EP 53 - EP 53 with Matt Maruca: Light is the Ultimate Fuel, Entrepreneurial Lessons as Spirituality and Living as Beings of Energy

Mics on, and this is not my podcast.

Yeah, this is the Soulcast. This is round 2, Light Diet, Matt Maruca. Here we are.

Here we go.

Wait, do you You find my name, right? Yeah, okay, sure. I gotta double check.

You blew me, bro. Yeah, my cover doxxed on camera.

Yeah, when did we do the last one?

Uh, it was in June of 2021, almost a year ago.

Yeah, almost a year.

Wow, time flies.

Yeah, time flies. A lot has happened since then. Um, yeah, well, here we are in, uh, in a beautiful space. We won't mention where we are. But round 2, I feel like anytime we talk, we should just need a, you know, a microphone going because we seem to align on so many things and have come to the same spiritual truths a lot of the time just from our own different, very different paths, right? Like you're much more, like you said, you haven't kind of gone the fitness route. You're more light mitochondria kind of background in terms of your knowledge, but it does seem to lead to the same kind of mentality and the spiritual truths that then direct how you live your life and how you should live your life, right?

Yeah, certainly. I, I've had a pretty interesting experience that brought me to that, as we probably discussed in the last episode. I don't even remember exactly what we talked about, definitely light, but it all comes together for sure because as I've come to understand, there is sort of let's say one capital T truth, like this idea of oneness.

Yep.

And so I've gotten deep into the science, as you mentioned, and this stuff from a place of trying to heal my health. You brought me to diet, it brought me to light, it brought me to spiritual perspective. And then of course I understand as a part of that, well, within this existence, why not take care of the body too? I never had the idea that you shouldn't take care of the body.

Yeah.

But I actually came into a point where when I first got into health, I was identifying as a person who was like sick. And so because I was reading on the different paleo blogs that if you do chronic cardio, like excess cardio training, you could actually basically wear down your cells faster. So I just sort of took a, oh my gosh, if I work out too hard, I'm actually going to hurt myself more. So it was like a more escape approach. But now I've learned more that if you change your mindset— mindset is everything.

Mindset is everything. I had this exact conversation literally yesterday, um, the belief about what you're doing to your body, what you're putting into your body. Um, not everything, you're not— you can't mindset your way out of McDonald's, you know. But if you are going to have McDonald's, don't cry about it. Don't be like, oh, this is going to impact my body really. Like, okay, I've had McDonald's in the past. Sometimes you're in a spot and like you need to eat it. I mean, you don't need to eat it, you can fast. That's my— would be my recommendation, just skip the meal. But Like, the belief about it is like, this McDonald's makes me stronger. This is gonna, you know, my body can process the toxins. Or literally don't even tell your body that there are toxins inside it. And it's, it seems like a ridiculous, uh, concept because, you know, or the belief in general is, oh yeah, McDonald's isn't that healthy for you. But if it's going to go into your body, if you are going through whatever events, not even just food related, we're talking about the, um you know, the, the mobile phone towers that are around. Yes, they're around. Uh, if you want to participate in a city, they're going to be around. You're going to be exposed to that radiation on some level. Uh, if you're like walking around like, oh God, the fucking radiation, it's everywhere, and the waves, and like feeling bad about it, cortisol, and the fear, which lowers your vibration, and then you're gonna be more susceptible to other things—

that's an option.

Or you just go, fuck it, this radiation's making me stronger. I'm the Hulk, baby. You know, like, take it in.

Yeah. I did that for a long time, the worrying about everything part. When I came across a teacher who was basically of the mindset that artificial light, blue light is going to kill you and EMF is going to kill you. And I sort of became sicker because I was already sick. But when I first learned about health and wellness and I was feeling bad and I had gut issues and headaches and all this allergies and stuff, I, I thought that it was something that was wrong in my body that was sort of beyond my mind, let's say, like I didn't have control over it.

Yeah.

And then I went into the diets as like, how can I fix what's wrong with me? But the fundamental belief was something's wrong with me. And then it went to the next level of like, all right, I'm going to do this other thing, lighten mitochondria, to fix what's fundamentally still wrong with me. So the premise was always that there was something wrong with me, right? And I didn't learn until going to someone like Dr. Joe Dispenza, who uses a bunch of science to explain this whole spiritual idea that we are all one. We are all whole and we're good how we are. We don't have to be apologetic about our existence. We don't have to be shameful that we're alive, and we can just be stoked and grateful that we're here.

Yeah.

And then I just started feeling better as I started to just say, wait, like, I'm good. Like, I don't have to be stressing about all that stuff. And I created— as many people probably do— I created my whole life to be an external representation of my internal stress and chaos, just basically reinforcing my addiction to those emotions constantly and forever. And so I never would have healed unless I finally decided that I'm already good, I'm already whole, and then I started healing. It's pretty interesting, right? First, uh, psychology, or it's irony because it's different from what we expect.

Yeah, and I think that's the most, like, the hardest thing for people to grasp is that same with fixing your health if you have an internal health problem Same with becoming successful in your career, same with being in the gym. Everything, like, you have to believe that it's possible or believe that you are whole or believe that you are capable in order to set the things in motion that then create that manifestation of yourself. Like, you can't, you can't do the thing first to fix, like you said, if you believe that there's a problem inside you, a health issue, because you only unlock that capability to fix that thing if you then believe it first. So it's like, it's kind of like chicken and the egg, like, well, it's not— you have to have the belief first. But people think that the physical realities of success have to happen first, and then it's like, now I've achieved it, now I can, you know, be happy or whatever. It's all internal. And, you know, I think we were speaking about this yesterday, is like, everything is the mind in that sense. It's very powerful, and it applies to everything. Like I said, your health, comes first, but then you realize, okay, well, this belief is holding you back here. Um, what else is holding me back? What, what other internal beliefs am I holding that is actually like why I'm maybe not successful in something else?

Yeah, I'm with you.

Um, why don't you speak about, um, the, the journey you have with the Raw Optics business? Because from, from the external, like, you're killing it. You have it— not killing, I don't want to use that language. You know, reverse. You're living it, you know, you're living this, you know, your business is succeeding, but you said that you were very, very stressed and it was wearing on you and you're thinking you were limited by this international business that was bringing success. So, so what was the journey there?

That's like, thank you for asking, man. So when I started Raw Optics, it was partially from a place of deep inspiration. That was a bedrock, let's say. But another part of the motivation was a lot of, let's say, what over time what became stress. In the beginning, it was almost all I was excited. I want to start a business and I was stoked. So I had spent years, as we talked about on the last discussion, years trying different diets to heal my body. And then after I tried all these different diets, I came into light mitochondria and how these work together to build health.

Hmm.

And so naturally, when I was graduating high school around age 18, about 4 years after getting into this whole health journey, I was asking the question, how can I make money from this so that I don't have to be beholden to the college path and my father's will and all these types of things? And I was very blessed that I was shown 3 books, 4 books actually, by a friend of mine when I was about 16. I was living abroad in Bosnia in Europe on an exchange program in high school, deeply studying all this health stuff, this stuff about mitochondria and light, applying it in this much more down-to-earth natural environment in this ex-Yugoslav country that was just sort of 30 years back. They walked outside more, they spent more time outside, they ate healthier, more wholesome food. They would go and get sun in the summer and swim in the rivers. It was just more outdoorsy life, and I really enjoyed it for the year I was there. So an American friend of mine through Facebook who I met in this health world was also into tech, so he was into that world, and he sent me these books. One was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

Mm-hmm.

The next was The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The third was Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and the fourth was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And the takeaways I got from each of those books, to put it really simply, was The 4-Hour Workweek has sort of showed me like there's this new way of living with what he calls the new rich, where you can basically make an income anywhere in the world online using the internet and basically do whatever you want.

Yep.

And have that freedom and be part of the new rich. And if you so desired, you could work only 4 hours a week. Now I could touch on how that, that idea from the book— I bought it so fully that it actually I used it to continue to reinforce an addiction to incompleteness in the sense that I thought that the goal was to only work 4 hours a week. So as long as I would, and then spend the rest of my time, just let's say screwing off, like doing whatever. And so I probably a little like too little, right?

