Matthew Maruca - Ra Optics & Better Health Through Better Eyewear

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over four years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, executives, thought leaders, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by future of fitness.co to subscribe and get our interviews with summaries delivered straight to your inbox. You'll also find our free industry report on artificial intelligence. Five industry experts, five different opinions, and tons of valuable insights for free at futurofitness.co. Thanks for listening and on to the show. Back for its fifth year, the Connected Health and Fitness Summit is returning February 7th and 8th in 2024 to explore the industry's most lucrative opportunities and hottest trends. Come learn how legendary players and innovative brands are implementing preventative health and longevity-focused initiatives into their businesses. Discover how to successfully tap into Gen Z consumers, meeting demands for holistic and wellness-centered fitness offerings. Stay one step ahead of your competitors and learn how to take your brand to the next level by leveraging artificial intelligence into your frameworks. Secure your next investment by keeping up to date on where investors are prioritizing their spending and realizing white space opportunities. Build relationships and share ideas at the Women in Connected Fitness and CEO Founders Forums. The Connected Health and Fitness Summit is bringing together the strongest brands in fitness and beyond for two days of quality networking and curated content to get you ahead of the game. Go to Connected Health and Fitness.com to download the agenda and find out more. Use code FOF10 for an exclusive 10% discount on your event ticket. That's connectedhealth and fitness.com, code FOF10, and do not wait. Seats are very limited. All right, we are live. Matthew Maruka, welcome to the future of fitness, my friend. Thank you so much, Eric. I appreciate it. How are you doing? I'm doing great. It's uh it's a beautiful Friday morning both in San Diego and Whitefish, Montana. So we're uh we're gonna use a little bit of it to record a podcast and then uh go enjoy the day, I would imagine. But yes. Um I'm I'm I've been looking forward to this for a while. I know we've had a kind of reschedule a few times due to uh a lot of different things, but uh I just find you to be an interesting person. Um I like the brand of raw optics. Um use your night glasses, and everyone I've suggested it to so far uh seems to be a big fan. And even you know, the the team at workout, uh Ramen, I don't think he minds me saying the chief financial officer of that company was always having a lot of problem. He said by the end of the day, his eyes were tired, he had a headache almost every day, right? Um by one or two PM. And you guys allowed us to try out some of the product, and he immediately within a day or two was telling me unprompted, you know, how much his days were improved now. He had more energy, he could stare, he could still still look at the screen in the afternoon, and uh overall just felt much, much better. So there's definitely a lot to it. We're gonna get into, you know, of course, the science of what it is today, but um something I haven't covered here. So it's it's good to have you. And I'll I'll stop talking for now. And you have an interesting backstory, Matthew. So maybe we can start there. Um, tell us how you got to be the founder and and CEO of Raw Optics, and then we'll uh we'll see where that goes.

Yeah, yeah. Uh well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it, Eric. Um, so as far as the background and how I got into the company, uh I started the company when I was 18 years old. I had just finished high school. And what preceded that was quite a few years of trying to improve my health. That was at least my idea, using whatever I could find on the internet. And before that, I had tried Western medicine. I had gone to regular Western doctors, and they had prescribed me for allergies I was having, uh, Xerotec, for gut issues I was having, Tums, and for headaches, Advil, and so on. So I kind of lost faith in that. And uh, even my mother, thankfully, if she was supporting me all the way, she had taken me to a naturopathic doctor, which was pretty cool, but nonetheless didn't fully have the effect that I needed. I was still having these symptoms, the gut issues, the allergies, the headaches. Uh, and by the time I got into high school, I started getting pretty bad breakouts of acne, as many high schoolers do, but I really thought there must be something I can do about this. And I had this idea that maybe I could actually change my diet, which to me seemed really far out at the time. But um, I just thought maybe I could use food to heal this. And so there was actually a little more to it. I actually had uh I had this idea like maybe my gut was damaged. I don't know where that came from, to be honest, but because I was eating greasy foods and then I was getting these breakouts, and I was like, somehow maybe the this uh maybe there's the barrier is just not working, you know, the the the the separation process of you know just taking everything apart and it's not working and somehow this this grease is coming to my skin and clogging my pores and whatnot. Again, I don't know if I actually don't know if that's actually based in in fact still or not. I haven't checked that one out. But anyway, it was funny that when I started reading about these diets, the my my skin issues did get significantly better. But the other thing was that I started reading about all this evidence that we could change other issues in our health with food. Like, for example, the allergies that and the headaches and all this other stuff, gut issues that I thought were just genetic. In particular, allergies I thought were genetic. The gut issues I didn't really have a clue, headaches, I just thought it was normal. And uh yeah, so I just did every every version of this diet I I I could find at the beginning. It was called the paleo diet, still is, and um I went really deep into that. I became pretty obsessive because I was at this point as a teenager where I had like self-diagnosed something's wrong with me, and I can fix it with my diet, was what I believed. I don't really think that's true anymore, that diet's as big of a deal as most people think it is. I don't agree, but anyway, tried all these diets, ended up struggling tremendously because I had really fixed in my mind that I could completely heal myself with food alone. And so I became like pretty orthorexic about every little thing I would eat, as many people are today in the diet world, thinking that the food is the actual most important thing for their health, and it ended up becoming pretty unhealthy. And I ended up doing stricter and stricter versions of the paleo diet called the autoimmune protocol paleo diet and then the gaps diet, which are elimination diets. And the idea behind elimination diets is that you'll remove foods that irritate the gut lining and activate the immune system, and by doing that, you'll give the body the ability to heal itself without being attacked, essentially, or without being overstimulated. Now, what I didn't know then, and I know now, is that they don't talk about or even ask about at all what the force is that's responsible for healing in the human body or in any living organism for that matter. And there's an assumption that it just works. And what I found in my experience was that no matter which elimination diet I did or how strictly I did it, I felt bad generally. I felt worse as I was more restrictive on my diet, and I didn't get better. I actually felt worse. Um, and so and then I would end up guilty, you know, binge eating, or I should say eating something that was technically not allowed on the diet, and then like going off the rails and eating whatever I wanted, because the whole idea of these diets is if you eat make one tiny mistake, it's basically as bad as if you know eat whatever you want for a week because you're you have to start from ground zero again based on your immune system activation. So it wasn't really, again, psychologically healthy. So I just ended up in this, I was in this kind of like loop for many, many months, just like obsessing about exactly everything I was eating, feeling like I give up, I'm just gonna break this, and then just going to the rails. And it was like a pretty unhealthy relationship with food. And then anyway, uh, thankfully there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel at that point. I learned about this research from a blogger in the paleo space, but not exactly, who was actually basically saying to people, hey, listen, um, are you still struggling with health should if health issues regardless of which diet you've tried and how strict you've been? I'm like, well, that sounds kind of interesting. And the idea was, well, hey, it could be because there are other factors uh that affect your health besides just food, actually, um, that are more important than food. And it turns out, for example, your mitochondria, the cellular engines that process our food, could actually be damaged because of different factors besides food. For example, excess exposure to electromagnetic fields, like all the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and 5G, has negative effects on our mitochondria. Even more simply, artificial light at night. You get blue light at night from the modern light bulbs and screens, tells the brain, tricks the brain into thinking it's still day. The brain makes less melatonin and the cells repair less, and mitochondria in particular, don't get the full restoration they need when we're sleeping, and so the body's living in a state of kind of chronic reduced function, which you could basically liken to chronic sleep deprivation on a on a small scale, but over time it it compounds, and people think, oh, I'm just a little tired, it's not a big deal, but over time that can be an issue. So, anyway, um that was fascinating, and it led me to all of these books that I started reading from this uh the source uh that this uh source had recommended, uh, all these books about biology and quantum biology and biophysics, and I started reading all these books, and it just made sense to me that life is so much more complex than just this simple chemical system where you put food in and you get health out or disease. Like there's so many factors that influence how well our cells function. For example, you could be eating a perfect diet, but if your cells are ridden with uh mercury, for example, or glyphosate from Roundup, then it doesn't really matter what you eat. It can make it worse or it can make it a little better, but if you're ultimately ridden with toxins, it doesn't really matter because that's it's it's separate from the issue. You know, you're gonna have health issues because of this. You can make your diet perfect, but still have issues because it's a separate thing. And so the mitochondrial dysfunction idea was something very similar. And it turns out that mitochondrial dysfunction underpins almost every chronic disease, whereas they're not actually genetic, and they know that now, it's all epigenetics. It's it's uh we're not, you know, humans have survived through millions and millions, maybe billions of years of evolution, and our genes are really good. And so everybody says, well, oh, heart disease runs in my family, and oh, heart disease runs in my family, and obesity runs in my family, and bad vision runs in my family, and Alzheimer's runs in my family. It's like, well, it runs in everybody's family because everybody's getting that and everybody's dying of it. It's not genetic, it's a population epidemic, essentially, and that means it's an environmental factor causing this. Like that that's the basis of it. Like, for example, vision problems, which are, I think, 50% of people or more now, uh, would have been selected out very quickly in evolution. So it's not a gene for that. It's a failure of our genes to function properly. And that's energy production, and the retina consumes practically more energy than any part of the body, and therefore it would be a place you would expect to have issues in this modern world. The brain also and the heart are two of the highest energy consuming tissues, and that's why the two killers today, the two top killers are Alzheimer's disease and heart disease, cardiovascular disease, because these systems require lots of energy to function. We're destroying our body's ability to produce energy properly, and so anyway. Now I'm going on quite a bit of a uh uh discourse here, but just to wrap this up, I I got into the company because I learned about all this information and I was I was particularly um over zealous and con overconfident maybe in 2017, but enough to thankfully the direct the information I knew about was directionally accurate. So I think you know, it's it's to be cocky or overconfident isn't ideal. But if the information you have is at least directionally accurate, I think maybe it's forgivable. So I had learned this information. I thought it was the be-all end all uh of everything about how light is so important. I started this company making blue light protection eyewear because there was nothing available that both blocked the right wavelengths of light and looked good and was high quality and stylish. Nothing. There was no, and today there are still very few other options besides our products as far as like really high quality, great-looking styles, plus the right protection. I can only think of one other company in the space that's doing it what I would consider decently well. And so I started that company, and it just was more for the niche community that I was a part of, these so-called quantum health people who were into this, all this stuff about mitochondria and getting the sunrise and sunbathing and blocking all the EMFs, and people most people would think are totally crazy, but there was some foundation, some truth to uh that information. Now, looking back, myself included, I would say that a lot of the people both in this kind of world and the diet world, as you probably have experienced, get a little overzealous, a little over the top. But uh, and and I've come to think more and more, as I mentioned to you before we hit record, is that I think the mental aspect, the psychological aspect is is probably bigger than anything else today. But anyway, that's how I got into uh running the business.

