Podcast 407: Live Without Glasses – Fix Your Vision for Good

Is it possible to live a life without glasses or contact lenses? Find out how you can improve your eyesight! Jake Steiner from endmyopia.org shares his tips and tricks, so you too can go glasses free!

Download our FREE Chronic Pain Manifesto!
Visit us on Facebook! Follow us on Instagram!

Subscribe to our newsletter, so you are always up to date with new health information, product tips, podcasts, webinars, and much more!

MARTIN: Hello, this is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast! Today I have with me Jake Steiner, he is a hobbyist, an enthusiast, and an aficionado of eyesight. Jake shares with me that he does not have to make a living telling people what he’s going to be telling us today, which is fantastic because there is no money interest. He can actually tell you the truth because he doesn’t care about profit. Welcome, Jake Steiner!

JAKE: Thank you for the introduction, Martin! Nice to meet you, everyone!

MARTIN: Yeah, well, the Life Enthusiast village, there are quite a few of us! We have a 20-year history, and tens of thousands of people who have come by here, we have listeners from 190 out of the 195 countries. So, today is a day of explaining. What we can do for our eyesight. This is for people who are willing to explore seeing better, right?

JAKE: That is correct. The very short version is this: if you wear glasses if your vision isn’t perfect, if you have kids whose vision is compromised, ignoring your eyesight is an amazing fallacy, that I am observing humans are going through, because there is no pain associated with it, right? You try to eat better, you try to be in better shape, you try to lose weight, and you try to exercise. But as long as there is a quick fix, a thing you could stick in front of your eyes in the morning to see better, you just ignore it. And it is so integral to your entire wellbeing. It is entirely fixable, but people just trust the optometrists saying: “You have a genetic defect, so you have to wear these things in front of your face.” And I am basically here to say that that is not true.

MARTIN: That is a big, bold, ballsy statement! I like that!

JAKE: Well, and then, as you said, I am an enthusiast, I have been doing this also for just about 20 years. We have the largest online community of people dealing with eyesight. The website had like 1.2 million regular visitors this year, it is a big community of people that have realized this. I grew up with glasses, I got them in my early teens, and it began a real shift in who I was in hindsight. I stopped playing team sports, I became afraid of the ball! So soccer, basketball, whatever the sport was, I wasn’t doing it anymore.

MARTIN: What was your problem specifically?

JAKE: Just short-sightedness, like most kids, minus 5 diopters, ultimately.

MARTIN: So you couldn’t see really much at all without the glasses on, right?

JAKE: Nothing, I couldn’t find my glasses without them, ultimately. I started at -1, -1.5, and just every year it went up a little bit.

MARTIN: I know a lot of people who are like that. And it is awesome that… I mean, looking at you with no glasses today… this is straight, no operation, no nothing else than the process that you are about to describe, and you are where we are now, right?

JAKE: Exactly, I don’t need glasses. Nobody needs glasses. Absolutely nobody needs glasses. I mean, for short-sightedness, if you started wearing glasses in your teens, you weren’t born needing glasses, but at some point, you started wearing glasses. There is no defect! It started as one issue that was environmental and then it became a problem because of the lens treatment. It is a hundred billion dollar a year industry, selling you this subscription to lenses. So they have a huge interest in not letting us learn basic biology.

MARTIN: Let’s unpack it in just a moment. I just want to explain to people what this is for and what is this not for, just in case they want to bail early. So we have myopia, which is short-sightedness, people who can see up close but cannot see further away. Hyperopia, which is people who cannot see up close, but can see far away sharply. And then we have presbyopia, which I have, which is, I can’t focus up close without glasses, because I am “too mature”. And what else do we have? Oh, we have astigmatism.

JAKE: Astigmatism is myopia on a specific axis, so if you don’t wear astigmatism correction, you get things like ghosting or double vision.

MARTIN: So for the method that you are about to talk about, are any of these conditions excluded?

