[00:00:01] Luke: So I was thinking last night about the-- I remember the night we met. I don't remember too many times I've met people. If you think about your 10 closest friends, you might remember, but people that you see less often, I don't know where I met people. And sometimes I've met people, and I don't even remember that I met them.

[00:00:22] They're like, "Hey, remember we met before?" And I'm like, "Ah, I don't want to be that guy. I am so sorry." But I remember you, dude, because obviously a relationship blossomed out of it. I used to do a lot of speaking, which I'm about to do again this coming year. I did a lot of talks in New York, and I'm speaking at Cap Beauty, which is like a little boutique natural skincare company and stuff. Really beautiful boutique.

[00:00:47] I did my little talk and then you were there, and afterward you come up to me. You're like, "Hey, man." You started dropping all this circadian biology shit on me and stuff about EMF and blue light. How old were you? 18?

[00:01:01] Matt: Yeah, 18. I just turned 18.

[00:01:02] Luke: Was that 2018?

[00:01:03] Matt: 2017.

[00:01:04] Luke: '17. Okay. Yeah. And I was just like, "This kid's so fucking smart and cool." And then you were telling me earlier that I was asked, tell me about the glasses because I forget how that happened.

[00:01:15] Matt: Yes. So my memory of the situation is I was saving my money after graduating high school that following summer to go and take a gap year, or at least a gap semester. Go travel in Europe and everything. And I was landscaping, so I was pushing a lawnmower every day, maybe digging holes, cutting IV and things like that.

[00:01:34] Luke: My IV needs cutting.

[00:01:36] Matt: Yeah, yeah. I was using a chainsaw thing to cut hedges, like a hedge cutter. One time I nicked my leg and then--

[00:01:43] Luke: I just got one of those. It's so rad. But I'm afraid to get up on the hedges I need cut. The vines are almost two and a half storeys.

[00:01:51] Matt: Yeah, you have to be careful.

[00:01:53] Luke: And I'm scared to get on the ladder with that thing.

[00:01:54] Matt: Yeah, you got to be careful. I was doing that and then the weight caught something, and I nicked my thigh. I'm lucky I didn't hit a critical artery or something there, but I still have a little bit of a scar. But anyway, so one day I was listening to a podcast you did with Dr. Jack Kruse, who I was following really closely at the time and learning a ton from.

[00:02:12] And I appreciate his work a lot because it has spurred so much of this light focus in the entire health and wellness world. So at the time though, the way I heard it was like, I don't think really many people understood the level at which Jack was able to communicate. I just don't think people were getting it.

[00:02:30] Luke: They still don't.

[00:02:30] Matt: Yeah. Well, fair.

[00:02:31] Luke: Especially on Twitter.

[00:02:32] Matt: Fair.

[00:02:32] Luke: Because the way he communicates is like, "You're a fucking idiot." That's another conversation.

[00:02:39] Matt: Yeah, so I thought it'd be great because I've been studying this work for a couple of years and I went and read the books that Jack is citing myself and even talk to some of the experts themselves. Maybe I could go on Luke's podcast and explain it in a way that it would make more sense to you and make more sense to your audience.

[00:02:58] And so then on that same episode, you advertised your little speaking gig you were doing up at Cap Beauty, and I was like, "Ah, that sounds like I could maybe go up and pitch myself." Because you're coming all the way from LA and I'm in Philly, so it's like a two hour drive from me.

[00:03:12] I'm not going to go all the way to LA. And so yeah, my buddy, Brian and I drove up and we went and had all-you-can-eat sushi, and then we showed up at your event and listened, and it was a great talk. And then, yeah, I remember standing out on the sidewalk and trying to basically pitch you on having me on your podcast, but then you asked me-- I think even before I could, you asked me where we got these cool glasses, me and my friend. And we had had them custom-tinted.

[00:03:38] And I remember in the following weeks trying to email connect you with the tinting company, and it was a huge pain. I think you were like, "Dude, this is complicated." And then I had seen an article in the quantum biology Facebook groups of how to tint your own lenses, which most people weren't going to do. But I could do, because I was a high schooler, finished high school, had free time.

[00:03:58] And basically with your initial payment, it was like-- I basically charged you, I think, the cost of just the materials to buy, like a hot plate, chemistry beaker, the tint, the lens holders. And basically, I remember you sent in your frame and we tinted the lenses and that was it. And then it was miraculous that you happened to be back in New York a month later, which is when we set the podcast for.

[00:04:22] Luke: Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought it was in the same trip.

[00:04:24] Matt: Yeah, it was like a month later you were coming back, and so you said like, "Hey, come up." And you were staying at the hotel, the standard, and then the AC was broken and then you got your way into the Empire Suite. And then we had this epic view to record the penthouse.

[00:04:36] Luke: Dude, the penthouse suite at the standard. Yeah. Super Scarface '80s, gaudy, modern. It's cool. I remember that because I had that room, and it's funny to think about now, but I don't think I could afford that room. I don't know how much it was. Maybe $2,500 a night or something.

[00:04:58] I got upgraded, and I was like, "Dude, I got to book a bunch of podcasts in here so the guests roll over and think I'm balling." like, "I have a huge podcast because I'm in this dope suite with cameras and everything." But I think you were the only one I managed to get there.

[00:05:13] Matt: It worked out really well. And then I remember months went by.

[00:05:18] Luke: I was like, "I was only going for about a year at that time."

[00:05:20] Matt: Yeah. It was 2017, late 2017.

[00:05:24] Luke: The first episode was June, 2016.

[00:05:27] Matt: So then what happened was the months went by. I went and took my gap year, and I was traveling all around Europe, and the podcast hadn't come out. And I remember thinking like, "Damn, did Luke just think it wasn't that good of an interview?" Because I remember I your youngest guest, your least known guest, and it was the longest episode you had ever done at the time.

[00:05:42] We cracked three hours. And that was the first. And I was just like, man, I guess it wasn't good enough. You're probably not going to release it." But then I ran into you at Paleo f(x) in April, 2018, in Austin, here. And then you told me, "Oh yeah, it's coming out in a few days."

[00:05:59] So you had canned so many episodes that it was like six or seven months down the lineup. And so finally it came out and I remember you telling me it hit your number one download ,and it stayed at the top for a long time. And I was like, "Wow, that's crazy."

[00:06:12] For me, it was a sign that the universe wanted this information. But to wrap this up, years later, I was reflecting on this whole interaction between us, and I really felt like I was asking God or the universe through you, like, "Hey, give me a shot. I want to get this information out."

[00:06:27] And the universe was asking back like, "Hey, bro. You got to be able to deliver the goods, help people have the tools that they need to apply the information." It's fun to just talk, but you got to be able to give people something to make it practical, which is what the glasses are and eventually now the lighting that we're developing and all that stuff. So in retrospect, it all made a lot of sense.

[00:06:44] Luke: So epic. Yeah, I think at that time, I was only going for a year, so-- obviously, still, sometimes I have people on the show that no one's ever heard of, and they maybe never been on a podcast, but I think they're really interesting, and so there they are. But at that time I was definitely vying for big names because I wanted to establish myself. So Jack Kruse and whomever else I was able to land.

[00:07:09] I was always trying to get a big guest so I could grow. And so had I not met you and I just got an email from you at that time, and you're like, "Hey, I'm 17, I know about blue light, and I want to be on your podcast." I'm probably like, "Oh, that's nice, but it's not really a fit."

[00:07:28] But dude, you were so confident. I think that's such a huge part of success, is just self-worth, self-esteem, believing in yourself. You know what I mean? You weren't shoegazing and being all insecure. You were like, "Bro, I should be on your podcast." But not in an arrogant way either, because some people are like that.

[00:07:47] You were just humble, but confident. And you just had such a, as you said, a way of breaking down ideas that are really complex for me even. I don't understand what the hell Jack Kruse is talking about half the time, but he sounds right a lot of the time. So I want to know.

[00:08:05] Matt: Yeah, I think he is.

[00:08:06] Luke: But how do I actually apply it in my daily life? And those glasses that you speak of-- I don't wear sunglasses, obviously. Who does? No. But even at the time I bought these sunglasses, and I still didn't really wear them, but they were really cool frames. Oh, man, these would be sick if they were blue blockers. And those ones that you made for me, I wore for years. I think I still have them somewhere.

[00:08:32] Matt: Yeah, I need to buy them from you and frame them. They're the first pair of Ra Optics, so we got save them.

[00:08:37] Luke: And now you have a real company. And then for context, my company, I was going to point to these, but these are a prototype. My blue-blocking eyewear company, Gilded-- company I don't do a lot with other than just sell a few frames. But in turn just shows, I don't know, good faith and karma, after you were already well established. And being highly successful with your brand, you're like, "Luke, you should make your own blue-blocking brand. I'll hook you up with my manufacturers."

[00:09:11] And I remember thinking at the time like, oh, that's so cool. Many people have a competitive scarcity mindset. To many people, if I would've said to you like, "Hey, I'm going to do my own blue-blocking thing, if you were not you, you'd be like, "Oh no, you don't want to do that." You know what I mean?

[00:09:25] Definitely wouldn't hook me up with the manufacturers that you use. You're literally creating a direct competitor. So I remember thinking, yeah, he gets it. That's how the universe works. There's a few billion people on the planet that need to protect their health from this toxic-ass light environment.

[00:09:43] And there could be a million blue-blocking eyewear companies, and they would still make money. You know what I mean? It's just a matter of reaching the masses and educating people that this is a huge problem.

[00:09:55] Matt: Yeah. And we should talk about that offline as well because I'm excited about how we can evolve that, let's say. I have some ideas. I've been talking to John. Anyway, to continue, yeah, that night was very interesting and very symbolic, just the whole experience. I really appreciated it. Another shock for me was we were standing there and then all of a sudden this guy walks up Tero, the founder of Four Sigmatic.

[00:10:19] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:20] Matt: And I was so starstruck in a way because I remember thinking, wait a minute. I've heard of Four Sigmatic. Aren't they always advertising on the Tim Ferriss Show? I was like, "What? This guy's probably friends with Tim Ferriss." I was going crazy because that was one of my favorite books. And I hadn't gotten into the health and wellness world. I hadn't met anybody yet.

[00:10:41] So I just didn't realize that it's a very tight knit world where everybody knows everybody. I was like, "What?" So I was mind blown. And then also, as a funny side note, I remember sitting at a dinner table with you and Neil Strauss a couple of years later, and you were actually retelling this story, and it was such a great story.

[00:10:58] And Neil with his great sense of humor, he was like-- and so I was a part of this somehow. He just cracked a perfect joke at the perfect moment because it was such a great story. It's like you want to be a part of it.

[00:11:10] Luke: It's funny, Neil, in a roundabout sort of way is part of the story because he's the one that introduced me to Rick Rubin. I guess I spoke at one of Neil's events, and I don't think I talked to Rick, but he was there. So Rick was aware of me, and then eventually Neil's like, "Hey, go over to Rick's house, and help him out with some stuff."

[00:11:31] And so I did that, and we became friendly. But then I think Rick heard you on my podcast, and Rick's really into Jack Kruse. And then he is like, "Hey, I want to meet this Matt guy." And then you fly out to Malibu and like, what? Live in his guest house. You're cruising one of his cars around. He just adopted you as a nephew or son. That likely wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for Neil, right?

[00:11:55] Matt: Yeah. And I think you told me too that-- I think Jack was speaking at one of Neil's events.

[00:12:00] Luke: Yes, that was through event.

[00:12:00] Matt: Which was how you connected with Jack, if I'm not mistaken, as well, and wanted to start interviewing him.

[00:12:04] Luke: That was my first ever public talk on health and stuff. It was a really cool. I wonder what year that was? Maybe 2015 or something.

[00:12:14] Matt: '15 or '16. Because I think it was just before the year prior to when we met.

[00:12:17] Luke: Yeah. But I remember that event. Neil had a group-- what was it called? It was a mastermind for men entrepreneurs and stuff. Maybe, I don't know, 50 guys or something like that. And so Ben Greenfield, Jack Kruse, Daniel Vitalis, me, I don't remember who else.

[00:12:38] Matt: [Inaudible].

[00:12:39] Luke: Rick was just in the audience. He didn't speak. But I remember I was just so nervous, dude, because really, Daniel Vitalis is one of my heroes in this space. I listened to all his content. I used to go see him speak at these big events. Jack, Ben Greenfield, these are the people I was learning from, and I felt so inferior to them.

[00:13:03] I put together this PowerPoint, which was five hours’ worth of content. But I didn't know that at the time. It's hard for me to create presentations that are-- you have 45 minutes. Like what? I can't even introduce myself. But anyway, I'm watching the speakers doing the talks, and I remember two things about that day that were so affirming that really gave me confidence to continue on this path and the space that I'm in.

[00:13:31] One of them was-- I think Jack was one of the last speakers. And when he was up on stage, you know how he is. He's very direct. He said something to the effect, like, "Yeah, all you speakers that spoke today are full of shit. You don't know what you're talking about. The only two that made any sense were Daniel and Luke."

[00:13:53] I was like, 'What? It was embarrassing." I was like, "Maybe I'm doing something right." Because I really respected him. And then before that, right after my talk, Daniel came up to me. We'd met a few times. We were friendly, but we weren't close. I did my talk and walked off the stage, and Daniel goes, "Come here, dude."

[00:14:14] He goes, "You know you could do this, what I do. You can do this." And I was like, "What? Me?" I worked in fashion. You know what I'm saying? These are the people that I would go pay to see in my free time. And it helped my confidence so much that two people I really respected said, "Dude, you got this."

[00:14:38] And then funny thing was, despite how insecure I was, I still got up and did the talk. It wasn't like it scared me from doing it. It took some courage to do it. And it's full of dudes too that are highly successful, high-performing people. It's not just like you going to speak at the local library. It's a tough crowd. You know what I mean?

