Hacking Eyesight – Interventions with Dave – Mark Bell : 895

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly Bulletproof Radio A state of high performance. This special edition of the Human Upgrade podcast is about teaching you how to think about hacking your own biology. And in this new series, I'm working with individual members of the Upgrade Collective, which is my membership and mentorship group that you can join. And I do these episodes because I want you to learn how to solve your own health problems. All of these, I'm solving someone's own health problem by helping them learn how to think. The kind of questions they might want to take to their doctor, the kind of interventions they might want to do themselves that are non medical, like nutrition or changes in sleep or something like that. And this is about setting you free to just say, oh, I know how to handle that, I know where to go, I know what to ask, I know what kind of professional I want to work with, or I just know what to do. Thank you for tuning on this episode. Interventions with Dave. Enjoy. Today is a intervention with Mark Bell. Mark came up to my place quite a while ago and was on the show. He is a world record breaking powerlifter. He owns Super Training Gym, the strongest gym in the west, invented the slingshot, which is a thing you put around your arms to help lifters lift more without getting injured. And well, he also runs runs Mark Bell's Power Project podcast. He did all this because, well, a bully was mean to him after punting his New York jets football into the woods and said, I'm going to be so strong that I can actually punt the bully into the woods. And apparently he can do it 1,080 pound squat, 854 pound bench press and 766 pound deadlift. And when he was here up at my house, I bench pressed him just to show him his boss. Okay, maybe that didn't happen, but it was really fun to, to see you on some of the gear from Upgrade Labs because I mean, you were pushing some numbers that didn't make any sense. You know, like it's like a video game where the numbers wrap around or an odometer, they wrap around back to back to zero. So you kind of do that with power. So what's going on with you, man? What are we going to hack today?

I didn't know this was an intervention, man. I'm out of here. Sounds pretty intimidating. You know, just, I think a lot of people have experienced this, especially in their 40s when all of a sudden doesn't work the same way as it used to. So for Me, it's my eyeballs. And I just. I don't really recall seeing anything like out of focus at any particular point. I don't remember being like, oh, I think my eyes are going. I just woke up one day and it seemed like they were gone. And they progressively gotten a little bit worse. Probably because of the interventions that I'm currently using, because they're probably not. Probably not great, you know, like wearing readers and things like that probably are making the problem a little bit worse. So, yeah, I've had some issues with my eyes. I've tried to do some stuff like, you know, look at the. Not look at the sun necessarily, but view the sunrise in the morning. And some things like that that I heard could potentially help. I also took some like vitamin blend that's supposed to kind of help your vision, but didn't notice much from that. Maybe I haven't been taking it long enough or something like that. But yeah, so I would like to be able to see the way that I used to be able to see.

I see. So I did there. Dad, joke time. You have something that's really common, right. You're becoming nearsighted or, sorry, farsighted. As you age. I said it backwards, of course. And you can hack this pretty effectively. There's some things going on. One of them. Are you ready for this? Muscle weakness. Now, those are words you're not used to hearing, right?

Right.

So there are muscles in your eye that control this. And as you know, as a Powerlifter. Can you put your ankles behind your head? Nope, nope. Can you touch your toes?

I can, yeah.

Is it hard?

It's not easy, yeah.

