. We got the meter to test the lenses and everything. And then off to the races, I thought, well, maybe the rest of this quantum health super niche community following, for example, Dr. Jack Kruse and similar folks at the time, maybe they would also want this.

[01:13:37] So it was a custom tinting service. It was called Matt's Custom Blue Blockers before Ra Optics. One person asked me like, hey, can you just offer a set line of styles? And that's where the company was born. As I mentioned to you downstairs, I'm much more interested now in two things in particular. One, coming from the mindset of Dispenza and this more unique approach, I view my products as much as everything's based in science. 

[01:14:04] Joe says, one foot in the real world, one foot in the quantum, so to speak. That's how we have to be when we come back to this world. You can't be all gone, but you also don't want to be all absorbed in the day-to-day. So I think, okay, for me, "the real world perspective", following this example, is the science. 

[01:14:24] You do the study, and, okay, maybe the scientist's consciousness is creating an influence, but the mechanisms behind blue light are so strong. And the anecdotal evidence and even measured evidence we have from the Oura partnership I mentioned earlier is very powerful. So I love that. 

[01:14:41] Now, at the same time, I thought, well, wait a minute, if we know the placebo effect works, and that all the people buying clear lens blue light blocking glasses, which don't block the right wavelengths of light at all, actually-- I have a YouTube video called Clear Lens Blue Light Glasses Exposed on YouTube. We should put that in the show notes as well. 

[01:15:00] It's very good, but I test 10 of the top brands. They're marketed as screen glasses, and I put them in front of the screen with the meter, and they don't block any of the light from the screen. They're using these coatings that block blue light that's shorter wavelengths that you could find in the sun, but that's not what they're marketing them for. They're marketing them for screens.

[01:15:17] Luke: I'm so glad you brought that up because that wasn't in my notes, but that's something I really want people to understand, and thanks to you, I have my own blue blocking eyewear company called Gilded, and you have Ra Optics, of course. I feel like I'm your little brother in the blue light eyewear space, but I get messages from people, and they're like, hey, what do you think of these blue light blocking glasses?

[01:15:42] And you look at them, and they're clear. And it's a lot of the bigger brands, your designer brands, Gucci, Versace, etc, and they have Tom Ford. Great optic companies. And they'll have a division of their eyewear, uh, site that's blue blocking, blue-free, whatever, and they're all clear. And I'm like, these aren't doing shit. I mean, whether or not they know they're scamming people, so many people are wasting their money on these clear glasses. 

[01:16:10] Matt: It's actually absurd. Because now, every optician, practically in the world, or at least in the country, but even in Europe, they offer this, in the industry, it's called a UV420 coating, meaning it blocks ultraviolet light and visible light up to 420 nanometers in the blue range. And so wavelengths of light are measured in nanometers.

[01:16:30] And so basically, visible goes from around 390, 400, up to around 760. So from indigo, blue, violet, all the way up to red. And then after that, it's near-infrared, and below, it's ultraviolet. So if you block 100% of blue light up to 420, you're blocking wavelengths of light, which you would find in the sun because the sun has this full continuous spectrum.

[01:16:54] If you believe that sunglasses are really important for health and protection of the eyes and so on, which I don't believe, you could make the case that there's at least some benefit to using those outdoors to protect from ultraviolet and short wavelength, high-energy visible blue light.

[01:17:12] But again, I don't believe the premise that we should wear sunglasses, except in really extreme cases on maybe snow or on a boat, when you're out for hours, etc. But most people, it's a crutch because their eyes are weak. They wear the sunglasses. Their eyes never adjust to the light, and so they not only have to wear them, but they're also depriving themselves of the many benefits of light passing through the eye, which we've talked about in other episodes actually in thorough detail.

[01:17:36] I think our episode after the first London conference in 2019 was the real deep dive on that stuff. Anyway. So the issue is that the range of blue light goes from 400 up to almost 500 nanometers. Screens emit blue light at a peak centered at 455 nanometers. All modern LEDs, not just screens.

[01:17:57] And it's because it's not just one wavelength straight up. It's a peak. So the light covers all the way down to around 430 nanometers and up to around 480, let's say. So 25 nanometers plus or minus each direction. But again, even if there's light at 430, these clear lenses basically go from full protection at 420, tapering off to almost zero by the time they get up to 430, 435, meaning the spike of the wavelengths of blue light coming off of an LED literally just go right through that lens.

[01:18:34] And that's why it appears clear. Because clear is the property of being translucent. Trans in Latin means across. Lux is light. So translucent just means the light passes through. So the lens is translucent. The visible light that we can see coming off of our screens goes right through, so the lens looks clear. 

[01:18:52] You take out the blue light that affects our circadian rhythm, which is the same-- this is the challenge for people to understand, I think, that the blue light that affects-- the reason we call it blue light-- from a circadian rhythm standpoint, there's nothing blue about it when it's talking to our circadian rhythms, uh, systems in our brain that's SCN. It's just wavelengths with energy.

[01:19:14] The only reason we call it blue is because the wavelengths that stimulate that system-- it's a non-visual system, the circadian rhythm, the, um, suprachiasmatic nucleus and the hypothalamus. Those same wavelengths of light happen to be those that make the color blue in our brain. But if they were the ones that made green, we'd call it green light that disrupts-- but it's wavelengths of light.

[01:19:34] Luke: That's a really important point because oftentimes, when I talk to people about the blue light thing, and when you look at an LED like in a recessed light, it's white. The color is white. It's not blue. I think people are confused by that because they're like, what? My lights aren't blue. These studio lights right here are hardcore blue light. 

[01:19:53] Matt: Mm-hmm. 

[01:19:54] Luke: I don't know what spectrum they are, but they 're--

[01:19:56] Matt: I mean, the blue would be like--

[01:19:57] Luke: They look white, but we would call that blue light because that's how your brain perceives that particular--

[01:20:03] Matt: Yeah. Just to, uh, put it another way, the blue light are the wavelengths that if you had just blue coming off these, you'd see a light blue. It'd be a blue white, but it'd be much more blue-appearing if you took out the green and the red that would be in these panels. But white light is just a combination of colors. And usually, in the sun, it's the full spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Uh, we would consider it white light.

[01:20:32] But again, you don't see it unless it bounces off a surface. If you have a white surface, like a shirt, like this white shirt I have on, you put this outside, the white isn't absorbing any of the wavelengths. Black absorbs everything, and so you don't see any light go back out. That's what makes it look black. 

[01:20:47] White is reflecting all of it, and so that's white. And so the light, you could say, is white. Just like when you look at stars in the sky, they're white. The only reason the sun's yellow is because there's so much light so close to us. And at least according to traditional theories of the atmosphere, and the way the Earth works, and so on, uh, there's this scattering process that happens with the shorter wavelengths, the blue wavelengths.