[00:15:00] They're not easy to impress. And I remember when I did my talk, I got a standing ovation. I was the only one that got that. And I was like, "What the hell?" And then they asked me to come back and speak the second day because I couldn't finish my talk.

[00:15:17] Matt: Mm.

[00:15:18] Luke: And that day was so meaningful to me just in terms of my confidence and just inspiring me that, "Wow, maybe I could do something in this space instead of being a bystander." I could be involved and do something. So Neil and Daniel and Jack really are pivotal in my journey, just like, to some degree, I was pivotal in yours by just saying, "Yeah, you seem super smart, and you're a really cool guy. Let's do a podcast."

[00:15:47] Matt: Thanks, man. Yeah. It's also interesting for me to observe how at that time, for example, bringing together a couple of health and wellness speakers, 2016. It's a big deal to have that level of people in the room, high caliber health and wellness.

[00:16:05] It feels like it was an underground thing almost. Rick's coming. Obviously, he and Neil are friends, and there's an opportunity to come and get involved. Now it's like this information is so much more mainstream.

[00:16:16] It's like these what were formerly niche health and wellness people are now running companies that are multi-billion-dollar or hundreds of million-dollar companies, which have, in some cases, sold to Kraft Foods or whatever. Like Primal Kitchen, the avocado oil mayonnaise that Marx Sisson started.

[00:16:34] Now it's in every Whole Foods. So what was once a niche is now driving the mainstream of health and wellness. It's just cool to see how it's really evolved into pretty much mainstream now. Siete tortilla chips are huge. They also just sold to some huge company like the grain free tortilla chips. So it's cool stuff.

[00:16:52] Luke: Yeah. It's amazing. That's one of the benefits of sharing information like we do here and many other podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot, is the public awareness creates demand, and that drives manufacturing up and drives prices down. It's a lot of these expensive supplements and devices and all this stuff that's like I used to have to save up to buy.

[00:17:18] I remember in, that was probably the late '90s, saving up $1,000 to buy an organic latex mattress. It was a huge deal to me. So I know buying something for $1,000 is a massive investment for people, but what if the only mattresses in the world were all organic and healthy?

[00:17:39] They would be $200, and everyone would have one. You know what I mean? It's just the education and sharing the information is the key to that. So I too think it's a really positive thing, and there's a lot of bandwagon jumpers that create super shitty rip-off products that either don't do anything or they're actually bad for you. You know what I mean?

[00:18:00] So that's the thing. When there's a market that's created, there's like a moth to a flame for people that just want to make money without actually delivering any value. Let me tell everyone the show notes. This will be lukestorey.com/maruca, M-A-R-U-C-A. Anything we talk about, it'll be clickable there.

[00:18:26] I want to request, if you're watching this on YouTube, please smash the shit out of that Subscribe button. Really been working hard on the YouTube channel lately, improving the quality of the video. We've been cutting some trailers so you can see what the episode's about without having to sit there for three hours to find out. So please, continue to support us over on YouTube.

[00:18:51] And let's talk about today light. I know we've done that before, but the public awareness around light toxicity, thankfully, is growing. To me, light and EMF would be my top two. Maybe add water in there. Water quality, I think, is something that many people ignore, and we're made out of water, so it's really important.

[00:19:17] I've been talking about that for ages, but the light thing, there's still obviously so many people that don't understand. You just drive around at night and look at the lights on cars. You go into any big box store, I'm like, I'm getting vertigo in there from the light. Once you get used to a circadian rhythm lighting life, then you really start to notice.

[00:19:41] That's what's happened to me over the years. It's like when you don't wear cologne or perfume or use any synthetic fragrances in your house, soaps, cleaning products, etc., and then you go somewhere where it has that smell. Sometimes we'll check into an Airbnb, and they have those Glade air fresheners plugged in.

[00:19:57] I walk in, I'm just like, instant headache. I want to puke. I'm like, "People live in this shit only because your body acclimate and you adapt. And I think it's that way with light. Many people just don't notice. All my neighbors have these spotlights for porch lights. It looks like a prison yard that shine into our house.

[00:20:14] I'm just like, "You guys actually live in that?" They just don't know. So they don't make changes like that. So even though a lot of people listening to this show are probably aware of it, I would like you and the gift that you have to-- I don't even know where to start, but just what is the issue with light, and why is it so important?

[00:20:37] Matt: Yeah, you have a lot of great points here. I would love to start with some updates on previous information. So years ago I learned from a lot of these people in the space, some of whom we've discussed already, who take scientific information and then draw their own conclusions, which I think is necessary in order to move science forward.

[00:21:02] However, if people misconstrue what the science actually says, which happens a lot in the biohacking world, it can lead to a lot of false conclusions and a lot of really strong conviction, which we see, especially in the biohacker space and the quantum biology space, convictions that aren't always, again, based on the actual evidence and what it says.

[00:21:33] So I've been working really closely with Dr. Alexander Wunch pretty much since we did our last podcast interview. It was a couple years ago. And my perspective on sunlight and even sunglasses and blue light has changed quite a bit and I think for the better. Definitely towards a more nuanced understanding of light.

[00:21:53] And so one of the most significant changes in my understanding is, for example, starting with blue light. When we look at blue light, it's not just like all blue light is the same. Blue covers a range of light from around 400 to 500 nanometers. So light's measured in nanometers.

[00:22:10] The visible spectrum goes from around 400 to 700 or so nanometers, which is in the red, and then beyond that's more or less the near infrared and then far infrared, and so on. And below 400 nanometers, you have ultraviolet A, B, and C. So anyway, we can split the blue light spectrum into two parts, more or less.

[00:22:30] Below 450 nanometers, we would call it bad blue. So this is blue light, which generally doesn't have any tremendous biological significance. It doesn't really have benefits for us. It's like the little sister of ultraviolet A light, which can be damaging to our eyes, to our skin.

[00:22:48] It can cause aging. It can cause cellular damage via reactive oxygen species production. So this is blue light that's generally not conferring benefits to us in general. Then we have what we can call good blue light, which is the blue light above 450 nanometers.

[00:23:05] This is the blue light which regulates our body's circadian rhythm. The key thing is that it's good during the day, but it's not really so good at night. In fact, it's bad because it's disrupting the body's circadian rhythm, the natural release of melatonin, and so on and so on.

[00:23:22] So now most people who are talking about blue light are just lumping it all together, and it's important to have this separation. So when we talk about blue light protection, during the day, we have daylight lenses, which you use of course in your own form, which block all of the damaging short wavelength blue light.

[00:23:45] So we're getting protection from modern light sources and screen devices, which have a huge amount of this bad blue, but they also have a huge amount of the, we'll call it good blue. So the blue light spike in modern light sources is right around 450 nanometers, which is literally right in the middle of, we'll call it the bad blue and the good blue.

[00:24:04] So for modern artificial lights, you have enough blue to cause physical damage to the retina and also skin as well. But the retina is the most sensitive because it's totally exposed. Whereas skin is designed to block light essentially.

[00:24:15] Luke: Oh, interesting. Right.

[00:24:17] Matt: To some extent. Or at least short wavelength light.

[00:24:17] Luke: That's interesting because the retina, the light's going right in there.

[00:24:21] Matt: Exactly. Because it's black so it's fully-- the reason I mentioned skin is because it's not that we want to fully ignore skin. I would honestly consider wearing something like a baseball cap or long sleeves, pants if I'm going to be inside, under artificial light all day continuously.

[00:24:38] But the retina is definitely the main concern because it's the most sensitive and the most exposed. And it's highly active. It has a very high metabolism. I believe it's the highest of any tissue in the body. It consumes the most oxygen. It uses the most energy, which means that changes in the metabolic conditions can be very quickly seen.

[00:24:59] And if they're negative, then they'll have negative effects very quickly. So anyway, short wavelength blue light has these issues of physical damage. So at the same time, all of the modern artificial lights with this blue peak around 450 nanometers are also modulating the body's hormonal system, which from the sun is a desirable thing.

[00:25:18] The sun shifts in the morning, blue light comes in. Blue light's essentially a warning signal, I've learned from Dr. Wunsch, for the onset of ultraviolet. So it allows the body to start producing cortisol and other stress hormones, which allow our body-- similar to plants, how plants adapt to sunlight.

[00:25:33] So they shift to be able to handle the strong intensity of sunlight and protect themselves. Our body has systems for this. I'm not saying sunlight is bad, but I've learned as I shared a much more nuanced perspective from Dr. Wunsch, that of course too much sun is going to be bad.

[00:25:49] And the extreme biohacking world that I started in has this mindset that-- normal person thinking is, if something's good, more is better. And the biohackers basically say if something is good, then more is better, and way more is even better than that. That's essentially biohacker mindset.

[00:26:06] Luke: I have that mindset sometimes. Yeah.

[00:26:09] Matt: Yeah. And that's what I was doing with sun. I was constantly overdosing, even when my body was telling me it's really not good for you anymore. I wasn't really enjoying it. I thought, oh, more sun's just going to be healthy for me. Oh, I should move to Mexico and be in the sun constantly.

[00:26:24] I'm not telling people to avoid sun. I would say simple-minded people obviously really like to jump to black or white conclusions because it's easy for them to understand. So he's not saying the sun is the greatest thing ever that you should overdose on constantly. Then he's saying the sun is bad. It's not like that.

[00:26:40] So Dr. Wunsch explains how in everything there's the thesis, the antithesis, and then the synthesis somewhere in the middle. And I feel that I've come closer to at least the synthesis of sunlight, which is that it's crucial for health. It's essential for optimal health at the right time in the right dose, which is the key.

[00:26:57] Too much sun is going to be harmful though, and that's not ideal. And it can cause all sorts of damage both to the skin, the eyes, but even to deeper systems if you are constantly overdosing. Then in the middle, it's about finding that balance. So anyway, back to this good blue light and bad blue light.

[00:27:15] When we're indoors and we're exposed to all of these modern artificial lights during the day, there's this unnatural overstimulation of that stress hormone system, cortisol, which when we're outdoors in the sun, there is ultraviolet light, which we want to be protecting from.

[00:27:31] So cortisol, for example, helps to actually reduce inflammation. Some of the other mineral corticoids in the body, which are a result of the activation of the circadian system help to regulate fluid balance in different ways. So the way that the body is moving fluid between different, parts of its of itself.

[00:27:51] So these are the things we're doing when we're preparing for sun exposure. When we're indoors, we don't actually need a lot of these systems in the same way. For example, cortisol also, it helps to move sugar into muscles so that we can do things physically. So it's glucocorticoid hormone.

[00:28:10] The question is, if you're sitting in an office all day, how much cortisol do you really need to move sugar to your muscles to be physically active? Not much because you're usually sitting around doing nothing when we're inside. So people are always saying sitting is the new smoking, sitting is the new smoking.

[00:28:24] It looks more and more like it's not sitting that's so bad, but it's sitting under artificial lights, which jack up our cortisol levels, make us more stressed when we're not actually using all that sugar. So just being under blue light, and Dr. Jack Kruse and others have spoken about this, increases blood sugar because it's increasing cortisol.

[00:28:41] That's good if you're out doing stuff. You need that if you're moving. But if you're sitting around, it's like pushing against a closed system where the system pushes back. And what happens is people end up overly stressed. Now, technically, anything that attempts to modify a biological process for a certain outcome is by definition a medical device.

[00:29:09] Now, of course, we have supplements and health drinks and blue light blocking glasses, which we have to disclaim. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration so that you don't get into hot water with them, even if maybe they're trying to do certain things biologically.

[00:29:23] But all of these light sources pretty openly claim, especially this new concept of human-centric lighting, which is terrible for human health, and I'll explain why, but they claim that they're actually increasing productivity and so on. They're openly sharing that they're medical devices without making the same disclaimers that other products are required to make or going and actually getting tested and certified for safety and whatnot through the standard procedures that any other medical device would have to go through.

[00:29:58] So, for example, somebody who has high blood pressure, if they are exposed to this blue-enriched light, which is designed to increase throughout the day and jack up their stress hormones when they're not out physically doing things, they can have serious health consequences as a result.

[00:30:16] It's literally a contraindication, from a medical standpoint, for somebody with high blood pressure or high stress to have an additional stressor added to their system, especially on a daily basis, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

[00:30:30] And it's known already really well in the evidence that stress causes illnesses effectively. Increased stress and regular chronic stress reduces immune function and leads to nearly every illness we have today. So in a way, I've also addressed the question so many people have, which is, well, I get the blue light at night is a problem because it's disrupting my circadian rhythm and my sleep. But why would blue light during the day be a problem at all?

[00:30:57] And that's one of the main reasons, because when you're indoors, generally you're not that physically active. And so this blue light is stimulating the production of cortisol, which we aren't really needing and using as when we're outside. Now the other risk of modern artificial lighting that's worth mentioning, of course, and I know you already know this, but it's that it's totally devoid of near infrared.

[00:31:20] And speaking of water, which you mentioned before, and the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack and the fourth phase of water and how water in our cells is structured and whatnot, near infrared is so essential for our body to function optimally, to structure water, to make energy on our mitochondria.

[00:31:36] And not just energy, many people in this health space don't even know that not only does the red and near infrared light increase energy production in the mitochondria. At the same time, it increases the production of melatonin, which is a key antioxidant, which isn't just associated with sleep. It's also just associated with maintaining balance in a way in cells.

[00:31:54] When I say maintaining balance, what I mean is fighting against the accumulation of reactive oxygen species and basically fighting against damage that builds up in the cells. So melatonin is constantly being produced in our cells even during the day under the influence of natural full-spectrum daylight with deep red in your infrared light.