4 hours in a week.

Well, he, you know, ideally he made the point that you could, if you systematized everything. And I do believe it's possible, but it made me I bought into his ethos, a different ethos, which— and I can't speak for who Tim Ferriss is now, that book was 20 years old, or almost 20 years old, but you know, at the time I came to see that the goal was to just be the guy sitting on the beach drinking mojitos, going out with girls, like doing whatever. And as the years went by, I finally realized, like, wait a minute. I heard someone say not long ago, actually, in a book, your work is just the thing you spend your time doing on this earth. It's not the only thing you do, but it's one of the main things you spend your time doing. You know, it's sort of like you're existing, you have to provide for your existence, and so you work. And so I came to believe though that anytime I was working, I was actually somehow like— so I was working on this business, but I held a simultaneously conflicting belief that my work was stopping me from like, let's say, going out and spending more time out in nature, or or going out and building up really high-level important relationships, whereas I'm doing administrative work, right? Now the logic wasn't complete, but I was so stuck in this like duality belief system that like either I'm living my best life or I'm working, and that it was sort of precluding me. And that was again just a belief. As I mentioned to you at dinner the other night, as I started to realign my thinking, I realized that was just an excuse to not be present in any situation, not to face life, not to be a man, let's say.

Yeah.

And just to kind of be afraid of everything. So that was what The 4-Hour Workweek— though the, the previous discussion we just had right now aside— it inspired me that I could sort of do anything, let's say, and have that lifestyle, which anyone can have. And I recommend that to everyone. It's very inspiring. The book Zero to One was very interesting in that it described the process of the inception of new ideas. So the idea being zero to one is the creation of a new idea, and then one to a billion or a million or 100,000 is scaling an idea. And it just got me really thinking like outside of the box, like that there is a zero to one moment when someone creates something new. Now, selling blue light blocking glasses, it wasn't a zero to one moment per se. It was a— it's something that already exists and I wanted to make it better. Yeah, but one could argue in a different way, the idea of bringing the consciousness of the awareness that light affects our health to any massive audience is a zero-to-one moment because no one's really done that before.

No, no, it's completely absent in terms of the mainstream fit, at least health and fitness, like the, the discourse. It's, it's food, diet, sleep, and supplements. And, you know, I do think there's like a a level of consciousness where these other things are kind of coming in and bringing in, and that's what I hope to aim to do as well. And something that— I mean, you can go into the nuts and bolts of this— I'm curious about is this idea that the amount of sunlight that we get is proportional to how you can use primarily carbohydrates in the body, is relevant to how much sunlight you're getting. You get more sunlight, you can have more carbohydrates, and you utilize them better in the body. So Do you know the nuts and bolts of what's happening there in the mitochondria or like what?

This is interesting. So from just a pure holistic biological level, and I want to address this and I want to go back to continuing the theme of the business, but to put it simply— sorry, no, it's okay, it's okay.

So would you want to finish that thought and then we'll go to that?

Yeah, so let's put carbohydrates on the side. Yeah, yeah. So, but definitely keep the notes. So The Zero to One book was mind-opening tremendously because it really showed me that, that you can create something new. And then scaling it's a different conversation. And so I want to create, I realized like if I could only have done one thing by the time I die, it would be having brought awareness about light to as many people as possible. I just thought that was a—

Boom.

This was a couple years ago, I just had this idea, but it was a pretty solid feeling I had that this could be a really good idea. And so I said, all right, let me go for that. So Zero to One, great book, highly recommended. Peter Thiel's the founder of PayPal, for those who don't know. Then the next book was The Lean Startup, which is amazing for startups. That was sort of like the roadmap. So Zero to One and The 4-Hour Workweek were sort of like inspiration. The Lean Startup's like a roadmap, and what it means, lean, as opposed to not lean, one can sort of intuitively feel what the difference is. But in a traditional manufacturing model, the book was based on Toyota's, what's called lean manufacturing. So in traditional manufacturing, when they would put out cars, they would manufacture huge amounts of all the spare parts, bumpers and everything, huge amounts. Toyota said like, well, wait a minute, you know, this is clearly a huge waste of cost. A lot of parts go wasted. Like, we don't need to do this. And they're all distributed, like, huge amounts of parts in this distribution center in North America and this one in Europe. So what Toyota did is they had lean manufacturing where they, they created all their machinery so that they could create, you know, the different parts with less machinery, basically. So more intelligent machinery, let's say. And then when there would be a problem, let's say with like, let's say you had a Toyota, you know, as opposed to a Honda or the other companies, the way they were doing it previously, to Toyota inspiring everyone else to shift this direction, they would have like a huge amount of parts sitting around. So you would go to the dealership and it would basically put— they described like a notch into the system. So you take a bumper and they have a small inventory they're keeping at the local distribution facilities, and then your need for that would pull one out of the system. It would come to you and it would just go up to the factory, up through the hierarchies, and just— they would basically produce as needed, you know, so okay, this many are being used, so this is how many we're producing. So it's like smart, it's lean, it's better for the business. So this guy had this idea, well, why don't we take that to the startup? Because there's so many startups, like especially at the end of the internet bubble, the guy was inspired because he had been in the internet bubble, and he created a company that was literally worthless, like nobody wanted the product, but because it was the internet bubble, they spent millions of dollars they got in investments to create these like sort of digital avatars that they thought you would be using when you were browsing on the internet, just sort of for people to like, you know, see who you are. But nobody wanted the product, so they spent millions of dollars, he describes, building all these crazy features out that literally nobody even wanted the core product. And they could have figured that out just by releasing a simpler version of the core product. And so he coined the term minimum viable product, and I think it's worth just briefly explaining what he explains in the book. The way to build a business is through what he calls the build-measure-learn-feedback loop. So you have a hypothesis, like in science, that I do this and it's going to have this result. So that's the hypothesis. So you build a minimum viable product, just like a science experiment, to test, is my hypothesis accurate? Does anyone actually give any shits about what I'm doing or what I think I'm gonna do here?

Yeah.

And so you build the MVP, they call it, minimum viable product, and then you have a specific set of criteria you're looking for. Like, if it meets this criteria, we're gonna move forward, and if it doesn't, where we're gonna pivot. So basically he says you, you measure based to the criteria, but you should set the criteria in advance because if you just do it and you don't have criteria you're going to measure against, then you're not really running an intelligent experiment because you could kind of warp the variables to favor whatever argument you want to. So anyway, that's the measure component of it. And then based on your measurement, you either, you learn and then you make the decision, am I going to persevere, meaning continue with the basis of the hypothesis, or pivot. It's basically the scientific method applied to a startup. So I had this idea when the glasses business started. It's a really cool story. I don't know if I've ever shared it on a podcast, but I was following this Dr. Jack Kruse, who taught me a lot about light and energy and is really a pioneer in the space. And I'm very grateful for his contribution. If it weren't for him, a lot of people wouldn't know about this, including probably the Mercolas and the Aspres of the world. He sort of disrupted the field and brought it out in a big way where they could kind of come on as like the, oh, he was the guy who got all the flack. Now let's look at this from level 2. And I was listening to him on a podcast one day, pushing a lawnmower, which is how I made money as a landscaper in high school, just landscaping, mowing grass, digging holes. Great hole. I was stronger than I've ever been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sun cooked, barefoot, shirtless. I think that's the best job for anyone who's listening to this who just needs to make money. Just go snow shovel in the winter and do landscaping. And I had all this free time to think. I listened to audiobooks, podcasts. So I listened to this podcast with this guy, Luke Storey, who I didn't know about at the time, interviewing this doctor. And I only knew about the podcast because he had posted it, Dr. Kruse, that he was on this podcast. And I listened, and then this guy Luke Storey says, hey, I'm gonna be up in New York City at an event, you know, sharing some information. Come up if you want to meet and hang out. And I thought like, "Oh my God, this is my chance!" I've been studying this guy, Dr. Cruz, for years, and, you know, like, I knew I could explain the science and the information and convey the energy in a way that people would relate to, maybe differently than the way he was relating. He was catching a whole crowd of intelligent doctors. I figured I might be able to reach another audience because I've been following it, studying all the blogs and everything for 2 years. So that was my hypothesis.