[01:21:07] So the reason the sky is blue and the sun appears slightly yellowish, golden, is because, again, the blue wavelengths come in, like foxes running through a forest, and the ones that are going the fastest bump into trees. And the others bob and weave. And in the same way, the shorter wavelengths with more energy, so the blue component, and ultraviolet as well, but we don't see that.

[01:21:27] The blue component is, you could say, not necessarily the fastest, because the speed of light is constant, but it has the most energy. So it bumps into, so to speak, like the wolves running through the forest, the air molecules, oxygen, nitrogen, and everything, and it's scattered the most. 

[01:21:46] And so that's why, when that blue light comes through, or the white light of the sun-- so the sun is just white like any other star, as far as we know. But when the light comes through, the blue is scattered, which is what makes the sky appear blue and the sun appear yellow. Because when you take out blue, you get yellow, and that's why these lenses are yellow. So it's the same thing. 

[01:22:05] Luke: Cool. And why do you wear your-- do you call it amber yellow?

[01:22:13] Matt: I call them yellow, same as the sun.

[01:22:14] Luke: Why do you wear the yellow ones in here? I assumed it was for the studio lights, but then I thought, well, it's not natural light because it's behind glass technically, but we have a bunch of light that's balanced coming in here. So I was curious why you wear them.

[01:22:28] Matt: I would because of these lights, because there's just so much more blue. I can actually even feel, being under lights like this, a dehydrating effect. Maybe I'm particularly sensitive, but, um, maybe I just haven't strengthened my mind enough. Just all a belief. But, uh, yeah, if we had these windows all open, it would be driving up your AC bill like crazy, but, um, then there would be near-infrared light coming in. 

[01:22:51] So basically, what the evidence shows, and something I've learned working with Dr. Alexander Wunsch more closely, is that near-infrared light-- I knew this even before, but he's explained it in more detail and emphasized the importance in a great way. But basically, near-infrared light is this component of the sun that is, uh, more than 40% of all the light coming from the sun.

[01:23:11] It's what we feel as heat, and it is very good for our cells. It activates the water in our cells. It structures it, as Pollock studied, and it also improves mitochondrial function. So that's why all these red light panels are putting off red and near-infrared, which we can't see, which is why you don't see some of them turn on those LEDs, but--

[01:23:33] Luke: Yeah. When you at your Joovv panel, it looks like half of them are turned off. Those are the near-infrared.

[01:23:38] Matt: So when we make our panel, we're going to do things a little differently to have a bit more, uh, I'd say, sensibility to the whole thing. We're working on cool stuff like that, but that's another story. So anyway, um, near-infrared enhances the metabolism of our cells. It improves the mitochondrial metabolism, especially in the retina. It helps energy production. Blue light, not that blue light's always bad. It's important from the sun, but it's more, let's say, stimulating, and it's very well documented that blue light wavelengths, the shorter wavelengths, are more ultraviolet, which people know. It's damaging if you get too much.

[01:24:21] Well, short wavelength blue light has more energy in a similar way that ultraviolet does. With too much ultraviolet, you can actually burn yourself with exposure to the sun, but with excess exposure to even blue light, again, closer to that ultraviolet high-energy part of the spectrum, as opposed to the red and near-infrared, it would be much harder to overdose on that. Although, you still could. 

[01:24:43] Um, this high energy can cause oxidization, or I should say, oxidation, in the cells. So the production of reactive oxygen species, which are, very well known about in biology, these molecules that basically run around and steal electrons from different structures, creates damage in the cells.

[01:25:04] It's just a fundamental, natural part of energy metabolism that we have reactive oxygen species. And some people think, oh, I should eat tons of antioxidants and just get rid of all of my reactive oxygen species, but that's, first of all, not possible. Second of all, misguided because they're actually very important for signaling.

[01:25:21] So massively dosing on antioxidants wouldn't necessarily be a good idea from the little bit that I've studied about reactive oxygen species specifically, but that being said, the way it relates to light, that's a separate, um, let's say, core detail of the mechanism. But when we're talking about light, what really matters is that we know that reactive oxygen species in excess are not optimal.

[01:25:44] So when you have blue light isolated from near-infrared, so you have cells exposed to blue light but not with the near-infrared present, there's a significantly higher degree of degradation in those cells and the mitochondria and everything, most likely because of this mechanism. When you have near-infrared-- I've actually watched Dr. Alexander's Show Me Live videos that he has. Real, live, um, real-time cell tests. 

[01:26:07] The cells are exposed to just blue light. You can see the membranes and everything degrading. Versus red plus near-infrared, or I should say, blue plus near-infrared light, there's significantly less cell degradation. So the near-infrared, in some way, is offering this protective, um, function, and it has something to do with mitochondria and water. Anyway, so that being said, when we're indoors and the windows are closed, there's a lot more blue light and the near-infrared's, for the most part, being blocked out.

[01:26:34] Luke: Dude, especially, uh, the way they build in hot climates like here in Texas. These are old windows up in the loft. We haven't replaced yet, and so they probably let more, um, near-infrared in. But all the ones downstairs, they almost have a little tint. Well, they do have a tint, and it's perceptual for the, um, climate control, for energy savings, and so they-- you can go stand in front of those windows right in the sun, and it's not even warm.

[01:27:00] Matt: Exactly. And that's crazy. And you can have the direct sun on you, and you wouldn't feel the warmth, and that could be an issue.

[01:27:06] Luke: This is something I think I learned from Wunsch. Is that who-- Alexander Wunsch. 

[01:27:10] Matt: Wunsch. Yeah.

[01:27:11] Luke: Wunch

[01:27:12] Matt: With a V. They do their Ws as Vs. Yeah. Wunch.

[01:27:15] Luke: Wunch. We'll put Alexander Wunch in the show notes at lukestorey.com/matty. That was probably the most scientific, mind-boggling deep dive I've ever done-- 

[01:27:23] Matt: Yeah. And I can help getting back on any time.

[01:27:25] Luke: On light. Uh, yeah. But one thing that he told me that was really alarming was that when you're inside, even if there's a bunch of windows, that the windows that are closed, it's essentially the same thing as having a bunch of blue lights on, electrical lights on, because it's filtering the infrared and one half of the UV spectrum. So there's no such thing as natural light when you're indoors because of the glass. Do I have that right? 

[01:27:54] Matt: Yeah.

[01:27:55] Luke: You go look at an apartment or something. They're like, ooh, there's a lot of natural light. I'm like, no, there's not. There's no natural light unless you open the windows. Comes through the screens. But if the windows are closed, like in your car-- and one thing he told me too was-- the time I was living in LA, I'm like, I'm in my car all day, every day with the windows up when it's hot. 

[01:28:16] So I'm just getting blue light exposure all day? And he's like, yeah. He goes, if you just crack the window or sunroof, you'll balance out the light spectrum in the car just from getting even just a little bit of that. Because it's so powerful from the sun, it overrides the filtered artificial light essentially being created by the glass.