[00:32:13] So in vitro, in glass, live analyses of cells where they tag the mitochondria of the cells with a certain red dye, when you see this red dye under the microscope, it means that there's a lot of mitochondrial activity. In other words, the cells are healthy, thriving, and producing energy.

[00:32:33] And they exposed these cells in the glass to three different conditions. One is near infrared light only, the second is blue light only, and the third is near infrared with blue light. So when you see the cells under the near infrared, you see they're active, thriving, the mitochondria are producing energy, they're lively, and whatnot.

[00:32:58] Then when it's just blue light, the short wavelengths to these exposed cells, which aren't part of the greater organism, they just start basically breaking apart and dying. So their mitochondrial energy production is significantly challenged and reduced by this reactive oxygen species inducing blue light, and they're basically degrading and failing.

[00:33:14] When you add back the near infrared to the blue light, it almost looks like it's just near infrared. You don't even really realize that the blue light's there. So the near infrared has such a massive protective effect, and I can get this video, and we can put in the show notes or clips of it.

[00:33:30] But basically the point is near infrared has such a massive protective effect on mitochondria, and so people think, oh, how bad could it really be to be under artificial light without all the near infrared? It's like, well, it turns out it's really bad because when we're outdoors we're always bathing in near infrared.

[00:33:49] 40% of sunlight is near infrared by itself. The other 60% is ultraviolet, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, and all the other colors. But just 40% is near infrared, which is critical, as I've mentioned now multiple times for our cellular integrity and health and energy production and antioxidant production.

[00:34:057] So I think the best place to start when you said, "Where do we even start about light?" There's this, let's say, bad blue light, which is generally not desirable at all. There's good blue light, but It's only really good during the daytime, and it's only really good from the sun or when it's used properly.

[00:34:24] And I've mentioned a bit, of course, about the changes in my beliefs on sunlight. And then I would say, just to add context with the blue light blocking glasses that, of course, we both sell and teach people about for people to have a deeper understanding of how they really work, you have daylight lenses. So these lenses focus on blocking effectively 100%.

[00:34:44] Any lens that claims 100% is never actually telling the truth. Because if you take a high-powered laser, it's going to go through, coherent light. But most people aren't staring into lasers, and you should never look into a laser. Lasers are very different from normal light sources.

[00:35:00] They're highly, highly powered and focused and coherent. We say 99.99% basically. So these daylight lenses are designed to block 99-plus percent of this short wavelength bad blue light, also known as HEVL, high energy visible light, the little sister of ultraviolet light, as I mentioned before.

[00:35:19] And around 50% of the hormonally stimulating, circadian-activating good blue light. So that way during the day you don't have that same jacking up of your cortisol levels, but you're also not going to get knocked on your ass and fall asleep. The sunset lenses on the other hand block 99-plus percent of the bad blue light, but nearly 100% as well, 99-plus percent of the circadian activating wavelengths.

[00:35:42] And that's really what makes these lenses different. So they're both protecting the eyes from artificial light, but one is neutralizing the hormonally stimulating effects, while as the sunset lenses are designed for the evening to basically make you tired and let the brain know all that stimulating, energizing blue light is gone.

[00:36:00] Now, Dr. Wunsch came to me with an idea about a year and a half, two years ago. He said, "We have lenses that do both of these things. They all protect from the short wavelength, bad blue light. And one blocks or reduces 50% approximately of this stimulating blue. The other, the sunset lenses, the evening red orange lenses, they reduce the stimulating blue by about 100%.

[00:36:27] "What if we were to make a lens that actually lets through all of the good blue while still reducing the bad blue? So you still get the protection while getting the stimulation if you want it."

[00:36:37] And so the key difference here is rather than, for example, blanketing an entire office of workers with this stimulating human-centric lighting-- which one person might react well to, because they're young and healthy and they can benefit from that increased cortisol, but somebody else is older and has high blood pressure and it's going to stress them out even more and affect their immunity and all this other stuff-- what if we could make a lens that allows people to choose if they want that additional stimulus? And so that's where Dr. Wunsch created the idea of BlueSync. And so BlueSync is the lens. I don't know if you've gotten to try it yet, but it's a lens--

[00:37:10] Luke: No, I want some.

[00:37:11] Matt: Yeah, we'll send you some.

[00:37:12] Luke: Let me try them.

[00:37:13] Matt: Yeah, of course. So it's a lens which transmits more of the stimulating good blue wavelengths while still filtering and reducing the short wavelength, more damaging part of the blue spectrum. Now the other thing--

[00:37:24] Luke: I dig it.

[00:37:25] Matt: The other thing, and this is quite controversial, and we got a lot of--

[00:37:28] Luke: Could these just replace sunglasses for--

[00:37:30] Matt: Precisely.

[00:37:31] Luke: Okay.

[00:37:32] Matt: That's where I'm going. So basically, the other function of BlueSync besides the lens, you could use indoors as a more stimulating lens. For example, I typically find that after 20 to 30 minutes, I actually want to take them off. Maybe up to an hour. But in fact, for you, getting your day started and you said, you haven't done a podcast this early, you might want to actually just wear them for a little while now and see how you feel.

[00:37:52] I sometimes feel that they have a similar effect to even coffee, because it's increasing the relative proportion of the stimulating blue by approximately 35%. So without an a light emitting device, you can't actually increase the total amount. But by shifting the balance of the spectrum, it relatively increases this portion of stimulating blue.

[00:38:16] And the brain perceives that as an increase because the sensors in the eye and the brain are working on a relative basis. For example, the pupils adjusting, opening and closing depending on the light intensities. But the difference in proportion is what the sensors are receiving here.

[00:38:303] So anyway, it can actually shorten the amount of time it takes for someone outside to get the same circadian stimulus by about 35%, as I mentioned before. So it increases what we call melanopic lux. I'm in my head trying to do the calculations in reverse, but melanopic lux.

[00:38:49] So melanopsin is the sensor in the eye, which absorbs that good blue light and speaks to the clock in the brain. So lux is light intensity. So melanopic lux is just the technical term for the intensity of the light that drives our body's rhythm. So it increases the melanopic lux of sunlight by about 35% or of any light source really, as long as there is good blue light to be increased.

[00:39:13] And again, I just have to caveat so people don't get this wrong. The good blue light is good during the day, but only if it's from the sun and/or if there's near infrared present to counterbalance the short wavelength damaging effects, or if the really short wavelength blue light is cut out.

[00:39:31] And that's what BlueSync does. So BlueSync reduces also the damaging bad blue, as I mentioned before. Anyway, so the other function of BlueSync is, as you mentioned, a sunglass. So regular sunglasses are a problem for health because they block UVA and UVB light, and that is actually-- I'm coming to believe more and more from working with Wunsch, a good thing if you've gotten enough sunlight already.

[00:39:55] If you're out longer than what is a beneficial dose, more UV light can only end up being damaging. And so I was totally wrong, I believe, on the whole sunglass thing for a long time, but not 100% wrong because the huge risk of sunglasses is that in trying to give people this feeling of visual relief, I should say, most sunglasses are dark brown or gray or black.

[00:40:21] So what they're doing is they're reducing all of the visible light wavelengths, all of the colors. And that includes the good blue. So it means you go outside and you're not getting the proper stimulus from sunlight that you're supposed to. It might be reduced by 20%, 30%, 50%, sometimes even more with darker sunglasses.

[00:40:38] And what that means is that people wearing sunglasses outdoors never fully wake up. They don't get the benefits of sunlight. They're groggy. They feel a little bit like in a daze. I always feel that way whenever I've worn traditional sunglasses. I never liked them.

[00:40:50] So with BlueSync, you get the feeling of relief and protection without the feeling of kind of being in a daze, being groggy, and being less sharp. You actually end up feeling more sharp. So it's a really interesting, I would say, revolution in sunglass lens technology, and it's how sunglasses should be.

[00:41:05] Now, I'll disclaim again, I'm not saying people should never go outside without sunglasses. I think people should go outside, especially at sunrise and sunset without any filter, and even, for example, at different periods throughout the day. Ultimately, I really recommend that people do what feels best for them.

[00:41:21] So I'll go outside sometimes and feel like, you know what? I just want to let the pure light onto my eyes. But then after a while I'm like, "I'm feeling a bit irritated. I want to protect my eyes." And another one of the concepts that the biohackers totally missed, myself included, for the longest time, is that not all daylight from the sun is created equal.

[00:41:41] And this is a huge concept for people to grasp. Humans evolved in the canopy of trees as primates for hundreds of millions of years. The time that we've been humans who left the trees and went out under the open sky is maybe 2 million years out of 100 million potentially, or at least tens of millions as primates.

[00:42:01] And so in the canopy of trees, you're surrounded by and completely encapsulated by green. And it's not just any kind of green. It's living chlorophyll, which makes these plants green. And what chlorophyll does is it absorbs the short wavelength light, including UV light and including blue light.

[00:42:19] So any forest environment you go into, like your beautiful backyard with all of the green and largely protected from the open sky, doesn't have nearly as much blue light and short wavelength light, UV, blue, and so on, as any open sky environment, like the desert or the step environment in nature.

[00:42:37] So we actually evolved and the photosensitivity of our eye has a peak in the middle of the green light range, which indicates that our eyes and basically visual system evolved for the chlorophyll spectrum.

[00:42:48] Now the other thing about chlorophyll is there's this beautiful effect called the near infrared plateau. So just like we breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2 and plants breathe in CO2 and then breathe out, let's say exhale, oxygen, there's this symbiosis between animals and plants.

[00:43:04] The same thing appears in the light spectra. So basically, they absorb the short wavelength light, which is more damaging and threatening to us and use it for energy production in the form of their chlorophyll. Then they reflect healing near infrared.

[00:43:22] If you look at the chlorophyll spectrum, and I'll also send this to you for the show notes, but there's this plateau where they're absorbing all the light and it goes just straight up and they basically are emitting all of the healing near infrared, which is actually really good for our cells.

[00:43:34] You've probably heard about forest bathing, the benefits. Really, when you go into a forest-- and it blew my mind learning this from Dr. Wunsch. When you go into a forest, you're literally in a near infrared bath with a little peak of green light, which is balancing and calming, like the heart chakra color.

[00:43:52] So you're in a near infrared plus green visible light bath, which is completely different from any open sky environment. And what I'm getting at here is that if biohackers want to talk about the environment, which we really evolved in, it was not under an open blue sky. It was under a green chlorophyll canopy.

[00:44:08] And that means less short wavelength light, UVA, UVB, blue, and so on, and significantly more of the deep red and near infrared. And so basically BlueSync doesn't put you in a forest, but it basically works on a similar principle that we don't want to have excessive amounts of short wavelength light because it's damaging. It is aging. It can cause sunburn in excess.

[00:44:31] Again, a little bit is essential, and we'll talk about that as well. But we do want to let through the good stimulating blue so people can get these effects. And it also, unlike a lot of sunglasses, all of our lenses are designed to transmit the beneficial near infrared. So you can also get those benefits.

[00:44:45] So it's really what sunglasses should be. And honestly, I believe that all sunglass companies are going to follow what we're doing very soon. So that's the deal with BlueSync.

[00:44:54] Luke: Amazing, dude.

[00:44:55] Matt: Yeah. So it's the best product.

[00:44:56] Luke: I was thinking about something when you were talking about sun and if some is good, go max is better. This is the first time I've ever seen you, I think, at least in many years, where you don't have peeling skin from the sun.

[00:45:11] Matt: Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I was overdosing for so many years, and I'm sure I damaged my skin, so now I'm diligently utilizing near infrared and red light therapy to heal my skin and try to make it healthier.

[00:45:24] Luke: It's funny though. There's a lot of things I want to unpack based on what you just shared because there's so much value in there, for people. But it's Jack Kruse, who's been on the podcast many times, and you and I both respect him a lot. He's like max sun.

[00:45:45] And so I've always kind of followed that. The more time I spend naked in the sun, the better I feel. I subscribe to his thing. When I go to the tropics somewhere closer to the equator, max on all day. Feel amazing. Maybe not so much on my face. I'll wear a hat.

[00:46:07] But I think I'm an anomaly in that most people I know would get burned or they'd have some oxidative stress from that, as you described. So it's funny because I'm always trying to find balance. So I'll push the extreme and see, okay, I pushed it that far. Maybe it's a little too much. I won't recommend that to people.

[00:46:27] But as long as I'm getting the sunrise, and on some days I can get a sunset-- I have to take a walk or drive down the street to see it-- I feel like that has a lot to do with my resiliency when it comes to sun exposure and why I never burn and I don't have like hyperpigmentation and lipo-fuss skin and all this stuff that people get from the sun.

[00:46:51] For 55, I don't have a lot of wrinkles, which you would think if someone's out in the sun maxing for as long as I have-- also growing up in the country, I'm in the sun. I should look like a freaking raisin based on that, but I don't.

[00:47:05] So there's so many things I want to ask you because you're hella smart, but how much do you think the sunrise exposure is prepping the body to be able to handle and absorb and utilize and benefit from more sun exposure throughout the day, versus someone who sleeps in until 10 and isn't going outside at all, then all of a sudden at solar, noon walks outside naked and tries to sunbathe for an hour? They're going to get fried compared to someone who's acclimating themselves through the eye to sunlight. Can you speak to that a little bit?

[00:47:43] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So there are definitely a few mechanisms at play, and I would say, I don't think anyone in this space would disagree about the benefits of sunrise. From Jack Kruse to Andrew Huberman, to myself, to Dr. Wunsch, sunrise is very beneficial. Low angle light, as Huberman calls it, as early as you can. The lower the angle the better. That means sunrise.

