Get ready for a life-changing, mind-blowing show! Jake has a fascinating and perhaps controversial take that will compel you to rethink the use of prescription glasses to see better.
He is the founder of EndMyopia.org, which offers extensive education on how to improve your eyesight naturally and avoid the pitfalls of relying on glasses – the ultimate โshortcutโ that will create lifelong dependency and accelerated decline of visual acuity. In this show, Jake reveals that bad eyesight can cause serious depression, anxiety, limit physical performance, and a number of diet implications as well. Meanwhile, myopia is not a โmysterious genetic conditionโ but rather the machinations of a 100 billion dollar a year lens manufacturing industry (and a lot of lobbying). โReal myopia is the thing that happens after you start wearing glasses,โ Jake reveals.
This show will ask you to have an open mind, think critically, and perhaps try a different approach where you monitor things like โstrain awarenessโ to give you eyes a bit of a workout every day, instead of throwing your glasses on without a second thought. After all, we work our muscles with exercise and fight hard to stay in shape, why shouldnโt our eyesight be viewed in the same paradigm?
Enjoy the show, and learn more about Jakeโs educational effort at EndMyopia.org.
QUOTES:
- โPeople donโt care about eyesight because they donโt realize that you are a different person if you canโt see well without glasses.โ
- โPeople donโt realize that if you wear glasses, it affects your posture significantly, it affects how you walk, how you look, your social behavior…itโs an extremely integral part of our existence.โ
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Get Over Yourself Podcast
Brad (1m 32s): Hey folks, you are in for a real treat coming to you from all the way across the world on a remote Island, Thailand. Jake Steiner. Yes. He’s landed there during the quarantine period and the shutdown of the airports. He was on vacation.Little did he know he’d be hanging on the island for a long time. He has such a positive attitude about it. Right away you’ll get Into this show and really warm to this guy and his incredible message that will turn the world of corrected vision optometry wearing glasses on it’s ear for you. Yes. What if we were all entirely wrong about our basic notions and premises that as you get older, your eyesight gets worse. Brad (2m 15s): You put glasses on. It corrects it. There’s no downside to wearing glasses. All it is is your screen looks more clear? Oh my goodness. It is time to rock your world with some new and earth shattering insights. So this podcast will be an exercise in challenging your fixed and rigid beliefs and your pursuit of confirmation bias. When it comes to topics like this. He is going to tell you something that is entirely opposite from the conversations that you’ve had with your optometrists. And it’s going to be a lot of fun to keep an open mind and listen to what Jake has to say. Go check out his great work at endmyopia.org. He’s doing this mainly as a charitable project because he just wants to get the word out. Brad (2m 59s): He makes money in the finance arena. He’s just a health enthusiast doing something really wonderful. And this show reawakened a long dormant 20 year insight that I had from reading a random book off the shelf that I picked up cause I thought the title was compelling and it was something like Improve Your Vision Without Wearing Glasses. And the book went on to describe how the eye muscle needs to be worked out like any other muscle. And when you put glasses on, you kind of turn it into a, it turns into a crutch where your muscles are no longer resilient and stretching and relaxing properly. Therefore you become dependent upon the glasses. And I remember the argument in the book was, all you need to do is 40 minutes of exercise each day with your eyes like doing the various eye drills, and then you’ll improve your vision and be able to wean off glasses. Brad (3m 48s): And I didn’t quite keep my commitment to 40 minutes of eye exercises per day, but I did take away this insight that I was going to try to use my glasses as little as possible, only when I needed them. And I’ve adhered to that for many, many years. And my near-sighted prescription, my myopia prescription has remained stable for something like 15 years. I also credit my transition over to a Primal Blueprint style, eating a low carb, low inflammatory, getting the junk out of my diet had a measurable improvement in my eyesight or the lack of dependency on glasses. Things got better. I stopped getting sunburn. All of these different things happen when I switched over to Primal and got that inflammatory pattern out of my lifestyle from the foods I was choosing. Brad (4m 36s): So without further delay, let’s talk to Jake Steiner and hear some new, exciting sound bites. Like your quote, strain awareness. How’s your strain awareness. That’s right. He wants you to strain a little bit in the interest of working out your eyes. And I don’t want to take too much of his thunder. So here we go. Jake Steiner. I got you, man. And isn’t it nice to have Zoom connecting us from across the world. And in your case you have a pretty interesting location. So I think we should start by figuring out where the heck are you? Why you’re there ? Where do you usually live? Oh boy. So I am on an Island in Thailand and I just happened to be in Bangkok the moment the world was locked down. Jake (5m 20s): So I decided to escape to an Island instead and wait it all out. What’s it like? Like over there that’d be the, the country of Thailand is locked down, like anywhere else? And what’s the Island like, is it a resort or you’ve been keeping busy for six months or, Or whatever it’s been? No, actually I’ve only been on the Island for two months. Now. I want to say the interesting thing is here there’s still a bunch of hippies. It’s kind of a hippie Island. So there’s a ton of hippies and there’s just yoga schools all over the place. There are no tourists. All the Chinese are gone and it’s really chill. Nobody cares about masks. I haven’t worn shoes in weeks. It’s not the worst place I think. Brad (5m 60s): Right. You’re you were there on vacation from your usual location in Burma, you say? Jake (6m 9s): Actually, I was coming back from Vietnam. We were kite surfing for a month with my girlfriend and they were going back to Burma, her and my son and I stopped off in Bangkok just cause I had something to do. And two weeks later the airport was closed. Brad (6m 25s): Wow. Jake (6m 27s): And then she had a baby since that I haven’t seen yet. So, Brad (6m 30s): Oh my gosh. Is the airport still closed?. Jake (6m 37s): Regional flights here, but I can’t go to Myanmar. Myanmar shut down. Brad (6m 41s): Wow. Maybe that’s a smart idea for certain places too, to, you know, and maybe we should all done that. I mean, U S airlines, I’m getting email promo messages to go and fly for a discount rate and they they’re, they’re begging us to get on the planes. Jake (6m 58s): Yeah. I don’t know this whole, this whole story. I just don’t know what to make of it. All I know is I’m stuck in a place that’s full of healthy food and interesting people. So, Brad (7m 8s): And, and a good attitude by Jake. So I think the important thing to talk about that I say I’m very fascinated by is this alternative view of vision corrective lenses. The entire paradigm is about to be flipped on its end by Jake. So I want to hear about your work and all the stuff you sent me on the email. Why don’t you tee everybody up? Jake (7m 31s): Yeah. All right. So you called it a fascinating topic, which you’re the first person to probably ever say that because people