JAKE: I talk specifically about myopia, if you take your glasses off, you can’t see clearly far away. For hyperopia, the same piece of vision biology applies. Presbyopia is a little bit of a different thing, we can chat about it too if you want. Glasses can maybe be preventable there, but it is a different call.

MARTIN: Well, I have been fighting and exercising my eyeballs as much as I can, but I need some magnification to see up close, like when I am looking at a computer screen, as I am doing right now, it becomes fuzzy when I take these off.

JAKE: Yeah. The lens hardens, so the focusing muscle, the ciliary muscle can’t shape the lens as much, so you don’t get as good of a close-up vision, that is a fact of increasing maturity.

MARTIN: All right, so especially people who have myopia or astigmatism, keep listening, this is for you! You said it beautifully a moment ago, you said there is a billion something dollar industry…

JAKE: …hundred billion dollars a year!

MARTIN: It is a racket because they’re charging you maybe $200 for lenses you can easily buy for $2.50.

JAKE: Exactly. That is exactly correct. Literally exactly correct. I have the wholesale pricing sheets for all kinds of brands, what the optometrist pays. If you are getting their super fancy stuff it is maybe $5 that they pay.

MARTIN: Those would be the high index, super-light lenses?

JAKE: Yeah, with all the coatings and everything else, of course, the brand name, but it is still just single-digit dollars.

MARTIN: And they are often crying, telling you: “Well, I can maybe give you a 10% off…”

JAKE: They have a huge overhead.

MARTIN: We don’t want to deny the livelihood to professionals who provide valuable service, and I suppose an optometrist or ophthalmologist would be useful to help you deal with more complicated things, like a detached retina or something complicated like that, right?

JAKE: Absolutely! Western medicine is really good at acute problems, right? Like if blood is gushing out of your body, if your retina is detaching, they have fantastic solutions. It is the long-term problems, when there is a thing going on that is not killing you at the moment, that there is a symptom treatment for, where they can just address the symptom, they are not as great at that. In general, an optometrist can absolutely help you. Like what we are going to talk about, there are helpful, friendly optometrists that give you glasses that are useful for you, that is perfectly fine. My concern is when you walk in there and you go: “What is wrong with me?” and they say: “Oh, it is something genetic, nothing can be done about it, buy these glasses, wear them all the time.” That is what I am fighting against because it is somewhere between a lie and just ignorance. When we were smaller, many years ago, I got a lot of pushback, but now they are just quiet and ignore us.

MARTIN: So we are actually developing a larger problem now because we are switching to a society that has got a lot of small screens that people stare at from very early in life, right? A hunter-gatherer would have his eyeballs exercised by switching from up-close to far away, scanning objects near and far, and that is not happening today. We spend half of our time staring at a little screen!

JAKE: Possibly even more, especially kids now are incredibly addicted to these things! All the stories I hear from parents and schools, about kids hiding phones and sneaking phones.. the distance is also a problem, the smaller the screen, the closer you are going to hold it to have an immersive experience. The way biology works: there is a lens in the front of your eyeball. And there is the retina that receives the light signal and starts processing it in the back of the eye. So there is a lens in the front and the retina in the back. And the lens’s job is to focus the light on the retina in the back. And the lens is flexible, it shapes itself with the help of this circular muscle around that lens, which is called the ciliary muscle. And the closer you look at something, the tighter the muscle gets. By design, the lens is intended to be flat most of the time, when the muscle is relaxed. When you look at something closer, like six meters [20 feet] away, it is still completely relaxed. But the closer you look, the tighter that muscle gets. But it doesn’t have a feedback mechanism, as far as pain goes. So it doesn’t tell you when it is tight for too long, or when you are overstimulating it.