Yeah, that's a great backstory, Matthew. I I I appreciate it. And it's it's uh I was thinking, I was resonating with it because when I started my fitness career journey, it was in CrossFit, and CrossFit led to Paleo, right? And because it worked for me and a handful of people that I was working with and family members, I was 100 because I was very cocky. Like all I need is CrossFit and Paleo, and I could solve most of the world's problems. I was convinced, right? You and me both. And then you start doing a little bit of research, and then that leads to more research, and then you realize, oh my god, I know nothing. There's there's so much I need to learn. And then and that's when it really starts, that's when the process really starts. So I think that initial phase of being, you mentioned it maybe cocky or overly confident or um maybe naive in some points is critical when when you're developing something like this as a person and as a professional. So I can uh I can definitely resonate with that. It's it's really interesting. And um so tell me about the company. Like at what point did this actually become a business? Like what was the first iteration of the product? Um, you know, you kind of scratched your own itch per se. Like when did it actually go from, okay, I'm just trying to solve my own issues here to okay, I think I have a I think I have a business man.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a great story. I don't share it often. I appreciate you asking. Um I was 16 in high school, and I was in the thick of my diet obsessive and just learning about light and mitochondria period in my life. And so for me, I'm twenty, I just turned 24, so this is uh eight years ago now, eight, nine years ago. Um, but as I as much as I was pretty immature then, I would say I was very much becoming an adult as far as the sort of level of responsibility I was taking for my own health. Um I wasn't an adult by any stretch yet, but I was definitely taking on certain responsibilities that someone would usually look at much later in their life, if ever. Uh so anyway, I went on a foreign exchange program because I didn't really feel like I fit in. So I had heard, seen this opportunity one day in class to go on a foreign exchange program, and I applied and I got in and I was super stoked. I was like, this is gonna be the coolest thing ever. I I don't know if I've ever been as excited about anything. Uh and I basically was placed in, so it was this kind of government-sponsored exchange program for high school students for a year. So your full a full year of high school, you'd be abroad, and it was to countries with significant Muslim populations that were safe for American students. And they sent like 62 or some American students abroad, and they would bring in like a thousand students from the Middle East and all this to live in the states, actually, but they'd started sending some Americans overseas to these countries, and some were like Ghana, Thailand, India. Uh I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is a country in the former Yugoslavia, uh, just inland and south of Croatia, which kind of wraps around Bosnia like a boomerang. It's kind of like a triangular-shaped, heart-shaped country almost, and it's to the west of Serbia, so just all north of Greece and Macedonia there, um, and south of Hungary and Poland, I guess, above that. But anyway, so I went over to this uh on this exchange program, and it was really cool because I haven't told this story in ages. I don't know if ever on a podcast, but basically I had all this information about uh how basically, if we spent more time in the sun and ate healthier food, like we would be healthier. And then I literally got to go do like a population study of my own, so to speak, going over to a foreign country where the people are living back like 30 years in the past. They had cell phones and all this stuff, they had Wi-Fi, like they're pr relatively modern, but the energy of the place was like 20, 30 years in the past, the psych, the way people think, but also like the the way that um they spent so much time outdoors, even in the winter walking. It was a walking city, everybody walked everywhere. It's a city called Banyaluka, the second largest city in in Bosnia, the largest city, the capital Sarajevo. Um it it was yeah, 200,000 people or so, and just a beautiful city. Um unbelievable picturesque nature in southeastern Europe, like nestled in hills and rivers and countryside. Anyway, and these people were like out at cafes all spring and all summer. In fact, the the part of the issue I think people would say is that like the there's no economy because like 40% of the population's unemployed and just sits and drinks coffee all day because there's not a lot of like hope, or at least a lot of the generation I was in school with didn't have a lot of hope about the future of their country, just given the the fact that it was war-torn from 20 years prior, 25 years prior. So, anyway, I saw such differences in how healthy the people were. It was crazy. Like the like the women, like the girls, you know, even 16 years old were just like, and and I was that age at the time, 16, 17, 18, like they looked like really mature and healthy women, like physically. Um, they looked really good. And I was like, whoa, that this is I've never seen this in the United States at all. Right. And this isn't just again, it's not just genetic, like this is population effects on human health, obviously, to me at least. Um then the the uh like even the guys, like being 16 to 18 years old, uh, you know, usually guys mature a little bit later than women, but like the the men were just like properly fit and healthy looking. And yeah, like they're the people I was with are mostly Serbs, so Serbs definitely have this kind of genetic leaning to look super masculine compared to your average person. But like I've seen the same now that I've traveled over the world. It's often the case in regardless of the the the country and the exact genetics they have, like any country to me where they are living a healthier, more outdoor, natural lifestyle, eating healthier food, spending more time sitting outside, walking outside, the people, first of all, the most obvious thing is they have like virtually no obesity in Europe compared to the United States. I mean, it's it's astounding. And the fact that people aren't like screaming from the rooftops demanding answers as to why people in the US are so obese and like why we're basically being poisoned like like farm cattle, like factory farm cattle, is kind of shocking. But in the same way, if you have a lot less obese people, you know, that bell curve and statistics where you have like a certain amount of people in the middle and then certain amount of people really overweight and really underweight, but like the average is in a certain healthy range. That whole range in Europe and other cultures is like just even now, even with all the toxic artificial light, it's just shifted over to like less sickness and more health. So, in other words, like there's many, many more people who are robustly healthy and fewer people, like as soon as you shift that that whole bell curve over just a little bit out of the disease and obesity, you get a lot more healthy people, right? And it's and like the level of radiance of health, not to say we don't have people like that in the states, you know, that 60-year-old down the road who's just radiant and vibrant. You've everybody sees that here and there, I would think. But in Europe, it's just like, whoa. There's like these 60, 70-year-old people who are just like out having a glass of wine or like whatever, and they're just doing great. So, anyway, that was something that was really interesting for me to observe. I was like, this is interesting, what's going on? And I was there for a year. So, anyway, the reason I brought that up to your question about the business, actually, it's just a interesting and relevant digression. And so for for me and for the listener, I would say that was the kind of stuff I was thinking about. And I knew I believed, as as we said about the paleo and this then, I believe that what I found was like the holy grail. First I thought paleo was it, and then I realized that was wrong, and then I thought the um the stuff about light and mitochondria was it. And I say thought because it's no longer exactly what I believe, and I'd love to get into that, but it it I still believe there's a very important significance. It's just not the end, it's just not the be all end all. And I believe this light stuff's way more important than food and diet still, for the most part, right? Uh, or at least worth noting at least at that same level, if not a little bit more. So, as far as how did the business come about? Um, I was communicating with people in this kind of niche community that I mentioned where I had started the business, but before I started the business, this was about two years prior, about it was just on the Facebook groups. And I had one guy reach out to me who is two years older, maybe three years older. He grew up in Napa Valley family uh Family had a winery and a resort and something like that in Calistoga, I believe. And he, yeah, so a cool guy was like going to actually was going to go play football for Princeton. Like he was an amazing football player, American football player. Um, but he got into health and startups and all this stuff and kind of like veered off that path to like much to the surprise, I think, of his of his family and people who that was like his, he was like that guy, like the quarterback, you know, the jock, but also like a freaking genius. And so he had been in this community and started sending me, he's like, dude, I think you should read these books. Like, I've kind of feel like I, you know, he's a couple years ahead of me. And you know, when you're younger, you feel like that age difference is a big deal. And so I um I was like, oh, I gotta take this guy's advice. And so I started reading these startup books. I read four books that were really, really valuable. One was the four-hour work week from Tim Ferris, which basically told me that there's this possibility that I wasn't really aware of, but he explained it very nicely, and even in the early 2000s when he wrote that or mid-2000s or whatever, um, that you could basically make money online, work from everywhere, and join what he called the new rich, which is people who don't necessarily, they're not necessarily billionaires, but they have time freedom and location freedom. And I thought that was really cool. And so it opened my