[01:28:34] Matt: I've measured it, actually. It's crazy. Even with my meter. Yeah. I don't have it with me today, actually, but, uh, I've measured it. So yeah, window closed, or sliding glass door closed, then there's clearly very little near-infrared that's being filtered out. Or just even open a little bit, even if I pull the meter back, or I step away a little bit, that near-infrared still pervades the room. It comes in. So yeah, it comes in.

[01:28:59] I think that's a really good thing for people to know. I mean, this is super simple stuff, but I love how we're combining this information about scientific, simple, light information that people can use to improve their health with light, for example, blue blocking glasses, getting out, watching the sunrise, doing these things we mentioned earlier in the first episode we ever did in detail. And the mechanisms why they all matter. Sunbathing.

[01:29:28] Now that I've learned more and evolved, we could say, I don't want to come on podcasts and just say, yeah, light, grounding, da da da. You got to do all this stuff. Knowing that I did all that and that it's not the final stop. If somebody's looking for the end, I think a great take home message is that you're going to have to, eventually-- I think unless somebody's just really happy, they just get to a certain level in their development, and they're like, I'm really good with where I am right now. I don't really want to go any further. That might be different. 

[01:30:02] But if somebody really wants to go to their highest level of self-realization or self-expression, at some point or another, we're going to have to look inwards. And I also feel super fortunate to have had this opportunity as, basically, a teenager at the time to have had this business take off a little bit, and get some exposure, and have regular sales and income, and this and that, where I could travel and still run the business remotely, and have this experience where I think, as I mentioned about, for example, my friends who are just happy just eating whatever they want. 

[01:30:38] They don't care because they're not in some pain or something that's stimulating them to do something another way. Similarly, I think most people just go through life like, they have a nice job, they get a nice car, they have a wife, they have kids. And then there's this midlife crisis that comes along for many men in particular. I don't know how it is for women, but there's this phenomenon of the midlife crisis for men in particular, where they really question everything.

[01:31:05] What am I doing? What is this? I got this car, this watch, but I'm not really happy. What am I doing? And I feel so fortunate because I can joke, but truthfully, I've had a midlife crisis-esque scenario when I was like 19 or 20 just because I had this freedom, but I'm like this-- people would say, oh, so you live the dream. You're traveling, this and that. And I'm like, yeah, I guess. But I didn't feel it inside, even though I had gone to Bali, and Mexico, and Costa Rica. Uh, not Costa Rica at that time, but Europe, and all over.

[01:31:36] Again, it all depends on somebody's goals. But I think if somebody's listening, and they're like, I want to find greater levels of wholeness, I want to feel better every day, I want to wake up and have, uh, more of a motivation-- I said this I think from the beginning. I don't claim to have mastered this field by any degree. I think there are people, actually, true masters, yogis, for example, who overcome the illusion of separation. And they do master it. But there's not a lot of people, necessarily, who do that, at least, that I know of. There are definitely in India, and so on.

[01:32:15] Luke: Exceedingly few humans are even driven to explore those realms. And those that do are largely unsuccessful.

[01:32:25] Matt: Yeah, they try, and we just keep trying. But for people who just feel like there's more to life, I encourage them to approach this information with an open mind, open heart. Maybe look into somebody like Dr. Joe Dispenza. Maybe look into somebody like Paramahansa Yogananda if that's your approach. If maybe it's Ram Dass. Maybe it's somebody totally different. Maybe it's um, qigong master, for example. 

[01:32:51] I was so fortunate I was exposed to so many different, uh, spiritual teachers at a young age where the Ayurvedic doctor I was telling you about, this good friend of mine, uh, I only met him because I walked up to him because I saw him surfing every day, and then I paddled over, I should say. I didn't walk up. 

[01:33:07] But I saw him one day doing a standing meditation that I had only learned about, this idea of a standing meditation, through a friend of mine I met in Norway who is a student of some, uh, qigong master there who happened to live in Norway from French Canada and was teaching this group and community there. So these pieces led one to the next, to the next, to the next, and I feel very fortunate about that. 

[01:33:30] And I think there's something really big there. And as I mentioned to you downstairs, when we were sitting talking about the company, for example, what I'm doing now with my business, I was telling you about how, as much as there's been really great results and connected with amazing people, there's that part of me that was questioning, like, is this it?

[01:33:50] I started this business when I was 18. Am I meant to be doing this for the next 20 years? When I had this doubt, this feeling of like, what am I doing? Not even the next 20 years, but even the next three or five years, do I want to keep doing what I'm doing, or do I have a different vision of how my life is going to go between now-- I'm going to be 24 soon, and then the time I'm 30? 

[01:34:14] And so, uh, really practical takeaway, I'd say, of the things at least that I've shared so far here, what we've spoken about, is that having this mindset from Dispenza, from Yogananda, we can call it the unlimited mindset, or the idea that, as Joe says, we're greater than we think, more powerful than we know, more unlimited than we could ever dream. Having that idea in my mind has given me at least some framework that I didn't have prior to look at this, let's say, challenging situation for me about my business.

[01:34:46] It could be about anything in any part of life, I believe, really. I think this is universally applicable information, but to ask a greater question, and to ask, like, what would this look like if I really was passionate about what I'm doing? And just asking that question, all of a sudden, the answers start coming.

[01:35:03] It's like, ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. This is pretty old stuff. Nothing really particularly new. Um, that quote I just gave was from a niche book. Underground. No, I'm just playing, but, uh, the Holy Bible, of course. So basically, the idea is that anybody can create what they want. And taking this information and applying it to my own business, when I asked that question, it came to me, oh, you should read Steve Jobs biography.

[01:35:37] For somebody else, it could be a completely different book. I don't know where that came from. I knew he had written a book, or I should say, there's a book written about him, and I knew my mother and brother had read it 10 years ago, when I was really young, my brother was even younger. And I'm surprised he made it all the way through it because he was probably 12 years old at the time, but he read it.

[01:35:55] It was in my consciousness, I had watched some movies, but so I asked the right question, let's say, and the universe just said, yeah, you need this inspiration. It came just as a total thought. Where do thoughts come from? I have no idea. The ether. And just reading that made me think, oh my gosh, there are people who actually were inspired about what they were doing and a product business.

[01:36:16] It didn't just have to be what Joe Dispenza is doing, which is amazing, an educational company, or what you're doing, a podcast, which part of me was thinking, maybe I should just pivot and go education, and this and that. But it's like, what if there's a way, and maybe that's what I'm here to figure out, is how to synthesize this information and put it into, condensed physical products, which can represent-- and this is what I came to believe after getting more into this spiritual work. 

[01:36:42] This was the part about one foot in the quantum, one foot in the real world. In addition to the science, what if the products-- we know how effective the placebo effect is. And this is where we went off into the clear lenses actually. But so those have the placebo effect, let's say, working in their favor because people believe they work.