Yeah.

So my experiment was go up to New York City and talk to Luke Storey and ask if he'll have me on his podcast, you know, and he had a lot of big names on his podcast already, so I wasn't sure if it would work. Anyway, went up, he actually said yes, and the same night he asked me and my buddy who had these custom-made blue light blocking glasses, he said, where'd you guys get those made? And I said, well, we did this tinting service through this company and blah blah blah, and I tried to connect him, huge pain in the ass, the email chains. And I had seen an article about how do you tint your own blue light blocking glasses, like how to make it, buy the dye, do all the stuff, buy the hot plate, the beaker, and And so I just realized after this email exchange with Luke and his company, I was like, let me just do it for you because it's a pain in the ass to connect you with this company. It's not working there. It's not their service really. It's not their specialty. Yeah, they sell the dyes. Anyway, so we did it. I used his first payment to start the business, and that was his initial investment, funded the first purchases of the materials.

Yeah.

And basically then I could scale it from there. So that was like my hypothesis. Then the next thing was like, well, wait a minute. Probably many people in the health and wellness community would appreciate this service. No one else is doing it. Everyone's wearing these ugly safety UVEX blue light blocking— do you remember those? Yeah, these ugly safety goggles, blue light blocking glasses. And I was like, well, maybe this could be cool. And there was one company called Carbon Shade that made them actually look cool previously, but then I got them and they were— they didn't look cool. They were ugly, they were huge, the frames were too big, they were low quality and crap. And so basically I was like, all right, they tried, they failed. So It's fact. Yeah. And so I was like, somebody else— and Swannies was the only other company with semi-stylish glasses, but the lenses didn't block enough of the blue light. They were ugly, uh, the frames were low quality. So I was like, all right, nobody's done it properly.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I offered this custom tinting service for people to send their own frames called Matt's Custom Blue Blockers on my own personal blog that I don't even run anymore. And, and that was my hypothesis, was that if I post up a Google Sheet in these communities, I'll get responses. And I posted it up just before going off to Europe to travel for like a gap semester before going to college, which was the plan, which did not end up materializing because the business took off. And I hired my little brother's friends to do the tinting in my garage. And then I would be like the spokesperson, they would be like the tinting, and my mother was doing shipping. And this was a lean startup in every sense of the word. And so it was just build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn. And my hypothesis was correct. People wanted the product. They wanted the service. And then in the book, I remember he said, listen to your customers' feedback. And so one time someone was like, well, what if I don't want to send in my own frame? What if I just— well, why don't you just offer some set styles? I was like, duh. So I actually went on to one of the websites of the companies I was using to recommend people, hey, go to this site, buy glasses, send them to us. We know those lenses from that company are tintable, we can tint them, blah blah blah. So I just stole pictures of their frames, put them on my website, and made them my own glasses. That was V1. That was a minimum viable product of a business. And it worked, and it went— it worked really well for a year, and then we just basically shifted the website, found our own manufacturers, and the rest is sort of history. And it's been really good, and we've just been upgrading the quality ever since. So that was The Lean Startup. It was tremendously important. The fourth book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, I barely remember anything about other than the fact that the name kind of says it all. It's like, when you're dealing with hard questions, like, there aren't easy solutions. And that is sort of the, the where the value comes in. So like, there are many times when during the business cycle I was like, I want to just hop on Google and get an easy answer. One of the things I've learned from this experience is the, the questions worth answering don't have an easy answer on Google. And that was a big shock because like we assume, oh, we can get any answer we want to Google. You can get basic statistical facts. I'll just throw in something else worth noting. Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451?

I've heard of it, but I haven't.

So it's like 1984, which I imagine you're familiar with, George Orwell.

Yeah.

So it's very much like that. It's a society where the every— all the houses are fireproof. So they've— they're in the future. The houses don't burn. Firemen's job is actually to burn books. So basically they come and anytime anyone's discovered with a book, it's like a dystopian society. They're reported by their neighbors. Any book, and they're burned. So they basically— and they'll burn someone's house fully with books full of— even with the person if they're housemates. Yeah. The house will stay, but they'll burn everything, including the person with their books. And so it's a really dystopian idea, but it's— there was a quote from the book that was so profound that I even have it in my phone, if I can pull it up. But if not, I'll just paraphrase. But it was something like, you know, if you don't want people to think, you know, just make it illegal to think. If you don't want people to have to compare themselves against other people who are like mountains, just make all the mountains equal. Make everyone equal.

Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Exactly. It's this whole idea that's obviously very much on display in our world today. And so it was just so profound that he said, in that point, he said, fill people so chock-full with random facts such as how much corn did Iowa grow last year that they think that they know everything. And they actually know nothing. And so that's kind of the connection to this whole Google story. So anyway, 4 great books that I had read before starting the business inspired the life out of me, and it was just my whole senior year after getting back from my junior year. So that's, in American terms, that's 11th grade and 12th grade. 12th grade, I got home from my year abroad, and it was just, what am I doing for my business? And I thought about a ton of ideas— coaching, duh duh duh duh duh. And then the glasses business just came along. And it was clearly the thing that God gave me. And yet, back to your original question, as it went on, instead of seeing and going at it from what I would call a manly perspective, like a perspective of both gratitude to the universe and a willingness to overcome myself, I was like a little kid the whole time. I was like, blessed with this huge blessing. And like, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed, life's so hard. Like, I really was like in a victim mindset for years, and I was fully embracing the victim despite the universe showering me with blessings. Business, cash, freedom to travel anywhere, you know, connections with some of the most influential people in the world who became my customers and friends now. And I was still bringing out this victim mindset. So it all came to like a realization when I started going to Joe Dispenza And I realized like, geez, all this stress that I've been telling myself I have, this is fully self-created.

Yeah.

And it was a continuation of an addiction, as Joe Dispenza would say, it is such a firm addiction to the emotions of the past that I was not willing to be open to the opportunities of the future. And I continued to use my life and my circumstances and interpreting them to reaffirm my addiction to the past and suffering instead of the opportunity, the future. So for example, challenge happens in the business. Rather than saying, all right, God slash the universe is giving me the next hurdle to jump over to level up, yep, it was like, oh my gosh, life's so hard, you know. And that's like that, that's the battle I feel like everyone is going through in their life, really, at every deep level. And I went through it for many years, and I did I did not choose to jump over the hurdles. I chose to try to avoid them however I could.

Yeah, yeah. That's incredible, man, and thank you for sharing that. I think that gives a, you know, a little plan for anyone that wants to kind of go the same way in whatever business they choose to do.

Great books.

The mentality switch from having problems versus having opportunities to improve. That will make everything this fun journey of improvement and getting better, uh, and make you happy about things to the point where, you know, you can work hard. And some people have this— again, it's an addiction to— I'm a hard worker, really grinding in the trenches. And yes, you can have that perspective, and some people will on paper succeed doing that, but what is their experience of life within that? If they are constantly battling with life rather than just accepting the path that— you know, cool, another problem. I've had this with supplements, the supplement company, and basically anything that if you run into a manufacturing issue or, you know, whatever it is, it's just another thing to solve. And you'll deal with it just as you dealt with every other problem that you got with so far. And the people that succeed are people that see that, see problems as opportunities to get better, because once you fix that problem and more problems— problem's even the wrong word. It's just like a puzzle to solve, you know, and having the opportunity and grace to just roll with the punches, figure it out as you go along, and understand that you're getting better each time that these, that these things happen to you. And with each level of higher success and financial success and, you know, even relationship success comes from fixing bigger and bigger problems. And even then, you know, what's really happening— yes, there may be higher dollar values assigned to the problems as you get bigger and bigger, but it's the same, same— it's the same thing. Like, inherently, it's just like, how do I find a a way through this. And then anything you come into, it's like a state of permanent bliss because it's like, okay, this is what I'm here to do. If you have to do it, you have to fix it. What are you gonna do, just throw everything? You know, I've hit this roadblock, give it up.