[00:48:04] Luke: I know. That's my window right there where I can see the sunrise, but there's all these trees in the way. I don't want to cut down the trees, really, but I'm like, "God, damn. If those trees weren't there, I'd be getting pretty much the horizon."

[00:48:14] Matt: Yeah.

[00:48:15] Luke: So I don't get it until it's already been up for probably 10 minutes and on the horizon.

[00:48:20] Matt: It's still pretty good. I think you're doing pretty well. So definitely the near infrared and near infrared light are building the structured water in our cells based on the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack. Also, they're helping the mitochondria to basically make energy and be more resilient and have more melatonin as well.

[00:48:30] There's also the benefits of, again, getting this cortisol rhythm going, which is, as I mentioned earlier, driving a whole bunch of processes in play that are going to make our body more resilient to sunlight. So I would say it seems quite clear based on my understanding and the evidence that there is that getting early morning sunlight is going to help to make your system more prepared and preconditioned for midday and later sun exposure versus staying out late drinking, which is also an issue, of course.

[00:49:14] Dehydrates your body and whatnot. That's what a lot of people do when they're in the tropics, having margaritas until 1:00 AM and then they're waking up late and then they go straight--

[00:49:21] Luke: Or drinking during the day in the sun with sunglasses and sunscreen on, passing out in the sun and turning into a lobster.

[00:49:28] Matt: And that's another thing that I have an issue with, or at least I don't think it's a really intelligent move, is being in the sun, but using things like sunglasses or chemical sunscreen to elongate your time in the sun. I wouldn't recommend, and I do not-- I explicitly recommend people do not use BlueSync as a way to elongate the amount of time they are going to spend sunbathing or something like that.

[00:49:49] If you're going to sunbath, I do recommend covering your face, but you don't just chill there like, oh, I have these glasses on. I can just stay here forever because I feel comfortable. If you start feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of the light, it's a decently strong sign, in fact, a very strong sign that you should get out of the sun. And chemical sunscreen isn't a good idea. For example, BlueSync is if you're out, you're walking, you're walking through the city-- cities, by the way, are not natural environments.

[00:50:14] Luke: I'm glad you brought this up, dude. I was thinking about this the other day, and when you mentioned the tree canopy in our evolution, dude, if you're out in a paved world and with skyscrapers that are all glass--

[00:50:31] Matt: Asphalt, glass, metal, and concrete, all do the opposite of the forest spectrum. They absorb the longer wavelength healing light, which is the near infrared and so on. And they reflect more of the short wavelength UV light.

[00:50:43] So any city environment is far more toxic for human cells, which is another recommendation or reason to use something like BlueSync and some mineral sunscreen if you're going to be under this light for extended periods of time. It's something for people to really think about.

[00:51:01] I would say the biggest takeaway is go back to nature, be in the forest. I was so shocked. When I first learned the side of my spectrometer-- and we should go outside after we're done and I'll just show you, but literally, I was standing at the Palmer Event Center in Austin at the Health Optimization Summit. Shout out Tim Gray, our buddy that runs this great event.

[00:51:20] So I literally stood on the asphalt at the front driveway and pointed my spectrometer straight out and down a little bit this way, and saw the light spectrum with a huge amount of UV and blue and then still a good amount of red near infrared. And then I literally just turned my body and pointed to that big grass field, actually the tree canopy, because you have to go a little further back to the open grass.

[00:51:44] But there was a canopy of trees and basically a shaded area. And I pointed that way into the shade of the trees, not just of the building, but the of the chlorophyll. And it was literally very low ultraviolet and blue, some more green, and then a huge dose of near infrared. And just by turning my body the other direction.

[00:52:04] So cities are not really a healthy environment to be in from a lighting perspective. And it makes sense that when I walk around a city, I don't feel at ease and peace a lot of the time. But one of my favorite cities is London, for example, because they have these tree-lined streets, especially those areas, or the parks.

[00:52:21] Then I feel at peace, and it makes perfect sense. Literally, it's so simple. When you're in a city, you're getting a huge increase in the stimulating blue light and other short wavelengths, which are both physically damaging and aggressive, and the cortisol, which is super high, or the stimulating blue, which stimulates cortisol to help protect our body from these shorter wavelengths, but it's going to make you feel stressed.

[00:52:430] That's what's happening in a regular city. Versus in any green environment, you're getting more of the healing near infrared, more of the cellular energy production and repair, and just a little spike of green light, which is known to be balancing and good for all sorts of other things, including hemoglobin in the blood and other effects, which I'm not even super familiar with, to be honest. But we know green is generally good and calming as far as colors of the spectrum. So cities, no good.

[00:53:08] Luke: So incredible. And imagine combining that with 5G repeaters everywhere. Downtown Austin, it's a great city as far as cities go. I think I've aged out of enjoying cities for the most part. But out where we live in the boonies, there's no good food. There's nothing to do. So if you want some culture, music, food, you got to go downtown.

[00:53:31] It's like, I don't like going down there just because they got 5G towers everywhere in downtown Austin. They're like 30 feet above your head, like right next to a restaurant, right next to a hotel room. It's insane. And you know my background with getting radiation poisoning from that shit. It's just crazy.

[00:53:48] So you're walking around in this insane millimeter wave and all of the other spectrums from cell towers that are outside of the city, and you're getting this light thing. It's just like, oh God, why does city suck bad?

[00:54:03] Matt: I should go and film with my spectrometer around cities, around midday or just anytime in the day and show how it changes from a green environment. But for example, when I go walking through Austin, my favorite place to be, and it always was before I knew this, was that beautiful trail right along the riverside. It's green, and it's shaded.

[00:54:21] You're under the canopy, and it's so calming. Even just going out under the open sky, even on a grassy field, that's still better than being in a city because the grass is still helping the situation. But imagine the difference between standing in a parking lot on a hot, sunny day, and on a beautiful grassy meadow.

[00:54:37] It's still a huge difference. The best environment though is to be under a canopy from a protection standpoint. That doesn't mean never go in sunbathe in direct sunlight. And you made a great point, which is worth addressing about how much sun people can tolerate.

[00:54:50] I'm not sitting here, telling people that you shouldn't sunbathe. And again, these simple-minded people who immediately jump to all or nothing will say that that's what I'm saying. But that's not what I'm saying, just to be clear.

[00:55:01] Luke: No. I feel bad for you sometimes because-- especially on X, man. Not just you, but that's the hotbed of just polarization. And I think a lot of what I see is people get invested in their belief system, and it becomes an identity. And then if someone has a different opinion, it's like they're not attacking your idea. They're attacking you.

[00:55:32] Not me, but people that are heavily invested and identified with ideas and belief systems. And so a guy like you comes out and is like, "Hey, maybe it's not just sun maxing. Let's find a balanced approach to this." And then you see people just like, "But this guy said this other thing, and I believe that, so you're wrong. It's just like, God.

[00:55:52] Matt: When we launched BlueSync, it was crazy, but I actually loved it. I actually intentionally went on the counter attack, and it was really, really fun.

[00:55:59] Luke: What? When you launched BlueSync, I saw some people getting all up in arms in the way that I just described. Because they're like, "You're attacking me because I believe something else." So frustrating. But I'm not trying to sound like, oh, I'm above that. I'm sure there's things I'm invested in and believe in too, yada, yada.

[00:56:17] But I don't know, I just have an open mind. It's like, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I love being wrong, because then I'm closer to being right. You know what I mean? But what was the beef when you launched these? Because I did see people getting all their knickers in a twist about it. What were the main concerns or complaints people had from the circadian cult?

[00:56:40] Matt: Yeah, that's exactly what I call it. That was very well put.

[00:56:43] Luke: That's cult-like behavior.

[00:56:45] Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:56:46] Luke: Especially if you were in the cult and then you defect, that's one of the main mechanisms of a cult, is ostracize--

[00:56:55] Matt: Yeah, ostracization. Yeah, you nailed it.

[00:56:57] Luke: Ostracization. It's like your fear of being alone is what they're playing on. So when you're like in the circadian cult and then you defect and come out with glasses like these, everyone's like, "Ah."

[00:57:09] Matt: For me, the best thing is I'm not on my own. I've basically spent pretty much a week, every quarter for the last three years with Dr. Wunsch at his house. He's like my uncle now. We're extremely close. We're literally developing the future of lighting products, the future of lens technology, the future of light therapy.

[00:57:25] I've learned from him very closely about all of the science of the stuff and the nuance and what most people miss. So it's like, if I had just come up with all of this myself, I might feel a little bit unstable being attacked, but I'm like, "Sorry." You know the meme where it's like there's this huge crowd of people and the one person looking at them saying, "Yes, you are all wrong." I know they're wrong. So it doesn't really personally challenge me.

[00:57:47] Luke: Dr. Wunsch, by the way, for those who weren't familiar, he is from Germany, and maybe isn't that well known here, obviously. I learned about him from Jack Kruse. And then I don't know if you introduced-- you probably introduced me to him, and I interviewed him in London. And we'll link to that in the show notes.

[00:58:05] You hear that guy talk, it's pretty hard to poke holes in anything he's saying. And what's interesting about that is that I know for a time Jack Kruse would cite him a lot. But a lot of the ideas that you're sharing are things Jack and his crew would shit on. Because Jack seems to really respect Dr. Wunsch, but then is super pissed about a lot of the things he's teaching people like you.

[00:58:33] Matt: Yeah. So Jack, again, I respect his work and everything he's brought out to the world, even if I wouldn't agree with all of it. He's brought in tons of different sources to create the strong beliefs he has, which again, I generally still subscribe to. What Dr. Wunsch has helped me to see, or the way I understand the situation is that he has been focused as a scientist on finding the truth and sharing the truth, not just a scientist, but really, first and foremost, he's a medical doctor.

[00:59:08] So he's a physician who treats patients and has a responsibility to get them the correct information. And he never wanted to be a pill pusher. So instead he got into the world of frequency medicine, which actually led him to light because light's such a powerful frequency.

[00:59:23] And he's seen his work misconstrued. And I believe when I came along wanting to work with him, he started to feel, I think even more empowered to take a stand and point out where people misconstrued his work so that it doesn't have negative consequences.

[00:59:41] Because he's concerned about a lot of the biohacker extremism that has led people to make poor decisions or incorrect or uninformed decisions about sun exposure, for example. So some of the main concerns about BlueSync were that, one, it's a sunglasses. So sunglasses are always bad.

[01:00:01] As I explained before, we've already actually covered a couple of the points, but I'll make them relevant in this context. So sunglasses are "bad." One of the reasons that biohackers believe that is because they reduce the beneficial blue. And I've addressed that.

[01:00:18] BlueSync was designed to be the first sunglass ever, which doesn't reduce that beneficial blue. It actually increases it on a relative basis to the other color. So it gives the brain more of a stimulus of it, which is the uniqueness. We market and sell BlueSync as a performance enhancing lens.

[01:00:32] We have people in their 60s, 70s who actually say it literally makes them feel like they can walk harder, run harder, perform better. And young people as well. I feel it when I use them. I run in them. It feels amazing. Anyway, so that's one, which we've addressed. The other is this idea that UVA light is necessary for health.

[01:00:53] So there's a sensor in the eye called neuropsin, which the biohacker people, Jack Kruse as well and his followers have concluded is essential for some timekeeping system in the brain. Basically because there's a sensor, or because there's a button, you should press it.

[01:01:12] That's Dr. Wunsch's way of summarizing this mindset. Because there's a button, you should press it. But what Dr. Wunsch explained to me is, what if that button's actually an alarm button? Should you press it? And his perspective is it doesn't necessarily have some timekeeping function. That's what melanopsin is for.

[01:01:28] That's what the circadian timekeeping-opsin is for. There's not really significant evidence to support that this neuropsin has some beneficial, important timekeeping effect that we need to stimulate, that we need to press it. That it's actually more of a warning sensor, and that it's probably best not to press it if you don't need to. That's his perspective.

[01:01:50] So it's actually quite simple. I don't think there's anything wrong with somebody like Jack Kruse or anybody taking this information and, and pushing the boundaries to develop ideas because that's how science evolves, and that's how the thinking evolves.

[01:02:06] If it weren't for a lot of the innovators in the health and wellness space pushing the boundary with products and then people going and studying them later, evolution wouldn't occur. So I don't think it's a bad thing that anybody's tried to do that, but I'm just saying what the other perspective is, and the cult like followers of the one perspective didn't like this other perspective.

[01:02:28] And so then it's just like, [Inaudible] the bad guys. We've gone crazy. We've sold out. We're just trying to make money now." All the other biohacked sunglasses which you see from other companies in the health and wellness space, none of them do any of what I'm describing here.

[01:02:42] They're just trying to sound cooler. But this is actually a uniquely different product, which was in development for literally five years. Wunsch once was working on this before I ever actually even started working with him.

[01:02:52] Luke: So you didn't come up with this on ChatGPT and be like, "I could make money with this tomorrow?"

[01:02:56] Matt: No. And I was highly skeptical of it. I was like, "I don't know if, first of all, people are going to attack us. I don't know if it's going to work." But I started using it. I was like, "I really want to release this, and we're going to release a darker version." Why? Which still lets through the good blue, because I was using this in Greece in July, BlueSync, and it's a category one, so it's like a very gentle sunglass for less high intensity sunlight conditions. But if you're in Greece, Paros, or some island in July, the sun is--

[01:03:25] Luke: Or in the snow?

[01:03:26] Matt: Or snow.

[01:03:27] Luke: Glare is brutal. Even though I'm pretty acclimated to sun, if I'm in a high-- I don't go on the snow very often, but out on water, out on a lake, on the ocean, on the beach, a lot of reflective stuff, cities, as you said, I don't wear sunglasses, but I would wear these. Because I always like, "Oh, I wish I had a hat." The glare is too intense.