Okay, There you go. So you're very strong, but you might not have as much flexibility as, say, a yoga teacher, right? Absolutely. And these are like the two sides of a coin. There's strength and there's flexibility. And as you age your eyes, the muscles lose strength, the tissues lose flexibility. And this has to do with collagen types and cross linking of collagen. You actually see yellowing of parts of the lens in your eye. And then there's also a neurological thing where the brain may not actually be connecting. And you've probably seen this in some of your lifts, Right. There's some kind of a connection between the thought and then actually doing it. And there's a willpower in manifesting and all that kind of stuff. The spiritual side of sports. But there's also a neurological side where the body doesn't fully tell the muscle to turn on because the muscle's afraid of being injured and the body believe the muscle. Right. So there could be some of that neurological stuff where the signal's not getting through and that can be a wiring problem or it can be a problem in the eye itself. Saying I don't want to do that. I don't think that's usually the problem in eyes. But honestly I don't have any data on that last point. But I do know that tissue stiffening and activation and training of the muscles so you have fine grained control are really important. And you're right at the age where this happens to a lot of people. And I'm going to humble brag for a minute here not to tell you, hey, everybody, look at me. But just as an example of what's possible, I was about 20, geez, I don't know, way back in 1997, I had Lasik, which was a bad idea. It did get me to 2015 for a while and I was pretty bad before that. I don't know, I got glasses in seventh grade kind of thing. And you could say, yeah, but Dave, you're nearsighted. You know, you could always see small print. But I'm going to get to that with you in a minute. And after, oh geez, a good 13, 14 years after the surgery, I wasn't 2015 anymore. I was more like 2060 or 2080. And I developed astigmatism and I went in and I did heavy duty vision training exercises once a week. The same stuff you would do in your strongest gym in the west super training gym. But I did it for my eyes. Okay. It was actually harder than going to the gym because your brain doesn't want to do it. Some of the exercises were for fine grained, nearsighted control. Some of the exercises were for distance focus. So you can see an athlete, say a gymnast. How do they walk on a, on a, what it calls a balance beam. Right. They're doing all this stuff. Well, it's fine grain neurological control. In fact, it's the same thing that lets women walk in 19 inch heels or whatever they do. I don't know how they don't fall over, but it's because they practiced. Right. So have you learned to walk in heels yet?

I've been working on it.

See, I can actually say things like that to the world's strongest power lifter because you're not in the same room with me and you won't fold me into a pretzel. So I'm kind of baiting a bull who can't charge me. So I'm just messing with you, but you know what I mean? Like, how do you. How could you possibly dance in heels or be elegant? Well, it's a learnable skill, is my point. Okay, so we want your eyeballs, more specifically, the muscles in your eyes and the connection between the brain and the muscles to be able to walk in high heels or walk on a balance beam or do something that's nimble and flexible and highly, highly precise. And it's that precision training. That's cool, right? I mean, you grab a dumbbell, and you're like. You're gonna, like, just bring it up, or do you bring it up really slowly without a wobble? Like, they're just different skills. Right? That's a part of this. So let's address first what happened with my training in that I'll tell you some of the exercises I did, and then we're gonna address supporting the tissue stiffening and the energetics of it, and then we'll talk about some hacks after that that might possibly work for you. Sound like a deal?

Sounds great.

Okay. And I want to call out here. I'm not a doctor. I have no license. I'm an unlicensed biohacker. And this isn't a medical call, as you've probably already heard. This is a training call. Just like you're not a medical doctor, but you help people get stronger and recover from whatever is going on with their shoulder. Right? So definitely not. Not a. A doctor sort of thing. If I talk about medical stuff, it's go see the right doctor who can help you out with this. So I did three months, an hour, a week of just crazy, annoying, exhausting eye exercises that are also kind of like brain training. At the end of this, I went from that 2060 with astigmatism back to 2015 in both eyes and the ability to read the very finest print a teenager can read. And I still have that today. Okay. What the heck? Okay, I am, let's see, 48. Still a bit older than you. The last time I went in was probably three years ago, pre pandemic, maybe four to one of those crazy eye specialist types. A little bit of a functional vibe. And she looked and she said, I've never seen anything like this. You haven't lost any flexibility in your eyes the way you're supposed to as you age. And you're still 2015. You can read the finest print. Keep doing what you're doing. I haven't seen this before, but I think it's A combination of your glasses, I. E. The TrueDark glasses, and the supplements you take and the things you eat. So I have those data points that I am able to read the finest, finest, finest print. And it's a question of lots of lifestyle things. I'm going to walk you through everything I did, but the first thing, let's get through the training side of things. There are people, including eye doctors, who may hear this and be offended, who have learned you cannot train the eye. It's not possible. In fact, if you go to Wikipedia, which is pretty much owned at this point by Snopes, not that it's a nonprofit foundation, it's not actually owned by them, but there's a very strong antifunctional medicine vibe amongst the 2000 or so people who run the content on Wikipedia. It is not a democracy at all. It is pretty much influenced by Big Pharma at this point. So they tell you lots of stuff aren't possible on Wikipedia, and they're just not even truthful at this point. So I don't consider them to be a good source of information on this. When you look at the history of eye training, there's a guy named Bates who figured this out. And if you look up Bates eye training, you'll find all kinds of stuff online about it. And I first became aware this was possible, Mark, because Meyer Schneier, who wrote a book called Yoga for your Eyes, which I want you to buy and read, I actually had the honor of hosting him at the nonprofit anti aging group that I used to run in Palo Alto. And he came and gave a talk. This is a guy who had 200 surgeries on his eyes before he was some very young age. He should be legally blind because his cornea is like a shattered mirror. Yet he reprogrammed his brain. He has a driver's license. He can see just fine. So what's going on here is the brain can change what comes in through the eyes, so you can still see it. And he has a set of exercises in the book that are incredibly annoying because they're more like yoga exercises. And so part of this is rest periods for your eyes. You. When you lift really heavy one day, do you take the next day off?