mind that he talked about the idea of starting a muse, like just an idea. Even if you already have a, if you're in school or you're like I was in high school or you're at you have a job, just starting your muse, it's your project on the side. And so I started thinking like, okay, there's I called it the thing. Like, there's a thing I'm looking for. I don't know what it is, but I was just kind of like attached to this idea and keeping it alive. And then I read the book, um, let's see, Zero to One by Peter Thiel, which the big takeaway that I still remember from that was just that the hardest part of doing anything, anything in in business and so on is going from zero to one. So going from nothing to something, scaling something's easier. But anyway, I thought that's interesting. So I didn't invent blue blocking glasses, but I would say my version of zero to one is something like taking this idea that nobody's really familiar with in the mainstream and making it mainstream. Once it goes mainstream, like we get more mainstream, we can scale a lot, but it's like this idea of making it relatable for people, I would say, is some aspect of what we're doing. Um, then there's a book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, from I think it was Ben Horowitz, which says basically everything in the title. Like there aren't necessarily easy answers. You have to be willing to think out of the box. Um, that's the one I remember the least, but I do believe it was still valuable. And then, and I think this could be amazing for anybody who's starting a company or wants some valuable resources. And then the roadmap, the the maybe the best book of all, but they were all critical, was called The Lean Startup. And the lean startup by a guy named Eric Reese, and he basically talks about how it sounds like you looks like you're familiar with the book by your uh gestures, but basically, for the for the for the listener who's not familiar, uh, it's a really great book, and it basically talks about a different model of running a startup, what he calls the lean startup, as opposed to the traditional startup where you have a business plan and you take on an investment and you build a team and you put all this resource, all these resources into executing this plan, and most of those just fail and waste a bunch of money. But like I was saying earlier offline when we talked about the employee size of a company, and people judge that. It's like that's the old model. That's like the people who think you need to go to college to be smart would basically judge a company's success based on the number of employees. That's the opposite of the model today of how it actually is, in my opinion. But anyway, um, so in the book, he explains how in this in the manufacturing industry industry, which he went into and studied after his startup miserably failed and lost millions of dollars, they built all these custom features and all this stuff, millions of dollars, tons of employees, lost all this fundraising money. And they found out that nobody even wanted the core product, much less all the features that they had built and spent years developing, right? So he went and evaluated uh Toyota and saw that they have this thing called lean manufacturing. And it's where they basically, instead of producing like hundreds of thousands of replacement parts for every or millions of replacement parts for all their vehicles on the road, they basically have designed really intelligent machinery which can produce much smaller amounts for a very cost, very cost-efficient price, uh, you know, in a cost-efficient way, they can produce much smaller amounts. And so their system's kind of like tracking real-time data of how many bumpers are being replaced at the local distributor, and that's all feeding up to the main factories. And like so, you take a bumper from the local place, and then it it sends a like a bump in the system. Okay, we need one at the regional, and then we need another one from the the the North American warehouse, and then we need another one from the factory in Japan. And it's like these numbers are more real time. So, in other words, they don't make way more than they need, it's much more real time, it's more lean. And so, in the same way you could start a startup where you're not doing all this fundraising and build-I mean, nothing wrong with fundraising if you have a great idea and you're gonna execute it, but um a lot of the time businesses just don't need that. Like, we didn't need that. What I did, and I followed these principles, and I didn't have money anyway, so it was like fine, was I had this high hypothesis, like it's the scientific method of business, right? So it's basically you have a hypothesis, you devise an experiment to try to disprove your hypothesis, you have certain criteria you're measuring for, the variables and everything you're looking at, devise the experiment, run the experiment, and then this is just the scientific method, and then you basically evaluate your results and see if you disproved your hypothesis or if you you should develop a new experiment to try to disprove your hypothesis a different way. And if you can't disprove the hypothesis, it's likely that maybe there's a theory or a law that's there. And so, anyway, he called it the build, measure, learn feedback loop. So you build an experiment, you measure with preset criteria. So, because if you don't have something preset that you're gonna measure for, you're just gonna adjust and you're not really gonna have anything solid and tangible because you'll cherry pick the data to support what you want to believe, right? And then you learn, and he has this term, you pivot or you persevere. So if you persevere, it's like I'm going with this, this is working, or pivot, it's like we need to adjust a little bit. Usually there's a degree of both, sticking with one part, losing another. So this is a bit the the long story, but again, I hope it's I hope it's valuable for people. So I I came back from my my year abroad when I had read these books. That's why I mentioned that. I was over there just reading, thinking a lot, way, probably thinking way too much. Um, I was kind of driving myself insane actually with the amount of thinking I was doing about like what I was gonna do with my life when I was 16. And so um, but but it worked out in some some respects. I mean, it's it's it's working out, I would say. Anyway, I came back and I had my senior year in the in and oh my gosh, I was so ready to like drop out of high school. It was so bad. I was like, what the heck am I doing? Sitting in like a box with like artificial light, an EMF, Wi-Fi. Like, this is there was a time when I was literally like about to get on a plane and fly to San Francisco to meet with this friend of mine and like live on a couch in San Francisco and like you know, start a startup of some kind. Like, I'm almost it's funny, I'm I'm shocked I didn't actually end up doing that. It would have been hilarious. My my dad probably would have would have excommunicated me. But um, but anyway, I'm just joking, you know, he supports me. But basically, uh it was an interesting time. So I finished high school, thankfully, and had a a lot of great connections. But as soon as it finished, I had all these ideas. I was like, well, maybe I'll be a like a light coach, a health coach about the stuff I've been learning about light, right? Because that's what a lot of people, everybody's a coach now. Nothing really wrong with coaches, but like I think a lot of people myself, I would have, I would have very much been in this camp. Is like people are not necessarily certified to teach. Like they haven't necessarily done the growth, and it's almost like it's almost like the coaching process is like their own therapy process, like with other people paying them. It's interesting, but that's a whole different conversation. Um, but anyway, one I imagine you're somewhat familiar with. So, you know, being in the in the training and fitness industry. Um then I thought, okay, well, maybe I'll make light bulbs, which we're actually working on finally, um, years later. But so like a healthy light bulb, but it seemed kind of obscure. It didn't really click. I was on like Alibaba and looking at what I could find. And then finally, um, I was I was landscaping. I was planning to take gap years. So I was doing landscaping over the summer and throughout the year. I was I was as young as I can remember. I would like leaf rake in the fall, snow shovel in the winter, and make some money, a couple hundred dollars to my name. And I would uh I was preparing for a gap year. So this is I'll close off the story of how the business started because this is this is great to me. So I hope it's great to you. So basically, I was landscaping, making money, and I had all this information in my head, what I believe to be like the cure for cancer, that's way, way beyond. I'm like, okay, I already thought the paleo diet was a big deal. I've now discovered, imagine the hubris when you're like, oh, I've discovered something that's way beyond the paleo diet. I didn't like you, it was funny. You said, you know, you'll research and you realize how much you don't know. For me, it was almost the opposite. It was like I learned more, and I was like, now I know everything for sure. I got it all figured out, which was not the case, but I thought it. And so I was pushing a lawnmower every day and digging holes and stuff, and I loved that work. I was like shirtless half the time out in the sun, listening to podcasts. So it was a great job, and I loved it. But I was sitting here thinking, like, I'm much more intelligent than $20 an hour. And $20 an hour was pretty good for a high schooler at that time in 2017. But um it was like, I know more than this. Like, I thought I had the cure to cancer and all this stuff. And to some extent, I still believe that that is true. That information is the foundation for a new model of health. And so I remember listening to a podcast, and this is how simply it came about. I didn't really force it, right? Um, and maybe this is a lesson for people, myself included, of how sometimes we don't have to try to force things, but just following the clues more. So I was listening to a podcast of this main doctor who had kind of connected all these dots for me. He was being interviewed by a guy named Luke Story. Maybe you've heard of Luke Story. He's a great lifestyle podcaster out of LA. He has a show called The Lifestylist. He's interviewed many, many, many of the top health and wellness people and other psycho psychology people and all sorts of things.