Cool.

Like, you want to do that? No. So, so, so have this happy mentality that you even are in the capacity or this position in life to be able to solve them. Because if you didn't have these quote unquote problems, then you wouldn't have a pathway to get better. And that's, it's funny that when you have that mentality, the problems become easier to solve because at an energetic level, you're attracting the things and the people and the relationships or whatever because you have the faith. It's like, oh no, it'll work out. It'll work out just like everything else does. And that makes everything easier, which is such a trip if you think about it.

But I've experienced the exact same things in, in, you know, my small businesses that I've kind of, um, developed so far.

And yeah, that applies to everything in life.

It's cool.

Amen. I feel that this idea about having faith is a very important one, and my experience has shown me that faith is the only road to success.

Yep.

You know, where there's different theories, right? Is the earth flat? Is it round? We don't need to get into that right now, but it's whatever.

It's a term.

Whatever we believe, you know, like within the experience we having, within the context of the things that occurring around us, it's pretty unique. It's pretty unusual to me would be a word I would use. Unusual, again, what am I comparing that against? Nothing. Yeah, but just the, the experience of being, you know, you're born, you're, you're raised, that you're just like, boom, you come in.

Where were you before? Suddenly you're just thrust into this experience of like, oh, now I can feel things, now I can I see things. What even is this? That alone— and I'll let you continue obviously— but that alone is like the biggest blessing and opportunity, because you could have been one of the sperm that never was fertilized and you'd not even be here. So at a base level, no matter what happens in your life, like, oh, I'm in this body, I'm looking around, there's grass on my foot underneath me, like, even that alone is so much to be grateful for.

My friend, this Ayurvedic doctor, he touches on this in a really interesting way. He says that from the ancient scriptural perspective, the blessing of being born a human is so incalculably large, yeah, in the— according to the ancient scriptures, that it is something that you cannot forsake. You must not forsake this experience. I mean, we could, we born as, as birds or as other significantly lower animals, which we can see all around us. They have a different experience of the world. And yet we're born as humans, like almost as close to gods, let's say, as it gets in our existence. And it is— so it's just a unique— it's a unique experience. It's a trip. Like, I wake up some days and I, I'm traveling a lot, which sort of enhances the uniqueness in some ways. Yeah, not that you— it can't be amazing if you're in one place as well. It's our choice. But I wake up some days and I'm like, where am I? But not just like, where am I? Like, seriously, like this morning I woke up into my own— go out, I got on the beach. I got on the beach.

Yeah, on the beach.

The beach. And I was just like, wow, where am I? Like, this is such a trip. But not in just the sense of like on planet Earth, in the solar system, in the Milky Way. I'm like Where's that? Yeah, somebody tell me, where are we? You know, like, that's sometimes just what I want to shout to the heavens, like, where are we?

What's going on?

Is there anybody out there? You know, like, it's, it's just like, it's just such a unique experience. And then I asked, like, we're both laughing and smiling. It's like, you get to that, that level of like, oh, like, this is just cool, like, we're good, you know, like, there's nothing to worry about, there's nothing to trip about. Yeah. And yet I trip about stuff way too frequently because I get into the, into the, into the mud and I just, I'm thinking too much about stuff. And but then somehow the act of overcoming it is, is the freedom. And so this is, again, I go back to Joe Dispenza, these spiritual teachers. I came to Dispenza, you know, going through the, the business story, just like highlight, because you asked about the business. It's really fun. As I mentioned, I haven't really told the story, but it was, it was, you know, started my garage. We ran 6 months in my garage. We outsourced to different manufacturers. We started running, and then it was just a a situation of like, all right, like, I did it. Like, I have a business, I have revenue coming in every month. Half the time I didn't even know where it was coming from. Like, seriously, I'm just like, money's coming in, people are buying, like, where are these people coming from? Yeah, eventually I realized like key influencers, obviously I knew that, and key podcast appearances I do to get the word out. And then they would self, you know, because people follow someone else and they say, I heard about you from this person, I want to promote you too. And you know I went on this podcast, or I heard you on the podcast, and I had a lot of like really successful people. Like I had one of the world's, let's say, the guy who produced a lot of the biggest bands of the last 30 years. MTV named him the top music producer of the last 30 years, and he produced like early Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, Adele, like all these people. And he literally just reached out to me because he heard the podcast that I did with Luke Storey. This podcast said, Interestingly, we recorded it, and so the night that it was a cosmic evening, because the same night that I decided to go up, just following the breadcrumbs from the universe, I mean, imagine how different my life would look if I didn't follow that breadcrumb there. Like, that same night, he both asked me, hey, where'd you get those glasses? That's led to the business, the product business starting. I was listening to the universe. And then I asked him, can I be on your podcast? And it's interesting that he didn't release the episode for almost 6 months. So after we recorded, end of September 2017, Beginning of— end of April, actually. So beginning of May 2018, almost 6 or 7 months later, he released the episode. I thought, I thought they just decided to shelve it. Like, I was like, alright, like, I guess I just wasn't famous enough or wasn't good enough. Dude, the episode comes out. Like, not only did I have this legendary music producer reaching out and they flew me out to LA, put me up, actually, like, we ended up becoming close friends and have all sorts of cool projects and ideas. Really super aligned types of people. I met a ton of really cool people out in the Malibu celebrity lifestyle, kind of their vibe, really cool people too. And then this podcast came out, it was Luke who was a much smaller podcaster at the time, but it became his number one most downloaded and his number one most— and I was his youngest guest, so most downloaded podcast of all time with his youngest and least known guest.

Yeah.

For a year, over a year it was, and he had interviewed people like Aubrey Marcus Neil Strauss, like celebrities. And it just, to me, it was like, all right, keep doing that, you know, keep doing that. So is this, this interesting? Just that single night led to the product business, it led to the podcast, and then it was just like, all right, I got to just keep doing this. Another good friend of mine who's big in the tech world, he said, and this is a kind of common tech like idea, it's like build it and they will come. He's like, he said to me, he's like, just if you build a really great product, like, it will sell itself.

Yeah.

And I really believe that. It's like if you build something really really good, like, in the same way that if, like, something really crazy happens, like, news spreads like wildfire, like, if something really great comes out, like the iPhone, there's no way they could have marketed any amount of money to make iPhones and Macs and Apple what it is today. There's no amount of marketing money you could possibly spend. It was one man, Steve Jobs, whose biography I've been reading— amazing book as well— one single guy's addiction or complete dedication to perfecting something.

Yeah.

Which one could actually argue, as you see in the book, probably was somehow linked to his own, let's say, his soul's karma. He was born into the world, he was abandoned by his parents, he was adopted by a new family, and always felt a sort of sense of abandonment that, as you could ascertain from the book— now I don't know if this is all true or not, but this is kind of the sense you get, uh, and sort of the way the author also directs it— that he was kind of trying to control everything outside of him to be perfect, to let's say make up for an inner insecurity.

Yeah.

And can we say is that good or bad? I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's good in the sense that like he transmuted his past suffering to greatness outside. And I would say like that seems to be the story of a lot of successful people. Like I grew up, my parents were divorced when I was young, and I think that had probably a pretty significant significant impact in like not feeling whole as myself because the very masculine and feminine energy that brings you into the world, to see that split as a young child, I believe it takes the world— it's like pulling the rug out from under you, the world out from under you.

It matures you, like very quickly.

In a positive way, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Or it destroys you actually because a lot of people I think are destroyed by their parents being divorced. And they don't choose to become matured by it.