Sometimes, yeah.

Okay, sometimes. I mean, at your level, you probably don't have to take the next day off because you've gotten tissues that are used to doing that. But most people who lift heavy at your gym, if they lift heavy every single day for a week, they don't make the progress they would if they skipped every other day, absolutely.

We need days off.

Yeah, there you go. When's the last time your eyes had a day off?

Good point.

Okay, so there are little muscles and things like that. And one of the things that Meyer Schneier and the base method use is something you can actually do right now. And you put your hands together and you rub them until they get hot. And that's 20, 30 seconds. I'm doing it right now up against the microphone so all you ASMR people can enjoy it. And then you cup them over your eyes, which means you don't push on the eyeball. You're creating like a hollow space. Now, anyone who does Qigong or Dr. Barry Morgolan's energy for Success exercises or, or negong or any of the other.

Are my eyes open or closed right now?

You can do either one. Whatever. Whatever is more comfortable for you. Right. And what I would be doing in person is sticking googly eyes on your hands. So you looked really funny now. And you do that for about 20, 30 seconds. And you breathe deeply and just kind of just relax. And what's going on is there is a bunch of stress in your eyes. That is unconscious stress. It's there. And your eyes are not really individual organs from one perspective. They're actually an extension of your brain. They're plugged right into it. And there's a lot of neurological tissue in there. So they're called specialized parts of the brain, if you want to think of it that way. So when the eyes chill, the brain chills. And I say this with great knowledge because I happen to own a glasses company and a neuroscience company, and I've done studies on that that were in the process of publishing. So take another couple deep breaths and then open your eyes and let's see if you feel different now. How's your brain feel when you do that? How do your eyes feel? Is there any difference?

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Took a second for my eyes to kind of re, you know, recalibrate to the room.

Yep.

But yeah, it felt good.

Okay. And what I did when I was recovering from whatever had happened to my kind of drifting off the path after that surgery I had many years ago. And by the way, have you had any vision correction surgery? That's an important question.

No, I have not.