So today I'm joined by Curtis Christofferson on my very first micro interview on the future of fitness. Kurt is the owner and founder of Workout and Innovative Fitness. He is a 20-year veteran in the wellness space and he's got the success to prove it. He's also a long-term friend and colleague. Kurt just recently launched a newsletter called Healthy Ambitions to give back to the industry that's given him so much. His goal to help other entrepreneurs scale their wellness businesses just like he has. All right, Kurt. What is one actionable insight you can provide our listeners that has been incredibly valuable to you in your business career? Wow, powerful question.

And I could have so many answers to that one. But you know, I'd say that, you know, the biggest element of scaling your business is hiring the right people. And without the right people, you can't scale. And, you know, one of my token rules is hire people that you admire. Hire who you admire. When you do that, chances are the people that you admire have some level of experience, education, or impact that you might not be able to provide. And so when you hire people that you admire and the value that they bring to your organization, inevitably they're gonna help you scale your business, no matter how big or small it is. When you hire people that are unlike yourself that contribute value that you can't contribute, you're winning. And so my biggest rule, hire who you admire, whether it's the things that you admire about them around their education, experience, impact, or even how they lead their personal life. I think when you surround yourself with great people, you're winning the day.

Oh, that's awesome. Kurt, thank you so much for that. And if you guys want to learn more, please check out the Healthy Ambitions newsletter. You can go to Curtis Christofferson.com to subscribe and learn more about it and all the great content he's putting out there. Thank you, Kurt. Awesome. Thanks.