[01:03:47] Matt: So the other thing that biohackers miss, and I already did describe this as well, but again, to tie it into this conversation in this context, is they think that any-- it's like any sunlight spectrum. And I used to believe this. I know this well because somebody once told me, they're like, "Oh, you're actually a recruiter for the cult."

[01:04:04] It was like one of the kids of one of the parents. The parents were in it. The child, the daughter came along with them and was like, "Yeah, you guys are all crazy." And she was like, "Actually, you're a recruiter." I was like, "What?"

[01:04:15] It was hilarious. She's like, "I've studied cults." So I know. I know the other perspective decently well, I think. And it's that any pure unfiltered sunlight spectrum is perfect, and it should never be touched, and it should never be modified.

[01:04:33] It's the healing sun. And I to some extent still believe that. I'm a big fan of sunbathing. I really am. I recommend people sunbath, just not in excess. The dose makes the poison. That's the classic line in medicine.

01:04:43] So the extreme circadian cult biohackers failed to realize that there's a difference between the spectrum in which we evolve, the chlorophyll-dominated forest canopy or jungle canopy spectrum compared to an open sky, which is, again, like a desert or the step.

[01:05:01] We're now modern cities with a significantly higher ratio of short wavelength light to long wavelength light compared to the forest spectrum. It's basically even or a little more short wavelength to long wavelength light if you look at a city or open sky. Whereas in the forest canopy where we evolved, it's like, let's say, 20% short wavelength to long wavelength.

[01:05:26] There's significantly more longer wavelength healing light. Yeah, so basically that's one of the other misconceptions that the biohackers have. They think that it's all basically the same, and just understanding that proves that it's not the same. And BlueSync's working on the principle that when we're in that non-natural environment, we actually do want to protect ourselves and balance the spectrum more towards the longer wavelength light.

[01:05:50] Luke: Epic.

[01:05:51] Matt: So I'd say basically that's the third misconception, is that all outdoor unfiltered sunlight spectra are the exact same when they're actually not. In the one we evolved in is actually predominated by the more healing, regenerative, longer wavelength range of light, the deep red in near infrared, which is what we see in the forest spectrum.

[01:06:13] And the environments, which most people are exposed to today, both the indoor environments we're living in under artificial lights and even the outdoor environments, the open sky areas and cities are not exactly what we evolved in.

[01:06:26] And for this reason, it can make a lot of sense, especially when people are exposed to those environments for extended periods to protect themselves from that excess short wavelength light and shift the balance of the spectrum. That's really what BlueSync does with the caveat that it does let through the good circadian blue to give that stimulating effect.

[01:06:45] We could create a greenish lens, which maybe we will-- could be coming-- which has more of that balancing effect in the middle for when you're outdoors. So that's where BlueSync comes in. And to tie this to another point you made, which we didn't close, I wouldn't recommend that if somebody-- so if somebody wants to get more sun and feels good like you do, or like Rick does-- Rick thrives in more sun.

[01:07:05] He's told me that. He loves to get more sun and get that tan going. I would not discourage them from doing that. This isn't you should do this, you should do that. It's just, hey, people-- especially if you're white, light, Irish, like me and other Northern European people, just be aware that going to Bali or Costa Rica and overdosing for days, weeks, months, years can have certain side effects and consequences.

[01:07:33] And just buyer beware. Caveat mTOR. Just be careful and know that there are risks and that it's not always more is better. Come to your own conclusion. For me, I generally sunbathe, let's say, 10 to 15 minutes on each side of my body. And that's enough for me in a day, typically, especially around midday, when the sun is strongest.

[01:07:54] Maybe I'll do two sunbathing sessions, but that works really well for me. I believe that if I were to stop traveling so much and give myself more stability in whichever environment I choose, I would be able to adapt a bit more and probably take on a better tan and sunbathe more.

[01:08:08] But I'm choosing right now to travel more because I love it. It's exciting, and there's so much good stuff happening with the company. Like for example, a bunch of professional tennis players started using our glasses. So I've been going to like Wimbledon and the French Open and all the tennis grand slams and tournaments.

[01:08:24] And that's a lot of traveling, but I really enjoy it. Anyway, so people should do what they want. One other important point that Dr. Wunsch has advised me on is if somebody wants to get the maximum amount of benefits from the sun, especially vitamin D production and UVB light with the least amount of relative risk and damage, the best time to sunbath is actually in the peak middle of the day.

[01:08:44] Because in the middle of the day, let's say between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM, you have the highest ratio of UVB light to UVA light. So generally speaking, the perspective I've gained from Dr. Wunsch is that UVB has this huge benefit of vitamin D synthesis. UVA doesn't exactly have a ton of beneficial effects that we're aware of.

[01:09:05] Again, someone in the biohacker health community might be able to point out certain things that I don't know, and I'd be glad to hear that. Please comment. I'll read all the comments. But UVB is where a huge portion of the benefits are coming from. There are certain benefits from UV. I'm not fully dis discounting it.

[01:09:20] So if you want the maximum amount of vitamin D in the shortest amount of time, the least skin aging, skin damage, all that other stuff, sunbathe midday. You'll get the most benefit relative to the concerning parts. And so that's a great recommendation for women who are scared of the sun because they think it's going to age them.

[01:09:39] Sorry to tell these ladies-- actually, I'm not sorry at all. There's a study out of Sweden which showed that the women who avoided sunlight had double the risk of death from all diseases, so what's called all-cause mortality and science and scientific literature.

[01:09:55] They had twice the rate of all-cause mortality compared to the women who actively sought out sunlight throughout their lives. And this was a huge study with tens of thousands of women over a lifetime. And the group that neither really sought out the sun nor avoided it or kind of right in the middle there.

[01:10:10] So it was a pretty strong correlation and statistically significant finding that people who are seeking out the sun are going to have better health outcomes in general. So here I am saying the sun's great and you should go sunbathe. So I wouldn't discourage.

[01:10:25] I would encourage young women who are trying to protect their skin and their beauty, don't let vanity harm your health and increase your risk of cancer and immune dysfunction and all sorts of other issues. Go get the sun. But don't just listen to a biohacker on the Internet telling you that you should do five hours a day and you'll be healthier as a result.

[01:10:44] Luke: I love it. Yeah. I have recently made a point to do my sunbathing around solar noon, which changes all the time. It can't be like, oh, every day at 12. It's like every day of the year it's going to be different. I found an app recently, I think on X, someone posted it, called Sundial. You can put this in the show notes, Jarrod.

[01:11:04] Super dope app. It has all kinds of features, but you can set the notification so it gives you an alarm for sunrise. Actually, for civil light as they call it. When it's light out, but you can't see the sun yet. So it's very dialed in, no pun intended, but it gives you the window of that peak, UVB, at solar noon.

[01:11:25] So I'll just look at that in the morning and be like, "Okay, cool. Around 1:15 is kind of the sweet spot today. And I'll try and arrange my day so that I can go-- if I only have 20 or 30 minutes to take off work or whatever I'm doing, I'll go out and spend that time. And that's when I really savor the sun.

[01:11:41] And in Texas the sun's pretty strong, versus some other places. So I think that's a good practice. And also, I think you raised another good point. Your genealogy has a lot to do with your relationship to the sun too. I never think about it, but I'm olive-skinned, dark hair, dark eyes. So it makes sense that I would be able to tolerate more sun than a redhead. Right?

[01:12:06] Matt: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

[01:12:08] Luke: I think that's something that's important to know too.

[01:12:11] Matt: One other point that you brought into my mind as well about this in-group, outgroup attacking people. So the other day I was catching up with Chris Williamson, the podcaster. Really nice guy. We hadn't spoken in actually years since he and I did an episode, which was one of his earliest podcasts in, I think it was 2020.

[01:12:28] And he mentioned a few really interesting concepts. Like, for example, there is the body positivity community. As soon as Adele started losing weight, it was like all of a sudden, they were up in arms that she wasn't one of us.

[01:12:48] People want to attack the people that they were previously identifying with to feel comfortable in their concept of life, whatever that is exactly. And then as soon as that person goes a different direction, it's like, oh, they weren't actually one of us. They weren't a true one.

[01:13:10] Also, he mentioned there's this concept he's done. I asked him like, "What's been some of the most interesting work you've done over the past few years or things you've learned about?"

[01:13:19] And he's done a ton of work, I think. Sounds like more than almost any other podcaster on this-- I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, but the concept of like the challenges of modern life for women and mating and all these things given like the changing environment of socioeconomic statuses and women wanting to date up.

[01:13:43] I'm not able to do justice to exactly what the whole concept is, but now you have the concept of so many women who have just dated and had fun through their 20s, and now they're in their 30s and single and are hoping to find a husband and realizing maybe they missed the boat, or at least are late to the boat.

[01:14:00] And he showed this amazing song of this one girl who's a famous country singer, it's called I Sit In Parks. It's like a two-minute song, but she basically explains how she is sitting in parks on a Saturday and looking at other women who have a family and kids and a husband who truly loves them, and they're having an amazing Saturday.

[01:14:18] And she's like, "I sit on this bench and I hit my vape, and I did what Rolling Stones told me it was going to make me happy, make all these albums and all this stuff." And as soon as the song finished, we sat there and listened to it. One of my good friends is this videographer, so we were just catching up, and we were listening to the song.

[01:14:34] I was like, "Oh my gosh, that was only two minutes? That felt like a lifetime." And he said, rightfully so, "A lot of albums, full albums don't say as much as this two-minute song had to say." So anyway, there's an interesting concept there, which is another discussion.

[01:14:49] But speaking of on the male side, there's this whole community of like incels, involuntary celibates. And there's this concept I was unaware of that he mentioned to me. I think it's called something like rising up. There's an actual word for it. But it's basically, if any of these guys who's-- they're all relating with one another and echoing in their own misery.

[01:15:15] And if one of them even posts or even thinks, oh, that that girl actually looked at me with interest or, oh, I actually got a number or somebody went on a date or something, had sex, the mindset is, oh, he wasn't a true one of us. They need to block that out because if they didn't, then it would force them to reflect on themselves and see like, wow, I probably have the potential to do that too, which is way more uncomfortable than just saying like, no, he's not one of us.

[01:15:46] It's so much easier for the simple mind to get into this thesis, antithesis rather than trying to find the synthesis in the middle. But that's like what Jesus said, "Narrow is the gate and straight is the way which leadeth unto life. And few there be that find it."

[01:15:58] Luke: That's amazing. I love talking to you, dude. I love listening to you. I love listening to you and talking to you. Yeah, you have such a great mind. I like the way you think. Yeah, I think the principle that applies to me is open-mindedness, which is something I've studied and worked on. I'm just fascinated by it.

[01:16:20] And I think when I first became aware of that idea, I thought open-mindedness was limited to being receptive to new ideas. I'm open-minded. You tell me about this thing, I'll look into it. I'll consider it. Which is only 50% of open-mindedness. The other 50%, which I would argue is even more important, is the willingness to let go of previously held ideas.

[01:16:45] Mind like water where you're fluid, and then the person who's very mind-identified or of the skeptic persona will see that open-mindedness as gullibility and naivete. Oh, you just believe anything. No. That's where discernment comes in as the regulator of the open mind. Discernment is like your heart and your gut.

[01:17:10] It's your intuition, your inner knowing. That's the best guide. The mind is retarded. It's like you're going to live your life by the dictates of the mind? The mind can't discern truth from falsehood. Literally. It's impossible. That's the major human failing, is the mind. And that we can't tell if something's true or not. But the gut knows.

[01:17:34] So this idea that you're raising of the cult and people leaving the cult and being attacked and you're not allowed to change your mind it's one of our greatest limitations, I think, as a species, of not being able to change our mind and not being able to get out of our comfort zone, to let go of ideas that we're attached to, and also of course, to let new ideas in.

[01:18:00] I just think it's so much more fun to be open-minded. It's like, is it more fun to know or to wonder? Wonder's a lot more fun.

[01:18:09] Matt: I agree.

[01:18:10] Luke: That's why I enjoy my job after doing this for almost 10 years. Thousands of hours of these conversations. I think I know some stuff, and I know some stuff, but then I have to unlearn. My friend Cal has a podcast called The Great Unlearn.

[01:18:28] I was with him last night, and he always wears his own shirt. It says, unlearn. I'm like, that's an important message. Our culture is so focused on learning and the acquisition of information and knowledge and less so upon the wisdom. And wisdom is derived from 50% of what you unlearn. That's how you become more wise, by admitting that you were wrong.

[01:18:50] Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:18:52] Luke: I think it's fun to be that way.

[01:18:53] Matt: I love it.

[01:18:54] Luke: It feels more liberating to just be malleable.

[01:18:58] Matt: Yeah, I don't know why more people aren't like this. I haven't thought about that so much. But maybe it's this simplicity we've been getting at. The classic quote is from Aristotle. It's the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it or denying it, I guess I would add.

[01:19:17] Luke: I put that quote in my book. I ended up deleting it because I had to cut words, but I had that in there because I love that too.

[01:19:27] Matt: Yeah. I feel that way, for example, in business or just in conversations with friends. When I am, for example, texting somebody or speaking to somebody about an idea, people always seem to get the idea that whatever it is that I'm sharing, I am super strongly attached to. And I don't understand why.

[01:19:45] It's like, I'm just basically, not necessarily playing the devil's advocate. I'm just playing the advocate of this idea in this moment. And people get all defensive as if it's like, I am gung-ho that this is the truth. I was just on a team call with my team yesterday, and we were talking about one thing, and I went full circle.

[01:20:07] We were talking about like, how are we going to display the pricing? We're bringing our glasses into some SunLife Organics stores all around the country. So I'm very excited about that. Shout out, Khalil, the guy. And we were talking about how are we going to display the pricing.

