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Show Notes
Matt Maruca is the founder of RaOptics, who make, I think it's fair to say objectively, the world's best blue-blocking glasses — but more importantly, he is in my view a radical citizen scientist, self-experimenter, and articulate communicator — and what's more he's only 24 years old. Which, given his depth of knowledge and wisdom, is somewhat mind-blowing for someone of his age.
This conversation didn't go the way that I had expected. I'd been reading journal papers and studies on photobiology, mitochondrial health, and how to optimize our light environment... but fairly quickly it became clear that this wasn't the direction that the conversation wanted to go. I think a former version of me would have wanted to stick to the script — but instead we veered off into a fascinating tangent into Matt's explorations into spirituality and what he describes as surrendering to life.
In this conversation, you can expect to learn:
👹 The effects of repressing anger on depression and health
🔆 The benefits of light therapy and being in tune with your circadian rhythm
⚡ Why Matt believes that humans are beings of energy and electromagnetism
🌱 The important distinction between vitalistic and mechanistic perspectives for personal growth
🙇♂️ The power of surrendering to life or how he stopped acting like he was a victim to life.
Timestamps
[00:01:36] Matt's curiosity about health and wellness led them to explore various aspects of their own well-being, including diet, nutrition, supplementation, and eventually light therapy. He discovered that cellular dysfunction, particularly in mitochondria, plays a significant role in disease and that environmental factors and lifestyle choices can impact health.
Matt Maruca is the founder of RaOptics, who make, I think it's fair to say objectively, the world's best blue-blocking glasses — but more importantly, he is in my view a radical citizen scientist, self-experimenter, and articulate communicator — and what's more he's only 24 years old. Which, given his depth of knowledge and wisdom, is somewhat mind-blowing for someone of his age.
This conversation didn't go the way that I had expected. I'd been reading journal papers and studies on photobiology, mitochondrial health, and how to optimize our light environment... but fairly quickly it became clear that this wasn't the direction that the conversation wanted to go. I think a former version of me would have wanted to stick to the script — but instead we veered off into a fascinating tangent into Matt's explorations into spirituality and what he describes as surrendering to life.
In this conversation, you can expect to learn:
👹 The effects of repressing anger on depression and health
🔆 The benefits of light therapy and being in tune with your circadian rhythm
⚡ Why Matt believes that humans are beings of energy and electromagnetism
🌱 The important distinction between vitalistic and mechanistic perspectives for personal growth
🙇♂️ The power of surrendering to life or how he stopped acting like he was a victim to life.
Timestamps
[00:01:36] Matt's curiosity about health and wellness led them to explore various aspects of their own well-being, including diet, nutrition, supplementation, and eventually light therapy. He discovered that cellular dysfunction, particularly in mitochondria, plays a significant role in disease and that environmental factors and lifestyle choices can impact health.
[00:09:04] Challenges led to self-reflection and a shift in mindset. Learning from Dr. Joe Dispenza's teachings, joy is found by opening oneself and surrendering limited beliefs and emotions. Change starts from within.
[00:20:28] Matt discusses their background in studying light and electromagnetic energy in relation to health. They criticize the mechanistic approach of Western medicine and promote the idea of tapping into the body's natural healing power. They express skepticism towards the carnivore diet's claims of healing and share personal experiences.
[00:43:54] Matt discusses their journey towards understanding health, wellness, and spirituality, emphasizing the importance of changing one's perception to create a better external experience.
[01:05:32] The idea of being greater than we think and considering limitless possibilities.
[01:13:12] The writer's goal is twofold: personal growth and creating an ethical company. They want to awaken people to the importance of inner light and bridge the gap between their products and spirituality. They believe that cultivating inner light is crucial for human evolution.
[01:18:33] Jesus is seen as a profound and humorous figure in personal spiritual development.
Official Links
😎 Ra Optics (affiliate link) — http://www.raoptics.com/nsmastery
👋 Follow Matt on Instagram + Youtube — @TheLightDiet
💡 Buy Warm Edison Bulbs on Amazon — https://a.co/d/aAV3tqb
Connect + Follow Jonny:
🐦 Follow on Twitter @jonnym1ller
💌 Subscribe to the Curious Humans Newsletter
🫁 Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🙋♂️ Join Five to Thrive — a zero-cost educational email series.
Episode Sponsors
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🫁 Nervous System Mastery — this is my flagship 5-week boot camp designed to equip you with evidence-backed protocols to cultivate calm and emotional regulation. Our fifth cohort will run in April 2024 ~ and applications are currently open. My sense is that if this conversation resonates with you, then you'd likely be a great fit for our upcoming cohort. This curriculum represents my attempt to distill everything that I've learned in recent years about how to create the conditions for our nervous system's flourishing. It's run in an intensive cohort-based way since this is, in my experience, the most efficient way to embody and practice the protocols. Previous students have shared how partaking not only improved their sleep and quality of relationships but also tapped into deeper states of joy, clarity, and confidence in their lives. We've had over 750 students have completed this training, and many have said that it has been the most impactful thing they've ever done for their personal growth — so if you're intrigued at all, you can find more details and apply to join this year's cohort over at nsmastery.com
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Further Ways to Support the Podcast:
🎙️ I use Riverside to record all of my podcast conversations (it's so much better than zoom for podcasting!)
🎧 I also use Transistor to host this podcast, it's fricking awesome, and I would highly recommend.
😎 RaOptics make the world's best Blue Blockers – I wear these anytime I'm out of the house after dark, and it makes a huge difference!
🤖 I use AI wizardry from Castmagic to help with each episode show-notes + timestamps
📹 Want to create a Hollywood-quality home studio? Get in touch with Kevin Shen here & save $500 with code JONNYSENT500OFF
Creators & Guests
What is Curious Humans with Jonny Miller?
Deep dive conversations that celebrate self-experimentation and ask what it means to cultivate embodied wisdom.
Jonny Miller [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast. Matt.
Matt Maruca [00:00:06]:
Thank you so much for having me. Johnny, how are you today?
Jonny Miller [00:00:10]:
I'm good. How are you feeling? In three words.
Matt Maruca [00:00:21]:
Grateful for life.
Jonny Miller [00:00:26]:
Beautiful. I can hear the sound, the birds in the background. Yeah, imagine that contributes.
Matt Maruca [00:00:32]:
Yeah. The first three words that came into my head were, tired of traveling, but I was like, no, I'm not. I really believe we get to choose how we feel. And just because you think something, doesn't mean it's true. Because I think a lot of the time we think that the first thing we think. Of course, there's the argument for our intuition, but I just obviously got through telling you how I've been on the road quite a bit lately. But just because we think something doesn't mean it's true. And I think that's a really valuable insight for people to know.
Jonny Miller [00:01:03]:
Yeah, I remember being on a meditation retreat once, and the leader said the words, don't believe everything you think. And at the time, that was just like a breakthrough for me. Wait, what? You get to choose if you listen to the voice in your head?
Matt Maruca [00:01:19]:
Of course. Absolutely.
Jonny Miller [00:01:23]:
Well, I like to begin these conversations by asking this question. Were you exceptionally curious as a child? And if so, could you tell me a story about something that you were curious about?