Okay, good for you. Because that severs nerves in the eyes and causes dry eyes and all sorts of stuff people don't know about. So that's a part of it. And I would do this every hour for like a year is the end of a meeting or something. You know, before I started the next one, I would just take a minute to do that. The other thing that I learned to do, I remember I was working when I was doing this, I was working at, at Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm on Sandhill Road. And they put all the entrepreneur and residents, guys like me into this little fishbowl. Horrible room on the inside with no windows and bad LED lighting. And then I bought my first Mac. I finally switched from Windows and they have very bright lights in the back of them. And so I was like, man, I'm feeling so tired. And it's because my entire visual field was four feet away from me. The walls of this little room where me and a couple other guys were, and then I look at a super bright light and then bad lighting. Bright light, bad lighting. So what I learned from my vision training exercises was I'd go outside whenever I could and I would just stare as far away as I could. And there's a reason right now where I'm sitting, I am looking at you. I have one screen that's about three feet away from me, which is my max screen. It's as far away as is reasonable for me to still be able to see it. And one screen that's five feet away from feet. It's a 55 inch HDTV. Because what I'm doing when I'm communicating all day long is I'm looking far away, not just up close, which you're doing at a laptop usually. So this is important. I'm changing my visual depth of field throughout the day. I also have, and this is for a different reason, have a mirror that's about 18 inches from my face right here. Right. That way I can tell whether my Instagram filter or not. Instagram filter, zoom. Filtered version of my healthy face, which I'm not using right now. Cause we're not even using zoom. But whether that's real or the thing here. So I'm like looking here, I'm looking here, I'm looking here. And then I turn to my right and I look two miles away. Okay. So variable depth of field. Okay. Now, you know gyms, you know exercise, right? So range of motion. This is, this is like your thing. So if you only did half of a bench press, you're probably not very successful. Right. You gotta have strength throughout the whole range. You've limited your eyes to a relatively narrow range. And while you're at it, you fed them junk light, which is pretty much junk food. So I know I sent you a pair of truedark glasses, probably was it the daytime ones I sent you the yellow ones, right? Yep. Okay.

I have a pair of red ones too.

You got the red ones. Good. The red ones are really powerful at night. And there's actually a study somewhere of using the. And the red ones are a patented lens. It's not just red lenses where it's filtering out four different colors and some other variables. Of light that make things hard to do. What I would suggest in the study I found was reading under a red light or probably wearing red lenses increased eye strength and helped specifically with the problem you have. I don't have the name of the study, but I can tell you that there's a reason that True True is probably a true light product. True light, True Dark makes little things like this little reading light, like a red rechargeable thing. And I don't even know what its name is off the top of my head, but I use that kind of stuff, right? And so at night my lights are red and very dim. And this is part of fixing the problem. They're just getting overstimulated. I am predicting a huge wave of macular generation looking at bright and LED lights from our ceiling and LED lights at our screens without depth of field like it's a, it's a disaster. So when I look at screens they're either dimmed and I'm running the night mode so it's all as dark as I can make it. So it's. We're meant to see stars on a black sky. We're not meant to see black dots on a bright white sky. Our eyes don't do that. It's very stressful for us. And so I change my screen that way and then I put on the, the evening mode even when it's not evening. So there's a yellow tinge and I turn the brightness down as much as I can and this reduces the load on the eyes a lot which is going to make them last longer. Especially around this problem with stiffening of tissues. So stiffening of tissues is going to be affected by your collagen intake. You need to have enough collagen so you can rebuild things. It's going to be affected by blood sugar levels. A lot of bodybuilders, but not so much power lifters like yeah, I'm going to spike my insulin in my glucose as much as I can after my lift because call it insulin growth factor for a reason. And some of those guys are ending up as type 1 or type 2 diabetics later in life because these incredible spikes, well they also create something called advanced glycation end products which is cross linking of proteins including collagens. You don't want that in your eyes, you don't want that anywhere in your body. So maintaining normal blood sugar would be good. Do you have blood sugar problems?

No, not that I'm aware of. I been on a low carb style.

Diet for long time Are you keto for long periods of time without eating any carbs?

No, I mix in, like, fruit and vegetables and things like that.

Okay, good. I think being especially with the output for your body, a lower carb diet is great. A zero carb diet might not be really good from an autoimmune perspective. You poke holes in your gut if you've had for too long and lots of other reasons. That's why I recommend cycling on the bulletproof diet. Who would have ever imagined? And not cycling cheesecake and burritos from Taco Bell either. So you're not eating a lot of sugar, so you shouldn't have glycation products. The other thing that can affect people's eyes, but I don't think is affecting yours, is if you're having mitochondrial issues, kind of brownouts, or you have toxins, which might be an issue for you because you said it kind of fell off a cliff, right? Yeah. I remember you texting me and I said, I can't see, like, what the heck just happened? This was over the course of a week or over the course of two months or what?