don’t care about eyesight, curiously, interestingly. And your eyesight connects to everything else. People don’t realize if you, if you wear glasses, it affects your posture significantly. It affects how you walk. It affects how you look. It affects your social behavior. It can be connected to anxiety, depression, child development. It’s an extremely integral part of our existence. And most of us are led to believe when we go to an optometrist that we have some curious or known mysterious genetic defect that is causing our eyesight just to get worse. Jake (8m 12s): This is something that didn’t exist a hundred years ago, basically, but now is affecting 60 to 90% of the world’s population, depending on where you go. That mysterious genetic condition, that’s a hundred billion dollar year industry. That’s been heavily lobbied to make clear curved pieces of plastic so-called prescription in some countries like the U S and extreme profit margins. The glasses people wear, the wholesale cost is two or $3. They sell a hundreds. And the whole thing is a really interesting scheme. Brad (8m 48s): We are, we are teed up and some of those things about your posture and your social behavior, I’m curious how that plays out. I got to watch my posture. Now, if I put my glasses on. Jake (9m 2s): Well, there’s lots of things and I don’t want to go completely into the rabbit hole here, but just as a very, very simple example, less with contact lens, as much more with glasses. If you’re wearing glasses, you can only, you feel the vision is just to the center of the lens. That your eyes don’t like to move within that lens because their distortion happens. People wear glasses tend to be really central vision focused. And what happens for example, when you walk is somebody who doesn’t wear glasses, you use your peripheral vision to scan the ground around you and just the world around you. A person without glasses is looking ahead as they’re walking. Generally speaking person with glasses is looking down because I have to see where they’re putting their feet next, because the vision is only working in well into central parts. Jake (9m 52s): You see myopic people with glasses walking their neck bent forward a lot more neck issues, neck pain issues, all of that one, super, just super basic example of lens wear affecting how you move through the world. Brad (10m 7s): So when we go and get our eye exam and we learn, I mean the, the genetic part is I’m getting older and now I’m getting more and more nearsighted. Or, and now I really need reading glasses. Once I hit age 40 and all these kinds of things that we’re so familiar with, and we have now come to believe that these are normal. So I know that there’s a big belief that prescription eyesight corrective vision is part of the aging process. Jake (10m 38s): Hmm. Yeah. It’s interesting that, okay. Here’s the most interesting part because this sounds kind of conspiracy ish. If it’s the first time you hear about it, I always tell people, go to scholar.google.com for those who are not familiar with it, that’s Google search engine for clinical science. So if you want to read peer reviewed clinical science documents, instead of just who knows what, scholar.google.com is the place to go. And most of the things I talk about very ironically are direct quotes from the clinical journals that are ophthalmology and optometry journals. So my knowledge comes from the publications meant for optometrists and ophthalmologists, the people who sell your glasses curiously, right? Jake (11m 24s): And this whole idea of my eyes are getting mysteriously worse, just for a little taste of what goes on, what actually happens at first short-sightedness you can’t see clearly at a distance is a muscle strain. There’s a muscle in the eye, a really cool circular muscle that is around the lens in your eye that tightens up as you look at something up closer, right? That muscle gets tight. And then also relaxes as you look at something in the distance it’s designed to spend a lot more time in distance vision mode, where the muscle is relaxed and less time and close up mode. Oh surprisingly, what happens when you stare at something up close for hours and hours, that muscle just hazards. Jake (12m 5s): It doesn’t completely relax immediately, right? So now you’ve spent four hour bingeing, Netflix, you look up and things around you a little bit blurry because that muscle just doesn’t go into full relaxed position. If you go to scholar.google dot com and you type in pseudo myopia, PSEUDO myopia, you get tens of thousands of search results. And these are all. Now we’re talking about references to clinical peer reviewed science saying that myopia short-sightedness starts out as pseudo myopia, meaning not actually a condition. It’s just a muscle spasm. Brad (12m 40s): Is that in contrast to real myopia? Is there a certain percentage of the population that really does have whatever it is, a, a genetics or unfixable imbalance in the, in the ocular process? Jake (12m 57s): Yes, absolutely likely though. You’ve never met any of them. It’s 0.3%. Yeah. Yeah. It’s some tiny percentage. The thing is pseudo myopia. It’s also called near induced transient myopia. It’s funny because you type that into Google scholar, you get tens of thousands of search results. You go to the optometrist to ask you what causes myopia. They say, Oh, it’s genetic. You go to Google scholar, you get tens of thousands of results saying it’s a muscle spasm initially, right? That’s how almost all myopia starts out. And this is when you look, when you scroll through and you look at where these things are written about they’re in optometry journals. So these are the publications these people are supposed to be reading the cellular glasses. Jake (13m 40s): Super interesting. Now real myopia is the thing that happens after you start wearing glasses. And then if you Brad (13m 49s): Right, because you’re no longer asking the muscle to relax because you don’t need to or something Jake (13m 55s): That is exactly correct. So the lenses, the muscle is tight. The, the light is focused in front of the retina instead of on the retina. And all the glasses do is they move the light back to the retina. So you can ignore the muscle spasm. It’s a really short term, quick fix symptom treatment that now causes the eye to elongate because the eye has a built in mechanism to change its shape, to always have perfect long-term focus. And when you put a lens in front of it, the lens moves the light in the eye. And the eye responds to that by elongating. That’s called lens induced myopia. If you put that into Google scholar, tens of thousands of results, and this is the really interesting part, tens of thousands of results that say lenses cause myopia to progress. Jake (14m 43s): Tens of thousands. And these are largely in optometry journals, literally saying the glasses you put on your eyes cause your myopia to increase. Your vision, to get worse. Brad (14m 55s): I suppose it’s like using a brace for your back or your wrists or your knee, and then going out there and doing your workouts, thinking that you’re protecting your knee, but if you look at it from a big picture perspective, you’re maybe atrophying the necessary muscles there because this brace is like a, a crutch, or when you put a crutch on it, a broken joint, you’re no longer going through the range of motion. And so the joint and the muscles and the ligaments, and everything’s atrophying. Of course, you’re going to get that cast off in six weeks and then start rehabbing and working the heck out of the range of motion. But with our eyes, we get our glasses when we’re, whatever age and that’s the rest, the rest of our lives, we’re succumbing to the crutch. Brad (15m 42s): It sounds like. Jake (15m 43s): Yeah. And it’s a really, what makes it so interesting is I used to be really upset at optometrists because I figured this out 20 years ago on my own, I went through a really long and difficult journey getting my eyesight back to 20 20. I had high neoprene. I couldn’t see anything without glasses. And as I finally started figuring it out and I’m reading all the clinical science, this was before the internet was as convenient as this today, I would talk to these people and all I would get is just a lot of arrogance. And a lot of you don’t know what you’re talking about and it, it, it put me from a place of excitement into a place of, Hey, I guess apparently it’s you guys, not only have you caused this in me, and you’re also willfully ignoring when I’m saying, Hey, why don’t we look at this topic, right? Jake (16m 30s): Sorry. I was angry there for a while. But then I realized that people like it, a lot of people want the quick fix, like what I said, you call this a fascinating topic. And I don’t get to hear that very often because most people say, I know how to fix it. Contact lenses. Brad (16m 45s): Right. Right. And it’s, you know, not to, you know, disparage the well-meaning eyecare professional, but I think we see this type of behavior across all platforms in life, where we form these fixed and rigid beliefs. I just had the best selling author, Mark Manson on the podcast. And he was talking about how, you know, thinking that you can change someone’s mind or change their beliefs. It’s almost always going to fail. You have the extremely minimal opportunity to do that unless the person’s ready and open and receptive. Hopefully the listeners are, and you’ve enticed us so much so far to, to think that maybe this whole entire paradigm can be shifted. Brad (17m 29s): And we’re, you know, we’re on a podcast with an audience by and large has been able to embrace a new dietary strategy. That’s in complete opposition to, you know, the, the dogma and the flawed programming and, and government recommendations and marketing messages that we’ve heard for decades growing up. So I think that the time is right for your message. And as I told you, before we recorded, this is probably now over 20 years ago, I found a, an interesting book in the bookstore. And it was titled How to Improve Your Vision Without Glasses. And reading through it the doctors who wrote it gave a bunch of exercises. Brad (18m 10s): So if you did the tromboning where you watch your finger, go up to your nose and then out and then back, or look at the distant tree out the window, and then focus on something, a foot in front of you, then look at the tree again. And the argument was, if you do these exercises for like 45 minutes a day, you’ll be able to slowly but surely wean off of glasses. And I, you know, I tried it for a while, but then I fell short of this 45 day commitment to doing my trombone exercises. So I guess I’m setting you up for a reply there, but you know, my entry point into this, into this idea was a long time ago and it’s been kind of baking on the sidelines. So I think it’s cool to see where this can go. Jake (18m 54s): Yeah. And I, you are setting me up for a response because I am like I was in banking and finance investments, doing things that are very much not health-related I’ve fallen into this, this topic. And as I went through your podcast, we’ve, I’ve talked to a lot of the same people that you have. And it’s funny that I’m now in this space because I was fairly mainstream about everything. I just, I was sick of my glasses and I’m a research guy. So it came naturally to me to go, what of this is nonsense and motive is real and knowing how to do research, right? So that’s, my approach came from a completely different place. But I’m now finding that this is the case for so many things. Jake (19m 35s): My dad is a, he’s a medical doctor and he swears by statin drugs and he refuses anything that’s not about statin, drugs or alternatives. When it comes to glasses and the exercise thing, nobody has forty-five minutes. It is the thing, right? Like nobody does. So I, and this took a long time. Again, 20 years of being at this, I built an approach that’s habit based. So you have an upfront bit of a learning curve. You spend a month or so, 20 minutes a day, three times a week, maybe getting to know how your eyes work and how glasses work and what habits affect your eyesight. And once you have all that dialed in the improvement to not needing glasses happens more or less automatically because you’re building the challenge into a habit. Jake (20m 24s): Instead of doing the trombone, you sit far enough from your screen to where the text isn’t perfectly clear, right? So now you’re all the time, a little bit challenged.And then when you go outside, do you wear glasses that are not quite what the optometrists wanted to sell you, but you see like 20 30, right? You hope we recognize your friends, but a distant, a billboard is fuzzy. And you have to challenge yourself to clear it up. Brad (20m 49s): A little bit of challenge is okay. A little bit challenging you want it’s good because I would hear the opposite from an optometrist. And the only concession I’ve made from reading that book 20 plus years ago is I try to use my glasses at the bare minimum of absolutely necessary. So if I’m driving at nighttime and you know, things get a little blurry, I will use those for a difficult windy road. But if I’m driving two miles down the road, I’m going to skip it. If I’m watching a movie, I like to bring my glasses in there because it does make the screen feel sharper. But if I’m just hanging around and watching a show for 30 minutes at home, I’m constantly thinking, you know how little I can need these or use them. Brad (21m 33s): So I guess I can pat myself on the back for that. But if there’s a way to take it further and know that you’re going to wean off these glasses, sometime it seems like a lot of people would be really receptive. Jake (21m 45s): Yeah. And you’re doing the right thing, actually do. You’re doing, what’s not intuitive to a lot of people. And if you were wearing them all the time, you would have worse eyesight right now, quote, unquote worse because your eyes would have adopted to the glasses. It have gone back to the optometrist that would have given you stronger glasses and you would have become completely dependent on them. So by only wearing them when you need them, you’ve, you’ve kept yourself in a situation where you don’t have that increased dependence. Brad (22m 10s): Right. My prescription has not changed in an incredibly long time, like 14 years. The near-sighted prescription is the same. However, the computer glasses or the close-up stuff, which I’m blaming on excessive time in front of the screen, that’s, you know, I’ve noticed a decline. I thought it was associated with age and all that stuff. But I think now we’re at a critical fork in the road because my optometrist’s straight up said, don’t do that. Use your glasses all the time. Or you’ll get eye fatigue and eyestrain and eye this and eye that. Now, if we’re talking about diet and someone saying, Hey, this fat stuff is healthy for you. Brad (22m 51s): It won’t clog your arteries. You know, this is life or death stakes. And it took a lot of effort to convince people, to trust the idea that we can depart from a grain-based diet, high carbohydrate, high insulin producing diet, and actually be healthy. But here with your eyesight, I mean, what do we have to lose? If we’re going to spend 30 days trying to make the text a tiny bit blurry or move the point size down on your, on your smartphone, dial it down a little bit, to make it a little bit more of a challenge. This