Matt Maruca [00:01:36]:
That's a great question. Well, yes, I would say I was definitely exceptionally curious. And the first story that comes to my mind, really is the story that got me into the world of health and wellness. Because I basically had some relatively minor in one perspective, but at the same time pretty intense challenges with my own health and wellness. Gut issues, allergies headaches and that were pretty persistent. And I actually started to look into my own health and wellness, though, when I began getting these acne breakouts as a kid. So I sort of accepted that these other issues were genetic. As much as I was curious about other things, I kind of trusted the medical paradigm. But when I started having really bad skin breakouts, I guess you could call it just sort of normal during puberty, but I was like, no, I don't want this. I started reading on the Internet about diets, about nutrition, about supplementation, about all these types of things and that's going on. And basically it led me down this rabbit hole of health, of supplements, of nutrition, and eventually it led me to light, which is where I've come to, in large part of why we're speaking to having a company making products based on light and light therapy. And I think that curiosity continues today because even when I got into the world of when I went from the food focus to the focus on light, and I had this understanding that there's deeper layers to health and wellness than just the food we consume. In the same way that if you, for example, you have an automobile or a car and the engine is not working properly well, you wouldn't just try to fix the gasoline you would actually go and look at the engine. Well, in our bodies it's very similar. As you know, there's the food and the fuel we take in. But then I learned as I was researching more and more that everybody's focusing on the fuel and the fuel additives which is the equivalent of food and supplements in our body but nobody is looking at the engines. But the research became very clear in the last decade or so that the real dysfunction that's happening in our bodies when people have disease is that the cellular engines, the mitochondria actually aren't working as they're designed to. And that's a really significant breakthrough because it basically means that we're not just a product of our genes but actually our health and wellness is a product of our environment and different influences and even choices we make and other factors and not just, again, the genes we inherit from our parents. And it means that our environment can have a negative influence but we can also have a really positive influence with the correct decisions. But to wrap the story up even after I applied all of this information about light and mitochondria and electromagnetic fields and clean water and all these other environmental factors that were indicated based on this research I still had this curiosity and still do of like well, is there more? There was a period in my life where I felt really physically my condition had improved tremendously from when I was a younger kid with these various health complications. But mentally and even spiritually I still felt a certain level of emptiness, truly emptiness and even sometimes like misery and just feeling depressed or sad or something like this. And I asked myself well, I'm doing all of this stuff for my brain chemistry and my neurotransmitters and my hormones from a circadian rhythm perspective. And based on everything I'd researched and really good evidence, really good research all the stuff I was doing should have been optimizing my neurotransmitters and state. And in fact, even based on some tests I did around the time everything was looking pretty good on a biological level. But somehow there was something deeper like my psychological state which was very much turbulent, let's say. And around the time of the pandemic this curiosity sort of sprung out again. It was always there. But sometimes, as you know, when we get into survival and stress there's not as much energy to open up to this curiosity. And that's something I sort of battle with every day the expansion into curiosity and research and learning versus all the obligations with my business. But so anyway, I started realizing if my model were complete, my understanding that I've learned if my model were complete then I should be happy the way I want to be happy. Like if I really understood life the way that I thought I did from all the research and the people I was following who claimed to have it all figured out, then I should be able to create this state of happiness, joy that I was looking for, truly. And I think that's what everybody's looking for deep down, is to feel whole. But I didn't feel that way. So it made me think, well, there must be something I'm missing. And that's where the curiosity really just expanded, ever expanding into, for me, more of a spiritual path and understanding what I now call the cultivation of our inner light. So not just focusing on our outer light and the stuff we focus on, but actually focusing inwards. And that's become a great focus of mine. So I'd say that's the prototypical story of curiosity in my life, or archetypical, I'm sure, if I use those words correctly. But anyway, that's it.
Jonny Miller [00:07:25]:
Wow, there's so much there. I'm tempted to kind of dive right into the inner light stuff. But I'm also struck by I feel like it mirrors my own journey as well. In the last ten years, I feel like the first five or six years was kind of focused on outer curiosity through travel, through exploring, through optimizing as well. And it's like the last maybe five or six years have also been that same force of curiosity has been directed inwards. And I love the phrase that in a light. I think that's let's talk about it, if you'd like. I'd love, yeah. Okay, let's go there. What would you say? What have been some of the most important kind of transitions in your thinking and your orientation to Joy? Because I think it's something that most of us at least are brought up with this idea that if you do all of the right things, you tick all the right boxes, then you'll just be happy. And many of the people I work with, founders, they'll have successful businesses, they'll have exits, and they'll still have this feeling of emptiness inside, and then that sends them on this kind of existential crisis into this inner landscape, this inner light that you're exploring. So what have been some of the pivotal shifts and maybe challenges or dark nights of the soul that led you onto this path?
Matt Maruca [00:09:04]:
Yeah. So as far as the challenges and dark nights of the soul that led me onto the path, starting there and then getting to the other part of the question about joy, I described it already just a bit in. The beginning there. But I remember being in Croatia particularly, and it was the late summer, and it was, I think, 2019. And I had just turned I was just turning, I guess, 19 years old at the time, or maybe 20. I was born in 1999, so I would have been turning 20 years old. And I just remember feeling really lost. I was spending so much energy and time just trying to decide which of these beautiful islands I would spend my time on, because it had nothing to do with that decision. That was just a distraction. But it was like I just was feeling so lacking direction that I was coming up in retrospect with something to just fixate myself on instead of really going inwards and saying, why am I feeling like, what's going on here? I got to take a look at this. And I think that's sort of natural, at least in the way we've been raised in this society. It's our natural response to reach, to look externally when something's wrong. And it makes sense because of, again, the way that our society is structured and the way we're taught to think and the examples that are around us. But it didn't help me because the more that I put my energy outside of me, the more that I put my energy outside of me. And so hence, I didn't take it in to make myself feel more whole. That was one time I remember then I remember around COVID coming up. I just remember feeling really empty, lost in some ways, like desperate. And I remember finally thinking, like, I've got to do something about this. Really, I can't keep ignoring feeling. I was already feeling pretty tested and I didn't want to descend any further. And so I actually pulled up a podcast from Dr. Joe Dispenza. And for a long time I sort of, how can I say, ignored some spiritual direction I had been given by people much wiser than myself, who I really look up to and admire, just because I felt like I had it all figured out. I thought I kind of knew everything about life and hormones and neurotransmitters and that, oh, if you have enough dopamine or whatever because you get enough sunlight, you're going to be happy. I really believed that at the time, and I think a lot of people still do who are in that world that I was a part of. And so, yeah, I kind of had to start looking deeper at this point. And I remember also coming across different spiritual people and feeling given when we're in stress and survival, one thing is you feel like you don't have enough time for anything constantly. And so I felt like if I'm going to put my energy and time into some spiritual practice or teacher, it has to give me a result. It can't be like some esoteric thing or some teacher who ends up being like a charlatan, like a false guru. And I came across certain people teaching different practices who later on were, let's say, revealed in one way or another to not really have been to the core. So I basically feel lucky that I felt drawn to Dr. Joe Dispenza. I mean, everybody has different opinions about different people and everybody can tell you a different perspective. But from my experience, he is from both my feeling and then having met him, he's a very authentic person who's truly, I believe, committed to helping people and changing lives. And so anyway, I dove into a podcast he was doing and then I listened to a course he did and then I went to some of his retreats. And it really blew my mind because I realized that there is so much more to life than I had thought. I remember calling a friend of mine from high school who was one of my best friends, still is, and knows me better than almost anyone in the world and who being so close to me. I think I've learned also, sometimes when we're in a tough, challenging situation or we're not feeling well, we'll kind of like to the public, we'll sort of put up a I mean, I've done this all the time. I see it in myself not speaking just about other people, but we'll put up sort of a veil like, oh, get on a podcast and present this personality. But then in our own life, it might be a bit of a different thing. And my goal is to dissolve that difference because I think that that difference isn't serving anyone. And it's ultimately like, I think if we're, for example, struggling and so there have been times in my life where I was like I mean, to people who are close to me or taking out my own internal frustration has nothing to do with them, but then kind of, on the surface, being nice to people who are strangers. And it's kind of ironic because it's backwards, right? But anyway, so that's just kind of a digression regarding this friend. So he was always there for me and he was somebody I'd share with some of my deepest challenges. And I remember calling him and