I just kind of recognized it, like one day. And then I was like, that's strange. And then the next thing you know, I'm like, wearing readers, like, I'm 60 years old.

Got it. So quite often you get exposed to a neurotoxin, your vision changes. There's something called a visual contrast sensitivity test, which you can get at certain eye doctors. And it measures. Can you. Can you see the difference between these 64 shades of gray? And if your nervous system is dialed in, you can see it, and if it's not dialed in, you can't see it. And they all look the same to you, or you don't see any gray at all, and it's totally invisible to your conscious mind. But when you say A versus B. Oh, what the heck. So this is used to diagnose environmental toxins. And I have seen people, including me, like, I do something wrong biologically, the next day. I am not 2015. One eye or both eyes may be blurry. And then I've even had times where, wow, that fine print is off. That's weird. But it gets better when you remove toxins and you increase mitochondrial function. Right. So some of this may be that. So when you had this sudden appearance of, you know, of nearsightedness, did you move into a new house? Was there any environmental change that would have changed the toxic load on your body?

Not that I'm aware of. I'm trying to line it up with like when it happened? Yeah, nothing that I'm conscious of.

Okay. Do you practice dimming your lights at night?

I have been for maybe like the last couple months, so I haven't been.

Okay. So it's a new practice for you? Yeah, I'm seeing more and more problems with just eye overuse. Your eyes are not meant to see bright lights at night. It's like candles, fireplace or fireflies and stars and the moon once a month. That's the entire history of our species until recently. So dimming those lights, it takes time. Replacing crappy lights is a good thing. And you're in your podcast studio, right?

Right. Yep.

What's shining on you right now to make you look so beautiful?

Yeah, we got some pretty bright lights shining on me right now.

And they're LED lights, right? I believe so, yeah. So they're kind of flat panels, kind of bright, harsh light. Okay. How much time do you spend under those lights every week?

Quite a bit.

Okay. You wondering why your eyes are having problems? Okay. Very bright pinpoint sources like those, they actually cause skin aging in addition to eye aging. So there's people who I actually support who will say, wear sunscreen indoors or long sleeves to avoid tissue aging from harsh LED lights, especially studio lights. Now, sunscreen is generally not good for you because of its hormone disruptors and all that. So this is mineral type of sunscreen that isn't harmful stuff I'm talking about or maybe paba, the B vitamin based stuff. So what I'm doing that's different than you is I have 120 watt halogen over there and 120 watt halogen over there. In front of them is a diffuser screen. So basically my eyes are seeing two sun shaped orbs about this big. They call it a diffuser screen from Amazon. For some amount of money at least put that in front of your LEDs. But your life will change if you just get a halogen. Yeah, they're hotter and they use more power and you need to change the bulb every now and then. Who cares? It's $100 lamp. But halogen makes a huge difference because it's warm and because there's infrared light in it. The other thing you can do to chill your eyes out a bit, having a red LED light on somewhere makes a really big difference for you, even if it's just behind your monitor. So you're just changing the ratio of this bright stuff. The eyes are expecting the rainbow of spectrum and heat to come from light. There should always be outdoors in the sun, there's heat and light together. When you get light without heat, the eyes actually don't turn on some of the healing stuff they should do. But I don't think you're going to turn on a radiant heater. I certainly don't do that. But if you look behind me there, see that red light that just came on behind me? Yep. At night those things are on. And I have something similar behind my monitor so that there's just a little bit of a red glow. Okay. You'd be like, dave, you're the biggest nerd ever. Look, you're on a low carb diet, right? It's because too many carbs do bad things to you. Okay. I'm suggesting you need to change the ratio of red light to blue light and infrared light in your life the same way you did with your food. And that when you do that, it's going to create long term advantage for you. Okay. It's not as crazy as it sounds when you look at it through that lens. Right? Right. Okay. The next thing I want to do is go back to that training I did. The stuff I learned from Meyer Schneier. We talked about that resting of your eyes. They call that eye cupping. And guys, you can Google Bates method. You can look at Meyer Schneier's book IMAG M E I E R S C H N E I R. One of the more inspiring books ever. You realize what this guy went through to retrain his brain? It's nuts. And it is tiring to do brain training. I have 40 years of Zen that does that. But training your eyes is just as tiring. So I brought something for you. This is actually left over from my eye training. Years ago I would refer you guys, but the guy who did that is not there anymore. Like, they don't do that. So what I have. And a functional eye doctor or someone who does neurological eye training or a developmental ophthalmologist can do this. Can you see these little letters?