Yeah, yeah, it's like anything, and obviously people have had much worse things than I have had. I've had a very blessed life, but people can let very small things completely affect them and completely derail them just as easily. A different person, or that same person with a different perspective, could let that jettison them into better things, and that's Like, you're here, you've had your experience so far, you've had the problems, the issues, the trauma, the whatever it is, you've had the good things as well. You can let that break you, you can essentially choose to let that derail you, or you can let— what's the lessons here? What are the silver linings? Yes, I was, you know, my parents divorced, whatever, I'm now thrust into my own independence a lot sooner than most people, and that can be, or is, scary. But then you, at your age, you're, you know, you, you have a much more accelerated experience of the world, and it's made you stronger, it's made you better. So like, do you let things, whatever it is in, in your scale and your experience of this life, in this particular human human experience. That can either— you can let that affect you and then never achieve anything, or you can, you know, I think I've mentioned this before, but Kanye West in the documentaries that have come out recently, very inspiring, but he's basically— he was in an interview and he said, I want everything that people said is gonna be like why I wouldn't succeed become why I do succeed. You know, you're from Chicago, 'Oh, you're low-income family.' It's like, no, that makes me better. And that light switch, that switch that just turns everything from a negative into a blessing, that itself is like, again, it's transmutation. It's transmutation of energy. Uh, and every human, again, going back to your capacity as a human, your blessing to be— is it exists as a human, is we have this higher level of awareness and consciousness that we can do that, whereas an animal is just like, oh, I break my leg, I'm pretty fucked.

Yeah, we get to turn the base metals into gold. And this is why I love Joe Dispenza so much, because, you know, I could look at my past, and for years I told the story of my past. So this is to bring in some Dispenza language, but, you know, I told a story of my past, and I let the story of my past be the person I'm going to be in the future. Because we live in this eternal present moment, Dispenza teaches, and that's all there is, right? And so the ideas of the past and the future, they're just ideas, because it's just you and me. That's it right now. That's it, you know? And so I can either, in the present continuous, great eternal present now, I can either, he would say, choose to be defined by the memories of the past. So what I remember, which he makes this funny, this great joke, like Usually the stories people tell about their past, they actually made it up. Like, they—

half of it's not even true. Because your memory doesn't work that way.

So they're retelling stories of suffering that never even happened to them to reinforce their addiction to the emotion. And so we can either do that, or— which again, the future is just another idea, so we're not saying the future is like a, let's say, real thing, but he uses it to exemplify an idea— you can be defined instead by the vision of the future. So instead of the memories of the past, a vision of the future. And so, okay, I told you a little bit about what I did and what I did with the business, but that's, I would say, inconsequential compared to what is driving me to continue. Because the world can be hard and life can get you down and life can put obstacles in front of you, and yet we continue to persevere. And I think that's the really fun conversation to have is like, but for both of us, I'm curious to hear about what it is for you. Like what, what really even if you have a hard time, you know, even if you're having a tough time, you're going through challenges, let's just say, like, what's getting us out of bed in the morning, like, every day to wake up to—

I'm hungry. That's usually what it is. Yeah. Oh, kind of a joke, breakfast, right? Um, what gets me out of bed? Well, thankfully I take SolSup's glycine, so I have a very deep restorative sleep and I wake up with very high energy.

And you wear Raw Optics.

Yes, Raw Optics before bed. That means melatonin's firing correctly and, uh, you know, we get a good night's rest. So that, that really helps. And that's the kind of the— it's much easier to be driven and successful if your health is taken care of. So that's like, if you're not in a place where your body's operating correctly, yeah, figure that out first. That's your first steps to becoming successful, um, because you then just have the fundamental biological energy to then do that. But as far as like a higher level—

can I just put a catch on that, actually? Older thoughts. So I actually learned from my experience, and I believe you're right, get your health going. I actually spent 5, 6, 7 years in that mindset of like, I got to get my health going so then I can live my life. Keyword then. Yeah, I actually would say that I fell prey, or I used a certain belief, a way of thinking, to excuse myself from overcoming it. But just to get the language correct there, but basically it was, I can't start really living, I can't start really being the man I want to be until I heal my health.

Yes.

And it was the constant idea that I wasn't healthy that kept me sick. You know, I didn't have— I never created a really, in my mind, a really beautiful vision for which I would live for. And therefore I actually didn't have much, even running— even 3 years into having success successful business. I was actually like, I have to be honest about it, like I was often miserable, like out externally, money, ability to travel places, great business, great connections. You'd think you're on top of the world. And it's like that classic, almost a cliché story where like everything looks great on the outside. On the inside I was suffering, but I took a very tremendous appreciation from it because I realized that there are most guys who get to this stage, they're 50, 60 years old. They've been busting their ass for 50, 60 years or whatever, and then they're like, this just isn't it. And I'm lucky that like 18, 19, 20, 21, I got to like say, this is diff— this just isn't it, this is not it. And that's obviously got me into spiritual stuff. But just a caveat out there for anyone who's saying I can't start being the man or being the woman until I am healthy, I realize you just got to start being the man and you'll become— like, I've started becoming healthier as soon as I started changing my beliefs. As soon as I started, I started linking my energy towards What is the future? What do I actually believe in with my company? And I'm like, I don't want it to be Raw Optics, I just want it to be Raw. So it's gonna be Raw soon enough.

Raw everything.

We have the domain raw.life, so Raw Life. So that was a great, great buy. And I'm stoked about that. Try to copy us, you can't. And I have the lightdiet.com.

What's raw.com?

It's rheumatoid arthritis, which we're also gonna cure and then proceed to buy from them. 'Cause we're curing rheumatoid arthritis. Or once the disease is cured, we just buy the domain. So, but anyway, I prefer.life. But anyway, all I say, I just started thinking like, why don't I just, why don't I do all the things I was saying I would do one day? Why don't I just start doing them? 'Cause like I get up every day and I'm in this, whatever this is, like nothing's stopping me. And it was as soon as I started linking myself to like, let's actually start the lighting product, like the projects. Let's start thinking about this society that I wanted to build, like build my, 'cause for years I spent my, my time asking the question. I realized I stole the mic from you, but I'll just finish this thought. So I took— I had this thought, like, for so many years, where do I want to live? Where do I want to live? That was like my, my another, let's say, theme that I used to excuse myself from being present. Was like, oh my gosh, where am I gonna live? You know, I like used that as a thing to hold on to for so long. Like, I don't know where I'm gonna be based. And what a blessing, like most people can't even leave Oklahoma or whatever, you know.

Yeah.

And I got to be wherever I wanted. And yet I, from that low energy, I found a way to turn the greatest blessing into like what felt like a curse. And that's just an example of what that fear energy can do.

Mm-hmm.

And eventually I did realize though, like, wouldn't it be cool to like— what you said something the other night at dinner, you said cities have traditionally organized themselves around labor markets. And it just was like, Boom! Light bulb, because it's exactly the words I've been looking for. Like, people are geographically, geographically organized throughout history out of necessity. Like, we're in a different age. We're in the information age. People can organize around ideas now. Yeah, so why don't we organize around ideas? And then you're talking about this, you know, society that you guys are interested in. I'm like, dude, this is— yeah, this makes me want to wake up in the morning because I could see a really beautiful society, and it doesn't have to include everyone. it's only the people who want to be, who want to move forward. Evolution occurs, and usually in evolutionary situations, the whole species doesn't evolve.

Yeah, it's an evolutionary bottleneck. It can happen from large natural disasters. It can happen from diseases or plagues or whatever, and then the strong survive. That's just the natural state of biology. But I think now there's almost— there's a spiritual bottleneck occurring, and most people are existing in an addiction to the fear-based narrative that is pushed out by, you know, the mass media and everything, but also within themselves. Like, you can just simply ignore that and choose to visualize a better future. When, when we do achieve a critical mass of people looking towards the positive future rather than being addicted to their negative past or the negative past of the society that they're a part of, that is the inflection point to— you don't want to say utopian world because that doesn't exist to some level, but a world where it is absent for the most part, or it's on the path to becoming better for as many people as possible. And, you know, it's awareness, it's consciousness. When most people are acting in a way that's good for them and good for their neighbor, that's all you need to do. That's all you need to do. And if you can do that in your small part of the world, that's, that's what we should aim to do. The spiritual bottleneck occurring is people that want to let go of the past programming of themselves, their past mistakes, their past identity, which as you said might not even be something that's real because you, you know, we, I think Joe Dispenza was the one that gave this idea to me or talked about this idea, but no, no, sorry, it's Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland. Have you read that book? Bro, I'll give that to you.