Anyway, celebrities and whatnot. Um, really great guy. He's now a friend. So anyway, I was just listening to his podcast because my doctor, who I followed, was on that show. I wouldn't listen to any podcast in particular, I would just listen to whichever podcast that this guy went on to, right? And then this uh host who I was resonating with, he had some great energy, seemed like a great guy. On that ad spot in the middle of the podcast, you know, they have all the ads now and and since forever, um, they he advertised this event he was going to be putting on in New York City. Uh, just a little, a little talk to maybe 20 or 30 people at this beauty parlor, right? He was his brand was much smaller at the time. He was a much bigger podcast and brand now. But I was like, I want to be on this guy's podcast because I knew in that moment as I was listening, I was like, I know that I can explain the science that this doctor is explaining because I've studied it for over two years now in detail. It was basically all I focused on. I can explain this in a way that this podcaster's audience would resonate with and relate to and be able to apply much, much more effectively and easily. And so this was my theory, my hypothesis, right? So I devised the experiment, drive up to New York, it's only two hours. The guy's coming all the way from LA, so he's a lot closer to me here than he is on the other side of the country. So I might as well go pitch him there. Went up with a friend of mine who was into this stuff as well, had our custom-made blue light blocking glasses because we were wearing these super ugly, cheap safety goggle blue blocking glasses, which were the only thing at the time that really blocked the right wavelengths of light, other than going and having them custom made for like four or five hundred dollars by an optician. Eventually we found a way to have them custom made a little less expensive, which we did. And so my friend and I had these cool custom made glasses. So we show up at this guy's little talk, 20 or 30 people there, chat and kind of stand out on the sidewalk with him for an hour or so talking after the fact, and he was really friendly and really open. And uh he asked us first, like, where'd you get those glasses? And we're like, Oh, we'll set you up with the company. And then that's saying so. I asked, it's an interesting energetic thing, but I basically he asked a favor of us, of something like that, and I asked a favor of him, like, hey, can I be on your podcast? I bet you can you give me a chance, basically. I bet I could do this. Well, the the the short version of that much longer story there on the podcast is that it didn't come out for six or seven months. After that, I had already gone on this gap year I was saving my money for, traveled all around Europe. Came out in April or so of 2018, but it became his number one most downloaded podcast of all time for it, held that number one for over a year. And this guy has interviewed, I'm talking like New York Times best-selling authors, like all the big people in the health and wellness space. He's interviewed all of them, and many he had interviewed at that point already. So it was like a shock that his youngest, least known guest, and by far the longest episode, was the number one download. It just struck a chord. So my hypothesis was proven, was not disproven at least, right? So that was really cool. Um, and that that led to all sorts of exposure, actually, like kicking the business off. Actually, that podcast led to uh now a good friend of mine, but one of the um top music producers in in history, really in our generation out in California, just reaching out to me being like, hey, this is really cool stuff. Do you want to come out and connect? And I started connecting with him and all sorts of cool people out there. Um, but anyway, that same night before the podcast request, he had asked about the glasses and where we got them. And I was like, I remember thinking when some company tried to make the glasses cool and they they failed, the quality didn't end up being good. They did a whole Kickstarter thing, right? Perfect example of not the lean start of a whole Kickstarter campaign. Although it's a little better than taking somebody else's money, you at least take your customers' money. But um, anyway, so that's that's a little more again lean. But anyway, this company kind of failed. And so I remember thinking when I saw that that Kickstarter thing, that I was like, finally, somebody's gonna do the glasses correctly. So I like because I would never want to do that myself. I just remember thinking that very clearly. Like I would never want to make glasses. And so, anyway, sure enough, when I'm trying to connect this guy, Luke, the podcaster, with this company that can do this custom tinting uh for a reasonable price, it was a huge pain. It was really inconvenient. It wasn't their core business. It was like a sort of one-off thing they would do as a favor for customers with this really specific need. And you had to go buy your own frame anyway and get the right lenses cut and just send the lenses. You wouldn't even send them the frame. They didn't want a frame, they just they didn't want to have to take them. They'd like literally you send them the lenses, the raw lenses, they tint them, send them back, and your optician would have to put the lenses back in. Now it's easy to put the lenses in and out of your own frame. Like I mean, for anybody listening to the video, like I learned how to do this because I did it all day. I like made glasses. But if you don't know what to do, then you'll think you'll break it, right? You want an optician to do it. So anyway, I had seen an article right around that period of this is way long, but let's just go with it. So I'd seen an article around this period of how to make your own blue blocking glasses, how to do this tinting yourself. You buy a hot plate, you buy a chemistry beaker, you buy the tint bottle, you yeah, like literally a chemistry hot plate. Like uh, you could use an electric stove, it'd probably do the same thing, but the hot plate was a little more adjustable. And then you basically get the water to boiling in a in a in a glass chemistry beaker, and then you would, you know, you'd have the tint mixture in there, so it was water and tint, and then you would dip the lenses in with a lens holder, a device just for holding two pairs of like a pair of lenses. You'd hold, you'd keep them in there for 10, 20 minutes, something like that. And then you'd test the lenses with the meter that we bought to make sure we tested all our lenses to have that to ensure that they had the right density of the tint, which meant that they would be having the right protective properties of that tint. Uh, and so that's what we did. And I that that was the article. And then I thought, well, you know what? Let me just do that for this guy. And then it then it just clicked. It became obvious in that moment. I was like, wait a minute, I could do this for him, I could do this for the entire community. And so I just devised the experiment. I created a Google form. People had to fill out the Google form with their name, their information. I gave them exact instructions on which website to send their, to, to go buy frames from. So it was a custom tinting service in the beginning. I called it Matt's Custom Blue Blockers. People could pick a website or pick the frame they wanted from certain websites, make sure they got the lenses included in the frames, uh, but without this anti-reflective coatings that would block our tint from getting into the lens. And so, you know, check the box, no anti-reflective coating, whatever, order it, order it to this address, to my house, my garage. Uh, you know, and if once they confirmed, they'd confirm that they've already sent payment through PayPal on the Google Horn. They checked the box and I had instructions which address to send to, how much money, and uh they'd fill out which color tint they wanted, the yellow or the red for the day or night, respectively. And then we'd send them back to them once they were tinted and if they had confirmed that they'd already paid. And it was, it was really cool. Uh, it was like an operation in my garage for about from September until May of 2017 to 2018. And as far as, I mean, I guess this is sort of how the business started, you asked when did it really become a thing? I think when it started to become a a thing, so to speak, something that was that was potentially taking off was when a customer had said, Hey, why don't you just offer some fixed styles? Why don't you uh give us that option rather than us having to send our own frame? And that's when I realized this has to be a brand. This can't just be a custom tending service, there's something here. And then I decided the name Ra because it's the Egyptian sun god and optics, the science that studies light. So um, you know, basically raw optics means sunlight. Um, and that that's how the company started. And then it just grew from there with a few different influencers promoting us, like this guy Luke Story, who I had done the podcast with, this guy, Dr. Jack Cruz, who is this main uh authority figure in this space of light and mitochondria and health and wellness, who kind of got me into the space. He started sharing this with his audience. Eventually, Ben Greenfield picked up on it because he heard me on a podcast and I connected with him, and that definitely brought us out to a bigger audience. So that's really how that's the whole that's the whole story. I mean, that takes up to 2018, which is still years ago. But yeah, I appreciate you asking, man.

Yeah, man, that's uh that's a great story. I can tell you're excited about um the company and how it started and the purpose that you have behind it. I mean, it's it's obviously something that you live and breathe, which is which is huge. I mean, if you're gonna put in the time, energy, um, occasional points of suffering to do a startup, uh, you have to have a pretty strong drive of, you know, not to make it cliched of why, right? The the classic why of what you're doing.

Yeah.