[01:36:58] And who am I to say that they don't work? Because if people believe they work, and we know the placebo effect is super real, they actually have to control for it in scientific studies. Well, then, wouldn't it make sense when we market our products, in addition to knowing that there's a solid scientific foundation?

[01:37:11] So I don't want to sound like we're just peddling some pseudoscience thing here. There's a super solid scientific foundation. But in addition to that, instead of making the marketing like it was when I started the company, because this was all I knew, oh, if you're exposed to blue light, it's going to throw off your circadian rhythm, and you're going to have this problem, and da da da, unless you buy our glasses, this negative mindset, just simple shift, it's like, yeah, you're good. 

[01:37:34] And if you want to be even better, or if you want to open yourself up to the possibility of a new life, if you want to start sleeping better, you want to start feeling better, you want to feel more whole, we got a product for you that can help you with that. And so the product, in addition, again, being super based in science, now represents, as Joe calls it, a potential in the quantum field, uh, or just a potential. A new opportunity for somebody. And I think that's pretty cool because then they can start to actually dream, and the product symbolizes and represents that.

[01:38:04] And do you need the product for that? This doesn't sound like the best sales pitch for my own company, but increasingly, I'm believing less and less and less that we need any products. But why not? If you believe in science, and, uh, you believe in the research that you're presented, and you read it, and you understand it, and it makes sense to you, then why not? Use it. 

[01:38:25] I use plenty of things. I have these Rudraksha beads. I'm told, by Hindu doctors that these are very good for your energy field. They're considered the tears of Shiva, and you always see monks and people, yogis, and everything, wearing these beads. Well, usually, they're a bit smaller, but necklaces, bracelets, and everything, they're very popular.

[01:38:44] And I'm like, well, there's, apparently, scientific evidence. I actually haven't looked into it. It just hasn't been of, uh, particular interest for me to go research that yet. I probably will at some point. But, apparently, there's science that these beads actually have an effect on physiology. They're one of the few seeds that you can wear and actually affects your physiology. I thought that's cool. Or is it just because I'm ascribing meaning to it that it's protecting or supporting my aura?

[01:39:10] Luke: Both. I'm with you, though. It's like, cool, let's have the placebo, and the ascribing of, uh, meaning, and also scientific data. When I'm into something, that's what I'm looking for. I like the energetics and the quantum stuff, and I know that that's all potentially very real and has an effect, but I think I just maybe have a decent balance of left and right hemisphere. I also want to geek out on some of the science, like the things you're explaining about the spectrum of light and all that. Uh, even though you just unmarketed yourself, I'm going to market for you. 

[01:39:46] Matt: Oh, thank you.

[01:39:47] Luke: Let people know if you go to lukestorey.com/raoptics, that's R-A-O-P-T-I-C-S. lukestory.com/raoptics, you can get some of Matt's glasses. And if you use the code LUKE, you get 10% off.

[01:40:04] Matt: Great.

[01:40:05] Luke: And I love marketing your glasses even though I sell my glasses.

[01:40:09] Matt: Hey, thanks, man.

[01:40:11] Luke: But I'm going to be honest. You have a better selection of frames. We both have the same manufacturer, so like our science is comparable. We're actually blocking the light properly. 

[01:40:20] Matt: We got you covered.

[01:40:22] Luke: Uh, but you have some dope frames. I look at your Instagram sometimes. I'm like, man, where'd he get those? Those are dope. 

[01:40:28] Um, talk to us about, uh, because when I got your glasses, they were much different than in the early days of blocking blue light. Probably like you, I was going on Amazon and getting weird orange and red goggles and stuff, and they were affordable, uh, but they were pretty embarrassing. 

[01:40:45] You had to really humble yourself to wear them in public, um, because they looked ridiculous. But then I noticed when you started making your glasses, that even when I would wear the red or amber ones, that I could still wear them driving, which I dangerously did one time. I got the TrueDark ones that are really dark red, the wraparound, Alice In Chains vibes ones. Those also looked ridiculous. One night, I remember the music I was listening to. I was with my friend Elliot. We were listening to Little Feat. We're going through the Hollywood Hills. 

[01:41:17] Matt: Iknow Elliot. Yeah. 

[01:41:18] Luke: Yeah. He's my OG homie. And we came to a red light, and I just blazed through, and he's like, what the fuck? And I'm like, oh my gosh, the glasses. I couldn't tell the color of the light. 

[01:41:27] Matt: That's so funny.

[01:41:28] Luke: Yeah, it was very dangerous. Just telling people, seriously, driving with their blue blockers at night can be dangerous. But then I got yours, and I think because you're using melanin, the same with Gilded glasses, uh, there's color differentiation. So it doesn't just turn everything red, even though you look at the person, and you're like, oh, why are you wearing red glasses?

[01:41:49] But subjectively, when you're wearing them, you can still differentiate colors, even though all of the blue and green spectrum is being cut out. And it's also better for watching movies, watching TV. I wear mine when I watch TV at night, and it doesn't ruin it because it doesn't just turn everything red. You can't tell every single color like you could in a full spectrum color, without the glasses. Tell us about that particular piece, because I think that's super interesting.

[01:42:18] Matt: Of course. First, on TrueDark, a lot of people who had purchased those products came to us because they would fall apart. So just for people to have a fair disclosure, understand. Maybe it's changed, to their credit. I would imagine or hope that, over time, the quality and everything has improved, but just so people know that. 

[01:42:38] Um, so anyway, yeah, we had to create a better product because we were one of the first to put the right protection and stylish frames. So then blue blocks did that after we did it. Uh, TrueDark also after, as far as I know. Swanwick was the only one, around that time, with colored lenses that did block a good portion, although even there's blocked less.

[01:43:02] We call them sunset lenses now. So the sunset lenses, they block basically 100%, 99.99 of blue. It just depends. If you shine an insanely, incredibly intense blue flashlight through the lens, which we do in our testing, um, just to max out the protection, uh, we use really high standards for lens testing.

[01:43:27] You can still get some photons leaking through, but really high intensities like that, you would never have, um, in real exposure. But so effectively, a 100% blue light extinction, we call it. And then, uh, green light is 90% plus as well. So it's not 100% of green, uh, but it's almost 100%. And so just letting through that little bit of green, we've determined it to be okay. One, based on the fact that there's not massive amounts of research that green is even disruptive to sleep anyway. There's some, but not tons. 

[01:44:05] Um, but just based on the basic mechanism and understanding the closer you get to 479 nanometers, which is in the blue range, of course, the more sensitive melanopsin is, which is the photoreceptor in the eye that is responsible for absorbing light, specifically around 479 nanometers, and then stimulating the circadian mechanism in the brain, essentially. 