man, like, this is going to sound crazy, but I realized from this course this is Joe Dispenza's intensive and progressive online course. I realized that from this course that I've been basically choosing to be miserable and stressed for as long as I can remember. Like, I've been choosing to be a victim and play a victim mindset in my life. And I'm ready to stop doing that. And it was just such a pivotal moment. I remember exactly where I was driving and exactly when I was making that call, and it was a profound shift for me. So anyway, those are some of the, let's say, the challenging aspects that led me to make the shift. And then as far as the question about mean, I'll give you my best answer. I'd say it's an ever evolving answer. But Michael Singer, I defer to the, let's say, realized or enlightened beings, higher beings than myself who have done this work for decades. And there's a teacher named Michael Singer. I imagine you've heard of the untethered soul and the surrender experiment. If you haven't, they're great books, highly recommended to anyone and everyone. And he was a follower of many teachers, but in particular Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote the autobiography of a Yogi, who's another teacher who I've followed more and more recently after the influence of Joe Dispenza kind of flipped me into the fact that this whole inner light thing is so important. But anyway, Michael Singer said that in his book The Untethered Soul, he says the highest state you've ever experienced was simply the result of how open you were. So what I've come to believe about joy and these kinds of states is like, in some way, joe Dispenza says we're like fish and water looking or asking for a drink. In other words, the energy of what you could call God, what many would call God, or Joe might call it the quantum field, some people would call it source. In traditional Yogic traditions, that energy is actually all around us, within us and all around us, as much as water is within and all around a fish swimming through the ocean. Right. And so it's like we're kind of, again, looking around, like, where is it? And it's actually all around us. And somehow we have to learn how to open our hearts. And that might sound really esoteric, but I'm happy to try to explain it a little bit more scientifically, but basically we have to learn how to open. The practice is to learn how to actually open ourselves and surrender our limited emotions and limited beliefs as simple as even in this moment, sitting, identifying my own body and scanning and feeling like, okay, I'm not breathing as fully as I could be. I'm holding a little bit of tension in my gut, which is something I tend to do, which probably correlates to the fact that I had these digestive issues throughout my childhood. And if I'm not attentive to my know, these patterns, if we don't truly change ourselves, dr. Joe Dispenza says, nothing in your life changes till, you know, we actually have to change ourselves, and then our entire life changes because who we are, our personality, creates our personal reality, our life. And so that's just a little summary there. But basically, joy, I've come to believe, isn't something that you find or you create, but it's something that you open and surrender to. As again, in the words of Michael Singer, we learn how to open up and somehow that that energy always wants to pervade our body and spirit, and the only thing blocking it is us.
Jonny Miller [00:18:31]:
Hmm. Yeah. Wow. What's coming to mind for me is what brought me into this journey for myself, I guess, was going through the the process of grief and how at a certain point, the the intensity of the grief opened me up, as you said. And I felt myself kind of receiving this. It was just like an overwhelming sense of connection and sorrow, but also joy at the same time. It was like the actual if I let go of the stories, it was like the feeling of joy and sorrow were more or less the same. And I'm curious about you said that we could maybe go into the what does it actually mean on a, let's say, semi scientific basis to open the heart. And it's something that I've been doing research around, things like HRV Entrainment, where a group of people will sing or tone or together, and you can actually measure the electromagnetic waves coming from their hearts, and they will entrain. And there is this kind of principle of entrainment that happens. I'm curious about lots of things, but one, how has your kind of citizen science deeply analytical perspective grasped this world of Joe Dispenza, of meditation, of inner light? Because on the surface, a lot of people might hear this kind of thing, and they'll dismiss it because it sounds woo. It's not backed by peer reviewed studies. I mean, that may not be the case, but how have you wrestled with this kind of blending of the potent experiences that you've had with the I imagine the desire to understand what the fuck is going on here?
Matt Maruca [00:20:28]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, I'll make, let's say, first, sort of a disclaimer. So dr. Joe Dispenzia. He's somebody I've gotten to know. He's an amazing teacher. And I want to recommend that anybody who's interested in this because I'm going to share a few things that I can share, but anybody who's interested in really going deeper actually checks out his work and goes to his events. But because of the significance of his work and my own journey, I'll share just a bit about my own experience, and that can help people to understand why I've come to believe some of the things I believe now. And it serves as a bridge for me between my journey in the Western scientific world where I studied. As I mentioned earlier, I studied a lot about light, electromagnetism energy, et cetera, which served as a really solid scientific foundation. So when I came to the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, a lot of people are just new, and they're just like, oh, this is amazing. Like, they get all the science. I had this really thorough several years of study, which basically laid a very similar foundation to the work that he's developed. Now he's taken it hundreds of steps further as far as actually applying it to help people transform and change their inner state, for which I'm so, so grateful, because that's what they say is like, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, right, as we evolve and grow and teach and share. Anyway, so I had just starting here, I had this background of studying light and electromagnetic energy and how it affects our health and why it's relevant to our health and our biology. There's books like The Body Electric by Dr. Robert O. Becker and Light Shaping Life by Roland van Weich, who is von Feich, I think is how it's pronounced in Dutch. But I could be botching that. But anyway, one book, The Body Electric, is all about how our cells operate with electricity. And that was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in his work. And we can get into more detail, if you'd like there. But regarding Roland von Feich, he has this book, Light Shaping Life, which actually is a compendium, a textbook of the majority of the research on biophotons. So actually light electromagnetic radiation emitted by cells for communication purposes and so on. And this significant role that this radiation plays in our cells, in fact, our cells create their own light, right? So right there with really well established and really well studied western science, there's already a foundation for the fact that we are beings of light, electromagnetic beings. And for me, that was a pretty big finding. Exposure to that definitely made me open minded to spirituality because I was open to things like acupuncture tai chi qigong, which document flow of energy through our nervous systems. That the traditional western scientific narrative which hasn't fully informed itself of the research of some of the folks I've just mentioned in these books, which are just a few of many more they've rejected. And Becker explains this very well in his book, how there has sort of always been a feud between the vitalists and the mechanists. And the vitalists were those in biology who believe that there's a vital spark underpinning life whereas of some kind of energy. And the mechanist said, no, it's all just chemical. That's it. You're just a sack of water containing chemicals interacting and it's all random and it's all based on genetic determinism. And everything that happens in your biology is a result of your genes and you can't really change anything. If you have an issue, the best you can do is pretty much take a drug. And that's what our entire western medical system is based on today, is a very reductionist mechanistic understanding of biology, which made sense when most diseases at a certain time were bacterial. And with just a single scoop, a teaspoon of white powder called penicillin, you could basically cure any disease. The majority of fatal diseases at that time that was like, whoa, this is it. But now, 75 years after the advent of the first antibiotics, you have more and more people sicker than ever with diseases that penicillin and antibiotics cannot treat and are not treating and will not treat because they're not diseases of bacterial infection. They're diseases of the system itself being compromised not by a foreign invader, but by a failure of the system to function, which has many causes but some of the largest of which are the jabs that everybody's getting full of mercury, glyphosate toxicity, electromagnetic radiation toxicity, constant toxicity by artificial light, among others. And it's particularly pronounced in the United States, the dose of toxicity is so high here because of the really significant lack of regulatory compared to other countries in particular. Again, on the food and drug side and on the medical side. So anyway, that's just a summary there. So anyway, that was the vitalist versus mechanist. Let's say feud, and the mechanists sort of won out, but the vitalists are gaining significant ground. I would say I'm one of them. We could say, I mean, if we were to look at it, most of the people in health and wellness today would be more I shouldn't say most, but many are vitalist. It's ironic because those who proclaim food and supplements as the only solution are actually much more mechanistic. They're much more similar to Western mainstream medicine than they would have you think. It's basically like, oh, you're sick, let's do a bunch of labs. Let's take you to a functional doctor and draw all your blood and measure all your things. Let's give you hundreds of supplements to take, or dozens at least a lot of the time, and the system will just start working. And this is the ironic thing. It was the same with my experience with Western medicine and my experience with the Paleo diet and the autoimmune Paleo diet in particular. And my experience with functional medicine doctors is they look at your values, they come up with all these supplements and IVs and all this other stuff and to their credit, some lifestyle things. But the core focus is usually on the supplementation, like that's going to make the difference. But the idea, Johnny, at the core is that you're going to give the body enough support with all of these supplements for what? For the body to basically support itself once again. And so it's the same thing with the premise, same thing behind the autoimmune protocol that I did for a long