And this extended, close distance causes the muscle to spasm eventually, the muscle just doesn’t fully relax, if you do this for many hours at a time. And then what happens is it keeps the lens stuck in some level of close-up mode, so when you look at a distance, you don’t get clear distance vision, not because of a genetic defect, but because that muscle in your eye is just stuck. By the way, Google Scholar is my favorite research website. ‘Pseudo myopia’ and ‘NITM (near induced transient myopia)’ are the two terms to type into Google Scholar, you will see tens of thousands of clinical research references. They are showing clearly that science knows that this focusing muscle spasm is the beginning of myopia. So when you go to the optometrist, especially with a kid, and the optometrist says things like: “very mild myopia just started, blah, blah, blah,” and you ask: “What is it?” and they say: “Well, it is genetic!” It is not! It is called pseudo-myopia, it is completely clearly explained by clinical science!

MARTIN: And the progression, as you outlined, when they start you off with -1.0, and next year you get -1.5 and so on, why is that? Is it because the cramp or the contraction of the muscle is just simply getting worse as time goes?

JAKE: No, this is really interesting, actually! It is called lens-induced myopia. I point this out because some people say it sounds so much like a conspiracy. Like, how am I saying that every optometrist is lying to you? That sounds incredibly farfetched! So, if you go to Google Scholar, and you see tens of thousands of references to pseudo myopia, you realize there is not an unknown genetic defect. It is really important to be able to make the distinction. When they give you lenses, the lens moves the light for the back of your eye, so it compensates for the muscle spasm. The lens basically hides the true problem, which is the muscle spasm and just moves the light for the back. Your eyes have a second mechanism for focus, and that is related to the length of the eyeball, they call it the axial length. It continually adjusts.

There is a complex mechanism in the eyeball that gives it a self-reference, that is between the rods and cones and the way you perceive green light and red light, and this mechanism continues changing the shape of the eyeball to calibrate it. The eyeball is never a perfect sphere. It is a liquid-filled sack, basically. So it always needs to adjust itself. That adjustment, when you put a lens in front of it, the lens causes something called hyperopic defocus, where some of the light focuses behind the retina. And that exact mechanism tells the eyeball: “I am the wrong length.” So the lens is creating a signal that says “I am too short.” So then the eyeball elongates, relatively slowly, it takes about a year for it to go a third of a millimeter, And a third of a millimeter is about one diopter. So in a normal case, if you wear your glasses all the time, you are wearing them a lot, every year you can make as much as one diopter increase, just because a perfectly healthy eyeball is adjusting to this stimulus from the lens. And that is how the optometrist gets the recurring subscription revenue of you buying stronger and stronger glasses.

MARTIN: So the antidote is that you will wear glasses that are just a little too weak for you today so that your eye will have to try and chase it backwards into the better territory?

JAKE: That is exactly correct, with the minor detail that you need two pairs of glasses, depending on how strong the glasses you need. If you can’t see your computer screen without glasses, you need a pair of glasses that are just strong enough for the computer screen. The way eyesight gets worse in the first place mainly is not from wearing the glasses for distance vision, but when you wear them for a closeup. You have to kind of challenge your eyesight very, very slightly, not throwing away your current glasses, not doing anything extreme. Just basically what you are saying, you are slowly walking backward.

MARTIN: I guess it is still safe to drive with the 20/30 vision, right? That is legal.

JAKE: Yes, but I am not giving any advice on that front, where somebody’s going to have a car accident. In the US, for example, in most states, 20/40 is the legal limit, so 20/30 is legal. When it comes to driving, I always say wear whatever gives you the clearest vision. Because in the nighttime, your vision may be less fantastic. If it is raining, at speed, your acuity is different from static acuity, so for me, driving is that exception where I always tell people to keep their old pair of glasses in the car. If you feel that you need them, be sure to be safe, but if you are walking, if you are out and about in an environment where you are not relying on perfect eyesight, and especially in the beginning, when you are still figuring this out, having two pairs of glasses, one weaker and one just right, is the best option. Like having the pair that the optometrist gave you and having a slight reduction to get you into that space where it is like: “okay, this challenges me a little bit,” so you can get familiar with it.