[01:44:29] So that being said, since green is closer to blue than, for example, red, orange, and yellow, the colors of fire, the warmer colors, they're more gentle, let's say, then we can just naturally understand, green's probably going to be more stimulating if it follows the normal laws of light and the way different wavelengths affect us. So it just makes sense. 

[01:44:51] Take out the blue. You're going to have one level of protection. That's what these yellow lenses are. These are blocking around about 90% of all blue light a bit more. Uh, and these are offering a very high level of protection even for daytime. Some could argue even more than is necessary, but we lean toward the side of more protection rather than less. 

[01:45:08] So anyway, that's one. Um, but for nighttime, you block then all the blue, and then vast majority of the green, just based on that mechanism I just shared of the fact that the green is also more stimulating than the reds, oranges, and yellows, the idea is that the brain will have even less stimulation and less light overall.

[01:45:29] And overall, light intensity also plays a role, so it's not just the wavelengths, although that's a key factor. But just overall, light intensity has a role. So, for example, if you stand in front of the Joovv panel or any red light panel at night, and look right into it with open eyes, it's so bright that it can definitely disrupt your circadian rhythm, even though those wavelengths are very far from the blue.

[01:45:50] Luke: Oh, that's interesting.

[01:45:51] Matt: Yeah, the higher up you go in intensity. So I wouldn't recommend people do red light therapy much past sunset. A sauna space bulb is significantly less bright and more gentle when you compare side by side. So I would say it's probably a little bit less risky.

[01:46:06] Luke: Yeah, they're not as bright.

[01:46:07] Matt: Exactly. Significantly less bright. Vast majority of the radiation coming off of that lamp is near-infrared, not visible red. There's a little bit of visible red. I still wouldn't do it super late at night, but it's actually something that the heating, the sweating could actually wind you down more than the light will stimulate you. Whereas with the Joovv, it's a totally different type of thing, a different type of therapy. So I would do the LED-based red light therapy, sunrise, sunset, at the latest, throughout the day, for example. Anyway. Let's see. Where were we with this?

[01:46:37] Luke: We're all over. 

[01:46:39] Matt: Yeah.

[01:46:39] Luke: My first part of the question was the color differentiation.

[01:46:43] Matt: Yeah. Okay, got you. Just to wrap that up. So we take out the green, uh, and the blue, and people get tired more quickly. That's basically it. I'm talking in circles, giving a lot more detail than maybe is necessary. They could skip it, but I like people to have the information if they want to hear and understand it.

[01:47:02] Luke: I love detail.

[01:47:02] Matt: Yeah. I agree. I'm a detail person as well. Very much so when it comes to our products and everything we do. So the other, probably more important thing than the scientific part that I'm just sharing about, are the wavelengths and green being almost, or I should say, more similarly stimulating closer to blue than red and so on, and that's why we cut it out at night.

[01:47:23] We just know, from subjective experience, that if you wear the darker lens that removes more of the overall light, as well as-- it's not just overall reduction of light, but it's actually just a cut of the shorter wavelengths, blue and green, that people get tired faster. We just know. Why? Because I felt it. 

[01:47:45] Hundreds of people who were using the products early, back in the day, knew that from their experience. And then we started selling them, and people know-- we've heard so many anecdotal experiences that people who wear the sunset lenses just knock when they wear them. They get really tired really fast.

[01:48:00] Luke: Yeah, I put mine on when the sun goes down. That's my rule. On a good day. I don'talways remember, but especially if I'm going to watch TV. I mean, we don't have any blue light really in the house except a couple of intentional light switches, like I was showing you. When we built the house, I made different circuits in the some of the bedrooms. So there's two light switches. Two of them will be blue, and two will be red. 

[01:48:23] But in the general vicinity, it's just incandescent. And they still probably have a little bit of blue and green in them, but, um, if I'm watching TV, or driving, or like tonight, I'm going to see Dave Chappelle, I'll be wearing my glasses, 100%, as soon as the sun goes down.

[01:48:37] Matt: Great, yeah. It's simple, and it has a huge effect. 

[01:48:40] Luke: It's really helped my sleep. I don't think people get how much it helps your sleep. It sounds too easy, I think, for people that have real sleep problems, I mean, I'm sure people that have clinical insomnia, maybe that alone is not going to heal that for them, but when people hit me up for sleep hacks, um, I'm like, you can't overstate it. 

[01:49:02] People are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But isn't there a supplement or something? Dude, seriously, when the sun goes down outside your house, you just pretend that it's sunset inside the house, and you put your freaking glasses on. And then it doesn't matter what light bulbs you have in the house.

[01:49:21] I don't really like wearing glasses on my face. It's uncomfortable. That's why I've adjusted that lighting in the house. But if I didn't want to spend all the time, energy, and money dialing in a super biohacking geek every light fixture in the entire house, um, a really easy fix for sleep is just, stop looking at blue light after dark.

[01:49:40] Matt: Yeah, of course. Candles, or warm lights, or if you can get them, incandescent light bulbs. As I mentioned, we're working on the future of lighting, but I don't have timelines right now.

[01:49:51] Luke: That's what we need. We've got the, um, Bon Charge. They have the great yellow and red, and then they have full spectrum bulb. Uh, they don't flicker. They're affordable. I mean, those are rad. I have them in a bunch of places in the house, and I travel with those. It's nice that they're LED because really light, and they don't break. Because I used to travel with boxes of incandescent bulbs in my suitcase, and I've never broke one, but it's like it takes up a lot of space. They're heavier. It's not practical, to say the least.

[01:50:22] Um, but I'm just a super light geek, which is probably why I've had you on the 15 times, or whatever. But another hack that I did recently is I got some, um, brake light tape from Amazon. And if I can, I'll put this in the show notes, but it's pretty easy to find. So when you break a tail light on your car, they sell this thick red tape that you put over the broken light so that you still have red tail lights. So I took that tape and put it on every little indicator light in the whole house.

[01:50:53] And in the sunlight and sauna, they have a chromotherapy red light in there, which is great, but then the little panel produces a bunch of blue light. And I usually sauna at night, so I took one of those hard plastic tape panels from Amazon, cut it specifically, and put it over that. I did it in the refrigerator. The hood range, fan light, all those lights. Yeah, so I'm hardcore. But it's much easier, people, to just-- when the sun goes down, you have your Ra Optics glasses, your Gilded glasses, whatever, and you just throw those on, and you're done.

[01:51:24] Matt: It's amazing.

[01:51:25] Luke: And then you just live your life, and you don't have to do all the crazy stuff that I do.

[01:51:28] Matt: I agree. I'm glad you mentioned it, because, yeah, for me, it's such a normal part of my life. I'm so accustomed to it. When I'm out, it's just natural. I always have my glasses. I beat them up like crazy, and I've destroyed my case, but-- 

[01:51:42] Luke: Well, dude, the thing is, too, once you get used to it, not having blue light at night, it's so obnoxious. Times when I forget to bring my glasses, and I'm out driving-- 

[01:51:54] Matt: Yeah, you become-- 

[01:51:55] Luke: The headlights, you're just like, how do people even deal with this every day? It's insane. Dude, I'll put down my visor in the car and hide my face. Alyson drives at night a lot because I'm old. Um, it's just safer if she drives at night.