time, the Paleo autoimmune diet. It's like the idea is you are going to have an elimination diet that's so strict, much like the carnivore diet today, where you're going to cut out everything that could possibly trigger inflame the gut, trigger your immune system. And the idea that's proclaimed is that your gut and your body will and your immune system will naturally heal itself and come back to balance. And it's interesting because nobody ever talks about at least that I ever heard in that space, why? What is the force that's causing the body to heal itself? And could we tap into that directly without having to basically starve ourselves or restrict ourselves? Could we tap into the force that heals, the power that heals? The reason I'm sort of, I'd say passionate about this is because I was so blinded and so stuck in this world of elimination diets and supplements for a really long time. And I suffered, I struggled massively because I believed falsely that that was the be all, end all, as many people still do. And that's why I share this message. And that's why I'm not a fan of the carnivore diet personally. If you're on it, more power to you. But I don't really think it's reasonable for people to think that if somebody wants to just eat that way for the different effects of meat, fine. But if somebody's eating that way because they believe that it's going to heal them, but then if they have a sweet potato or a blueberry, their immune system goes haywire. And I'm not making these examples up. These are literally testimonies of people in the space who are leaders in the space, who if they have a little bit of spinach, it destroys their gut. I mean, I've talked to the three top carnivore actually, the four top carnivore experts in the space. I've talked to all of them, either on a podcast or in person or on a call or something. And maybe there's more than four now. But these people have told me their own stories of how if they eat something that's a plant with certain oxalates or this or that, their gut gets wrecked and they have all these problems. And I'm not saying that's not real. I'm not trying to minimize that experience. And it's not just them. It's many people in the movement. It's just to say that if the body's still reacting the way it used to, to those things, and sometimes it even gets worse for people. Have you healed or are you just hiding the symptoms in the same way that Western medicine does with different drugs treating the symptoms and not the root cause? And I would say that it's still just treating the symptoms and not the root cause. And so hence why I say that those approaches are, I would say, arguably more mechanist. But anyway, I don't particularly like to go after a particular approach. I think everybody's on their path and everyone has to go through their own journey to find what works for them. But from my experience, I would share a cautionary. This is my cautionary tale regarding elimination, diets and obsessive focus on food supplementation and functional medicine. My experience showed me that we would be better suited if our goal is true health and wellness. We would be better suited to focus on the factors that support basically the energy field. I know this is going to sound esoteric and vague, and let's get into a little more detail. You asked the question about the heart, but basically to focus on the things that support that system. So that's it. Now, to your question about the heart, unless you want to interject and go a different direction and feel free. But regarding the heart and opening the heart, one of the things that I've seen in the Dispenza work and community is they've studied literally thousands of people's brains and hearts with heart monitors and brain EEG, quantitative EEGs, measuring brainwaves measuring the heart. And they see this unbelievable. I mean, it's almost. Unbelievable. But it is believable when you have this inclination and understanding as you do, of course, as I do. But when the brain would go into these coherent states, they'd see the heart also go into these super coherent states. When we say coherent, there's a sort of rhythm that's present that isn't normally present, that indicates health wholeness, not in survival, not in stress, which we know the research is clear. Stress can make us really sick. The Heart Math Institute is a very large resource on the subject who has studied thoroughly the effects of heart coherence on our health and wellness. And you, of course, implied that you've looked into some of these things. So I would say from my own personal experience, just speaking really from me, somehow I've come to realize we wouldn't know this unless we actually start to practice it. But you can actually feel when your heart's closed and your heart's opened and can I put really scientific language behind that right now? Not really. I could try a little bit more. But basically you can feel if you're relaxed and comfortable and you feel safe, you can actually feel that. You just kind of feel like, okay, if that makes sense. And then you can also feel when things don't feel okay. And a lot of the time the only difference because the circumstances outside of us are what they're going to be. And it's just that we've basically chosen to say, yeah, when this circumstance is like this, I'm going to react in this way and I'm going to close my heart and I'm going to be stressed and upset. And then when this circumstance happens, I'm going to open my heart and feel safe and secure in that way, if you see what I'm saying. And so we've kind of created this artificial idea that this situation I should be unhappy, in this situation I should be happy. But what's interesting to me, and this is what many authors, including Michael Singer have written about is that the spiritual path is when we switch. That where we work on keeping our heart open or choosing to be happy and have control over our inner state regardless of the external circumstances. And that that's really the spiritual journey. So for example, when I'm interacting with my mother or with somebody who and a lot of the time it's our parents because they're our teachers and we're their teachers. So there's a lot of triggers there, right? But when I'm interacting with my mother there's so many times where I want to react and we actually work together. So she actually helps in my company in various capacities and it's been a great pleasure. I don't think anybody takes better care of certain things than a mother in many cases, just like they would of a grandchild, for example. So anyway, it's been a really great pleasure and tremendous benefit to my mission. And at the same time, there's lots of opportunities for triggers to arise. And so I'm actively and not perfect by any stretch at all, but actively working on becoming aware. And I think this is the path of like when I'm angry and I want to say something mean and like, that is the time we have to change. And the question that Joe Dispenza, he puts it so nicely is I'm paraphrasing, but what part of myself would I have to be willing to let go of to not feel this way anymore? Michael Singer says it basically when we're opening up in the sort of surrender experiment, there's parts of us that literally die in surrendering. This opening up and surrender. When we want to close and react, we actually have to open up. And it's so hard for me. And I think for many people, this is why many people don't do it. In fact, I would go as far as saying, johnny, I think it's the hardest thing in the world sometimes to when everything, every situation, all of our experience, our entire in those moments when we're in that altered state of stress and survival and anger, every single part of our universe, not just us, but everything feels like it's messed up. At least speaking from my experience. And it doesn't just feel like it's us. It feels like the whole world is going wrong even though it's again, it's just our altered state in that moment. But everything wants to say screw you, f you make somebody feel like crap. There's this anger that wants to come through and hatred and to open up and let love fill in that darkness. I think it's one of the hardest and probably the scariest things in the world. And again, I'm not perfect at it by any means, although I'm working on it. But I ask myself the question, like what would happen if I actually let go of this anger? Would my life be different? Would I maybe be a happier person if I was willing to let go of this judgment, frustration, anger, impatience? Because I feel myself in some moments and thank you for letting me go here. I think this is a really valuable point. When I'm so committed, I felt this many times so committed to being angry, but to being right, but also to being angry. And it's an identity. And I'm asking myself, like, really, what would I have to let go of? What would my life be like? How might my life be different if I decided to let go of this? Maybe I would just stop being angry. And that's what, again, somebody like Dr. Joe Dispenza says for know, what would your life be like if you actually stopped being unhappy? Maybe you would just be happy. And I thought that's really interesting. All the things I've tried do over the last few years, there's always this sort of searching, seeking, trying to plan the next trip, the next whatever. I've done it for so long and I've asked myself, like, what if I just stopped doing this and just chilled out? Maybe I would actually just and I've done it enough times to know that that's unexpectedly, it's not what we would expect, at least what I would expect, because many of us, I believe, have been programmed to think that we have to grind. We have to grind really hard. We have to plan and struggle and suffer. And I reject that idea that you need to grind to be successful. I do not believe that. I think when you grind, you hurt yourself. Doesn't mean you have not to be dedicated and committed to something. It's totally different. But the idea of the grind to me implies suffering and struggling and it's like if it were possible, and this is my experiment in my life now, is it possible to be successful? Have a business that runs, have a business that grows and reaches millions of people or hundreds of millions or billions of people, but not grinding, but being open, surrendered, happy, joyful doesn't mean we don't do hard things. I think the things that somebody does when they commit to staying open, when things get hard is harder than grinding, actually, in many respects. So it doesn't mean that we don't do hard things. It's just a different kind of hard. It's like forcing and pushing and struggling and almost hurting ourselves versus like, opening, surrendering, letting go of our ego. And that is the story of the Surrender Experiment, the book of Michael Singer. He ends up running a multi billion dollar company just by surrendering. People have to read the book to see how that amazing story. He introduces what I just shared at the beginning. So it's not a spoiler, but basically how the whole thing comes together just by opening up and accepting what life offers and making it where it's not about what I want, it's about what the universe or God wants for me, what it's showing me. So it sounds super esoteric, but there's a lot of experience on my side behind this and a lot of really intelligent people have written about this. And I think this is what matters more than almost anything in life, including for our health.