Thank you.

So our narrow band of awareness, as we go through life, we create this narrative about our life, uh, and then we identify with that narrative. I went to school here, this is how I performed, I got these results which led me to have these opportunities, and this was impacted by this, and then this led to that. And it's like this, you know, from birth to blah blah blah blah blah, here I am at this point. There is a general narrative that you you create, which is impacted by what you were focusing on in the present moment. And you don't know whether you didn't get that scholarship because your results weren't good, or the person that was approving and reading it that day was just in a bad mood, so like, nah, fuck this guy, you know. But our interpretation of what we were focusing on at the time, due to our limited band of awareness, in any one moment our mind's conscious awareness is only dealing with one thing, really, like you walk past the bakery, then boom, the smell of bread, that dominates your consciousness for a certain amount of time, and then you turn the corner and a homeless guy walks past you, and then you start thinking about homeless things, and it's like, you could have missed so much in that short space of time because our brains and our minds are only really dealing with one thing, one sense, one experience at a time. But from that, as we go through life and only really focusing on that thing, we create a narrative like X leads to Y leads to Z and here I am and this is why this didn't happen. But for the most part, we don't have control or we're a very small part of the grand narrative scheme of things, right? And how we operate within this world is a part of that.

You can choose to visualize a future and fix the things that are holding you back and if you do so, your life will improve.

Or again, be addicted to that thing, that, that the failures that you think like, I, I failed this thing in high school and I didn't get this job, this is why my life is bad now. But you know, there are so many more things impacting it you just can't see. We don't have this kind of constant awareness of everything that's happened. It's impossible to kind of figure out in this grand network. There's thousands, millions of humans all interacting interacting at the same time. So understanding that the narrow band of awareness that creates the narrative that you tell about yourself, which then creates this egoic notion of yourself, that's not real. It's never existed as a tangible thing other than your head. You can tomorrow delete that, if you will, and, oh, I'm not good at this thing, therefore I couldn't run a business because of this. Well, who says you're not good at that thing? Yeah, you've never practiced that thing, you've never researched that thing, you've never done that thing, you've never iterated back on feedback, you know, going back to the business kind of analogy.

So you are not a thing.

So for you to then limit yourself because you think of this past narrative, I'm not good at public speaking, I could never do a podcast, that's just holding you back. Again, it's a limiting belief. So just understanding that that's how the human brain works and to not allow that to dictate the narrative of your future, I think, is a really powerful idea.

Amen, man. Yeah, amen. I, I'm sitting here and I can feel within myself, you know, there's this— it's sort of a constant battle, I would say, maybe for life, or maybe it's just the stage that I'm in in my life. Where it's the battle between, let's say, the good and the evil, or the battle between sin and what is right, you know? And I'm sitting and I'm looking, and I could feel literally just in one moment as you're speaking, like, there's, you know, part of me that is completely fully present, let's say, listening to you, and I can tune into that frequency frequency and just be here and say like, wow, this is so dope. I'm sitting with Sol Brah on the grass in unnamed undisclosed location, like recording a podcast. Like, this is badass. And then there's another part of me that's like, I gotta worry about this, I gotta worry about that, I gotta worry about— and that's what Dispenza, you know, teaches. And, and right, right on the same line that you're describing, I could choose to be the guy or the person who's defined by all that nonstop talk that's going on and just let it be my reality. And many people don't realize there's another choice. I didn't realize there was another choice for a long time. I might have eventually, but I didn't realize. And so people, spiritual teachers come for a great reason because they can help us open our mind. And then on the other side, I can sit here and say like, gosh, what a great experience. And to your point, like, if we really don't have control over what's guiding us and what's moving us in each direction, you would think, one would think that the best thing we could do is just surrender into the beauty in every moment and then just be grateful because if there's nothing besides the present moment ever, and if you master happiness in every present moment, then you win, so to speak. And in the book, there's these great books, The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer and The Untethered Soul, which is very popular by Michael Singer as well. And he describes in these books this idea of just full surrender to everything that's going on and just being able to surrender. And The Untethered Soul, he puts it in a really, really cool perspective. He's like, you could just choose to be happy and never let it go. Like, you never let happiness go away. Unconditional happiness. And the only reason you let it go, we let it go, is because we choose to. And it's like, that's a powerful idea, you know, that we— that unconditional happiness, that is the path of the master. They put happiness and they say, I'm just not— and I tried it, like, when I had listened to the book, I was like, all right, I'm gonna be happy, like, and never get unhappy again. But surely, like, there were things that came along that I wasn't willing to choose my happiness over that thing, which is— and the thing The things, just to be clear, the things we assume are existing outside of us, but in reality, from a basic physical scientific analysis, you know, we discussed this at dinner, like at least I did with one of the people there. I don't remember if we were talking together, but the world outside of us, like how could I know that the world outside of us exists at all? Like, you know, it's just my experience, right? And so if there's a different way of looking at the world, to put it, is that there's something that comes up. Let's just say for me, I'll give an acute example. I'm ordering frames and glasses cases from China and we're dealing with supply chain issues and things take a long time and it's bothersome for me because it makes me feel— so it's just, it itself is an objective situation. It just is what it is, right? It is what it is in the moment. But I have observed the tendency of some part of myself to want to use that situation to bring up the emotions of stress, fear, scarcity, lack, etc. You name it. Like, oh my gosh, what if I don't get enough cases on time? Then we can't sell the glasses, and yeah, the glasses don't come soon enough, and then we're sitting on, you know, overhead expenses. But which we don't have that many actually. Of, but you know, blah, blah, blah. It's just like my mind wants to run in a million directions about how things are just not going to work out and everything's going to go really badly. But interestingly, this is a really a trip. A few weeks or months ago, I had this insight that you kind of touched on this as well. I looked back and I was like, I've worried about so much useless stuff that was not worth worrying about. I mean, it never happens, and it never— none of it ever went bad, like even if it was really hard in the moment, which there were challenges, like it just burned me through the karma, burned my karma and I moved forward, you know? I burned through the fire and now I'm here and I didn't die, that's the thing. Like in the moment the level of fear was akin to death, like as if I was in a survival mode. I never died, so why wouldn't I just take big risks? Like I know that no matter how bad anything could go in business, which is really realistically speaking, the opposite of what's actually happening. Like, the business has been wildly successful. How there's the worst-case scenario— like, it's just, A, it doesn't almost ever actually come true, and B, I'm wasting all of the best-case scenarios, like all the beauty around me all the time, choosing to continue to remain in the worst-case scenario. This is why I believe meditation is a really worthy practice. Because for one who is subject to their mind and is naturally disillusioned or confused by their mind, it's a practice of just constantly coming back to a certain point of focus. Yeah. And if you could get really good at this, in theory, you could constantly keep your focus on the truth, which is that everything's pretty cool.

Haha, yeah.