Um when you look at this industry, and I guess uh can we call it like blue block blue blocking light product? I mean, uh I I doubt I know you're not old enough to remember, but I'm sure you know of it. Like I I remember the old blue blockers, right? I don't know if that was like the 90s and they had the catchy jingle, and you know, um it was kind of funny that people wear now, like people wear the old school blue blockers as kind of a joke, but I feel like it kind of started a little bit back then. Um how would you say like the arc of this particular product category? Like, you know, people like Ben Greenfield, you know, I can kind of put into like a little bit of the biohacker community, which is early adopters for many pieces of technology. But where do you think this is now? Are you are you nearing mass adoption? Um, you know, I I mean you have a I want to touch on the partnership with Aura. That's huge, right? That's a big deal. But like, where do you think we are right now in this in this uh in that cycle?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um so I would say that we have not reached a mass market awareness yet. But there's there's a cut we have to distinguish blue blockers. I'm glad you mentioned the blue blocker sunglasses. So blue blocker sunglasses were a type of sunglass that was particularly successful. Um, and their kind of unique pitch was that they're sunglasses, but they particular particularly reduce blue light in addition to violet and ultraviolet light. And the idea there being that you know, violet and ultra or ultraviolet light in particular is uh high energy. It can be damaging if you get excess amounts, so that's something that pretty much all sunglasses filter out, uh, except maybe some really cheap sunglasses that don't really work. But um, the blue light is also pretty high energy and it's in the visible range, so it uh causes a large portion of the visual discomfort, glare, uh, and brightness that people can experience when they're out in the sun. So the idea of blue blockers, it's like a it was they're as I recall, very like brownish orange, like a deep orange brown lens that's very much shaded. And so, yeah, the idea was that it would just give you a really nice experience of the world because you're not just cutting out the ultraviolet, you're also cutting out the other shorter wavelengths of light. And there is actually something to that. I mean, people could use our lenses as sunglasses if they want to. We don't generally recommend sunglasses. Glasses is a concept. But so anyway, to make this a little more brief. So sunglasses are not, that's that's like blue blocker sunglasses. They're almost a completely different product. They are because they're marketed for people protecting sunlight. So those are never intended for or made for artificial light, right? So that's one. Now then more recently, there is a development of blue light protection eyewear for artificial light sources, like screens, like LEDs, and so on, primarily from a mainstream perspective, primarily for screens, because people are staring at screens. There's high energy blue light. It's interesting, there was a study that came out recently that basically it was a meta like an analysis of multiple other studies that which is actually pretty cool that they did this. Um they organized all the other studies that have been done on blue light and they actually reviewed them. Sadly, uh, that they to me that they would spend so much time without really doing a better job of controlling for their variables, but more than half of the products used in the studies they analyzed were clear lens blue light blocking glasses. And so I want to talk about those. So that's like when you talk about there's the sunglasses, so we'll put those aside because that's not really what we're dealing with. There are blue light blocking glasses today, which are clear lenses, which are the main product that people are currently purchasing. So the number one thing you'll get if you get blue light glasses or blue blockers on Amazon or from any major optical store or any local independent optician, even, they offer blue light glasses. Usually it's in the form of a coating that they add to your prescription. And this coating in the industry is called a UV 420 coating because it blocks ultraviolet light and it blocks blue and indigo light up to 420 nanometers. The issue is that the LEDs that are the basis of all modern lighting, screens and general lighting, emit the peak of their blue light at 455 nanometers. So there's a peak which ranges from around 430 to around 480, more or less, uh, or even 435 to 480, something like that. Um, but the the peak is centered at 455 nanometers. So the point is, if you have that peak and it goes down to 430, 435, there's some blue light emission at that wavelength range. There's none at 420 nanometers. So if you have a lens that blocks all the blue light below 420 nanometers, and then by the time you get to 430, it's blocking, you know, less than 10%, less than 20% for the most part. And by the time you get to 450, the core of that spike, it's blocking zero. I mean, 0.1, 0.2, 1% maximum. Uh some, some maybe 2%, but again, virtually nothing. We're talking out of 100, right? Um, these lenses, the point is they don't block the light coming from screens. They block blue light from the sun, but that's not what we're concerned with, as I was just sharing. We don't believe in in my world that sunglasses are something people should wear every day. It's it's something you should wear in extreme circumstances, very bright lighting conditions if you feel the need. A lot of people, the light experts I work with, light doctor I work with, never wear sunglasses. When he's skiing on a boat, I never do either. When I'm on a boat, I'll get I like the light reflection. It makes me sleep well. It makes me feel good. Um, if it's too bright, I'll wear some kind of protection. But so we have to distinguish. So there's the sunglasses out the window now. There's the blue light glasses, the clear lens blue light glasses is how we distinguish, which effectively don't work. But that's like 95%. Uh, I don't actually have the exact numbers, but just an estimate is about 90 to 95% of all the products that are sold on the market. Why? Not that me and you know, my company and the other company selling the colored lenses that actually block more of the light are so small or something like this. No, it's just that the clear lenses have been picked up by Warby Parker, by Xenny Optical, by Glasses USA, every major online glasses retail and every major lens crafters, you know, some like all the offline, even physical retail shops, they'll add this blue light coating. So just by sheer volume, because they've added the blue light coating to practically everyone's glasses now for a ridiculous, you know, $250 upcharge because it doesn't even do anything, um, that's that's basically what they what's happening. So that I would say has reached mainstream adoption or very close to it. Like that is mass market adoption. The clear lens blue light glasses, they're there. Anybody you talk to about blue light, blue light glasses, almost anybody knows about it. Okay. Now the the colored lenses that actually block the meaningful blue light. So when you actually block that blue light in that range that comes off screens in LEDs, what caught what happens is that if you have enough pigment in the lens to absorb that light, it actually causes the lens to have a color. The pigment causes the color because the pigment's absorbing light. So you could say the pigment causes the color or the absorption of light causes the color. It's like saying the same thing. Um, so basically it's it's the, and this is in the case of these yellow lenses for those watching this, these yellow lenses are basically yellow because what's coming in uh one side isn't being fully transmitted through the other side. So like this is me, if you're looking at the video, I don't know if the video is going to be there. This is me with without blue light, and this is me with blue light. So it changes the color. But again, in order to remove, let me put it this way, the blue light that causes the issues like retinal damage and melatonin suppression, which aren't things we visually see happening. We might feel them a little bit, but we don't see them because they're non-visual effects, is the same blue light. That's why we call it blue light. It's the wavelengths of light that are in the range that we would see as the color blue for the most part. Um, so anyway, that is what we're doing. And so the clear or the colored lenses that actually block blue light, I would just call them um real blue light protection eyewear, is not near mainstream adopt or not in mainstream adoption, I would say. It's getting there. We have, from from my perspective, as one of the leading companies in the space, we had a partnership with Aura, which is a, you know, originally a very niche biohacking company that's now, I think you could say mainstream effectively, because they've had their products on every NBA player around the pandemic in order to help test their uh body temps to see if they were you know potentially infected before they might have felt any symptoms. And so, you know, that was that's gone pretty mainstream. They so we had a partnership with them last summer, which was just a simple referral program. So it was like a great incentive if you're an Aura member, hey, refer a friend, buy an aura ring to buy a ring, and then we'll give you, as the referrer, if if your friend purchases, we'll give you a free pair of raw optics. And so, of course, many people were incentivized in a way that they wouldn't previously have been to actually go out and refer a friend. And that's great for Aura, it was great for us. Uh, you know, we sold them the glasses and they gifted them out, and uh it was it was amazing. One of the coolest things was the feedback we got uh from the customers. Many people who didn't expect any results or were skeptical, but they took it because it was a free gift, ended up leaving reviews saying things like, you know, I didn't believe the hype. I saw that you could, you know, people said they slept better the first night. I didn't believe it, but I wanted to try it. I wore the glasses, I proceeded to have the best night's sleep I had in months. Believe the hype, they live up to it. That's like almost exact words of one of the it's hard to forget. Um it was really cool. And then there was people who's like literally had chronic sleep issues for years. One one woman said she thought it was her aging and menopause, and she realized when she wore the glasses, her sleep got so much better it wasn't aging and menopause. She looked back on her life and saw that it was just the increasing screen time over the last 10 to 20 years. And she was so grateful. And it was it was really awesome. But just to close the loop of the mainstream adoption, I think we're getting there with things like the partnership with Aura, with people like Ben Greenfield, who's getting more and more you know popular in public, um, getting talking about blue light glasses. And lastly, I would add that we have many top celebrities and athletes around the world using our products. So, for example, this is just I don't even know what to make of this. I think it's serendipity and uh an amazing coincidence, like divine in some respects. But I was in Norway six years ago, and this was 2018, so almost six years ago, so five years ago in the summer, and I met a young guy named Arling Holland, who is a uh young Norwegian soccer player at the time. And you know, I just connected with him. I was actually meeting with friends of mine who were uh one friend who was like a kind of friend and personal trainer and health coach, you could say, for a lot of these young soccer players at this at this local club and the highest top league in Norway, but it's not like the big leagues in Spain or England. It's you know kind of like the equivalent to you know Second League in the United States. If you had like the main baseball league, then you have the second league below. I forget exactly what it's called, but you know what I mean. So anyway, um, but for the locals, it was still a big deal, right? Like this is their home team and whatnot. Anyway, this one this one particular player uh got traded to some bigger teams and like over the years just kind of kept building up. And he got traded, you know, last year maybe you're familiar with him, but he got traded to Manchester City, and now he's one of the biggest players in the world. He broke the record for uh the scoring, the most goals scored in a single season in the Premier League, which is not easy to do because it's the top league in the world. And like anyway, so this guy's really big and he's been using our glasses all along the way. Have they made him the player he is? Not necessarily, but I would I would definitely go as far as saying that having had exposure to the principles of what I call the light diet, so optimal health through you know, uh uh and deeper understanding of light and mitochondria probably has definitely benefited his kind of cat, you know, catapult to success from a health standpoint. Getting light improves your physiology significantly, knowing that it's not good to drink a bunch of alcohol, obviously, which a lot of players shockingly do, um, you know, knowing that uh you should block blue light at night to help with your recovery and repair, knowing that you can use things like red light therapy and maybe arguably more important than everything else, which is uh what I uh referred to earlier on, the importance of meditation, which I didn't instill in him. It was actually a friend of mine who I was meeting in Norway who shared this information uh with Arling. I believe he was one of the first people, if not the first. And he also is a guy who shared this information with me. Really great guy. He's a fitness trainer and just a really, really intelligent person. But anyway, uh that that is where the the products are. So I think mass market adoption is is very close.