[01:52:11] Matt: If you said this, you're not that old.

[01:52:13] Luke: Yeah. I'm an elder. Um, then I started waving my finger at people one of these years. But no, I'm so sensitive to gnarly blue light now because it's been years since the time I met you, whatever year that was. That's around the time I got hip to this stuff and started really just integrating the practice into my life.

[01:52:33] For people listening, it seems neurotic, and it probably is, a pain in the ass, only in the beginning. Because you get so annoyed by blue light, and flickering light, and shit like that, after you've gotten accustomed to blocking it, that you can't go back. I mean, you just can't. I don't know. Maybe you can, I can't.

[01:52:53] Matt: Yeah, no, I'm totally with it. It makes so much sense. We can connect or reconnect our bodies' natural circadian rhythm with the external environment, and it feels good.

[01:53:04] Luke: Exactly. That's the thing dude. With grounding, the example I was giving of just, throughout all of time, all beings are grounded all the time. In our evolution, and in how many years this version of human has been here is debatable, but it's been a few hundred thousand years probably, let's say. 

[01:53:21] Even if it was only 10,000 years that we've been here, if we were created and just dropped here, however your views frame that, before the advent of electricity and the incandescent light bulb, the only color light human beings evolved to see and perceive is light by fire, and moonlight, I guess.

[01:53:43] Matt: Yeah, which is extremely dim. It doesn't even compare. Moon is one lux or less compared to on a bright sunny day. Like today, it's 50,000 to 100,000 lux. So our eyes adjust significantly. So right now, your pupils are very contracted because of how ambient light there is. Even in this room. And if you went outside, they'd probably contract a little bit more. Uh, whereas at night, you could probably see my pupils too. They're probably pretty small. Yours are small right now. 

[01:54:12] Luke: Yeah. 

[01:54:14] Matt: Tiny, almost. And you go out in the moonlight, and they're as big as-- it looks like you're on mushrooms because they so big just because it's so dim. So your eye's letting in so much more light. So the moon, you perceive it as like, oh, it could be really bright, but, it's-- 

[01:54:29] Luke: It's only one lux? 

[01:54:30] Matt: Yeah.

[01:54:30] Luke: That's crazy. Because I've thought about that when going outdoors at night, and I'm like, ah, maybe I should have my glasses on because it's a full moon.

[01:54:37] Matt: The full moon, at it's brightest, could maybe be a little bit more, but it's not significantly more. It's orders of magnitude less than the sun. You could look right at the full moon and not even feel it. You look right at the sun, you'll burn your retina within less than a second.

[01:54:52] Luke: Yeah.

[01:54:53] What was I talking about?

[01:54:54] Matt: You were talking about-- 

[01:54:57] Luke: We've been at this for a long time.

[01:54:59] Matt: Yeah. Uh, blue light blocking glasses, circadian rhythm, grounding.

[01:55:03] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. No, it was the evolutionary piece. A, little neurotic to change all the light bulbs in your house and pay a contractor to switch the things, and put on your glasses. It can get neurotic and paranoid. I own that. Yet, at the same time, if you just think, from pure logic, how long human beings have been lighting our world at night with fake sun, which is light bulbs, it's one grain of sand on a long beach in terms of time.

[01:55:39] We've evolved to be exposed to warm, colored light at night. That's how our bodies are controlled and wired. So as neurotic as it might be in some cases, with a guy like me who takes it to the extreme, it's also just common sense. And it's one of those things, it's like, I don't know if you have this feeling, but because humankind has drifted so far from nature, that doing something extreme like not making it daytime when it's nighttime inside your house seems extreme.

[01:56:13] I feel like I'm the sane one and the rest of the world who doesn't care about this stuff are actually the weirdos. You know what I'm saying? Of course, everyone wants to be the one who's right, but it's not even from an egoic perspective. I mean, just zooming out, it's like wait a minute. Because I've been critical of myself sometimes. Like God, I'm the weird guy at the party that has my Ra Optics on or whatever, and feel, um, self-conscious about that. And then I've had the thought like, wait a minute. No, I'm actually the smartest motherfucker in the room, and the most sane. These guys who are staring at their phones and-- 

[01:56:45] Matt: That's a tough one.

[01:56:47] Luke: Working under fluorescent lights or whatever. I'm like, you guys are actually all the crazy ones. I'm just being normal.

[01:56:52] Matt: Yeah, that's a tough one.

[01:56:53] Luke: I'm just being a normal person, pretending that the industrial revolution didn't happen and that we're still sitting around campfires.

[01:57:00] Matt: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I am with you. It's been so interesting. Normally, on podcasts, I'm talking about light, and all of this type of stuff, but I'm also pondering more and more just how much I've traveled in and of itself is astounding. I don't know if even rock stars sometimes travel as much as I do. I think they're the only ones. 

[01:57:21] Um, I looked at this list of where I've been since I was out of the country, and it was ridiculous. When I reentered, I was like, oh, I should probably list all the places I've been since I last left the country. It was like 40 or 50 different places. I was like, whoa. Anyway, that being said, I see a lot of people in different environments, and yeah, you can already see this just going to Austin. But going around the world, it's even more clear that nobody knows about this stuff in general. Most people don't know about this stuff.

[01:57:47] It is cool when, very occasionally, somebody does spot or recognize me, that, oh, you're the guy who started Ra Optics. Very, very rarely in the grand scheme of things. But, uh, it happens occasionally. More often within healthy, conscious communities. That being said, I'm also pretty optimistic about where the world is going.

[01:58:07] Uh, I think that's one thing that is off right now, that not everybody but many people seem to think that the world's just going into absolute chaos. And, uh, yeah, the interview I was listening to last night with, uh, Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson, as we had discussed, uh, very interesting one.

[01:58:29] It can heighten this sense that there's this big control narrative going on, and this and that. That's basically the message of that interview, and I was intrigued because a friend sent it to me, and I thought, okay, I'll hear this guy, and his story, and what's the deal. I try not to judge people just based on what I hear in the media being reported.

[01:58:49] Without anybody like Andrew Tate talking about it, we know that there's this narrative going on of making masculinity a bad thing, like toxic masculinity. Of course, there are toxic forms in masculinity. But the way, if you look systematically, that the things that make men men are being more and more considered to be negative, at least in the West, in the United States and Western Europe, I find it really interesting. When I went to other cultures, for example, Russia, obviously, they're involved in a very politicized war right now, so they don't have a good rap at all, uh, globally. 

[01:59:32] But there's more to the story than what the US mainstream media is reporting, of course. But even in Eastern Europe, like Serbia, Bosnia, these more traditional cultures, it fascinates me, in retrospect, how much more masculine the men were just at a baseline. Maybe because of their fathers. Just people even I knew. 