Jonny Miller [00:39:48]:
Wow. This is not at all the direction I thought we were going to go in for today. I'd researched all these questions about light and photobiology and mitochondria. I actually love that this is the direction it's gone in, because it feels very much aligned with what I'm attempting to share, teach, experiment for myself around nervous system mastery, which in its essence, is around the question of, like, how do we rise out of reactivity? And how do we live from this heart, open space when there are so many triggers in life, from our environment, from parents, from relationships? And I think that's the fundamental question that I've been wrestling with for myself. And man, there were so many things coming up as you were speaking, but I think one of them was you mentioned the kind of the vitalists and the mechanists. And something I've been exploring for myself is that you can kind of create certain conditions where it is easier to rise out of reactivity. And I think it might also be worth unpacking what that means as well. But when in the work that I do around emotions, let's say someone gets angry, I actually think that there's kind of two paths and they may be pointing to the same thing. There's like the Joe Dispenza Michael Singer path, Ram Das two where they're just like just let go of it, just like let it go, just drop it, drop that part of yourself that think that needs to be angry. And then there's also another path which is more coming from the work of Joe Hudson where he says just like welcome, love, feel and sometimes express the anger as well. Sometimes I think a lot of people that get depressed, at least I've noticed my work as a breath worker, it's more a function of they have a lot of repressed or unfelt anger. Like they feel that anger is a bad thing and so they just push it down, they meditate it away and actually that in itself causes a lot of health problems. But the direction that I'm curious about is I feel like there is actually this blend that's required between the vitalistic perspectives, which I think is where a lot of philosophy kind of medicine originated from thousands of years ago. And the more recent mechanistic view. And in my experience, it's actually easier to let's say I had a call with my mum. She said something. It triggered me. It would actually be easier for me to down regulate, to come back to myself, come back to my heart with an understanding of the, let's say the mechanistic interventions that make a difference. So things that you've been researching in the earlier parts of your life, like eating well, like having good light, exposure to non artificial light, to grounding in the earth outside, to co regulating with nature, I think all those things actually do play a part in this kind of inner challenge of keeping our hearts open and having a kind of open awareness to everything and not closing down. And there's a line that kind of came to me when I was studying the nervous system and it's like it speaks to the same kind of fish in water thing where the nervous system is basically a lens through which we experience reality. Like you said, when you're angry, you see the entire world as angry. You see everything that's wrong with the world and then when you downshift and when you down regulate, then all of a sudden the world becomes safe. The world becomes like a beautiful place full of wonder and awe. And so I think I'm curious to hear what have you learned about combining what you've learned and practiced from the first decade of your life in this kind of biohacking human optimization world versus maybe like a broader perspective about what actually matters and what it's pointing to.
Matt Maruca [00:43:54]:
Yeah, I appreciate the question. I think it's a great question. So for me what I started to learn about from the perspective of health and wellness and from diets to light, it led me to light. It led me to this electromagnetic understanding that we are beings of energy, beings of electromagnetism which of course led to the more spiritual inner light focus which I do believe is critical. Now I believe from my experience that and this is why I'm more interested in speaking about this than anything else at this point because not just for myself but for people who are searching. Because I remember at one point when I went to my first meditation retreat with Dr. Joe Dispenza but the first time in my life that I just took time out of my life, out of my work as an adult to focus on myself and my inner state and not continue to reaffirm my own patterns. Because I would wake up every day and open my laptop and continue to feel and think the same way. And this taking a week out I think four years or so into starting my company or three and a half years or so into starting my company was a pretty big step. And I remember after a few days of really absorbing this as I described deepening of the information I was already familiar with about our biology but really in a much more practical way to be applied for spiritual development and development of our energetic field, et cetera. I remember feeling so I felt so good one day on the beach like so good after this walking meditation I felt so open. I remember asking myself like what's wrong with know, Joe would make jokes like this like people ask oh, what's wrong with me? I can't open my heart. And it's like well that's not the mind of the being who has an open heart. They're not asking why am I not just they're not asking why am I not healed yet? They're just stepping into the glory of the feeling of being healed. It's not something you think your way into. And I just remember as I was walking down the beach I had the thought like why can't I do this? And somehow something clicked like what if I just got over this? I had all this great information I had assimilated all week about how to overcome myself and saw examples of people I met throughout the week who I could see they were feeling better, changing their state. It was this great energy and I just thought what if I actually just opened up a little bit more, just tried right? And somehow the act of just attempting to open myself up a little bit more than I felt comfortable with. That's the key thing. It's not going to feel comfortable, of course, because it's unknown. That doesn't mean it's bad or unsafe. By definition, these new feelings and new ways of feeling for people are going to be unknown. This is something Joe talks about a lot. It's going to be unknown for us and doesn't mean it's bad if you've never felt true joy in your life, it's probably going to be scary because it's going to feel super unknown to let go of the because we get attached to the familiar. Even if it's something we don't, an emotion we don't enjoy, we become attached to it because it's comfortable and familiar. Like the suffering becomes comfortable and familiar. So we would actually choose that over opening up to a potentially positive unknown. So anyway, I just tried this and in the act it's also interesting in this spiritual work, how it's not like the how do I say this? Somehow our own internal changes create our experience of the world outside of us. It's really interesting, and it makes sense from a purely and I thought about this even well before discovering the work of Dr. Joe. He just helped to put more detail into it. But basically it's always been interesting to me how the information we're receiving from our external environment is just basically indiscriminate sensory information. I mean, information, it's just electromagnetic waves, for example, from light of light, vibrations in the air that we call sound, things that we feel tactile, sensation, the repulsion of different like, I can't put my hand through the table because of the repulsion of the charged particles that make up the table. It's not that it's actually solid, it's mostly empty space, but it's electromagnetic repulsion. So anyway, we have all this sensory information coming in all the time, and I would say it doesn't have an innate meaning to it. Like this information doesn't have an innate meaning in and of itself. We assign meaning to all of it. Like every single thing from a tree to grass to a table to a chair, all the stuff around me, the mountains, the cell towers on the hill, the birds, all of it. There's a meaning that I've assigned from my understanding, a baby sees it just as this experience, right? And I'm not saying it's bad that we assign meaning to it. In fact, I think it's very much necessary. Now, the reason I'm saying this is because what it means is that the only way, not one way, but the only way to change our experience of our outer world is by changing these inner perceptions the way we perceive this information. I really think that's true. And that's the same thing Dr. Joe says when he know your personality. The way you think, act, feel, creates your personal reality. And in order to change your personal reality, you have to change your personality. Otherwise nothing in your life is going to change. And the way I just explained it from my own learning and perception, like we have this indiscriminate sensory information coming in. We assign all the meaning to it. That meaning that we assign is our life. So they say we don't see the world. You basically just implied this. We don't see the world the way it is. We see it as we are. You could also make a case that the entire universe we're experiencing in fact, I think this isn't even under debate, this is just accepted in science is that the world I'm experiencing right now, my experience