sounds fun, Jake. Jake (23m 20s): Yeah. And it has a little bit of challenge. That is what you want. You don’t want to have a headache by the way, you know, it’s too much, as you have a headache, your eyes hurt, or your eyes get really dry. You’re not blinking enough. Like you’re staring. If that’s not the case, challenge is what you want. Right. And also what you’re doing is actually perfect because some people refuse to wear glasses ever. And something, I call blur adaptation. It’s not the clinically correct word, but you get used to blur your visual cortex Just goes, this is the default. This is the standard. So by sometimes putting them on, especially if you only put it on, in specific conditions, right? Like it’s dark, right. Or you’re, you’re watching a movie. So you’re only doing it in those cases. Jake (24m 0s): It’s like, you’re reminding your visual cortex. This is the amount of clarity to be expected. So people who just refuse to wear the glasses, sometimes aren’t doing themselves any favor because their brain forgets what clear vision even looks like. So your approach is actually the perfect way to just intuitively manage this issue without it getting worse. Brad (24m 22s): Right. It’s we want to tiptoe on that line. Know what clear crystal clear vision looks like when you’re getting the exam and they keep switching the lenses and you’re like, Oh, that’s perfect. What a, what? A beautiful thing. I’m so happy to have this correction and then kind of dance around there instead of, you know, go the rest of your life with the glasses on. That sounds, sounds like a cool strategy. Jake (24m 47s): Yeah. And that’s long-term, and it I’m, I’m kind of skimming the surface here. There’s a lot more detail. That’s why I said there’s like a month worth of learning curve to really dial it in. But on the basic level, that’s all there is to it. Right? And the other thing is what you’re talking about. Age-related and you can see clearly up close different issue. What happens is, is your lens gets less flexible, right? As we age, the lens just gets less flexible. And as it gets less flexible, the muscle has a harder time shaping the lens for closer. And the closer up you look at something, the tighter, the muscle has to get. The more the lens is being reshaped and we lose some of that flexibility. Some of it. Jake (25m 28s): Now. I’ve been doing this for a long time and we’ve got a pretty large audience. And so far I’ve never heard of somebody who’s reduced their myopia, who needs reading glasses. So while your lens gets less flexible, the dependence on lenses is really the question. Like, do you need reading glasses? And what the optometrist will do, I’m not disparaging them, they’re taught this way and they’re selling things people want, right? But once you start putting on those reading glasses, you’re not now, you’re not challenging that muscle. Now you’re not reshaping that lens. And that lens loses more of its flexibility. So resisting the reading glasses and not wearing them when you don’t need them is generally the right strategy. Brad (26m 12s): I also find that if I really am feeling the strain looking at the computer screen, I’ve probably been looking at the computer screen too long anyway. And my productivity and all that I need to, I need to turn the bloody thing off rather than get my magic glasses on and power up for three more hours. Jake (26m 32s): Yeah. And that’s three hours. That’s actually funny. You say that that’s kind of my personal limit. And for a lot of people, that’s about where you hit the amount of time, where you need to get away from the screen and you can, right? Like there’s a lot more to this because you can, for example, you can measure your eyesight. We have an app, hopefully coming out in the next few days here. But even right now, with just a measuring tape from the side of your eye, to the screen or a book, and then you can, you can just adjust the distance until you see a little bit of blur. And that’s where that’s all the optometrist does. When the optometrist figures out, how much blur you have, how strong your glasses are, they’re just measuring a distance to blur, right? Jake (27m 14s): And that that’s all it is. Like, you can literally add home with a measuring tape, figure out how quote unquote bad your eyesight is just by measuring the distance. And then the interesting thing is that distance changes, right? Like if you went hiking for the weekend, you didn’t bring your phone. That distance is going to be larger. You can see clear, further. And after five hours on Netflix in a dark room, that distance is going to be small. Right? So what I encourage people to do is doing that measurement to realize you can very easily and specifically pinpoint what’s bad for you, right? Like if after the Netflix binge, your eyesight might be 30% worse. And if you measure that and you see, Hey, I got to go this close now and there’s already blur, then you know, that Netflix thing is maybe not a great idea. Jake (28m 1s): And the next time you try it an hour in a not dark room and then measure the distance and you’ll see, it’s not 30% worse. Right? So that’s why I say by, by tweaking habits, like realizing what straining your eyes specifically, and then slowly adjusting that a little bit is most of the battle. Brad (28m 20s): So we don’t want a dark room to consume our digital entertainment. Is it more strain on the eyes? It is more strain on the eyes or something? Jake (28m 29s): And again, here with the measurement, you can. This distance to blur really works well, depending on your eyesight. Like if you have perfect eyesight, the distance is too far to be conveniently measurable. But for most people who are like most people, it’s like I, not most people, but you might see 40, 50 centimeters or half an arm’s length on arm’s length, where before blur starts do the same thing in a dark room and the distance will be smaller. But just now, I mean, literally go from now, from, from outside in a shaded area where the distance may be too large to even measure with an arm’s length. And then you go into a dark room with a small iPhone screen and the distance is going to be notably shorter. Jake (29m 10s): Your eyesight is just less great in a dark environment, several factors. But, but so now when you’re in a dark environment, you’re going to have the screen closer, right? So you’re going to have the muscle tighter. So you’re going to be causing moisture. Brad (29m 24s): And also, I guess I have astigmatism, which is pretty common where when it’s dark, your eyesight dramatically decreases, I guess, for the same reason, or is this another category that we can correct? The astigmatism? Jake (29m 41s): Astigmatism is a real thing, but also very relatively uncommon. Unless it’s very significant your, your visual cortex will correct for it. I think it’s pseudo astigmatism. It could be right. It depends. There’s ways to, you can do a corneal topography. You can check out if your cornea has on, on evenness. That’s too great for your, for your brain to correct. But basically what happens is retina goes to your visual cortex and the visual cortex interprets the signal, right? So you don’t have your eyes. Don’t have to be perfect in every way. As long as your visual cortex can fix the image. I like the way Photoshop can fixed lens aberration. Jake (30m 23s): Like it’s the same sort of thing. Now, what happens anytime you get into a dark environment of refractive air, like anything that’s not perfect about your vision will become much more noticeable in a dark environment right here. You’re closer to the edge of how well you can see and anything that’s not perfect will, will show up more basic. Brad (30m 44s): So I think we should jump