The you know, one of the things I I've I've thought about these products is I've had the opportunity to uh to use them and I like them. I use the evening ones, I don't have the daytime ones yet. The uh yet. Um I think there's a really big opportunity for the fitness profession, not just the practitioners, the coaches, you know, the trainers, um, but also like health clubs and gyms as well to to have these in. Because it's you know, as as this industry starts to find its way into like the larger wellness um paradigm, right? It's like fitness is kind of finding its way right now. Um it's really important that we we talk about overall health and wellness. And this is a really simple tool. Like, you know, it's a one-time I look at it as a way as like, and people can use the workout platform too. It's like go through training and go there, you can have access to you know uh products like Aura or you know, you can build a recommendation. But I think as like a starter kit, like if I was I if I was still running a gym and coaching people in the world of fitness, I would say, you know, coming in, hey, this is your starter package, right? We're gonna talk about your sleep. I want to start tracking with a wearable, like you have these opportunities and these new tools um to give your clients that just offer more value in in more ways where you can touch them outside of that one hour or three hours a week that they come into your gym. Um and that's a really um, you know, that's a really powerful thing. I mean, if people want to get involved, and this is uh, I know we kind of have to wrap up here in a minute, but um, if people want to get involved in what you're doing and they are in this field, like what are some of the ways that they can be involved in raw optics?

Yeah, what do you when you say involvement? By the way, I'll just say I I can go a little bit longer if you have if you want to go a little bit longer. So I just I sent you a message in the chat. Uh anyway, so yeah, if if we want to continue a little bit more, I'm happy to, because I know I've kind of answered some questions pretty thoroughly. Maybe there's some other stuff you wanted to touch. But anyway, um, as far as getting involved, what are you referring to? Like, like if they want to sell it.

I mean, is there um ways to do like um yeah?