[01:59:53] It was just the culture. And women just really wanting to be women, wanting to be-- when I say wanting to be women, I mean traditional female roles. Wanting to be a mother, wanting to stay at home, wanting to have a man who's strong, and confident, and providing for her. That's one thing, of all the traveling I've done, that has, uh, really stuck out for me. 

[02:00:11] And I've even gotten interested, and we could go down a whole rabbit hole, but there's a part of me that's all like, geez, when I have kids, and I'm living in different places, the US is less and less desirable to me. It's one of three countries in the world, I believe. So it's the US, North Korea, and Eritrea, which are the only countries that tax you based on your citizenship, meaning that even if you go and domicile in Switzerland or the Bahamas, you're paying zero taxes, or 5% taxes, or something really low. The US says, listen, whatever you're not paying them, you got to pay us too. 

[02:00:48] Luke: Diabolical.

[02:00:49] Matt: That's how it works, yeah. Whereas any other country, if you move to the Bahamas or Switzerland, you're just going to pay them taxes, basically. But the US says, well, no, you take out what you paid them, but you pay us the rest of what you would have paid us. For example, this is the weird thing. If I move to Spain and I'm paying 50% taxes, then the US government says, okay, yeah, you're good because you already paid them that amount that you would have paid us, but you're good, so you don't have to pay us anything. 

[02:01:15] So it's just the FOMO from the government. It's like, well, yeah, if you pay somebody else, we're cool, but if you're paying 0% or 5% taxes because you're on the Cayman Islands, or Bermuda, or whatever, well, then you got to pay us what you would have paid us.

[02:01:27] Luke: Robert Barron, uh, tax theft FOMO.

[02:01:30] Matt: I've thought about that though.

[02:01:31] Luke: Hey, have you listened to, uh, Rick's podcast? Tetragrammaton?

[02:01:36] Matt: Yeah. Pretty extensively.

[02:01:37] Luke: Did you hear the one, I think it was last week--

[02:01:40] Matt: Yeah. Andrew Henderson. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad you listened to that. That's what brought this to my mind. So this guy, I've been following him, actually, for years. So Rick, he texted me the episode because when he does an episode that he thinks I'll like, in particular, he actually sends it to me, and I'm like, oh, wow, the guy making the podcast is sending this to me. I love it. 

[02:01:56] But Rick's a really good guy. Obviously, you know him. In fact, I met Rick because of you, because you had recommended our glasses to him. Then he heard the podcast, our first podcast, and he actually sent me an email and invited me to come out and, uh, go to was LA. So that was the origin. It's nuts. From one podcast--

[02:02:12] Luke: That was great. That was so fun. Yeah, I remember that. That was in his house, uh, the one that burned down in Malibu, and you were staying on his other property, and he gives you a Range Rover to drive around. I was like, damn, Matt's living large, man. He's chilling. He's Malibu.

[02:02:27] Matt: Funny moment. 

[02:02:28] Luke: Living the dream. Yeah, that was fun.

[02:02:29] Matt: I love Rick. He's an amazing person. He's very inquisitive. Uh, very, very curious guy, and probably one of the most curious people I've ever met. Just the way he--

[02:02:39] Luke: Incredible human.

[02:02:41] Matt: Yeah. So he sent me the podcast of Andrew Henderson, and I thought to myself, I've heard that name before. Who is this guy? Because Rick's interviewing celebrities and actors, I'm like, he's some British model dude. I don't know. Something. You know what I mean? Whatever. Some actor.

[02:02:58] And then I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the guy I've been following, Andrew Henderson. Nomad Capitalist. I'm like, how did Rick find this guy? But of course, if you're looking about this stuff because you're traveling, like Rick is, outside of the country a lot, he's the guy you would find.

[02:03:10] And yeah, I listened to the episode on top of what I'd already heard from him on YouTube and stuff, and that's what spurred this conversation. Got me thinking a lot. And I've already been thinking about this because I spend much time outside of the country. I'm like, I have to pay, from last year, a lot of money in taxes to the government. I'm like, I spent less than 20 days in the country. Within that calendar year, to be fair, 2022, I probably spent two full months, not even. More than half. 

[02:03:36] Luke: That guy forfeited his--

[02:03:38] Matt: He renounced his US citizenship.

[02:03:40] Luke: Renounced his citizenship.

[02:03:41] Matt: Very likely, that's the--

[02:03:43] Luke: You're going to be the trailblazer.

[02:03:44] Matt: I have an Irish citizenship. Yeah. Somebody's got to do it. 

[02:03:46] Luke: Keep me posted. The one thing about him though that bummed me out, not about him, but just his perspective, was he's not a fan of Costa Rica. I was like--

[02:03:55] Matt: I heard that. But that's just because he's a city guy, and he's a different-- like he said, yeah, I'm not going to be the guy waking up at 6:00 AM, meditating in the morning. He's just a totally different kind of guy. He's more--

[02:04:03] Luke: That's he likes cities.

[02:04:04] Matt: Yeah, he's an intellectual type guy. He seems like a great guy. I'd love to speak with him at some point, but, um, he-- you could probably get him on your podcast, but, um, he is a very intelligent person. But I think that's just not his vibe. He didn't mention it. He said it's like a police state. I was just in Costa Rica while I was listening to this. I was like, I don't see anything about this being a police state. The only thing--

[02:04:22] Luke: Costa Rica is so chill. I mean, they were a bit funky. I think their president is tied into the Klaus Schwab demonic scene a little bit. I was observing them, not having gone there during the plandemic, but they were definitely super masky, and vaxy, and weird, um, which was a bummer comparatively to some other countries that would be appealing to me with good weather, and good culture, and all that.

[02:04:45] Matt: They're tied into the United States to a great degree, but they've also tied themselves in China little bit. I'm not a of what China's doing at all, but they're just a small country. They don't even have an army. They abolished it, and they put that budget into education. So I think they depend on the US for protection. So it makes sense.

[02:05:04] But anyway, it was fascinating. From that podcast, it got me thinking about all the places I've traveled. Well, I've been in Europe. I love Europe, but I haven't found a particular town or city where I think I would actually live. I'd love to spend, for example, a month here, or a few weeks there, or a month in Spain, or a few weeks in Rome, or Athens, or whatever, just on an island. 

[02:05:26] Luke: Have you been to Majorca yet?

[02:05:27] Matt: Yeah, Majorca is amazing. It is unbelieveable.

[02:05:31] Luke: That's the only place I've been in Spain. It's so dope. A friend of ours just moved there, and she's like, come over and stay any time. Don't say that in vain because we'll be on a plane. I love that place.