to what your program’s all about rather than waiting until the end and, you know, signing off with a, a call to action. But so someone’s extremely interested, wants to participate. Tell me about your offering. Jake (31m 0s): So I, my attempt is to put everything out for free because I don’t, it’s not, I make money in other places. So by and large, you can go to endmyopia. You can set your expectation of this is going to be a learning experience. Brad (31m 17s): endmyopia.org. That’s why I was jumping to the middle of the show here. Cause I’m like, you know, most people that are getting on an interview and telling their, their story, they’re trying to sell something. And I’m like, what is this all about? It was just so, so super awesome this community, and you have a huge, you have a huge Facebook community already with tens of thousands of people, right? Jake (31m 43s): Yeah. And that was, and actually I don’t promote any of these things. I wasn’t even really doing podcasts until I was made to do podcasts. I don’t advertise. It’s all word of mouth. The Facebook group is like 18,000 or so members. Now we also have a forum that’s quite big because I like to get away from social media, YouTube channel. That’s not very professional, but I post relatively frequently. The community is very large. And yeah, I don’t really, you can buy courses because this thing has become expensive over the years. Like what I mentioned earlier, there’s an iPhone app that is hopefully coming out in the next few days. So you can do this measuring just with your phone will do it automatically. Jake (32m 23s): And then you can save the results and it’ll give you suggestions based on all that. So I’m spending a bunch of money. There are courses that help fund some of this stuff. But basically the idea is there’s 1200 plus articles on the website. Do some reading, 97% of people that are doing this just to figure it out with the free stuff. If that’s too much work or you want to support myopia, there’s a very much condensed version of it. And then there’s a full on course where if you’re like, I don’t, I don’t want to deal with any more than have to have a course that I provide support for that gives you the step by step by step. Never have to look at the website, but it’s not necessary. Jake (33m 4s): Right? I like to encourage people to just go, Hey, all this stuff is on there. I figured it out. I’m happy if I can help you figure it out. The main thing I want is if you’re a parent with kids or you’re a young person, or you’re just you’re into sports, right? Or you just, your lifestyle doesn’t fit, wearing glasses, that there is a place that you can find answers. Because what bothers me right now is not that optometry sells everybody glasses it’s that it’s made to sound like a genetic condition. It’s as if McDonald’s said our food is healthy, right? Like that’s the place we’re in with eyesight. And I would just, I want to move that bar to where people recognize that glasses are a quick fix for their screen addiction and they like it, and that’s fine, but people want answers. Jake (33m 50s): I just want them to be able to figure out that there is something else. Brad (33m 53s): I would venture to guess that 99% of the people have no concept that there’s another option. And it’s either put these on and see clearly or not. And boy, I mean, the fact that there’s a, a door number two here should, should give us all pause. And I guess it’s the, the, the simple thing that you mentioned of just doing that blur test and then challenging the eyes a little bit would be, you know, a great entry point take away. Even if you don’t hit the website or get serious, you’re really busy. But you just remember that one takeaway from the podcast. I suppose you could make progress. Brad (34m 33s): Just doing that as a rule. Jake (34m 36s): Yeah. And there’s there’s for somebody who doesn’t want to look at anything. There’s two comments I want to make. One is if you have kids, IPads are not babysitters. And I’m saying this because am I in my inbox gets, I get about 700 emails a day on average. I can’t read all of them, but the emails that make it filter through me, or you can read all of them. No, but the problem is that emails that do get to me that the volume of parents freaked out about that five-year old needing glasses has increased super dramatically over the last five years, even extremely worryingly. It used to be nothing. And now it’s half of my emails are parents going why does my three-year-old need glasses? Jake (35m 21s): And the iPad is not a babysitter is my first no screens, right? Like my kid is five years old. Now he’s not allowed to look at any screen that is closer than six feet away. Not allowed, not for a minute. He’s not to pick him up. He’s not allowed to play with because the young eyes developing, right. And putting a screen a child’s arms are this long. Right. And the same thing happens. It’s silly. Your muscle is super tight. Now the eye elongates extremely quickly. And then as soon as you put glasses on young children, that myopia progresses extremely rapidly. Brad (35m 57s): So, Oh, because they’re in this vulnerable time where the eye muscles are still developing? Jake (36m 3s): Yeah. And the eyeball is adjusting, right? Because all like all babies are hyperopic. They can’t see clearly up close. And the mechanism and eyeball is extremely active in adjusting its length. And now when you put a screen in front of it, that’s problematic. And if you put lenses in front of it, that I will, we’ll just elongate by about a full diopter a year. So if you follow the optometrist advice and you have a five-year-old that gets minus one glasses today, next year, it’s going to be minus two. And next year is going to be minus three. And next year it’s going to be minus four. And I’m not saying guaranteed, but very likely. So iPad babysitter, definitely not a good idea.. Keep distance, right. Jake (36m 44s): Cartoons Brad (36m 45s): And limit the overall time is probably darn good advice too. Jake (36m 50s): Yeah. The internet is extremely addictive. And parents love it. Cause it kids quiet. And on the flip side of it, once you take that away from the child, because it’s so addictive, now you get the extreme adverse reaction. So parents are just like, Oh, we’ll just give him back the thing. But it’s, it’s a really terrible idea. Really, really, really, really not good. Brad (37m 11s): I suppose, on the flip side, are there some benefits to be had spending time outdoors and having your eyes focus on distant objects, which of course there are none in a home, right? You can’t look more than 12 feet or you’re, you’re at the, the wall, but when we’re out hiking, like you said, and we leave for the weekend and leave our phone behind and our eyesight measurably improves. Is that something that you could recommend every day as simply for eye health? Jake (37m 41s): I, we live in a weird time. I I’m saying this because I like we’re both from a different time, slightly than a younger generation. That’s grown up with the internet and I’ve had literally not infrequently have younger people go, I should spend an hour outside? What am I going to do an hour a day, every day? And so it, so now one of the things that I do, and I feel weird saying this is I explore what could be interesting hobbies that tempt you away from the screen with younger generations, because what is more tempting than YouTube and Instagram and dating apps and gameplay. Jake (38m 25s): It’s really hard to say, put this thing down and be bored outside. I think it’s hard to feed yourself with as much excitement, even going to play soccer, then what you can get from a screen. So finding things that you might be tempted to do