of it, is entirely occurring in my brain. Right. It makes sense if the images are being formed in my brain. Yeah, there might be this whole world outside of me that I'm perceiving, but I'm effectively living in my own universe. And so again, if I wanted to change, if something really bad happens, it's only bad because I say it's bad because I've conditioned myself to think it's bad and to react a certain way. I love cliches a lot of the time, like common phrases that people repeat because I find myself citing them more and more often. But the funny thing is everybody will say cliches, but a lot of the time people don't understand the meaning or don't apply the meaning or don't have the context for why it's actually true. But for example, there's these books, like the titles you can get the whole idea of it. Like the obstacle is the way. If we change our perspective from this understanding of the way the universe is created in our head, our experience of the universe, at least then it makes sense that you could say, yeah. Well, if I face something that I would previously call a challenge. And now I'm going to say no. This is exactly because the universe or the world or whatever, god has given me what I'm perceiving in this moment as a challenge. Right now, it is the perfect moment and the perfect opportunity because it is on my plate and I can't argue with that. And the fact that it's here right now probably means that it's the thing that I need to deal with to get to the next level. It is the perfect opportunity for me to overcome the limited emotion or limited level of consciousness that I've been existing at. And so, in other words, again, you could say the obstacles away. So the next challenge that comes my way and here I am talking to you. I'm thinking about four or five things that I've been dealing with recently that I'm like, jeez, I'd better really continue to apply this philosophy to these situations. I do it regularly. But it's funny, sometimes I'm like, Jeez, this is important. But anyway, taking that, changing the perception and approaching the situation as like, maybe this is my opportunity for growth. For example, I'll give you an example right now that's actually pertinent to me. Like, I've been traveling like crazy recently. I'm exhausted. I traveled too much. I thought more than I thought I could manage. And it's interesting because I have a situation in the present sort of moment, the near future, where I'm like, there's some things I'm committed to do that a part of me is like, yeah, of course I'd love to do those things. But another part of me is like, I don't know if it's a smart idea from a perspective of taking care of my own well being. I've been pushing myself really hard. Now, not that there's a right or a wrong answer, but I'm just looking. I could look at that like, oh, this is a big problem. Why is it hard? Why couldn't it be easier? Or I could just say, well, there is a limit in my consciousness, in my thinking that this is actually a problem versus observing it as a way to grow and level up to the next level in whatever way that that means. And I don't know the answer to the question. And it all depends. The situation could be one outcome in one context and another in a different one. Right? But so you asked the question, circling back to your original question. How does this become practical? How do we take the stuff that I was learning in earlier parts of my life? And where I'm going is that that day that I was on this walking meditation on the beach at this retreat, I remember opening up and feeling really good, really whole. And I felt so much energy coursing through my body, through my nervous system, through my auric field, whatever it is. I felt a lot of energy flowing through my body. And I started to have a taste and an understanding of what Dr. Dispenza and other spiritual teachers talk about in these spiritual states of bliss, joy ecstasy, where even people in the Dispenza community practicing his particular methods of meditation have actually healed from many, many really severe diseases in the last decade or so, which is pretty amazing. Like spontaneous remissions, effectively. And I had a taste of that energy. I felt really good. And I remember feeling so overcome with love and joy that I was just trying to call all of my family members to share that I love them because I just felt so good and I felt so whole. And I remember having a thought, and this is a key takeaway as it relates to your question. I remember having a thought. Maybe the reason I had gut issues my whole childhood was because I was living in chronic stress and survival for a variety of reasons. Parents, divorce, constant. There was a worry about money, so there was this feeling of not being safe and secure. And so what happens is you close your heart, you basically drain all of your vital energy into your survival energy centers and you're basically draining your energy staying in stress and it makes perfect sense. The research is very clear. There's nobody arguing this either. When you're in stress and survival your body's not going to digest. When you're in the sympathetic nervous system you're not going to be in parasympathetic and rest and digest. So there's no argument about that. But the thing that's just not people don't necessarily take it to the next step which again thank God for Dr. Dispenza doing this. In my view we don't realize that we can actually control these thoughts with our mind. That's where there's a mistake in traditional psychology is that we're almost victims to the different emotions we're feeling. And if you go to a traditional psychotherapist, they're maybe going to just at least my experience was that sort of soothe you and comfort you and kind of ask very delicate vanilla questions about, oh, and why do you? Nothing against that, because I think that might work for some people. But is it really working or is it? Again, back to the carnivore diet. I'm probably singling out the carnivore diet too much all elimination diets supplement focus. Is it actually healing the root cause or is it another crutch? And So I Thought if I Could Just Continue To Surrender and Open Up surrender And Open Up relax And Get Out Of Survival relax And Get Out Of Survival enough that it Becomes My Default State of being where I'm not contracting My Gut and Feeling in the Survival State, which I started to again talking about the Unknown and The Discomfort. I realized, johnny, I was like, I've spent my entire life in this know? It makes sense that people get sick, really sick, because if you spend your life constantly contracting your lower centers in stress and survival and putting all your energy in the lower energy centers, basically our adrenal glands for fighting and pushing and willpower into. Yeah, basically that's the main one. When people get stressed you drain off your vital energy down there. It makes sense people won't be able to digest. It makes sense people will have gut issues and it made sense to me. So again I'm not saying people shouldn't eat healthy foods. I think that's really important and I still do. I'm not saying that people should not observe healthy circadian meal timing. I think that's important and I still do. I try not to eat almost any food at all after five or 06:00 p.m. In the evening and if I do I try to keep it light and if I don't then I feel the consequences. I make my main meal lunch or even sometimes breakfast but lunch is my main meal because that's when our body is best suited for digestion and we could talk about all that all day. That's going to warrant a separate probably interview a conversation about the circadian rhythm and all that stuff. But our biology is best suited to digest food in the middle of the day when the sun's the most active because our metabolism mirrors the sun. And so the biggest meal, if you're eating one meal a day, it shouldn't be the dinner, it should be lunch from a health perspective, from a digestion and taking care of your sleep and circadian rhythm standpoint. So I still do all that stuff. I've been a little bit, as I mentioned to you, over the top on my travel, which is very stressful for the body and it's had certain effects on my physiology kind of causing me to be totally a little bit dehydrated and whatnot anyway. But I'm aware of that learning. But so I still do my best to practice all these different things. I still keep my phone on airplane mode. I still block blue light at night. That's why I created a company making the blue light protection glasses. And I love it and I feel great when I do and I feel the effects, the disruption when I don't. But all that's to say I was doing all that stuff already but still feeling stuck. And I truly believe that the deepest message that I could share that could help most people today, because I think it's probably the biggest. Either the biggest or one of the largest afflictions most people face today is living. In chronic emotional stress and turmoil, which, as a result of creating a permanent stress state or semi permanent stress state in the body, people use all their vital energy to react and ultimately end up being miserable in the moment because they're reacting in a way that isn't necessary because you don't have to run from a lion in those moments. That's what that reaction is for. So people become miserable in the moment they're hurting themselves. We also become less effective at dealing with the actual problems, as you know, in our life because when we actually go into that survival state, we become hyper focused on