If you haven’t gotten new glasses in 10 years, then these glasses you currently have may already be “weaker,” because your eyeball may have adjusted in length over those years. If you have recent glasses that you’ve got from an optometrist, it is very likely that you are over-corrected by as much as one diopter. What I found is people that start this, in the first 90 days, make about a diopter reduction, which is not the eye improving, but you learning how to challenge your eyesight, and you are realizing that what the optometrist gave you was stronger than you really needed in your day to day life. With that first reduction, if you just reduce it by half diopter, just because it is an experiment and you don’t want to introduce more blur, so if you are just introducing a little bit of blur, that is perfectly fine. There is no need for more reduction. People often tend to go overboard. Like, the first thing people do when they find out about this, as did I, they just make too big of a reduction. And now you can’t recognize facial expressions, little details, people across the street, and then it affects the quality of your life.

MARTIN: So don’t try to break the world record in the quickest recovery!

JAKE: Yeah, exactly. The average rate of improvement and this is talking about tens of thousands of people for the last 20 years, is about just a little bit under a diopter per year. So in three to four months, you can make a quarter a diopter reduction on average. Right at the beginning, it is faster, but after that, this is about average. So it is unlikely that you can just throw away your glasses in a month or six months or whatever internet claims. It is very gradual, your eyeball readjusts itself slowly.

MARTIN: So of course, that is going to get costly, if we don’t have friends in the right places. So how do you do that? Where can you buy cheaper glasses? Do you share that with people on your website? How do you help people with this?

JAKE: I say just buy glasses online. There are a bazillion lens shops, in the US a lot of people use a place called Zenni Opticals, for $20 you are getting things that the optometrist charges $200 for. I wouldn’t call it cheap, but it is in an affordable range. You can find really affordable glasses online.

MARTIN: So you have three pairs of glasses or something like that, and you just alternate by the situation?

JAKE: Yeah, and every three to four months, you are stepping it down a little bit, getting weaker glasses every time.

MARTIN: So what about a person that has different needs for both eyes? Like, their left eye needs -2.0 and the right one is -3.0? What do they do?

JAKE: Our website has like 1200 articles I have written over the years, and there are so many little detailed scenarios. What I refer to as diopter ratio when one eye is stronger than the other, starts with something called ocular dominance, everybody has a stronger eye and a weaker eye, it is just part of how your visual system handles focusing, movement, and 3D space. So your eyes don’t see exactly the same, but when you go to the optometrist, they correct your vision. The fact that one eye is weaker is just natural. So they introduced this ratio change that over time can grow larger depending on who the optometrist is, and depending on how you answer their questions, sitting in a dark room. 

There are many details to this, but for the first reduction, you can just ignore the difference and just reduce both sides the same. So if you are -3.0 and -4.0, you go down to a -2.5 and -3.5, you keep that difference, so you are not introducing a change in how you see your environment, you are keeping it as simple as possible. But when your eyes adjust to that, and then you can see as well as you could before, you can eventually just go a quarter a diopter lower in the stronger side, it takes a little bit longer to adjust to that, but eventually you can get rid of this ratio the same way that it was created in the first place, just by very slowly reducing it over time.

MARTIN: Okay. So is the astigmatism problem similar to this, or is that a more complicated thing?

JAKE: It is very similar. Real astigmatism exists if your corneal surface is uneven to a degree that your visual cortex can’t compensate for it, but it is exceedingly rare. The problem is when you are sitting in the darkroom at the optometrist shop, they introduce cylinder correction that fixes astigmatism, and if at that moment you don’t say: “No, that is not better,” they might leave it on, and there you go, you have astigmatism, and eventually, the eye adapts to this, and now you really need the cylinder correction. But you can reduce it! And again, you reduce it for your closeup first. A ghosting or double vision from astigmatism, that is noticeable at a distance, may not be noticeable when you are reading a book. So you reduce astigmatism for closeup first. And when you find that any small amount of ghosting is gone, then you introduce that reduction for distance. It takes longer. Astigmatism reduction may take you six months instead of three, but it goes away the same way as spherical myopia. Your eyes are fine. They’re doing the job if you let them.