[01:20:22] It's like, are we going to use these little gold-- like at a Rolex store where they display the prices on a little plaque or gold lettering thing sitting on the display case on the shelf? Or are we going to put a little ball clasp metal tag around each one with the pricing there?

[01:20:39] And I went full circle. At first I was like, "Yeah, what if somebody bumps the case and then the little price things move and they have to reset it and they have to look at the price sheet to know which one had which price? Because the store people, they're not necessarily going to remember. It's like, that seems complicated.

[01:20:52] So I went all the way through. I was like, "Okay, yeah, the tag." I walked past the Ray-Ban store, at the shopping complex where Sun Life Organics is in Austin. I saw how they do it. They have these little paper tags. And I was saying, yeah, we don't feel like that feels cheaper to me, so I'd rather use the metal ball and clasp tag. A Rolex might have on it or something like that.

[01:21:09] Yeah. But then that creates a visual disturbance when you look at the display case and you see these beautiful glasses. You see a tag hanging. It makes it more commercial. Versus these little pricing. So I went like full circle. And surely in the moment, everybody thought I was the advocate for this other approach. Not the little letters, but the ball and clasp metal tag thing.

[01:21:30] And by the end I was like, "You know what? Yeah, I think where we started, the little metal numbers is the best approach just to start, and let's see how it goes. And I went full circle. And I was thinking, if anybody didn't know me, or even if they know me, they probably think I'm like crazy because I go full circle.

[01:21:46] But it's like I fully take on the other idea to try to see if it makes sense to me, and I'm fully willing to let it go. And that feels great. It seems to work. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg as far as business success, but we've done pretty well. Sometimes I'm like, "Oh, we've been around eight years." Most small businesses don't make it two, one or three. So at least we're coming along and I'd say not really small business anymore either.

[01:22:10] But anyway, so it's a great, great point. Somehow, if I had to guess, I think that-- and there must be a great quote on this point that somebody could throw in the comments. But yeah, intelligence really is-- I think Aristotle nailed it-- the ability to take ideas, challenge your own preconceptions that you're super attached to, which make you feel comfortable and good, and be willing to let go of all of that in search of a higher truth and being willing to be wrong.

[01:22:42] That's another thing. I was just talking about entertaining new ideas, but as you pointed out, other 50% is letting go of old ideas. And I constantly admit when I'm wrong. People react. I react in business. I think a lot of people react. Joe Dispenza says, "It's not about whether you react or not, or whether you lose it or not, or whether you fall per se or not."

[01:23:07] It's about how long you're going to stay like that and when you're going to decide to change and get back on the horse and keep moving forward, basically. Paraphrasing Joe Dispenza there. I don't like reacting and being mean or letting out the, let's say, evil inside and projecting that on somebody else.

[01:23:35] But I do my very best to as quickly as possible-- sometimes it's in two minutes-- realize like, yeah, that wasn't cool. A friend of mine, a yogi who I've maybe told you about, one of my closest friends who's a spiritual advisor to me who I met surfing in Bali, and he's a Russian guy from Moscow, more or less, who went to India and studied Ayurvedic medicine and then lived in an ashram for several years and studied the ancient scriptures of India.

[01:24:03] So the traditional medical texts of India, but also the traditional spiritual texts, and gleaned huge amount of wisdom. And one of the concepts he told me that comes to mind here-- so I've learned a lot from him about different just principles of living, which have become a part of what I call the light diet.

[01:24:21] And I was so open to what he was sharing because it's so closely mirrored what I had already learned from the likes of Dr. Jack Kruse and the deeper base of evidence supporting light and circadian rhythms and healthy meal timing, which is a critical part of Ayurveda.

[01:24:39] So anyway, there's a lot of great stuff we could discuss, but one principle is he said, "Do you know what sinning is?" I was like, "No. Could you explain it to me?" If you make one mistake, if you make a mistake, that's okay. But sinning is when you keep making the same mistake over and over again, even though you know it's wrong.

[01:24:56] So that comes to mind when I'm thinking about reacting to people being mean, projecting out. Apologizing doesn't really fix it. The real lesson I'm getting at to me is when you actually change the way you're reacting. But anyway, at least in the context of being willing to be wrong, I find, I would say one of my strengths maybe, is that I'm able to quickly say, "I was wrong. I was wrong."

[01:25:22] I shouldn't have either handled that that way or just my perspective was wrong. If somebody can provide compelling evidence as to why anything that I've discussed on any podcast or anything I've ever done or with our glasses or anything is wrong or should be better, I'm going to listen.

[01:25:38] It just happens that I had so many years of trying all of Western medicine and then trying naturopathic medicine, which I think is great as well. And then trying all the diet stuff, the paleo, the autoimmune, thinking that it's all about diet. This is my personal story, thinking it's all about diet. And then believing that, because I read on one of the paleo diet authors blogs, diet is 80% of health and everything else is the other 20%.

[01:26:02] And because of that, I had become so obsessed in my teens with the diets. And I know we talked about this in previous episodes, but I went from the paleo to the autoimmune paleo to the keto autoimmune paleo, to the GAPS diet, which is basically like carnivore bone broth only, well-cooked meats.

[01:26:19] I ended up becoming really orthorexic. You're the one who actually taught me that term. So obsessed with diet that I actually ended up feeling sicker, both physically and mentally. Because it went from, like, I got some great benefits from going paleo to getting so obsessed with trying to get that last, let's say 30 or 40% in improvements that I ended up feeling way worse in the end.

[01:26:41] And that's when I learned about all this health and light and mitochondria, which plays, in my view, a much more foundational role. But I believe we should also eat healthily. And this was effectively the journey to finding light and realizing its power, building a company off of it. Now seeing over 100,000 people benefit from our products.

[01:27:06] Somebody would have to provide really compelling evidence that blue light at night is actually really good for us and that we should be exposing ourselves to blue-enriched, harmful LEDs. Now, BlueSync, of course, it's a newer idea. So again, super open to being wrong, but when the world's leading expert in integrative photobiology designed it and developed it-- it was his idea, not mine.

[01:27:26] And I just helped to make it something that people could understand and really flesh out what is the substance and the essence of this product that we can help people to realize it's a lens which you can use during the day. For example, interspersed with when you're wearing these daylight lenses.

[01:27:41] If you're in an office and for some reason you can't go outside, it could make sense to switch from the daylight lenses to the BlueSync lenses for 20 to 30 minutes. If you can't get outside, it's going to benefit you. We'd rather just say, go outside for 30 minutes. Not everybody can or will.

[01:27:56] And same thing with sunglasses. It's like so many people have come and said, "I'm so grateful that you guys created this because I believe the biohacker dogma that I should never wear sunglasses. But my eyes started to hurt and I started to feel uncomfortable, and I really wanted my sunglasses back, but I was afraid they were going to hurt me. So I'm so glad to have this confirmation that my intuition that I do need some degree of protection was right."

[01:28:19] Luke: Love it, dude. I want to talk more about the indoor light specifically. And this is something I learned from Dr. Wunsch, was how much windows suck. So say we're in here and we have no artificial lighting of any type turned on.

[01:28:52] What he explained to me was that glass filters out the positive spectrum of light. I forget if it's UVA or UVB. But he was talking about how when you're just indoors all day, you're screwing yourself because you're getting this unnatural, alien, non-native light. And that even one thing I remember from him that I do all the time is when you're riding in your car for long periods of time, that you're getting blasted by blue light, even in the daytime, bad blue light.

[01:29:21] And that you should always keep your sunroof cracked or keep a window cracked. And even just a one inch crack is going to illuminate the car because of the lux is so powerful from sunlight. And so that's something I'm always aware of. But depending on the temperature, the temperatures can be pretty extreme here in Texas.

[01:29:39] So a lot of the year, especially in the summer, opening a window or cracking a window is not an option. So I'm always working on ways to hack the indoor light situation. And I think you could shine some light on this. It would be really helpful to the listeners. Again, it's not like black or white, good versus bad. It's not duality. There's a balance.

[01:30:01] So I just want to run a couple of my strategies by you and see what you think. When I can't crack any windows, which is a lot of the time here, one thing I did was when we installed these windows up there, those don't have what's called Low-E, which blocks infrared light.

[01:30:17] So otherwise the entire house would've no infrared light during the day. So told the window, guys, I don't want that. They think I'm crazy. But those windows never get direct sunlight, so it doesn't heat up the house. And the other thing I do is I'll have the SaunaSpace lights, the single bulbs. And when I'm in my office, unless it's really hot-- they create quite a bit of heat-- I'll click one or two of those on while I have the lights--

[01:30:44] Matt: One is more than enough.

[01:30:45] Luke: While I have the light on in my office. And then I have this-- do you know the company Chroma, lighting company? Super cool. They have this thing called the Sky Portal, which is on a stand. It's a round light. It's LED but it has a really nice spectrum.

[01:30:59] And so that's behind my computer monitor. Because this is another thing I learned from Dr. Wunsch. It's not just the spectrum of light. It's where they sit in your eye line. And that's another thing. But the Sky Portal is super cool because I have that where like the sun would be, and then it has a dial on it where you can go super blue, the good blue, and then into infrared. Super rad.

[01:31:21] So you can adjust it in the day. So later in the day I turn it completely orange and there's no blue light at all. And then in some rooms here in the overhead can lights or recess lights, there's infrared or these amber incandescent, which make infrared. Then some of the light switches are just all red LEDs, but they don't have infrared because they're LED. It gets so complex.

[01:31:48] Matt: You've actually done really well.

[01:31:49] Luke: So it's like I did all that just because I live indoors and I'm not a paleolithic hunter gatherer that you wouldn't have to worry about any of that. But the way we've, in a such a shortsighted, unintelligent way, lit our indoor environments, I feel like just to try to recreate what's happening outside, but not die of cold or heat that you would outside, depending on where you live, it's like I'm always trying to mimic the sun.

[01:32:14] And so I have this fantasy where some entrepreneur is going to create something that doesn't produce EMF or run on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or anything, where like houses will just be built with the lighting at eye level, no overhead lighting-- maybe you can tell us why that sucks from your work with Dr. Wunsch-- where it's timed to your time zone and is the exact balance spectrum that you would have outside all day and night.

[01:32:52] I have like different light switches in every room. I'm used to it. I'm just acclimated to it and you just habituate. For me to sit here and say, yeah, everyone listening should do what I've done with our lighting, it's a huge pain in the ass and it's expensive.

[01:33:06] A lot of people don't want to go through that, and their health and sleep and mood and hormones and neurotransmitters are paying the price just because the barrier to entry is so freaking difficult. Now, wearing glasses like you make and I make help that a lot, but I don't actually like having glasses on my face most of the time. I want a free face.

[01:33:29] Matt: Yeah, of course. Free face.

[01:33:30] Luke: So where the light source is, cover that, and then if you can give some practical advice on the types of bulbs, the whole thing.

[01:33:46] Matt: So regarding where the light is-- these are all great points, by the way. You have really quite nailed it already. We should have a SaunaSpace bulb here. That's one great solution to add back near infrared. So regarding the location of the light, the factors that affect the circadian system and the hormonal system as a result, cortisol productions, stress, and so on, are not just the wavelength of light, but also the sheer intensity.

[01:34:12] So, for example, having high intensity red light, like a bright red light panel late at night is not a good idea. Actually, remember I was one time at your place in LA and I did a super intense red light session just before going to sleep, and I couldn't sleep. And that was like my firsthand experience of having super bright red light.

[01:34:37] These panels put off high intensities of light, brighter than sunlight in some cases, depending on your distance. You get really close, it's like brighter than the sun at a far distance. Obviously, if you were that close to the sun, you'd be torched. But talking relative here, for all the people who want to jump into the simple thinking.

[01:34:53] Oh, he said it's brighter than the sun. What? Anyway, so it's the intensity and the wavelength. And also the location, because the sensors for the melanopic lux, so the circadian-stimulating blue wavelengths are generally in the inner retina, the lower portion. Why? Because the sun was never below the horizon.

[01:35:15] So it was always above the horizon, which means the sensors would be in the-- whereas like visual processes, you could be looking down and seeing things. But in general, the sun is never going to be below eye level effectively, unless you're really high up watching the sunrise at a place below you.

[01:35:30] But even then, it's so far away. It's not that far down. It's just about horizon level. And as it gets higher, that's when we're sensing it even more. So the point is Dr. Wunsch and I believe that overhead lighting is unnecessary and even harmful because it really represents midday sunlight. So even if you have red lights overhead at night, one of the three qualities.

[01:35:57] Again, wavelength of light, intensity of light and position of light that can influence the circadian system. Red lights overhead at night can theoretically still activate the circadian system to some extent. They're not going to activate it nearly as much as high intensity red light would or as any blue-containing light would. But it's just not really natural.

[01:36:19] So our concept of lighting, without me revealing too much, will be more toward peripheral lighting, especially at night, but even during the day. And we've been thinking a lot about the ways that we're doing that. In the beginning, we're trying to give people solutions that they can apply immediately, which will give huge benefits.

[01:36:36] So we are limited to the way that homes are currently built, where light sockets are. But when people buy our light bulbs, I'll also recommend-- a lot of people just want to have overhead lights because that's just what they're used to. They have guests over. They don't want to be weird. They want to turn on their light switch.

[01:36:50] So they'll want to get the light bulbs that we've developed to put into their overhead sockets. But if somebody asks me what I would do, I would use luminaire or a lamp as we call them in the US just peripherally, around. We're thinking about also developing a really beautiful, simple, minimalist style luminaire for people to put the light bulbs into. So anyway, that's the issue of position. It affects the circadian system--

[01:37:14] Luke: One thing that fixes that too is sconces. It's funny. I don't know, I think many of us don't think about this, but if you walk into an older building-- in LA, there's a lot of Spanish style homes, like my old apartment. I think you maybe came to in LA. I forget.