[02:05:38] Matt: Yeah, it is really cool. It's a great representation of Europe. The vibe is phenomenal. For me, I'm really interested in what I'm doing with my mission, and the business, and so I'm thinking about where I would go more based on the intellectual connections I would have with people. Not to say that that's totally absent in a lot of places in Europe, but I'd have to go to more of a city.

[02:06:01] And I actually don't mind a city. I can get over the EMF part, or I can just go into the outskirts or somewhere in a little cove, by the beach, or something, where I'm just not in the beam of a massive apartment building and towers. But anyway. I haven't been to Lisbon, but I think Lisbon, Portugal is a place I could probably spend time, or Biarritz, um, in France, places where they have good surf.

[02:06:24] Luke: What time is it?

[02:06:25] Alyson: It's 4:45. 

[02:06:27] Luke: Okay. Thank you. For those listening, we--

[02:06:29] Alyson: I'm going to do this. 

[02:06:31] Luke: I just got the [Inaudible] from Alyson. 

[02:06:34] Alyson: Wrap it up. 

[02:06:35] Luke: I've been monitoring the time but, uh, you know that we can't trust me looking at a clock to be able to tell what time it is. It'll be 4:42, and I'll be like, oh yeah, we got to leave at 5:00? We got a good two hours. I have no concept of time.

[02:06:50] Matt: That's so funny. I love it.

[02:06:50] Luke: I saw this thing on, uh, social media yesterday where a woman had been fired, and she was claiming to have been discriminated against because she has something called time blindness, and so she was continually late to work. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to use that. 

[02:07:06] Matt: Time blindness.

[02:07:07] Luke: I'm time blind too, anytime I'm late. Yeah. And then someone, of course, commented, yeah, maybe she's time blind when it's time to go to work, but you can bet your ass, when work day is over, she's out of there on time.

[02:07:17] Matt: Yeah, that's funny. That's very funny. 

[02:07:19] Luke: Anyway. All right. So finish your thought, and then we'll tie a bow on this thing.

[02:07:23] Matt: That's all to say about, uh, the different places traveling, as far as living, and this idea of Nomad Capitalist, Andrew Henderson, um, two main things. One, I love Bali. So of all the places I've thought about where I've been, Costa Rica, Bali, love them both. They're amazing places. I do recommend people check those out.

[02:07:40] Um, they're not secluded secret spots anymore, so there's tons of people going there anyway. So if people with good vibes are like, I'd love to check that out, check it out. Europe, obviously, has great vibes. Uh, and then the US, I love Austin. I got here, and I was hanging out at Barton Springs.

[02:07:54] In the last four days I've been here, or three days, I've been there probably 10 times. I go morning, afternoon, evening, repeat. Um, so anyway, that's something. And then one other thing that I just think is interesting, and totally unrelated to most of what we've spoken about today, but a little bit relating to the cultural, uh, aspects of masculinity, femininity, certain traditional values, beyond that too, is seeing the rise of a country like China, or India, or Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, and Russia, I've started to think more and more, um, after even listening to the Tate interview, these countries, they're already emerging and evolving.

[02:08:32] These are probably going the countries that are ruling the world. Maybe Brazil. So it's just interesting to think of how the United States is degenerating in some ways, and how these other countries might rule the world, and how, in every way, whether we're employees or employers, have our own business or not, how we could position ourselves positively to be really successful in this changing world. I don't know how it's going to go, but it's an interesting thing.

[02:08:54] Luke: 100%. We're in the fall of Rome right now, my friend.

[02:08:56] Matt: Yeah, very much so. 

[02:08:57] Luke: Yeah. And very few people see it, but seems to be, not that I'm an expert on world geopolitics, but yeah, we're in a crazy scenario right now. Well, hot damn, dude, I think we did it, my friend. 

[02:09:12] Matt: Great. Thank you. 

[02:09:13] Luke: Thank you.

[02:09:13] Matt: I appreciate it.

[02:09:13] Luke: Yeah. When you hit me up, I'm going to be in Austin for a couple days, let's hang out, I immediately thought--

[02:09:19] Matt: I'm so glad.

[02:09:20] Luke: We would have just been talking about mostly the same shit. 

[02:09:24] Matt: Yeah, of course.

[02:09:25] Luke: So why not throw a mic on and let other people benefit from at least the parts of it that are inspirational or educational that aren't just shooting the shit? But man, I love you, dude. You're a great person. You're a good man, doing great work in the world. It's been amazing to see your trajectory and evolution from the physical to the metaphysical, and how you're building a model now with yourself, and your personal life, and your brand, where you're integrating both of those. And I just think it's wonderful to see, and, uh, so happy that you've been successful doing what you're doing, man. Traveling around the world. You're living the dream, dude.

[02:10:04] Matt: Thank you, brother. And more and more, since doing the work, really, now, I can look and say I actually feel it. I feel excited about what I'm working on because I ask the bigger questions, and I say, how can I change this? And maybe it takes a couple of years, but some people, it takes less. 

[02:10:19] Luke: Are you single? 

[02:10:21] Matt: At the moment, yes. 

[02:10:21] Luke: Yeah, that's what I'm waiting for next. You travel maybe too much to get hitched up.

[02:10:26] Matt: I've had, uh, a few relationships in the past couple of years, so--

[02:10:30] Luke: Oh, good. Okay.

[02:10:31] Matt: Yeah. That's so funny.

[02:10:32] Luke: We got to get him cast on Love Island. 

[02:10:34] Alyson: Give the show a shout-out.

[02:10:36] Luke: Yeah. Love Island, that's Alyson's favorite show.

[02:10:37] Alyson: Yeah. I'm campaigning for Matty on Love Island. 

[02:10:39] Luke: I think he would do great, honey. Yeah, but I look forward to-- when I was your age, I certainly wasn't trying to settle down at 24 or anything. But yeah, I look forward to you meeting a great person. You're going to meet your equal, consciousness speaking. You're such a loving, kind guy.

[02:11:00] Matt: Thanks, brother. I appreciate it.

[02:11:01] Luke: I have so many challenges. I can't wait to meet the woman who's going to be your match.

[02:11:06] Matt: Thank you. I look forward. 

[02:11:08] Luke: Yeah, it going to be fun. So ladies listening, I don't know if you're in any of the countries to which Matty is traveling and spending time, but you can, uh, track him down. What's your Instagram?

[02:11:17] Matt: Uh, oh, for the DMs, no. Uh, @thelightdiet. So my Instagram is @thelightdiet.

[02:11:23] Luke: The Light Diet. Not The Blue Light Diet.

[02:11:24] Matt: Not The Blue Light Diet. Just The Light Diet, um, because it's about light in the electromagnetic sense. Sunlight, blue light, etc. It's also about light in the sense of actually eating lighter. And then it's about light in the third sense, which is the spiritual light. So inner light. So it has a few meanings.

[02:11:40] Luke: Let there be light. Until we meet again.

[02:11:42] Matt: Likewise. Thank you, brother.

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