MARTIN: I know people who complain about headaches in front of screens and this double vision, and they get the correction and they feel better, they don’t get the visual stress that they previously had.

JAKE: Absolutely, for sure, there are situations where you need correction for your eyesight. It is just a lot less common than what we are being told. I had astigmatism, I had over a diopter of astigmatism, I don’t have it anymore. I collect success stories, we have a Facebook group that is fairly large now, and I do a little podcast about it. Very commonly people have astigmatism around a diopter that eventually is just gone. It happens, especially if you have no spherical myopia or very, very low, like in the one diopter range, but you have a bunch of astigmatisms. If you have +2.0 of astigmatism, there is maybe something going on. In those cases, people have gone to the ophthalmologist, and they get something called corneal topography that checks your cornea to see if there is an actual issue you need glasses for, but it is just very uncommon.

MARTIN: So what is the name of your website and the Facebook group? Is it a public group, or do people need to apply and be approved?

JAKE: People need to be approved, when it was created, I didn’t know better, so I made it that way, and now Facebook doesn’t let me change it. So even when we have 18,000+ members, it requires approval to get in. We also have a forum and a Youtube channel. Our website is endmyopia.org, and it has all the links to all the community stuff as well.

MARTIN: Great! This sounds very hopeful!

JAKE: One issue that people have is lacking the motivation to do anything about it because you can throw in the contact lens, you can put on the glasses. We don’t realize how much it is empowering and how much it improves your quality of life to not be dependent on these things. I used to think that I can’t do sports! I paraglide and kitesurf now because I found that my motor control skills are better than I thought because I have good peripheral vision that you don’t have with glasses. There are so many nuances. I thought I was a huge introvert and that I don’t like talking to people, but it was just not true! The way you move your eyes, instead of moving your neck when you wear glasses, makes you seem somewhat anti-social. 

When you walk, you look at the ground because you don’t have peripheral vision, so your physical expression of yourself is significantly different as a lens wearer, and the way people perceive you and the way you end up perceiving yourself and how you interact with the world is very much affected by your lens wear. So even though it seems like not a big deal, I just throw those things on and it is one less problem to have to fix, it is completely worth it to go understanding doctors, understanding your eyesight, and at least just taking a little step in the direction of “maybe I’ll explore this.” I just want to put that out there, because what we talk about of course is interesting, but the motivation for a lot of people doesn’t come, until they realize: “Hey, my life could be noticeably better if I wasn’t stuck behind glasses.”

MARTIN: Yeah. This is important! Why, why am I wanting to do this? Why am I wanting to spend the money on the extra frames and lenses? And the end goal is: you are going to be as humans were supposed to be, we didn’t evolve wearing eyewear in the Savannah in Africa, right?

JAKE: Posture, the way people sit in front of a computer, is also a big deal. There are a lot of posture problems, people try to correct posture with yoga and other exercises, but then they wear glasses, which limits their  ability to fix posture things! I could talk for an hour about how lenses affect your whole interaction with the world and yourself.

MARTIN: So the expected trajectory is that you are going to be able to push back about a diopter a year, so for most people that could be only a three or four-year process to go lens-free, right?

JAKE: Yes! People tell me like: “Oh, this is going to take five years, that is not worth it.” But every diopter is a completely different experience! Because if you look through your glasses, if you take your glasses off and you move them in front of your face, you start seeing how poor the optical is that you receive through lenses. You start seeing the steps and color changes, and everything is a lot smaller through the lenses. So if you go from -5.0 to -3.0, you see literally a larger world! And you have less distortion, you see better colors, you can put your glasses down and find them again. So I say, celebrate every diopter, because every diopter gives you literally better vision even through the lenses. I always like to think of it like this – every year is a significant change, not just the end goal of 20/20 vision.

MARTIN: Well, I find that nutrition has a lot to do with it. I know that if I don’t eat as well as I could, my vision is worse. Do you have some comments on that?