[01:37:32] Matt: Maybe.

[01:37:34] Luke: No, no. When I met you, I was living in the apartment, but you hadn't been there yet. But in LA you have all these old Spanish buildings, apartment buildings, fourplexes, and so ons, and homes that were built in between the '20s and '40s. And none of them have overhead lighting. They all have sconces.

[01:37:49] It's like part of that Mediterranean Spanish feel. It just feels better. You don't even notice it because, oh, this is the vibe in here. And now very few homes are built with eye level sconces. They all do the overhead lighting. My dream is like if I ever have the opportunity to build a house, there'd be no overhead lighting, and it would just be all sconces.

[01:38:08] Matt: That's how it should be. Yeah.

[01:38:10] Luke: Because lamps also, they have to have something to sit on. And it just like, then you have to arrange your furniture, and then you have to manually go over and turn on each light switch unless it's on a wall switch outlet. It's a whole thing. So I'm just like, we just built houses with sconces, and you have the right kind of bulbs-- you're golden.

[01:38:29] Matt: It just clicked in my mind, like, I'm assuming the reason they were designed like that is because they used to be torches. You couldn't put fire in your ceiling.

[01:38:36] Luke: A lot of the ones in LA, even though they'll be a little incandescent, where those tiny bulbs that looks like a flame, it's even shaped like a flame, and it's on a fake candlestick. So it's just the evolution of that.

[01:38:47] Matt: Yeah. Of where it used to be. It's really interesting. And that actually aligns nicely with the reality, which is way, way back, of course, the only artificial light at night was firelight. And it was always below eye level, and it's very warm. And if you're really close, it's high intensity, but it's not actually that high intensity compared to the sun.

[01:39:05] And if you step back 10 steps, it's quite dim, especially when you get to the amber glow of the embers at the end of the fire, the end of the celebration or the meal or whatever. So we touched on the position of the light, and to get through the actual lighting recommendations-- I'm very impressed. You've pretty much nailed it.

[01:39:26] I thought a lot about this because we have so many amazing, unbelievable business opportunities as a company. And surely if somebody else doesn't do it, which might not be a bad thing because I have enough to do, but we would make a glass business, basically just bringing back good glass and/or if it has to be plastic, it would be like a healthier plastic, if that's possible.

[01:39:50] I haven't really looked into it much at all. But you basically nailed it because of the energy efficiency green agenda, which we should touch on if we have a moment, they have made all the glass block near infrared and infrared in general because it heats the air more than the visible light spectrum.

[01:40:09] And you want the visible light spectrum to come in. That's what a window does. You get visible light in. But the exact same affliction of modern LED lighting has afflicted window glass. It's this idea that light is something that we just see. And so the purpose of a window or a light bulb is to produce illumination so that you can see and get the stimulating effects.

[01:40:32] Nobody is going to deny the stimulating and wakefulness inducing effects of visible light. But what people aren't aware of, because we can't see it, is the essential health benefits of the near infrared light both for our retina, for our skin, and for our entire body.

[01:40:48] Because near infrared, there's a study from Dr. Glenn Jeffery that showed that near infrared passes all the way through our entire body, and it even improves vision. Light coming through the torso even improved vision in the participants, showing that the systems are much more interconnected than we think.

[01:41:03] Luke: Dude, you know what's the trip? Let me enter really quick.

[01:41:05] Matt: Yeah, please, please.

[01:41:06] Luke: You know the SaunaSpace sauna? I have one downstairs, and I use it quite a bit because it's really fast. It heats up fast. The days that I do a sauna in the morning, I don't need my glasses. When I do podcasts, it's not blurry. Because it has incandescent near infrared lights, if I'm not doing that sauna for a while, I notice my vision starts to get blurry again.

[01:41:30] Matt: Yeah, somebody needs to cut this and send it to Brian Richards, our homie for an advertisement, because that's a phenomenal testament.

[01:41:36] Luke: It's amazing.

[01:41:37] Matt: Yeah, unbelievable with the science and your experience. And I believe it. So thank you for that phenomenal example. I wasn't expecting that.

[01:41:43] Luke: And also eye exercises in there too.

[01:41:45] Matt: That's great too.

[01:41:46] Luke: I'm looking left or right.

[01:41:47] Matt: No, don't tell that because they're going to say it's a confounding variable. It's the near infrared.

[01:41:50] Luke: Combination of both. And probably the sun gazing practice, which has been a long time. But I was sun gazing. I've been doing it for, I don't know, over 10 years, sunrise, sunset stuff. And my vision still went bad, even though I'm regularly sun gazing. So I think the artificial red light, if it's the right kind of light and it doesn't flicker, is really good for vision. Anyway, continue on.

[01:42:14] Matt: So the biggest problem with the modern windows and artificial LEDs is this false idea that light is something just that we see. And so we just want to have the maximum amount of light transmission and illumination for the least amount of electricity in the case of a light bulb, which means cutting out the near infrared because you don't see it. So it doesn't contribute to visible illumination.

[01:42:39] In other words, the standards for light bulbs for energy efficiency is lumens per watt. The maximum limit for general lighting appliances in the United States is 45 lumens per watt, but that's visible lumens. So it doesn't include near infrared. So any light bulb, which contains a significant amount of near infrared is either exceeding or just pushing up against the standards. And by the way, they tighten the standards constantly.

[01:43:74] So it's just like how junk food costs less electricity and less money to produce. Junk light, as we could call it, also is cheaper and costs less electricity, less money, but it's far lower quality. The light that we're constantly exposing ourselves to, the blue-enriched LED light is the nutritional equivalent of basically refined wheat flour or sugar.

[01:43:31] If the government said, what's the cheapest way we could feed a bunch of slaves or servants or something, it would just be like, shovel a bunch of sugar and flour down their throats because it's just the cheapest, simplest calorie source that you can possibly get.

[01:43:43] And that's essentially what they've done with all modern indoor lighting. It's high blue, so it's the cheapest to produce. It's full of flicker because they don't want to spend the extra couple of cents per unit to basically make the wiring, the circuitry higher quality so that you don't have flicker.

[01:44:00] They're just like, "Ah, it doesn't really matter." Costs a little bit more money per bulb, but they just don't even bother. And the spectrum is lower quality. As a result, the color rendering index is far lower, and near infrared, forget about it. Because near infrared takes a lot of electricity and a lot of money. But it has such a significant health benefit that they've disregarded.

[01:44:18] So anyway, to your question, windows have the same issue. It's about transmitting the maximum amount of visible light, blocking the near infrared because the near infrared heats the air, and you'd have to use more air conditioning, therefore more electricity and more money. But they're concerned about the environment supposedly, which is totally sus, and we'll get into that in a moment.

[01:44:36] So the solutions would be if I were building houses from scratch, I would have lots of ways for natural light to come in, like screens, so that you can open the windows and let the light in. But then windows, which, for example, to make the home environment, let's say, safe so that you don't have to shield from ultraviolet-- because as I've gotten through explaining, I am concerned about excessive ultraviolet.

[01:44:57] So I would have windows that would filter the ultraviolet, the shorter wavelength light, but let in the near infrared. So when you're in your home, you're in a maximally healing environment shifted towards healing and regeneration. If you want to get the benefits of ultraviolet, go outside and sunbathe. But you don't need those necessarily indoors all day long. So that's what I do, is I would have healthier windows. You've already done that. That would be a good start.

[01:45:20] Luke: You just reminded me of a fallacy, a commonly held fallacy. Imagining you're shopping for a home and the real estate agent walks you in the front door and is like, this is a beautiful home. There's lots of natural light. Lots of natural light is a big selling point on any building.

[01:45:36] Matt: You'll age faster in a penthouse.

[01:45:37] Luke: There is no natural light if there's windows. That's not natural light.

[01:45:42] Matt: No, you'll age faster. It'll be stressful. I've seen on Instagram those same videos, like a penthouse, which is floor to ceiling windows, and I'm like, "I would not want to be in that environment, especially not with direct sunlight coming in, which it will be a lot of the time.

[01:45:55] Luke: Dude, before I learned this, I was living in a house in the Hollywood Hills. I had an amazing view, and I had just giant windows in the living rooms and got sun all day. I was like facing South. And dude, I used to go naked, sunbathe behind the window.

[01:46:09] Matt: If they were like a good old glass, it could have been--

[01:46:11] Luke: There probably were at least from the six-- I think the house was built in the '60s, and they were the original windows. But it would burn me. I would get a weird sunburn. And I'm like, "That's weird. I don't get sunburn when I go outside." Yeah.

[01:46:24] Matt: So that's not a good look. So near infrared transmitting windows, we've already discussed having light at eye level, not above, generally speaking, with sconces. Maybe a little bit above eye level. Adding back near infrared is one of the biggest ones. So considering time, I think it's worth mentioning-- do you know when this episode will come out, ballpark?

[01:46:41] Luke: Yes, I do, thanks to Jarrod, Mr. Organization. This comes out 12/16/25.

[01:46:47] Matt: Okay. So in January of 2026, we're going to be launching our first lighting products ever, which I'm really excited about. We've been working on them now effectively eight years, since I started the company, but in much more depth and detail over the past three, four years since I've been working with Dr. Wunsch.

[01:47:05] The product's name is Lumios. So it's the first healthy LED ever made. So Lumio comes from Lumen, light. So the technology behind the bulb is what we call the incandescent LED. So I was recently telling somebody, "This is really the solution." I'll say it's not just because of my product. It's because I understood all the problems, and we wanted to build a true solution. So when anybody--

[01:47:34] Luke: I'm so envious. You beat me to that. I've always wanted to do that, and I don't know how you do all the things.

[01:47:41] Matt: I think if people understood really how much it takes to do this kind of thing, you wouldn't want to do it.

[01:47:46] Luke: Which is why I have these ideas and I'm like, "Someone do it." And then they do it, and I'm like, "Damnit, why didn't I do that?"

[01:47:51] Matt: It's going to fall. Yeah. Anyway, we've got you. Don't worry. We'll make it huge.

[01:47:57] Luke: So you're to be able to have infrared, even though it's an LED?

[01:48:01] Matt: Precisely.

[01:48:01] Luke: Sick. Have you looked into the dirty electricity issue with LEDs? I've heard that they'll turn your whole circuit dirty.

[01:48:09] Matt: I was just testing that two or three weeks ago.

[01:48:12] Luke: I figured you would. You wouldn't ignore that part.

[01:48:15] Matt: No, we won't release a product [Inaudible].

[01:48:16] Luke: Another thing that really sucks is dimmer switches.

[01:48:18] Matt: You can't use dimmers with our [Inaudible].

[01:48:20] Luke: Yeah, brutal.

[01:48:21] Matt: At least for now. Actually, you can. Again, the circuitry just costs more money. There are ways to use a dimmer switch with an LED, but with modern dimmer switches, you're going to create this terrible, dirty electricity, which is why we're not going to allow it with our products and tell people not to. It just won't work, so there's no point in doing it.

[01:48:44] We will develop systems over the time, like these whole home lighting systems that exist, to allow people to have changes in intensity. Our bulbs have changes in intensity, but it's built into the bulb itself not into dimmer switch. So basically, the incandescent LED is a type of LED technology.

[01:49:01] So when I posted about this concept of the incandescent LED, first, somebody responded to me like, no General Electric already did that. I'm like, "Dude, are you kidding me?" So he's just sent me a picture of an LED incandescent. There's a difference between the incandescent LED.

[01:49:16] Luke: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[01:49:17] Matt: It's an incandescent replica bulb using LED technology.

[01:49:20] Luke: If you go on Amazon and search for amber incandescent, it'll feed you a bunch of fake-ass LEDs that flicker like crazy, and they're total garbage.

[01:49:28] Matt: The main problem with modern indoor illumination, there are several. Where do I start? There are five main issues. Which is the most significant? Probably the first is that they have no near infrared in order of significance. So they lack near infrared, which we've spent half this conversation talking about the benefits of near infrared, how it counterbalances the short wavelength spectrum.

[01:49:51] The perfect light source is the sun, fire, and even incandescent lamps. They all follow what's called a black body radiation curve, which means very low blue light and tons of near infrared. Also far infrared. Far infrared, as a side note, is it's heating. That's what you actually feel as heat from an incandescent light. The near infrared, for example, from a red light panel like a Joovv, you don't feel the near infrared really.

[01:50:12] Maybe it's a tiny bit as heat, but that's the range that has the most significant biological effects. The far infrared, arguably less. So it's less biologically relevant. Unless you're in a far infrared sauna and your goal is to sweat, then it can help with that kind of thing.

[01:50:25] Luke: Right, right. The sauna back there, the Sunlighten sauna, it's cool. It has a near, mid, and far infrared

[01:50:35] Matt: Yeah.

[01:50:37] Luke: And it's all invisible.

[01:50:38] Matt: I like the SaunaSpace because it has that, but it has a ton of near infrared, and it follows this natural black body radiation curve. Technically, it was Kellogg, the guy who also made Kellogg cereals. He was the first to use what he called incandescent lamp therapy. And that's essentially what SaunaSpace bulbs are doing.

[01:50:54] They've just added a red glass, so they have hormonal neutrality other than the brightness, which we spoke about earlier. But they don't have the blue wavelengths like a regular bright incandescent chicken lamp would. So you can use them at night without significant risk to disrupting your sleep. Or at least in the early evening. I wouldn't use it right before bed for the reasons we discussed earlier.

[01:51:11] Luke: I've made that mistake before. I'm like, "It's red light." And then I'm super energized.

[01:51:15] Matt: Yeah, exactly.