It's on some level, it's like not even believing that so much good is possible. So people self-sabotage because either they think they're not worth it, they're not worthy of success or good things or love. And that's something that's more— maybe occurs more in relationships in particular. It's like if you don't hold the belief that you are worthy of love because of the story someone else told you, your family growing up, or just something that you don't believe about yourself because you're comparing your physical attributes to other people, or just like, why would anyone care about me or love me? You're gonna seek out relationships, or never find good relationships, you're gonna seek relationships that reaffirm that belief. And I would say that the vast majority of people don't have a healthy relationship, like romantic relationship. Full stop, because they don't understand that the love has to come from within them first. If you love yourself, you're good with yourself, and you're like, yeah, I deserve good things, I, you know, I have a lot to give, I am worthy of love from myself, you're not going to accept any relationship that doesn't reinforce that. Oh, this guy's treating me bad, this girl's treating me badly, Okay, bye, like cool, I love you too, but like bye, like not around me. Same goes for business, like you have something that's really good that happens to you and succeeds, but again you just go, oh, what are all these things that could go wrong? And on one level, if you continually visualize the ways and things that could go wrong, all you're doing is directing mental energy to a pathway that you don't want to happen. So one, the experience of visualizing the negativity is just bad. You— it feels bad, you're stressing, you're scared, but you are literally increasing the chances of that scenario happening because our power as humans is to direct our attention, direct our energy to that thing. The more energy you direct to a thing, the higher level of chance that it has manifesting into your reality. So if you're always thinking about what can go wrong, then you're literally like putting yourself on that track. Like, you imagine a train track, you can go left and slowly arc off to the left, or then go right, and you create the train tracks, the railing that your life then goes down through your mental energy and awareness and, and all the rest of it. And yeah, meditation is great for that. Because one, just having the regular practice of being, coming back to experience and awareness rather than following the machinations of your mind, which are, you know, fantasies and phantoms at the end of the day. It's just like, why would you want to visualize that? Like, think about the best things that can go right. Like, we're gonna get, you know, our manufacturing and they're gonna send more cases for cheaper because why not, you know. But people, again, it's like, it's the lack of abundance because they think that the world is scarce, they think it's not possible for things to go so right. But you'll find that anyone successful or anyone happy has left that belief as much as possible in the past. And it's not, you know, I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, you still get trapped in that. But on on average, you can train yourself to be more aware of your own issues and beliefs so that you're spending more time, more out of the 24 hours of each day, in a state of abundance, gratitude, awareness, which then reflects in the success and positivity of your life. Yeah, for it.

The way it goes for me a lot of the time when I meditate is I come right up against the emotions that I've been most attaching to that are the, let's say, the negative ones, if that's the goal. And it's in one, like, instant. It happens like that. You see something from that higher consciousness that is sort of the goal of channeling and meditation, at least for me. And, and then that whole, like, a whole— it's almost like a whole universe implodes.

Like a whole—

this could happen and that could happen. All this, it's just like, whoosh, like I just, I never had to buy into that emotion in the first place. And it's just that, that single instant, again, a whole, what feels like a whole lifetime of suffering can just completely disappear. And you're like, everything's fine. And that's for me what meditation is really largely about, just overcoming and finding each thing that I've been using to not be present.

Yeah.

And just try to play thought through it. I want to add to your commentary before. You're saying that the more we connect to that energy of something going wrong, the more we make it likely to happen. I fully agree with that. Interestingly enough, when the actual negative situation happens, the only reason— well, perceived negative situation— the only reason, of course, it's negative if it does happen is because we interpret it, interpret it as negative. But more interestingly, this is what I'm getting at, is in the idea of moment, and this is where things start to get a little like trippy.

The—

if the actual experience of the thing happening is innate, it doesn't even have innate meaning, it just is positive or negative, then that's— and that's not the present moment, then that just doesn't even exist. It's just out of— but, but the only moment that does exist, by worrying about something that could go wrong, what we're actually making it so that we're experiencing it as if that thing were already going wrong in the present moment and living the experience of the worst-case scenario in the present moment.

Mm-hmm.

So forget about any events ever happening in the so-called future. By choosing to not be one with the truth, let's say, or one with, you know, like Jesus says, if thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light. Like, by choosing to not be present with our conscious experience of the moment and then choosing positivity within that, by choosing negativity, you know, choosing Satan over Christ, let's say, in the present moment, we're actually just making it so that is our life. That just is the life, you know what I mean? So it's like even, even bigger than this may cause the event to happen more likely, because then we're still putting people into the linear thinking. It's like Right. Our only experience is the present moment, and when we use the present moment to dwell on the negative outcomes, that therefore is your life.

Yep. Full stop. Yeah.

As you just said, we should period.

Yeah. So no, that's a good point.

And that's for me, that's like, that's what they call the hero's journey or, well, the hero's journey is they call it like the cycle, but to me it's like that inner journey when you just say like, I'm just not gonna keep going down that path, you know. Like, I'm sitting here with Sol Brah in Miami. If my mind wants to worry about 100,000 things that could go wrong, I can actually just let it do that. But to let that disturb me, that's my initiation, is to like feel it and let it happen and let it go and not let it perturb my present experience. That's hard, but that's the growth I believe in life is to overcome our negative emotions. And if we wanted to get like more metaphysical, there's a— and my research in biology, studying the books like The Body Electric and in biophotons, so that's bioelectromagnetism. Biophotobiology is the book, a great book called Light Shaping Life: Biophotons in Biology and Medicine. Very interesting, just a lot of scientific stuff. But the key takeaway is that we really are beings of light. Our cells communicate using ultraviolet light to stimulate mitosis and cell division, all this stuff. But anyway, all that showed me that we are beyond a shadow of a doubt beings of energy. Coming from an atheist perspective growing up, coming from a Western scientific perspective, we're beings of energy. So when I read these spiritual books, I came to really be open to these ideas about Buddha and Jesus and oneness. And then when I started learning from Dispenza, he started really making this even more scientific, that he has this— a certain breath that he teaches, a breathing exercise where you actually pump basically the cerebrospinal fluid up your spine, and you basically are overcoming your animal self, he calls it. You're overcoming your animal self. Now, it's really interesting is if I sort of change the language here in the ancient, uh, what they call a scientific technique of self-realization or God realization or enlightenment. It's called Kriya Yoga, which I mentioned to you. That's the, that's the focus of Yogananda in The Autobiography of a Yogi. It's, it's all centered around his finding his guru, which is based on Kriya Yoga. But anyway, in Kriya Yoga, they say that that act of the kriyas, these techniques they do, which I have been told— because I'm not initiated in Kriya and you can't know the techniques unless you get a formal initiation. I will eventually, but I've been told by someone who's a Kriya yogi and is initiated that it's very similar to these Joe Dispenza techniques that he sort of says he came up with himself through his own experience. And in the Kriya perspective, it's about burning through karma. So It's interesting that all these fields, the science, the Joe Dispenza, so the scientific spirituality, and then the ancient spirituality of Kriya Yoga, the sort of purpose of our existence, let's say, or one of the highest aims and goals of our existence that these yogis strive for is to burn through karma, to escape what they call the cycle of birth and rebirth. Now, do I know whether there's the, in like, Do I believe that rebirth and reincarnation exists? No. I tend— of all the things I'm open to, that's one of the things I've tended to be most skeptical of deep down. I don't know why. But you know what's interesting is as a young kid, and this is the first time that my mind was open to the idea of reincarnation, was when I remembered about a year ago or even 6 months ago as I was learning about this Kriya Yoga stuff, and I remembered learning about the lotus posture which the yogis use. Fold their legs in like this, and they use it so that if they go into samadhi, which is like a state of eternal bliss, that they can't fall forward or backwards. They're locked in place essentially. Whereas if your muscles are like a regular, like a half Indian pose, if you fully released, you'll probably fall forward or backwards. So with, with the lotus posture, although your legs tend to go numb depending on how flexible you are. But anyway, I remembered in first grade, dude, I was sitting 6 years old, teacher comes up to the front and they're showing the lotus pose. And I just was struck, like I was deeply touched by the lotus posture. Like it was like a, whoa, like that's dope. And I'm just, I, and it hit me. Yeah, it hit me exactly. Somehow I reckon some part of me recognized it, right? I didn't know at the time. And then I remembered that moment like a year or 6 months ago, whenever it was, 15+ years after the initial experience. And I thought, all right, reincarnation. Yeah, yeah, I must have been a yogi. I mean, how else could I be so called to the yoga path? And I don't know if it's true, but anyway, that, that wasn't even the point. It's just I don't even know whether reincarnation exists or not or what it is, but I think it's an appealing— I'm inclined to as well, but it's an appealing concept that like we are, so to speak, the reason we're here and not just one with the infinite bliss is because there's something that we have to overcome. If nothing else, it's just a cool story to believe in. Like, there's something we have to solve that is our— what they call, quote-unquote, karma. There's something we're here for, and we have to work it out.