JAKE: insulin spikes are very bad for your eyesight. If you drink a large coke and eat a pizza afterward, you might notice that your focus isn’t as good. Insulin spikes are not great. A lot of people report, and I am not a nutrition food expert, that intermittent fasting helps their eyesight. These are still anecdotes, it is just people telling me stuff, but it is a lot of people who say: “Hey, when I fixed what I eat, less processed food, less sugar…” Generally, a better diet and fasting really seem to make a difference in eyesight. The core issue is the lenses and reducing diopters, but absolutely diet plays a role, diet, and light.

MARTIN: You know, as a health coach, of course, I could tell you that the eyes reflect the quality of how your liver is operating, and your liver is affected by the food you feed yourself. Because if you make your liver more toxic, then you are going to have a lesser operating capacity at your eyeballs. No question there. So just as you mentioned, the high carbohydrate diets will do it. Fasting is great because it gives your body a chance to detoxify itself. That is the main purpose of it.

JAKE: Yeah. And people forget about light! The weird narrow spectrum, indoor lighting that we use, affects your eyesight noticeably as well. By the way, these things are all easily measurable, because a diopter is just distance to blur, how many centimeters can I see before there is a blur. So you can take a measuring tape, we now have an iPhone app that can also measure your myopia, it is not perfect yet, but it is measuring your distance to blur. How many centimeters can I see before the blur starts? If you do that in shaded natural light, the distance is going to be noticeable greater than if you do it in some weird LED or fluorescent-lit indoor room, that appears to be bright. So the spectrum of light affects how far you can see clearly. So food and lighting are the other two big pieces of the puzzle that we ignore.

MARTIN: We actually have several products that help people with their vision! We have something that helps to detox the eyes, it has fulvic acid in it, we call it Bright Eyes, it is a product that many people have bought on our website, it helps them immensely because it helps to detoxify the eyeball, especially from floaters and other oxidative stress stuff.

JAKE: The floaters come up a lot. And that is your area more than my area. In the Facebook group, every few days, somebody asks about floaters. Because we have a fairly large group, if people bring up floaters, I am more than happy to recommend your products, so they can try that and see what it does! We have to be open, we have to try things! If you say it works, I am more than happy to tell people that you said it, and they should try it out!

MARTIN: I started a Facebook group too, this was for people with fibromyalgia, thinking that they needed a lot of help, and I knew how to help them. But when I started telling them what would work, many of them were very hostile, saying that I am actually peddling my wares, that I am trying to take advantage of them, even though I was not forcing anybody’s hand. I was just saying: “Try this, it works, try it, if you like it, tell others.” But they wouldn’t even try it, they would just scream at me, saying I just want to sell stuff.

JAKE: This is why I mentioned Google Scholar for people to do research because it is really difficult. I appreciate people’s position because there is so much stuff on the internet, where somebody is just using something to sell whatever product they are trying to push. So it is really hard for people to make that distinction. I appreciate where they’re coming from, but at the same time, it sucks because I used to sell courses, not very actively. Right now I don’t sell any, but whenever I do, there are people saying: “Oh, you are just trying to make money.” I understand where they’re coming from. Do you know what I mean? But at the same time, I think we have to be open-minded and recognize that some people are trying to help us. We can’t just put everybody in the same box of ‘you are just peddling your wares.’ Try it out! Because if I can answer the floaters questions with something, I’d be absolutely happy about it.

MARTIN: Awesome. So the other question we know how to answer is red eyes, overtired red eyes, we have something that will bring oxygen in and soothe them, it is the MSM Gold Drops. I will post links to these products in the description.

JAKE: Bring it, bring it on! I am happy to share.

MARTIN: And the funny part is that it is not crazy priced! So hopefully, we can help your people too! What did I not ask? Is there anything else we should talk about?