the problem. We can't see beyond it. We lose all of our critical thinking and we basically become useless when it comes to solving problems. And so it's like you're not only making yourself miserable, we're also eliminating our ability in those states to solve problems effectively and then we're sapping our health for the future. And we're literally creating and this is another cliche, but has a really strong basis and I'm so glad we're talking about this, is that when we choose to be in fear of something, we actually create the experience in that moment of the worst case scenario already happening that we're afraid of as if it already happened. But it hasn't. Like, and Joe Dispenza says this well, of all the potentials in the quantum field that we could create our reality, we actually create the physical, visceral experience of the worst case scenario and we live it in our mind and in. Our life. And we've explained today how there's not a lot of difference between the two, and it's kind of crazy. And I got to give one more analogy for this. The best story ever for this is Star wars. It is unbelievable. How well have you ever seen Star wars? Please tell me you have. Well, many people haven't. I'm shocked. Haven't seen Star wars, but so if you haven't watched Star wars, you got to watch Star wars. You got to watch from one to six in that order. Some people say you start with four, but that wouldn't serve my point as well at one through three in particular. So Anakin Skywalker, and if you haven't seen Star Wars, skip this part. But Anakin Skywalker basically, or don't you'll have a much deeper meaning when you watch it? He listens to his fears that his wife is going to die in childbirth, and because he listens to his fears from his bad dreams, he actually chooses to buy into his fears fully and put all of his eggs in the fear basket. He decides to kill a Jedi and submit himself fully to the Dark Lord, sort of the Sith Lord, emperor Palpatine. And I probably sound like such a nerd, but Palpatine represents basically fear, destruction, suffering negative emotions, and he decides to surrender himself completely to those negative emotions in the hopes that he'll be able to prevent his bad, his worst nightmare from happening. But in doing so, he creates his worst nightmare. He causes his wife to die in childbirth because of the stress and fear she goes through, all because he listened to his bad dreams. Now, that might sound like a big one, but that's exactly what happens in Star Wars. And when you look at it from a spiritual perspective, it is a trip. But so that's exactly what we do when we choose to buy into fear. We're not actually preventing that situation from happening in the end. We're actually creating the experience of the situation, happening in the moment, creating the very thing that we're trying to avoid. And it sounds so counterintuitive in some respects, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it and when you look and apply it to your life. So all day we could talk about light and circadian rhythms and all this stuff, and people can we can do another podcast to dive into that. But I really believe that this is the most important thing.
Jonny Miller [01:02:25]:
I love that so much. And there's a few things I want to kind of add as, like, cherries on top to what you just shared. The first is this idea of the golden algorithm, which Joe Hudson, who's been on the podcast before, which is exactly that, what you just shared through Star Wars, that by avoiding feeling a certain way, life will kind of conspire in order to make us feel it even more intensely in a way that we couldn't have expected. And I think the other thing that I want to kind of double click on for listeners as well is this reframe of like instead of habitually avoiding triggers or avoiding feeling certain things. I remember there was at this moment for me during breath work training where there was this phrase that they said, like, take it to the mat. And so if something would come up like anger, frustration, shame, something that I didn't want to feel, then the invitation would be to go do a breath work journey pretty much like right away and get curious about it and realize what is going on on a deeper level. And time and time and time again I would go in. I remember that there was one point where I was actually triggered by my teacher and there was this feeling of like anger and shame coming up and did a breath work journey about half an hour later and had this profound kind of cathartic experience that related back to my childhood. And I left, as you said earlier, kind of feeling more whole and feeling more integrated. And I think that is the ultimate if listeners were to there's a lot that's been shared, this amazing conversation. But I think one of the key things is that when we get in that kind of trigger state, it's almost like a signpost to be curious and to look inwards and it's an invitation to be more whole. Ultimately, at the end of the day, there's like a part of ourselves that we have exhaled. If people kind of want the scientific side of things, you can search for it a really recent paper. Let's see if I can find it. It's the energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load. And that paper basically kind of backs everything that Matt's just been sharing around how the body just goes into this kind of survival shutdown space when there is this much emotional debt that's been accumulated which is basically all these times that we've been triggered and we haven't been able to open up to those feeling states. Okay, I'm going to pause here. I feel like this could be like a five hour podcast. I'd love to ask you five rapid fire questions and then we will wrap it up for today. All right, cool. So first one, this might not be a rapid fire one. We'll see. What is one half baked theory or hypothesis that you hold that you suspect is true but you don't have proof for?
Matt Maruca [01:05:32]:
Well, I feel like we just kind of got through sharing it for the most part. What I would naturally respond to this question is the idea that we really are know, dr. Joe says it really well. You're greater than you think, more powerful than you know, more unlimited than you could ever imagine. And I think it's a very hello. I think it's a very popular I should say it's a very powerful idea that's my grandfather stop saying hello. So I think it's a very powerful idea that we should definitely consider. And the way that I think about this is that, for example, even in my own situations, like a scenario I mentioned to you earlier, thinking about different values and balancing of different decisions, questions about travel and about commitments to people versus taking care of myself. I'm trying. Whereas in the past, I would ask questions from a limited perspective of, oh, what do I have to do? To just almost coming from a state of fear. Like there would be a fear based perspective and I would ask my frame of reference would be that I'm not unlimited, that I can't do anything and I'm just experimenting with what if I actually were able to do anything right now? I'm not saying crazy stuff like getting on an airplane every day for a month and flying a different place. I bet if you condition your mind correctly, I think you probably could manage that. So for me, it's about can I condition my mind and bring my body into such a state of balance, which I'm not a master at yet, but I'm experimenting to find the highest outcome in any situation. I'm not sure if I've said that quite well, but basically I'll give it one more shot. I would say the better way of putting it is if you read The Autobiography of a Yogi. I don't think these are half baked, but I'll put them in this question just because most people will think they're half baked. But if you read The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, the great masters and saints that he describes through his journey through India, looking for his guru had these supernatural spiritual powers like levitation, like constant ecstasy and never sleeping. Really unbelievable stuff that most people would say that's impossible. But when you've studied the body electric and you've studied light shaping life and you understand that we are electromagnetic and you understand that there's sort of no limit to electromagnetic energy and you could say, theoretically, if a human were to cultivate this energy in themselves to the maximum extent, could we even resurrect from death? Could we even keep our body in two places at once? That's kind of what I'm referring to. The first way I was answering it was kind of attempt at this, which is I think, much more on point. So things for people to think about. You don't have to agree with me, reject it all you want, but I would encourage people to read some of this research, read some of these also spiritual texts and consider could that actually be possible? Could it be that these people who are accounting these stories could be telling the truth?
Jonny Miller [01:08:54]:
Beautiful. And I'd say for listeners, Ramdas or Michael Singer are two good starting points for this kind of perspective. Okay, question number two what is one underappreciated book or research paper? That has impacted your life in a positive way.
Matt Maruca [01:09:12]:
Yeah, I would say I just gave it the autobiography of a yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
Jonny Miller [01:09:18]:
Great. Beautiful. If you had a research grant and a team with a million dollar budget, what is one study that you would like to run?