outside, or even just not in front of a screen, because you know now with lockdowns and things, maybe you can’t go outside, but you can fix a motorcycle in your garage. Right? Or you can, you can do anything. That’s, even though it’s close up, it’s not a fixed distance like this for three hours course. Because as long as the closeness varies, your muscle keeps moving. And as long as your muscle keeps moving, it tends to not spasm. Jake (39m 6s): Right? So even if you’re painting, right, like you’re varying the distance, you’re dealing with the painting that you’re moving around. So even though it’s close up, just the fact that you’re constantly varying the distance, reduces that that muscle strain alone. Brad (39m 20s): So three hours maximum time without a break, absolutely go and take a really significant break. I don’t know how much time you recommend there, but how about inside that three hour block? Should we look away every five minutes or do some exercises every 20 minutes or something like that? I remember some of these tips from the book. So I’m curious. Jake (39m 42s): Yeah. I’m a practical guy, right? And, and I’m more, I look at this pragmatically of what are people really going to do? And I was a stock trader for a long time. I’m not going to look away for a screen every five minutes, never going to happen. Right. So you initially I recommend taking a break every 20 minutes to get yourself used to the feeling of strain. Because one of the weird things that happen is when you wear glasses all the time and you’re used to this, close-up, you can be close up for eight hours and that’s not natural. So if you start taking frequent breaks, after a couple months, you start feeling it like I cannot spend more than three hours looking at a screen. Jake (40m 22s): I can’t like it. Just, you get to the point where your eyes are just like, feel terrible because you’ve de strained them enough to where you get that feedback back. Right? So taking more frequent breaks in the first month is ideal. I respect that people are working and they are focused on their work. So if it has to be three hours, it is three hours. But then try to get as long of a break as you reasonably can. If you’d work, make the lunch break, picking up food somewhere, you know, like find ways to, to encourage enough distance vision to where over time you get that strain awareness back to where you can’t do a five-hour Netflix pitch because a normal person. Jake (41m 3s): And I mean, somebody who would have to not live in our society at this point could not spend five hours like this because it would just get too painful, you know. Brad (41m 14s): But you’re saying with the glasses on, we now have the capability because those glasses are, are freezing the muscle in place, reducing the strain. And then we can lock in and, and, and spiral downward into complete dependency on glasses. Jake (41m 32s): And there’s a kind of numbness that happens from doing this for so long. Like as the kid starts out, you know, reading a book or playing on a screen and then playing somewhere outside, maybe, and the older you get, the more you spend time on screen, it’s like a monk would train themselves to meditate for 30 days straight is you, you built this resilience to close up to where you don’t feel it anymore,but it’s a pretty universal thing that I hear from people. Once they spend enough time taking breaks, where they just can’t do that anymore, I can spend hours and hours on the screen because your eyes will tell you that this feels not right. We lose a lot of like, just normal, natural interactions with our body, from this stuff. Brad (42m 16s): Yeah. Explain that again. And I think that’s hugely important point. So when you’re good at taking breaks and you’re stretching that muscle, or you re you’re relaxing that muscle because you’re taking a break and going and looking at the forest, and then you start to get less tolerance for those prolonged screen bouts, because you’re good at taking breaks and letting that muscle relax a lot. Jake (42m 42s): Correct? Yeah. You get the strain awareness back, Brad (42m 44s): the strain awareness. That’s the greatest soundbite. I love that. You gotta, you gotta trademark that, man. How’s your strain awareness. I have no awareness of any strain. My glasses are awesome. That’s terrible. What are you talking about? I love it. I love it. Jake (42m 59s): I appreciate it. I come from a weird place because again, like I just figured this out and then I shared it with friends and friends shared it with friends, and now there’s a zillion people. Last year I looked at the web stats. So it’s like 1.2 million are still regular coming back readers of the thing. And I’m right. Like I’m a mainstream stock trader guy. I was just eating whatever food was in front of me. I learned all of these things. Like in my twenties, I had pain problems. I’d get chronic inflammation. I had erious issues. Now I’m in my late forties. I’m so much healthier from learning all these things in no small part from people that are in related areas, right? Like I talk about eyesight and then somebody is like, well, what about your nutrition? Jake (43m 40s): And I’d never thought about my nutrition. I’m just like, I eat food. Right. And we live in an amazing space now to where we’re able to share things that are not fed to us by corporate advertising and government mandates. Brad (43m 55s): Yeah. I’m, you know, fascinated by the carnivore diet movement for many reasons. First of which being that the, the rationale makes a tremendous amount of sense that you can emphasize the most nutrient dense foods on the planet as validated by nutrition science, right. A eggs and liver and things like that. And wild caught salmon have more nutritional value pound for pound than a big piles of produce. And then all the other arguments about the anti-nutrients and plants and the sensitivity, but mainly just going on the big picture, the, the opportunity to challenge our fixed beliefs and exercise some critical thinking here, because let’s say I have a guest on the show, Dr. Brad (44m 40s): Sean Baker, Dr. Paul Saladino a couple of the leaders have been, I’ve had a great interview experience with them, and they’re forcing you to, to rethink some of these basic foundational notions that we’ve locked into position. And they’re so fixed and rigid that we spend the rest of our days looking for confirmation bias. So now we have a guy on here saying that the optometrist is wrong and you’re your glasses are, you know, the opposite of the intended effect, which my optometrist is telling me the more I wear my glasses, the more my eyes will, will heal up and not be strained and be stronger and better. And I appreciate your sort of, you know, independent and free thinking approach. Brad (45m 23s): You’re referencing Google scholar. If someone wants to argue with you, you can say that there’s these thousands of studies and it’s not Dr. Jake’s wild and crazy glasses that are better than the next guy down the street. So we’re, we’re forced to listen to you if we want to exercise critical thinking, or if we want to put our head in the sand or the thing that you said at the outset of the show, if we want the easy way out. Sure. Grab those glasses, and don’t worry about it and forget about your strain awareness. But I think a lot of listeners are going to be intrigued and say, Hey, I want to be the best person I can be. And that includes seeing better. Yeah. I was actually on Sean Baker’s podcast. I was interesting was an interesting man. Brad (46m 5s): He know you guys so much in common with your, your, your free-thinking. I mean, it’s fantastic. Jake (46m 10s): Yeah. It’s a circle, right? Because I talked to Kate Messenger