JAKE: This is a long topic, and I think this was a good introduction. Especially the ‘why’ part, and the way to research, whether it is true and that you are not genetically defective. Also, kids are a big thing. iPads are not babysitters, and your kids might be incredibly addicted to those screens. And you might be setting a bad example by also using screens too much yourself. So recognizing the addiction to the screen, not blaming yourself, but just going: “What else can I do with my life that doesn’t involve scrolling through a Facebook feed?” That is a side worth considering.

MARTIN: So the antidote to that is really getting away from the screen, right?

JAKE: Yeah, 100%! I get so much email from parents, that I wasn’t getting 10 years ago, that all boils down to parents figuring out that an iPad is a babysitter. When you put an iPad in front of a two-year-old, by the time the kid turns three, they already can’t see perfectly, they go to the optometrist, get glasses at four or five. With young kids with glasses, that eyeball elongation happens very quickly. So it can be a dramatic thing, and it will affect the child’s quality of life significantly. I always say, if a child is holding a screen, that is a no-no. You might as well just give them coffee and vodka at that point.

MARTIN: So the gift that a parent can give to the child is the gift of uncorrected vision. That is a life lifelong gift! If you allow it to go sideways, you are actually stealing from your children the future that they might have had.

JAKE: Yeah. I have a five-year-old, and one of the first words he learned was ‘scooch back.’ It is funny and terrible, because we let him watch movies, but the distance is the key! When you are six meters away from the screen, the eye muscle is still relaxed. My kid was never allowed to hold a phone. When people give him a phone, I shout at them. The distance is super key for entertainment. If your child has vision problems, and your child gets to hold and play with an iPad, that is why. And it is going to get a lot worse if the child gets glasses.

MARTIN: It is a very important topic! Not long ago, I was reading my father’s bio that he wrote, he is no longer alive, so I am reading his bio that he wrote and saved it for whoever wants to read it. And there he is talking about how at age 14 or 15, he had to give up hockey that he loved, because his vision wasn’t up to it, and with the glasses, there was no peripheral vision. And the thing that was left for him was running. So he became a sprinter because he was into sports, but he had to give up team sports.

JAKE: I used to play water polo. I loved water polo. But when I got glasses, and I got a stronger and stronger and stronger prescription, it got to the point where the ball was just a yellow blur. I taught myself how to catch the center of the yellow blur. Then it got to the point where I couldn’t recognize teammates. That was the end of it. This is why I am doing this because it diminishes your quality of life. And that genetic defect thing is a lie. We just need to be at least the choice: do I take the quick fix or not? Because what happened to your dad happened to me, it happens to millions of people that are just not aware that there is another option.

MARTIN: This is a big deal. And I especially see this thing with the parent and the child. I would really like to put in the guilt message for all parents who are watching this. Don’t steal your children’s future by letting them become myopic!

JAKE: In the 16th century, this problem already existed, it was just monks, because nobody else was reading. It was just monks and candles and books. Johannes Kepler already said that myopia comes from staring at this close-up thing for too long. He already figured it out. And then it became us in our teens, but we didn’t have screens, we just had books. Now we have screens! I own stock in lots of lens manufacturing and related industries, and I have made a lot of money from it because that is a growing industry, it is very unfortunate.

MARTIN: So the website is endmyopia.org. What a wonderful name!

JAKE: I figured out years and years and years into this, that people don’t know what myopia is. It is not until we started doing podcasts and people started asking “What is myopia?” that I figured out my marketing is terrible.

MARTIN: Well, I don’t know how else to say it. Maybe www.seemeclearly.com. (laughing)

JAKE: It is fine now, people know what it is now.

MARTIN: Well, a Facebook group with 18,000 people, that is a significant movement!

JAKE: Yeah, and we don’t promote it or anything, so it is cool.

MARTIN: All right! This is Jake Steiner from endmyopia.org! People, you can see better than this!

JAKE: That is beautiful, thank you so much, Martin, for having me on, I really appreciate it.

MARTIN: Thank you for being here! This is the Life Enthusiast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Visit us at www.life-enthusiast.com, or call me directly at (866) 543 3388! Thank you for listening!

Author: Nina Vachkova