I see, yeah, yeah, of course. Uh well, we have a lot of different opportunities. So, for example, the classic simple partnership that we that we run with many people is a simple um educational sort of affiliate model. So, where if somebody has an audience and they want to promote, we can give them a unique discount. And I don't just say promote, I should say educate and spread the message because the only way anybody's ever going to sell our products is by educating. So it's it's really cool, and I'll touch on that in a second. But basically, people can share a discount code with their audience and then get commissions for their sales, right? And that's a really great model because then it's just like if you sell, then you get paid. Great, it works out. If you have a really engaged audience and you're sharing valuable content, then you know you'll make some good money. Um, so that's a really great, it's not like a whole MLM thing or this or that. No, it's just, you know, we sign people up, we vet people who we trust, and that's it. Uh, you know, we don't just accept anybody who applies. So basically that's one thing people can do. And then if if that's successful, then we can look at all sorts of uh deeper ways of collaborating. Not to say that that's not deep, it can be, but other ways of collaborating, I should say, um, that are maybe more involved. Yeah, all kinds of frame collaborations. We can do a bra, you know, we're doing some really cool uh custom branded frames with different influencers right now who have been really successful, and they're like, hey, I'd left out my own frame. So there's all sorts of cool stuff we can get into. Uh, and that's with individuals, with with companies, brands, uh, with, you know, well, you know, it kind of there's a there's not really a clear line between individuals and companies in this world today. You could be a coach and have your own coaching company and and so on, and then you gotta have a fit a studio, right, or a gym. But so anyway, people with gyms or studios or trainers, they can actually, if they wanted to retail our products, people can retail our products. So they could have a little display case and and something we've been getting into more recently, uh, the more brick and mortar physical retail as opposed to the e-commerce, which is what we've been focused on until now and continuing to be focused on primarily. But anyway, this is something because people ask us about it. So we kind of cater to what people ask for, right? Um, so this is a great opportunity. If anybody wants to get in touch, they can email us partners at roptics.com. Um that's a great, a great angle, is actually retailing these products because that offers people more margins. Obviously, they have to make the sale, but you know, we'll buy back people's untouched inventory if they don't sell it. Like we're not really worried, you know. I mean, at least I say that now. If somebody listens to this down the road, it might not apply in the same way, but like we we know we're gonna, we we know the products will sell, they work. Um, so right, like it's fine. We're we're cool with anything. Um, we just want to get the information out. What I wanted to share about the products, and I appreciate you saying it's a great tool, is one of the quotes that really inspired me in this process. I I didn't hear it before starting the company, but I heard it or I read it one or two years into the company, and it just clarified for me why I was why I was doing what I was doing and and still am to a great extent. And it's from this um this, I guess you could call him a scientist, this architect and systems theorist and so on, named Buckminster Fuller, who's very, very well known in his time. Um, anyway, and there's actually an isotope or a form of carbon named after him called Buckminster Fullerine, um, like diamonds and graphene. And there's there's this one. But anyway, um, he had this amazing quote which basically said, paraphrasing here, if you want people, if you want to get people to understand something, don't bother just trying to teach them. It never works, he says pretty assertively. Um he says, instead, give them a tool, the use of which leads to new ways of thinking. So for me, that is that encompasses everything we're doing as a company. So, yes, we're selling products, but the only way someone's gonna buy our product anyway is if they understand why it's important and why it works. Otherwise, they're not gonna spend $164 on a pair of glasses with colored lenses and be like, what? Unless they understand what it is and why it works. Uh, and then and so if we've gotten somebody to that point where they're gonna make a purchase, we've also gotten them to the point where they understand blue light and circadian rhythms to some extent. Now, in other cases, like the Aura partnership, where they got them as free gifts, people didn't understand it. But that's fine too, because the product works, because it's based on science. And this is it just was so cool to have this opportunity to work with Aura, and we're probably gonna do something like that again in the future, uh, maybe even more in-depth kind of work. But but anyhow, um, that all is to be to be seen. But anyway, the cool thing is that not only do we have our customers who are kind of like you could make a case before the Aura partnership that we ran that most of our customers are in an echo chamber of being a biohacker and they're they're placeboing their way into having an effect because they're like, this is a big deal and it's gonna help me, and then they get the effects. And I believe in the placebo effect. I mean, it's not a matter of belief, it's it's proven fact. And they literally, in drug studies, they have to control for the placebo effect. You know, they have to actually change the the numbers to control for the fact that a huge amount of people who didn't get the treatment are gonna appear as if they got some form of treatment because they think they did, right? And they have to find the difference between that and then the other group, and that's the effects of the drug. But anyway, um, so otherwise it might look like the drug didn't do as much as it maybe did. Anyway, so we now had this other completely this other group of people, which was quite a large volume, like a huge amount of volume, even relative to our to our own uh you know quarterly, quarterly sales. It was like big, because aura is huge. And so they gave us this effectively this cohort which was largely skeptical. I mean, you could say they wear aura rings, so they're open health and wells, but there's a lot of people who wear aura rings who are just like your regular averyday person who doesn't even eat necessarily eat healthy, right? But they, and and based on the reviews, we know people were skeptical, but they still worked, right? So you don't even have to explain people the information. Like, although that's what we need to do to make a sale to most customers, they have to get to that level of understanding. Even if they just get the product in their hands because a friend gives it to them, they start as long as they just use it the way we tell them to, and they start sleeping better and feeling better, it works. So it's really, really cool. And it's it's just again, I I don't even like to make it about products. Like, you know, I've had many questions, like I believe now more and more studying inner light and how we can modify our health and wellness and everything with our mind, that we don't even need products to be healthy. And that's a bit of an odd thing to say as a guy who runs a product company, but like that we can actually all generate health and wellness internally through things like meditation. That might sound a bit far out there for people, including myself a few years ago, who are so attached to the idea that you need a certain diet and you need a certain product and you need all this stuff. If people go, if you know, um a great guy to get on your show at some point, if it's if if it would work out, would be Dr. Joe Dispenza, who's a less in the fitness world, more in the the world of mindset, but the science of meditation, he's they just published a landmark study with one of the top epigenetic researchers in the world out of UC San Diego, where they were studying the blood of some of the people who participate at their week-long retreats. And I've been to like 10 of their week-long retreats because they're so awesome. Um, and you know, and the changes that happen in people's physiology just from meditating are crazy, and they're measuring it because they were seeing people getting out of wheelchairs. They're like, we need to measure this. What is happening? Like, we're causing spontaneous remissions. Or the whole idea is spontaneous because they don't know what causes it. Well, they're figuring out what causes people to heal in instance from energy or changes in their physiology or whatever it is. They don't know exactly the mechanisms right now. They're finding all these really cool uh metabolites and proteins that that are in the blood of people after a week of meditation that are significantly elevated. Uh, now the reason I'm sharing that is because some Dr. Joe Dispenza, for example, he'll he'll share sentiments and and and thoughts and ideas, such as that people start healing when they actually start training their body to feel whole rather than, you know, most people we train our bodies to be addicted to judgment and hatred and guilt and pity and frustration. But when people actually start training their body for different emotions, like to be happy and open and joyful and forgiving, it requires, it's like going up steps. I thought of this analogy yesterday. It takes effort to get to the next step, but you've gotten to the next step and you've got up. If you don't want to go up, you don't have to take a step. But if you want to go up, you have to exert the effort required to take the step, and then you get up. And you can take a bunch of steps and you end up higher. And that's basically the way I look at it, like trading lower emotions for greater emotions. So anyway, I've come to believe personally, and this is my own greatest area of fascination now, that we can actually transform our own health with our mind and our thoughts and said differently that I believe that I kept myself sick by being addicted to being sick and being a victim. Like it was actually an identity thing. I never took the time when I was trying to heal with all these diets. I didn't actually take the time to think of what I would do with my life if I were healed. Like, would I go out and like if I didn't have these symptoms, you know? Would I go out and play more basketball with my friends? Would I go out and bike? Like, would I go out and get a life? And for this reason, um, and I say this with uh a bit of disappointment, but the health and wellness industry is a lot more like a sickness industry. Even the alternative, it's a lot there's a lot of obsessiveness about all of this stuff that isn't actually about health and wellness. I think more and more the health and wellness is the people out on a Saturday hiking up a mountain. That's just that's health and wellness. They're just not obsessing about what they're eating, organic, gluten free. They're just living a healthy life. I'm not saying that the health and wellness stuff isn't valuable. Again, I run a company making products that are science. Proven to help people sleep better. But I want to just add that perspective. Whenever if somebody listens to me, I never want anybody to walk away thinking from a podcast, oh shit, blue light's killing me. I'm going to die. It's like, you're going to be fine, first of all. Very strong and resilient. I believe more than anything in the resiliency and the internal capability of the body to heal, which is where we started. And it's a great place to kind of sort of maybe wrap up with another, you know, question or two if you want to get in any more detail here or in some other area. But this idea that when I tried these elimination diets, and I wasn't really feeling much better, I was actually feeling worse. And I didn't ask, I didn't know then, I didn't even have the knowledge to ask a greater question at that time, uh, or at least this particular question. But having learned about light and mitochondria and energy, and that there's so much more to physiology than just food and calories in, calories out, and you are what you eat, that there's so much more to how our body actually processes food and how our body functions in general, and has a lot more to do with energy and electricity and all these things. I've gotten really interested in, and in particular, seeing these miraculous spontaneous remissions from cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease, all kinds of crazy stuff, autoimmune diseases at in this meditation community at these retreats of Dr. Joe Dispenza. Um, I've really started to ask the question like, what is this force that causes us to heal? And like, do you even need to do a ridiculously strict elimination diet for two years for your gut to heal? Or could you just either strengthen or support the force that causes us to heal, or better said, get out of its way? That's the problem, is that in my in my experience and view is we're just in the way of that force. Like our choices to, this is like really in my in my view, um, really important for people to know. And myself, this is probably the most important thing I ever learned in my life. Like the choices that we make to be angry, and I'm not saying I'm perfect, I do this sometimes every day. I'll react about things, but the choices we make to be angry, to be mean, to be unkind, to be hateful, frustrated, resentful, impatient, uh, all of these emotions that we choose. And again, I'm not exempt from this. I do this too. Choosing to be a victim, choosing to be stressed, choosing to see limited possibility as opposed to unlimited possibility, as Dr. Joe Dispens would say, choosing to believe more in our past than in our future and to tell the story of the past more than the story of the future. I think more and more that this has some of the biggest consequences on our health. Because otherwise, like the universe is just energy, right? There's energy all within us and all around us, and it wants to move. I've actually come to believe that we actually we actually stop the flow of this energy or significantly hinder the flow of the energy that causes us to be alive through our own thoughts, our own words, our own choices, what they called in the Bible sin, um, which means in Greek to miss the mark, to fall short of like a higher way of doing things. So both psychologically and your actions and your words and your thoughts. Um anyway, that's my perspective at this point.

I love it, man. Uh obviously you're a deep thinker. Uh I can tell that uh, you know, we didn't have time to get into it, but you know, you've gone on some literally long hawks, long hikes and walks uh to present. Uh I imagine just think, right? And figure figure shit out, which is which is a really nice um benefit to having built your own business. And I and I appreciate it all. I mean, you mentioned a couple of things, like you know, obviously there's rawoptics.com, there's partners at rawoptics.com. People want to go follow you or maybe reach out to you. Is there any place that you want uh them to go?

Yeah, of course. Uh people can follow me on the light diet on Instagram. So I have this sort of brand and program I call the light diet, which is how we can improve our health with light. I'm in the process of refining it, making it more um yeah, refined. Essentially, we have a blog on our website called An Introduction to the Light Diet. Uh something, yeah, that's the name. And people could look that up. It might even be at rooptics.com forward slash the light diet. I think that redirects there. So anyway, um, people can check that out. People can message me on Instagram. I'll actually respond to pretty much all of my Instagram direct messages. So if somebody wants to get in touch with me, that's the best place to do it. If you don't have Instagram, you just gotta make one. Um email's the worst place to get in touch with me because I'll never respond. Um so basically, I mean, I might, but it'll take forever. So anyway, um, yeah, that's that's how people can get in touch. People should follow me at the Light Diet on Instagram, and they can and should follow raw underscore optics, our company page on Instagram as well for more of the science of light. The light diet page is more of my own thoughts, my own travels, etc. So yeah, I would say that's uh that's about it.

Right on, man. Well, Matt, I I really appreciate you spending some time with me, man. It's very interesting what you've done. Uh, and you know, at a relatively young age, you you've done quite a bit. And uh obviously you have a big mission and just keep Trump forward. And uh yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew Maruka.

Thanks so much, Eric. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure to speak with you.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.