recently, and she mentioned him and it’s like, all of you guys, everybody’s kind of seems Like a, this circle, this group of people that have these ideas that are willing to take the time to share them. I’m really kind of humbled to be somehow in this. Brad (46m 28s): Oh my gosh. And if nothing else, I want to be a member of the club who is open-minded willing to think, think critically, maybe I will form a fixed and rigid belief about whatever it is and, and carry on with my life, thinking that what I’m doing is right. But if I’m not open to new information, boy, that’s going to be a heavy strike against any one of us. And I mean, same goes with divisive politics. Should we pay attention to what the other side is saying? Probably so we should probably process it a little bit, see where they’re coming from and then make a, a decision that is aligned with, you know, things that are important to you. But I think we’re getting not as good at that. Brad (47m 8s): And just dogmatic and whoever shouts the loudest is going to, you know, score the most points and it’s time to kind of unwind that stuff. So I I’m putting you in the cloud, man. I love what you’re doing. It’s really fascinating. And hopefully we’ll get a lot of people going over there to endmyopia and myopia.org. Is that the Jake (47m 29s): that’s right? Brad (47m 29s): Yeah. Okay. I feel like I’ve had all my pressing questions answered. Do you have anything else on your mind that might be of use to the listeners or, you know, good suggestions to take some baby steps and get started and learn more? Jake (47m 48s): The two things. So one is that measuring the distance until the app is ready. If you get a measuring tape and just X it’s really, I don’t want to say addictive, but it makes it interesting. Once you realize how much that distance changes and how much taking a break can, may improve your eyesight in a short period of time, then you get tempted, right? Like the hearing about this is fascinating and you listen to podcasts, you know. But picking up that measuring tape just for a day or two puts you in a different state of mind of actually trying it. Brad (48m 20s): And So I could print out a simple eye chart, right? And tape it on my wall, and then notice where I’m standing when line four gets blurry and then go out on a four hour hike. Yeah. Do do it after a long day at the computer. Notice that point where line four gets blurry and then come back after the four-hour hike and try it again. And just simply notice where I am on the kitchen floor. That that’s a way to do this? Jake (48m 45s): Absolutely. Absolutely. Just the specific awareness of where you’re at. It’s like how like blood tests, like if you know where the number is, you have a different attitude to eating when the number, you know, my triglycerides just went up, whoops. Maybe I shouldn’t be eating that sugar. Having that, that frame of reference of data, not just an impression makes a big difference in getting you into this that’s one piece. And the other piece is people don’t care about the awareness because they don’t realize you are a different person if you can’t see, well, without glasses, like you, there’s more social awkwardness. There’s more anxiety. Especially if you wear glasses, you lose your peripheral vision. Right? So, so that system that’s in your brain that warns your predators is still there, right? Jake (49m 31s): Just things are approaching. It’s now not functioning. People are in a state of permanent anxiety. I’m not saying because of glasses, but if you’re wearing glasses, that’s a troubleshooting point. Like you want good peripheral vision, right? You want to be able to look straight ahead. When you’re walking, you’re your social interactions are affected by the fact that your eye movement isn’t natural. So now you’re talking to a person, but you’ll behind glasses and your eyes, aren’t moving the way a person without glasses has eyes moving. People will react to you differently. Instinctively recognize the reaction and you feel socially awkward. I’m just mentioning a couple of examples out of hundreds of things that by limiting your vision, you’re limiting your life. Jake (50m 14s): Like the word was short-sighted right? Like that’s literally what we call. Brad (50m 20s): That’s great. Don’t be so shortsighted about this of it. Love it. Yeah. Jake (50m 25s): Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s literal metaphorical Also that you’re, you’re limiting your opportunity of, of living your best possible version of your life by accepting glasses when they’re really relatively easy to get rid of. Brad (50m 40s): Yeah. It’s it’s it’s let me say this right. It’s metaphorical because it’s literal, right? I mean short-sighted is short-sighted. Yeah. Oh, I should also ask you, I guess this is kind of personal, but it might be relevant to some listeners that the doc told me. My main man, Dr. Brad, my childhood friend, he says, yeah, you got something called monovision going on. And that is where my left eye. If I close my eye, I can use my left eye for up close computer screen reading. And it’s absolutely awesome. And the right eyes super blurry. And I was really concerned. It seemed weird to me when I discovered this and he said, Oh, people pay me large sums of money to do exactly what you have with cataract surgery, where you get one lens to see distance. Brad (51m 27s): I don’t know if a lot of people know this, something that’s there in the, in the senior citizen category, but it’s kind of trippy how they do that. Well, they’ll, they’ll do a cataract and one eye will be good for seeing distance. And one, I would be good for reading and seems as though I’m carrying that around now at a, at a younger age. So how does that figure into your mix? I know watching on YouTube, you can see Jake’s face when I’m telling the question, but if you’re listening, Oh boy, he’s, he’s been pained by my question. Let’s find out why. Jake (51m 57s): So this is a complicated topic, and I’m going to say it’s a fringe issue, right? Like it’s not my main focus. My main focus is just, here’s how you fix your eyes. The monovision being induced is a huge problem because it really, it messes up how your eye should be working. And that turns into kind of a long topic. If it’s just occurring for you anyway, it’s worth exploring what’s going on with the left eye and the right eye. And that turns into a bit of a longer topic. You can reverse monovision just by if one eye is super blurry, you may need some correction just for that eye. And that practice a little bit of a project, getting both eyes to function at that distance. That’s, but that’s a little bit of a project, right? Jake (52m 37s): Like, and you got to weigh out if that’s worth it getting into for you specifically. My pained expression was just because all the people that get presbyopia, for example, and then they’re being induced with this monovision where the optometrist just goes, Hey, we’ll just set one of your eyes up for closeup and one for distance. And it’s just a mess. If you’re used to it, it’s fine. But creating that on purpose, it’s like, it reminds me of the African tribes where they get the really long necks by putting, you know what I’m talking about? Brad (53m 8s): The rings of putting rings on your neck. Jake (53m 10s): It’s just, it’s, it’s all natural. And so on necessarily if it just happened for you, it’s some compensation for one eye or the other being much stronger or weaker or some habit that you had fixable, whether you want to get into it is another question, but best not to. If, if your eye eye care professional says we’ll create monovision, I would run and hide. Brad (53m 34s): And it’s so common though. I mean, that’s what the majority of cataract people need to see better. I guess, with lenses, you get those progressive lenses where you’re reading and one part of the lens and looking out the other part. And if you’re, if you’re doing it with the cataracts, you got to choose something. So you can see the see in all cases. But yeah, it seems super weird. I was shocked to know that that was actually an actual thing. Jake (53m 60s): Yeah. But cataracts also is one of those things that if you’re not necessarily need surgery right now, now’s a good time to hold off because there’s a lot of developments on drops that dissolve cataracts. None of them are FDA approved. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, but it’s a hot topic right now, you know, for there’s actually some guy making his own cat R hydrops to experiment with, I’m not endorsing this. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but there’s enough evidence that cataracts can be dissolved from the lens. And that extreme surgical intervention might be a thing of the past relatively soon. Brad (54m 36s): Wow. Maybe who knows, hang in there people. So I’m, I’m pretty inspired right now. I’m going to say that I really feel the need for my computer glasses that I use for the time when I’m on the screen. But if I want to make some progress here, I’m gonna maybe go back and forth and take them off for five minutes, an hour or 15 minutes an hour, whatever I can handle. And then also take down the, take down the font size or something to make it a bit of a challenge, or perhaps could I increase the font size and try not using glasses? Would that be a better choice? Jake (55m 14s): I would go with the bigger font size, not the font size, the screen, the zoom sign is not the font size. Brad (55m 21s): Sorry, sorry, readers. We don’t want to give you big books yet. Jake (55m 24s): Okay. But you don’t want to overdo it. Like change takes time. Biology takes months to adapt. Right? So the main thing is a little bit of challenge and consistency in it. Just a little bit doing it consistently. So if it’s 15 minutes an hour, your eyes feel tired or you’re feeling just, you want to go back to glasses. It’s totally fine. It’s just introducing a little bit of challenge. And then over time it almost happens naturally. For a lot of people, we just have longer and longer. You don’t need them and you find yourself going, ah, today, I’m fine. Without it. It’s just not forcing anything.Like with eyes, it’s always important to not, not to take a long time to adopt don’t force stuff. Brad (56m 5s): Right? Headache, dry eyes, congratulations. You’ve over done. It just like you do in the gym. So don’t be, don’t be a hero here, but I, I really think there might be a lot of people in my category where if you just zoomed your screen a bit more and had 150% view of the Microsoft word file or whatever, maybe you could put the glasses aside and, you know, go up to 200, but at least you’re putting, putting the crutch aside and making your eye work a little bit. And then, you know, taking those, taking those breaks to relax and look at distant objects Jake (56m 37s): And also look at how many diopters are in those classes. Because sometimes it might be, for example, if there is 1.5, go try out a 1.25, right? Like maybe that’s the, the tweak is just because a lot of what I talk about is gradually reducing the strength of your glasses by little bits at a time. So if this is Brad (57m 0s): Walk into your optometrist’s office saying, yeah, I want some worst ones, please. They’ll be like, what are you talking about? You? And listen to that. Jake Steiner guy in the jungle of Burma, didn’t you Jake (57m 11s): Now one thing to note here, and because this comes up is retail. Optometry is being replaced by online sales. As we speak, there’s an Uber thing happening. And as soon as Amazon gets into having an app that measures your eyesight, which we’re doing one, so it’s entirely feasible. Retail optometry is going to be in a whole different place, right? So number one, number two is you are the customer and they’re a shop selling your glasses. Number three, there’s no law requiring them to sell you the strongest possible glasses. The DMV over there in California, 2040s, all that’s required. So technically you could go in there and say, I want 20 40, there’s no legal requirement of any kind that says they have to sell you glasses for 20 10 vision. Jake (57m 57s): Optometrists. Hate to hear that because they’re trained. They’re worried, right? Like because what happens is if you go in there and you say, I want 20 30, cause Jake said, so they’ll be like, who’s Jake. I would start in school to give you the best glasses. And they don’t want you to be dissatisfied and come back next week and go, well, these are not strong enough. So they’re doing what they think is best. And in my opinion, to find a good optometrist just requires maybe to spending half day aside and going into different shops and just going, Hey, having a good story, right? Like strong glasses make my eyes hurt. And my dog ate my last ones. And 20 30 is where I’m happy. I’m not saying lie. Jake (58m 37s): I’m not saying manipulate. I’m just saying a reasonable story. Instead of an argument that doesn’t get into the philosophical thing where you’re just saying, Hey, I know this works for me. I’m not asking for anything illegal or that shouldn’t be done. I love 20 30, just as an example. And I don’t have my old ones. Can you make me new ones? Five will say no. And one will say yes. And that’s the one that gets your money. Brad (59m 1s): Oh, she can go and buy those off the shelf too. Unless you’re me where I have a different diopter for each eye, but you can go down to a plus one. And if you’re using plus 1.5 or something. Jake (59m 12s): Okay. So that’s, you know, a different diopter for either. That’s the first thing to fix because that’s, so there’s something called ocular dominance, one eyes stronger than the other that’s normal. And what optometrists do is they, don’t correct both eyes equally. They’re correcting both eyes to be the same strength and that’s not natural. One eye is supposed to see better than the other. That’s just built into the biology. So whenever there’s one doctor different in one eye than the other, the first thing to sort out is start addressing the, the imbalance of diopters twice slowly, just lower one side just by a quarter and then take three months, six months. And when that feels completely fine, lowered again to both eyes have the same job. Brad (59m 54s): Wow. Okay. Jake (59m 56s): In most cases, if there’s a medical condition standard disclaimer, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. If your ophthalmologist who doesn’t sell glasses says that this doesn’t apply to you then by all means. But in a lot of cases that imbalance, if you go back through your history of glasses used to be very minimal and then may be grew because they keep adjusting the weaker quote, unquote, weaker. or higher that creates more balance and fixing that is worth doing first start., Brad (1h 0m 22s): WHEW Jake Steiner. What a show! I so much appreciate you taking the time and all the great work you’re doing and myopia.org. I want to send everybody there to learn more and listen to this show. This is a position where every six months they remember to get that strain awareness, beautiful stuff. Jake (1h 0m 44s): Thanks for letting me have a moment on your show to share and thanks for joining us from across the world. Thank you, listeners, duh, duh, duh. Brad (1h 0m 56s): Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com. And we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to thanks for doing it.
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