[01:51:16] Luke: I think the mitochondrial effect too, you get so much energy from that stimulation and the visual. Yeah. Actually, I did it a couple of weeks ago. I was like, "Oh, I should take a sauna. It was 9:00, and I was so hyped afterward. Like, "Okay, yeah. Wrong timing."

[01:51:30] Matt: So modern artificial lighting, it has no effectively known near infrared. That's the biggest issue. So our lights, the incandescent LED, it adds back the near infrared, but it's still far more energy efficient than regular incandescent because they don't emit the far infrared.

[01:51:49] First of all, they wouldn't be marketable because they'll go so far beyond the energy efficiency thresholds, but also that's not significantly biologically relevant. So there's really no point. So we've found the balance between incandescence, then the junky LEDs.

[01:52:02] We've created an LED, which basically has the good near infrared and not the, let's say, more wasted far infrared. Okay, so then the other issues with modern indoor lighting is it has a lot of the HEVL, the short wavelength, bad blue light that we spoke about.

[01:52:20] So with that blue peak at 450 nanometers, you have more risk of damage to the eyes, reactive oxygen species, and all the potential eye issues that come downstream from that. So that's another huge issue with pretty much all modern indoor lighting, including a lot of the bulbs that claim to be circadian friendly.

[01:52:37] In fact, almost all of them still have their blue light peak at 450 nanometers, which isn't ideal. In fact, it's problematic. They also have, again, too much, generally speaking, hormonally active blue light, which is also a problem, especially when you're lacking the near infrared. Same with the other bad blue.

[01:52:56] They become magnified when you don't have the near infrared, which is how all modern lights are today. So our bulbs are very low, almost free of HEVL, the bad blue. One of the lights, it has what we call a sky function, which allows you to switch the light setting to have a colder white light with very little, almost none of the HEVL bad blue, but with the good blue.

[01:53:24] And it's literally the first LED-based, stimulating, blue-light-containing bulb ever that is good. Because again, it has the near infrared. It doesn't even have the short wavelength, HEVL, bad blue, but it does have the good blue. It's very similar. It's basically the BlueSync lens in a bulb.

[01:53:45] Depending on which bulb you choose, we have a general Lumios product, we call it. I haven't finalized all the names actually, but probably Lumios or Lumios Flow is the standard bulb. Then we have Lumios Sky, which has the Sky function, and then we have Lumios night, which only has the night mode, which is a really warm, like-candle light.

[01:54:03] So anyway, most artificial lights, they have no near infrared. They have too much HEVL. They have too much overstimulating, bad blue light. They have a really poor spectrum. The spectrum isn't very continuous, which means they have low color rendering.

[01:54:18] And color rendering, it is how well the light reflects the true colors that you're actually seeing. So for example, some incandescent light and fire light have a CRI color rendering index of 100, meaning perfect. They're the reference. Modern LEDs have accepted a CRI of 80, as good enough.

[01:54:40] And that's why most people have a really serious issue with self-confidence because they see themselves constantly under these terrible LED lights, which make you look pale, sick. They're overhead so the shadows on your face look terrible.

[01:54:54] If anybody's ever gone into a bathroom where they actually have a true incandescent above the mirror, or even a very warm, high quality, or at least very warm-- maybe not high quality-- replica incandescent, you still have a similar effect. Because there's more red, maybe not near infrared, but at least red, you see the blush in your cheeks. You see yourself as healthier and more alive.

[01:55:16] That's actually the right light under which is to view ourselves. So a lot of people, especially in the Instagram world, feel like I'm ugly. I'm not pretty. I don't feel good about myself. But if they just saw themselves, in a different light, literally. They might have a bit more confidence.

[01:55:32] So CRI allows people to see themselves and the people they're conversating with or just spending time with in a more true light, let's call it, and the food you eat, the color of the food you eat, which has important signals for the brain, for digestion, or the color of any painting or of your beautiful carpets and all the types of things you have in your house.

[01:55:49] So CRI is actually critical. It's both important for us to perceive all the colors that we are around. And also, it's a direct representation of a continuous broad spectrum. I'm not going to say full spectrum because it doesn't have UVA and UVB like the sun, but a broad spectrum light source, which also has health benefits, which we know about, and which many of which we probably don't even know about yet.

[01:56:14] So our light bulb has near perfect CRI, 98-plus, greater than 98. So that's a huge one. And then that only doesn't apply for the night mode, which is 1,200 Kelvin, which is like candlelight because that one's really difficult to make perfect. And our purpose was to eliminate all the blue, which means by definition you're not going to have a perfect CRI.

[01:56:38] Luke: With your night bulb, is it solid red?

[01:56:42] Matt: It's not solid red.

[01:56:43] Luke: Okay, cool. I'm going to have a happy wife because at night, if I turn to pure red on, she finds it irritating.

[01:56:52] Matt: It is irritating.

[01:56:52] Luke: And she gets dizzy, and she's just like, "This sucks. I hate this." She doesn't mind the incandescents. I've had to compromise. We found a place in the middle where we're both happy. I realize I'm probably an anomaly that I wouldn't mind if the entire house was only red from the time the sun goes down. I'd be happy as hell, but I'm not normal.

[01:57:16] Matt: Basically, it's not normal either to have all red light.

[01:57:16] Luke: Do you hear that, honey?

[01:57:16] Matt: The biohacker--

[01:57:21] Luke: Matt's making bulbs that are going to be healthy and safe, but they're not red color.

[01:57:26] Matt: Yeah.

[01:57:27] Luke: Yeah, she hates it.

[01:57:30] Matt: So basically, the idea of having all red lights in a house, it has been, again, the biohackers simplistic solution. Like, okay, blue light, bad. Let's just go all red. But monochrome red isn't really natural for us to be exposed to.

[01:57:49] And even from a psychological perspective, red can be somehow stimulating, because of just the properties of the color red, the red light district. There's a reason people use red. There is a stimulating quality to red, depending on the intensity. So if it's really dim, it's more like evening fire. But again, if it's really bright, it can actually be stimulating.

[01:58:09] So depending on the intensity, it's not ideal, but it doesn't have any color rendering. It's monochrome. So things don't look normal, which can make people feel really weird. But ours, because it's following still to some extent, this black body radiation curve, you still perceive people in a much more natural light. And so our bulb is it's the best night light ever, and it has a lot of near infrared. So it's the best LED you could possibly make.

[01:58:33] Luke: Amazing. I'm so stoked.

[01:58:35] Matt: Yeah, short of taking an incandescent and putting a red glass or a yellow or orange glass on it. But again, that doesn't really fly in the modern world. And then finally, flicker. Most LEDs, we already discussed, they have tons of flicker and fluorescence as well.

[01:58:49] All it is, is a simple investment in higher quality circuitry to get rid of the flicker, and that basically solves it. So the bulbs we've created solve all of the problems for modern indoor lighting. The glass is another thing we already discussed. So you would have a solution just by having our bulbs everywhere. You would have a substantial amount of near infrared.

[01:59:08] You can toggle through the settings to go from a warm, white light, which is an incandescent spectrum, which is 2,700 Kelvin, depending on the bulb, down to 2,200, which is warmer, white, really vibey, down to 1,800, which is like a real evening light or early morning light, down to 1,200, which is like a pure orange.

[01:59:28] But it's not monochrome orange, monochrome yellow, monochrome red. It's a continuous spectrum similar to fire, candlelight, so it's really pleasant. But all the things you've done are like the patchwork solutions I would recommend. I would tell people, if you have a red-light panel, turn it on, even just on near infrared only mode, and just kind of bounce it off the wall and have it illuminate the whole room. Or a SaunaSpace light. Those are the best interim solutions for now.

[01:59:56] Luke: What was I going to ask you? Oh, I'm always thinking about, the thing that adopted me to the color spectrum of light being important and why just intuitively blue light at night sucks.

[02:00:13] We've evolved, as you said earlier, to be around fire light. However long humans have been here until a couple hundred years ago when electricity was invented, it was always fire. The same thing is true of flickering light. And someone might think, well, fires flicker. Fires don't turn on and off completely.

[02:00:33] This is just my theory. I don't know if you've ever thought of this yourself, but the only time in nature through our evolution we ever would've had a light flicker on and off is if we were chasing game through a forest or running away from something trying to kill us. Think about like if you run on a trail. It flickers. Not like a shitty light bulb. You know what I'm saying?

[02:00:56] Matt: Yeah. Through bamboo or through trees.

[02:00:57] Luke: Yeah.

[02:01:01] Matt: It's stimulating. And the brain has to use energy to filter these types of things out, which is not a desirable-- just like a tag on your shirt, which is bothering you. Dr. Wunsch is like, "Why won't you cut that out?" I'm like, "I don't care." He's like, "You realize your brain actually is using energy to filter that out, the annoying tag or whatever." It's like that in a way. I couldn't agree more. And fires, because they don't flicker in a consistent manner, it's like hypnotic, because you can't predict the way it's going to flicker next.

[02:01:22] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[02:01:23] Matt: So it's like, ooh, it puts you into a trance. But with flickering light, it's consistent. So just like anything else, which is repetitive, the brain's basically, if it's not relevant, it's trying to filter it out. So yeah, flickering light is not ideal. And one more, I think, paradox that's worth using to wrap up here is deep blue light. So a deep, saturated blue is actually calming, which is interesting. I try to understand this from Dr. Wunsch long. I was like, "Why?"

[02:01:50] Luke: Right, right. Because the color you paint a room has an effect on your mood. This is like some old new-age, hippie shit.

[02:01:57] Matt: Why is blue calming but blue light wavelengths-- and the difference is there's a nuance to it. So blue light at any high intensity, especially in a white light source, which we would call unsaturated, it's not the blue color-- it's like blue in a white light-- is highly stimulating because that always represents daytime skylight, etc.

[02:02:17] But deep, deep, deep, dark blue, which we can produce with a light source and filters because we're also working on color therapy products, but that's further out, deep, deep blue or indigo or violet is actually very calming at low intensities. And that always represents a nature dawn or dusk, or even nighttime.

[02:02:35] If you look up at the sky, late, late, late in the evening after dusk, it looks like a deep blue violet crimson, depending on the way it is. And that's very calming. So there is so much nuance to this stuff, and it feels in a way paradoxical, that bright, high intensity, unsaturated blue is energizing, and dim levels of saturated-- saturated meaning, for example, a bright red, a rosy red is saturated red. Pink with a lot of white added is an unsaturated red.

[02:03:06] And it's also interesting, Dr. Wunsch explained to me that when you change the saturation of a light source, it changes the effect. So in other words, red in general, as a color has more stimulating properties, actually, no effect on the mitochondria, effect on the psyche.

[02:03:22] The first chakra, the lowest chakra is considered red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and white at the top, let's say. So red is stimulating actually, which is another reason why I'm not a huge fan of the monochrome red light bulbs at night, unless they're really dim, which in many cases they are.

[02:03:37] Luke: I feel like they also cause eye strain.

[02:03:40] Matt: This, I'm not sure about.

[02:03:41] Luke: The color differentiation, the lenses that Ra uses, the lenses that I use with Gilded, thanks to you, you still have color differentiation.

[02:03:50] Matt: Yeah, exactly. Because you don't just have monochrome red. It's not monochrome. You still have actually red, orange, yellow.

[02:03:56] Luke: You can tell there's no color difference between things.

[02:03:56] Matt: That when I say monochrome. It's just red.

[02:03:57] Luke: Whereas if you just put some generic red glasses on, which a lot of people are selling-- watch out, guys.

[02:04:03] Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[02:04:04] Luke: For me, it causes like eye fatigue. And even at night, as much as I love having only red on, it's like you have to strain in order to see things properly in depth of field. To your point, it's just not natural. Fire isn't pure red.

[02:04:19] Matt: But so the thing about stimulating red, saturated rose red is it's more stimulating, especially at high intensities from a psychological perspective, which also influences physiology. If you add a lot of white to that same red, it becomes pink.

[02:04:36] And pink is very calming. In certain insane asylums and mental institutions they'd actually put prisoners or in inmates, or patients, or whatever, in a bubblegum pink room. Have you heard this before? The most insane people who couldn't be controlled, they would in some cases put them in rooms painted bubblegum pink, and it would just completely chill them out.

[02:04:57] So it's a totally different effect. Anybody can look that up. So red and then unsaturated red, pink have opposite effects. Deep, deep blue is more calming at its essence, if it's not too high intensity. I'm not talking about like a blue floodlight LED at a concert. That's different.

[02:05:14] But high intensity, unsaturated blue, like a light blue, sky blue is going to be much more stimulating. So there's a lot of nuance to the whole topic of light. And I've been learning so much from Dr. Wunsch, and I'm very grateful. And shout out to him for all of his work because, yeah, we're excited about what we have to come.

[02:05:29] Luke: I'm stoked, dude. We've talked about this over the course of your journey in developing it, and I forgot because I haven't seen anything yet except these.

[02:05:39] Matt: Yeah.

[02:05:40] Luke: I was like, "Yes, he's doing it." All right. We got to get out of here. We got a house full of people that are ready to party. We're going to have a rager here. Thank you so much for stopping by. Matt texted me and was like, "Hey, I'm in Austin." Anyone that comes to Austin, it's like, "I'm here tomorrow, then I leave." It's never like, "Hey, I'm coming in a month. Can you make time?" So I was like--

[02:06:01] Matt: I'm the only one who can make that excuse because I actually don't decide until like the day before I come to visit.

[02:06:05] Luke: I know. You're a weirdo. We'll save your nomadic lifestyle for another one. So I thought, if I can carve out a little time this morning, let's just do a podcast. Because we probably would've talked about much of the same stuff. So audience, thank you for being a fly on the wall, and until next time, man.

[02:06:23] Matt: Thanks, Luke. Appreciate you.