Matt Maruca [01:09:34]:
These are great questions. I haven't thought about this a ton. I mean, one, I'll just do two briefly. One, I would love to study the products. We make blue light protection glasses and really with a more clinical approach show that they work. There are some studies that have shown that amber lens blue light blocking glasses are effective. There are studies that show that blue blocking glasses aren't effective, but these are the ones using the clear lenses which we know don't work. I've tested dozens of pairs of clear lens blue blocking glasses and they don't even block the range of light that comes from our modern lights. So of course they don't work because they don't block the light. That is the problem. But anyway, the cool thing about the blue light protection glasses, which we didn't talk about at all, which is fine, actually, is that there's so many strong mechanisms behind blue light protection and blue light protection eyewear the fact that we have a circadian rhythm. It's set by blue light, and so blue light at night disrupts it and suppresses melatonin. All of that's well documented. And then again some limited studies, but solid nonetheless that these can actually work for improving sleep and health. So anyway, and then we have the partnership we did with Aura last year as a company. My company is called Raw Optics. I don't know if that'll be in the show notes, but basically partnership with Aura we did last year where many, many thousands of their customers received a pair of our glasses as a free gift in exchange for referring a friend. And we got hundreds of reviews, basically unsolicited, just people had such a great experience they wanted to share and it's not exactly true because we did send out emails requesting we sent out an email. They weren't exactly unsolicited but I should say they were unexpected because they were unexpected reviews because the customers didn't purchase the glasses, they just got them as a free gift. So they were unexpected that people would take the time to actually leave us a review of their experience regardless. And sure enough, they did. And it was unbelievable the amount of people who actually clarified or explained that their sleep scores improved significantly. Some provided sleep screenshots. So we know that the product works very well from experience and from the data now. But anyway, I would love to run a study to really dive into that and then I would also love to run studies on and this is actually what the Dr. Joe Dispenza community is doing, I would just donate the million dollars to Inner Science. The research fund actually that they're doing because they're doing all the studies I would want to do. They're basically studying when somebody goes into a deep meditation state and their brain goes into these super high gamma brainwave patterns and their hearts and crazy levels of coherence, they're studying the changes in the blood. They've applied that, well, this is actually, you know what? I'm going to let people I shouldn't share. If you want to learn this, you got to go follow Dr. Joe Dispenza, get on their newsletter, and they'll show the details. It's not mine to share, but it is unbelievable what they're discovering with people in meditative experiences. The blood of advanced meditators, people who have gone through a week long meditative experience literally has unbelievable effects on cancer cells, on the ability of cells to be infected by viruses. And I'm talking really positive changes in both cases. So people got to check that out. That's the kind of research I think the world needs more of, for sure.
Jonny Miller [01:12:50]:
Beautiful. And shout out to Royal Optics as well. I've got a couple of pairs of your glasses. I'm not wearing them currently because it's light basically when I fall asleep right now. But when the winter comes back, I'll be wearing them again. Okay, last question. What is your greatest aspiration for the impact that your work will have in the years and decades to come?
Matt Maruca [01:13:12]:
This is great. My goal with my company is to twofold. One is for me, it's a personal motive. It is to see what I'm capable of creating and see how much I can grow as a person and create something that really matters based on true principles, a moral, ethical company that does the right thing and see where that goes. So that's one. But as far as the impact in the world, what I would love to see, what I think would be cool to see, and I'm surrendered to whatever God and the universe gives me. I would love to see that the focus on light, on light and light therapy products wakes enough people up, or many people up to the idea or even just the possibility that the greatest light we can focus on is our inner light. I think that for me is the highest goal. So as we're a light and light therapy company and as I've described, I've gone through different challenges, dark nights of the soul, internal soul searching, recollections. And I've had to ask myself like, okay, I'm doing this, what I'm doing, selling products that help people's health. And it's proven and it works, and we know it works, and we get such great feedback. But something still didn't feel quite right for me, especially as I learned more from a spiritual perspective that there's a deeper aspect to health and wellness, which is what I'm so excited about and so glad we've spoken about today because I really think this will change more lives than practically anything else we could have spoken about. But at the same time, how do I say this? I felt like, how do I bridge the gap between these products and this deeper understanding? And what I came to believe, as it was my own personal experience, is that people aren't necessarily ready to just jump straight to spiritual practices and cultivating their inner light. Because to most people it seems like woo woo. And until they maybe have an experience with something that's based on energy and not just a supplement. So we can full circle here and close off with the vitalist versus mechanistic view, everybody's deeply rooted in the mechanistic viewpoint. You say to somebody, take this pill, take this supplement. You don't have to try very hard to sell a supplement or a pill or anything because if it makes sense to people, they get it. People have a reference for how that works. But when you say wear a pair of glasses, it's going to transform your sleep, protect your eyes, help you feel better, you're going to sleep better. The only reference people might have are sunglasses because they protect your eyes from intense sun. But the effects of blue light are at a subconscious level, so you don't feel, even when you feel blue light as intense, you might feel a little eye strain as far as disrupting your hormones and your circadian rhythm. You don't necessarily feel that as consciously right as you do the sun being too bright. And then you maybe want to put on sunglasses, right? It's almost like, do you have to see to believe or not? Right? Well, with this, since it's non visual, you literally can't see it, so you'd have to feel it. And so if we can give people an experience with a product that is based on really solid science, where they can have an experience that they would not have believed possible and we had tons of reviews from Aura customers who said, I got these glasses as a gift. I did not think this was going to work, but I took them because they were free and oh my God, believe the hype. They live up to it. Like, I didn't believe the hype, but they lived up unbelievable feedback we got. And all these reviews are on our website. People can read them, but anyway, these are on the sunset lenses. So people have to go to any of our sunset products, the red lenses, and read these reviews. But so if we could give people that experience, then I think there's a switch that's flipped out from mechanism to vitalism. Somehow that happens where people are open to other ways of thinking. And I think that in addition to giving people true scientifically based benefits with our products and the glasses are just the start of it. We're working on light therapy, general lighting, all kinds of really amazing stuff that people will be able to use, keep something in their pocket and transform their state with the device. There's really cool stuff coming, but that can lead to the I think the change is that no matter how great our light therapy and light products are, as I learned from my own experience, if we don't take the time to cultivate our inner light in whatever way that means for people. Qigong, meditation, breath work, journaling, whatever. I don't think we're going to have the evolution that we could have as a species that we need to have as a world. Given the way some things are going, I think we could do better. So that's my biggest aspiration. And again, thank you for asking. Thank you for letting me share in detail, Johnny.
Jonny Miller [01:18:04]:
I appreciate it. Mic drop. Thank you so much. Matt. Yeah, I feel like you ended with, like, the Trojan horse from the mechanistic perspective to the vitalistic perspective. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I've really, really enjoyed this. I'll include all the links to raw optics and everything that you're up to in the show notes as well. I believe there's also a discount code in there somewhere, too. Any final parting words?
Matt Maruca [01:18:33]:
Not particularly. I want to say it's funny, the first thing that comes to my mind is Jesus is king. I know that might sound like out of left field, but I'm just going to put that out there because I think Jesus I'll just say briefly, Jesus would be one of what I would call not half baked, but a theory that Jesus represents to me at this level that I'm in, like, a peak of spiritual development. So as much as the world has a lot of, let's say, challenges against a lot of traditional religious beliefs, I actually think there's something really profound to be looked at if people get through all of the bias is that people have. So I'm just going to just leave that there and people can make of.
Jonny Miller [01:19:19]:
What they like, beautiful. Well, thank you so much. We will wrap the show with that. Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been great.
Matt Maruca [01:19:26]:
God bless you, brother. Take care.
Jonny Miller [01:19:30]:
All right. Much love. Thanks.