Yeah.

And just like you work out a knot in your muscle, we have to work it out, and then we can move on. And it's like, you know, I thought like many times in my life as well— I think many— I don't want to judge for other people, but I think many really intelligent intelligent people do. Like, what would it be like if I wasn't alive? Like, you know, and, and sometimes when I was really struggling, maybe towards a suicidal tendency, although thankfully never so dark down that hole. But, but I've definitely thought the thought, and I understood to a certain degree from this Indian perspective, the ancient Indian perspective, that's a cop-out. Suicide is a huge cop-out. That is not the way to go to reach infinite oneness and bliss. You have to work through through all the challenges. But it's a pretty cool journey, and I think that's, to me, the takeaway, you know, of all this conversation, of everything I've learned through the business, which was a really great stimulative question. Thank you. You know, it's interesting because for months I've thought, how cool would it be to talk about my business experience on a podcast? I've never really done it. I think I've learned a thing or two, um, that are worth— worthy of value to anyone of any age, even young people like 18 to 22. But This idea that like the main goal is to overcome the cycle of birth and rebirth, to just be one with the infinite bliss. And that there is this science that I came to through my own experience called Kriya Yoga from the ancient East that they've used for like 5,000 years. They know it's— the story is that there's a guy named Babaji, Mahavatar, which means like perfect avatar incarnation. Babaji, father, revered father basically, who lives eternally. They truly believe this, that he never has died. He's an eternally living being in the Himalayas who has a body, contrasted with Jesus, for example, who they, you know, believe lives eternally but doesn't have a body anymore. He gave it up.

Yeah.

And Babaji brought, after thousands of years of reclusion, brought the science of Kriya Yoga to a householder yogi in India named Lahiri Mahasaya, some 150 50 years ago, and then it was passed down from him to a master named Sri Yukteswar, and then to Paramahansa Yogananda, who was commissioned, let's say, or tasked to bring this information to the West. And he brought it to the West and largely is responsible for the explosion of yoga. But the mistake people make is they think yoga is stretching. That's called hatha yoga. That's physical postural yoga. Yoga means unity. It's the pursuit of the realization of the truth, which is that we are all one. It isn't making it true because it's already true. It's just realizing it and not forgetting it.

Yes.

And to me, that's the highest pursuit, the only pursuit that I'm interested in at this point. And it's back to the idea of me saying the business is my obstacle. I came to realize like my business wasn't my obstacle. My business was always the way. The business was the huge blessing. Yes, that, that God, the universe gave me. Just like my parents getting divorced as a kid and all the emotional challenges that came with that, that was the vehicle that I was given, the blessing to advance through this path faster. And I could never be more thankful for it. I'm very, very lucky and very grateful. And for me, if there's one lesson I could pass to anyone, it's, it's that yoga— not, not the stretching hatha yoga, although that's useful for physical health, but something like Kriya yoga, a path to realize the truth scientifically, which the truth of oneness is the only pursuit worth endeavoring in life. And that includes love and that includes relationships and that includes, you know, running a business and starting, but all of it for a higher purpose, all of it to say like, you know, like Jesus taught, like how can I take the truth and bring it out? For example, Jesus said something like in the Bible, you are the light of the earth, you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. And like, go out and let your light shine, you know, so that your Father and those around you can see your good deeds. And it's something so beautiful for me about like that idea, like it gives me goosebumps, like that there's something higher just to strive for, you know, just it's— and there's no reason other than the fact that it is what is good to go that direction. And we see in our society And today it seems seemingly a concerted effort to not go that way. But, well, we just got to keep going, keep walking, and maybe we'll lead the way.

Yes. Side by side, conversations like this help. And yeah, that's beautiful, man. I think that puts a good cap on the Soulcast.

Thanks again.

I appreciate it. My brother in arms. This has been Soulcast. For those listening at home, We appreciate you and we'll see you next time. Is there anything you want to mention before we go?

Yeah, thank you. So I would just recommend anyone who's interested, go to rawoptics.com. So as Sol very gracefully mentioned earlier, Raw Optics is a company I started, as we talked about a lot, for those who don't know, to create really exceptional products to improve your health and the function of your biology, utilizing the simplest discoveries in the field of how light affects our health. And specifically eyewear that blocks harmful wavelengths of light both day and night to improve your health. So during the day we have daylight lenses, which you can— they're yellow. You can wear them, for example, if you're in an office or a school or on a computer for many hours or gym or gym. Perfect. Yeah. Anytime like that or night driving. They're very good for night driving, but they're made primarily for day and you'll feel yourself relax. You'll feel yourself more calm. You'll feel your cognition more sharp and clear because when your brain's not as stressed by this overstimulative blue light, everything works better. So your body's more inclined to be in this stress-free state. Although, as we've discussed, I do believe it's 100% mind and everything else can just help, but it's still 100% mind. And sunset lenses, which are for nighttime, you put these on after the sun goes down or right when the sun goes down approximately. When the lights outside start turning on, the headlights, the car lights, the street lights, the house lights, the TVs, the computers, everything. And they block the high-energy blue light that tricks the brain to wanting to stay awake, which prevents your brain from making melatonin. So the lenses block that high-energy blue and green light, just making all the light around you like a fire or like lights from over 100 years ago, like lanterns.

Yeah.

And then your brain can naturally tune down, your brainwaves naturally drop, from the high-energy beta down to alpha, down to theta much more easily. And so with just these two products, you can solve some of the biggest problems people have today, which is A, lack of energy during the day, and B, inability to turn the energy off at night and fall asleep. And so the main things people are using now, people are trying to use alcohol and weed and sleeping pills to relax in the evening. Our glasses fix it. We have really good reviews from people. It's worked for tens of thousands of people. It can work for you too. And then during the day, the daylight lenses have a huge benefit. Like you don't need the cigarettes to chill out because you're just chilling yourself out. Now, the key thing everyone should know, which Sol Brah teaches about a lot, is you got to go out and get morning sunlight for 10 to 15 minutes. That is the pitch. It's not about the glasses and the products. 10 to 15 minutes morning sunlight will change your life. And these other things are, let's say, adjunctive treatments that can help tremendously. So that's rawoptics.com and you can use Soul Brah's discount code, Sol Brah, S-O-L-B-R-A-H, for 15% off everything. So thanks so much for listening to me, and by doing that, you're not only supporting me and Raw Optics and my mission, you're also supporting Sol Brah and the podcast and everything, but you're supporting a vision of creating a better world, which is what we're on. And specifically, we're developing the world's best lighting technology. So we're on a quest. I'm working with the world's number one leading expert on human-centric lighting therapy to develop lighting devices, panels, light bulbs, and everything. We're looking at probably sometime in early 2023, so about a year from now, to have that stuff starting to roll out. But it's been very fun, and that will be another tool to help people raise their consciousness, because artificial lights, just like bad food, is a way that we are— it makes it harder to step up. And so healthier lighting, going outside more, which is the key call to action here, can help you step up just like these products. So thanks so much, guys.

Yeah, I'll just add to that. I use mine every day. I'm on the computer a lot, on my phone a lot, doing work, and they, they just change the game completely with how your eyes work and feel, your brain. You don't get that kind of technology burnout. They're also the most stylish glasses. The amount of comments I've got from wearing mine out and about Thanks, bro. At dinner or just, you know, whenever you go out at night, um, people think they look awesome, which they do. And especially the red ones at night, it's like putting a cozy blanket on for your eyes. Like, it truly— like, you'll wear them for an hour and then you just, you know, peek out from behind the lenses and it's almost like being attacked by this blue light at night. And, and then you start to realize, like, it becomes— you become aware and conscious of what that is actually doing and feeling in your body. Body. If you don't know the other option, then you know, you won't feel the difference. But if there's anything, you know, 100% stand behind these products. RawOptics.com/SolBrah and get yourself some. If it, you know, it will help, and I really love them. So thanks again, Light Diet.

So much, brother. Appreciate it, Sol Brah.

It's been Solcast. See you later.