I cannot.

Well, that's because you have eye vision problems. That's right. It might be a camera issue. It's just like a grid you would use for searching out a word finding game that you'd find, but they're pretty darn small. And I have a smaller one and a bigger one. So what you do with the nearsighted training or, sorry, the farsighted training, this is to train your up close vision. You have these really, really awesome little things. They're lenses that have different levels of focus. Kind of like Readers, Right? But if you wear readers all the time or corrective lenses all the time, your eyes get weaker and weaker by design. Now, every eye doctor who recommends glasses. How dare you say this, Dave, don't you know, guys, I have some information that you may not have. And yes, I wore glasses for the first, whatever, 20, for at least 15, 17 years of my life. I haven't needed them ever since. And I know dozens of other people who've been able to train their eyes. You can say it's impossible. I have evidence that it's possible. One of us is right, and one of us probably is wearing glasses. So there you go. Right? And this doesn't mean everyone can do it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't wear glasses. Just saying that if you put on progressively stronger readers, you do what most people do. Oh, like I'm just going to walk with a crutch all the time. And, well, eventually you kind of need the crutch, and then you get a walker, right? And then you get a wheelchair, and it's a progressive decline. But if you're injured, you need the crutch for a little while, and that's okay. So what you do with these things is you look at the finest one you can see, and then you have the correct one, then you turn it over, which makes your eyes go in, out, in, out, in, out. And you get really tired and probably yell at people around you because your brain's really hating life. Okay, before that, training, not having toxins and having stuff that increases your mitochondrial function. I don't know, a little MCT oil, some coffee, and all the other stuff you might do, even doing breathing exercises, maybe some Wim hof, whatever you like. Anything's gonna charge you up, but you can actually do this. And you can order these kinds of lens things online. But honestly, find a developmental ophthalmologist or a neurological ophthalmologist. Call them up. Say, can you train my eyes? You actually do the same amount of effort you put into getting arms as big as tree trunks, you put into having eyes that can be flexible like that. And that's a big part of this. It's like you've been training so much of your body for so long that these guys haven't been trained. And you've increased the load on them a lot without any recovery time because of the shift in your studio lighting. And, okay, without studio lighting, we have a history of people needing readers, but not as early as you. So you have early onset. Okay, so that's I'm putting my, my cool toys away.

With the like, I guess the red, the, the red true darks and the yellow true dark glasses. I think the ones I have, I think, I think, I think the red ones are normal. I don't think they're magnified at all.

No, they're not.

It's hard for me to really see anything with that on. So how can I, how can I, I just go to. I just usually wear them for a little bit and I usually just go to bed because I'm like, you know, I can't look at my phone. Which is, I think is a good, healthy practice anyway, so when I read.

At night, whether it's a screen or even a piece of paper, I have dimmed it as much as I can and I put on the glasses. So my night vision's better than yours. I also have a huge supplement advantage. So here's what I'm doing supplement wise. There are great studies on bilberry, astaxanthin and lutein as well as xenolutein and a bunch of other things like that. I don't know what eye formula you took, but it's not going to give you huge changes overnight. Except with night vision. And seeing through red or seeing during red light is similar to night vision. You actually, when you have red lights, I. Even my exterior lighting on my house is all red. So I walk outside, I can see the Milky Way. And that's partly because I live on an island pretty far north so there isn't light pollution. But it's also because my eyes don't get killed by my porch light. Right. Also that no bugs come to it. But what I do is I take five, which is a lot of the eye armor formula that I put together when I worked with bulletproof and it has an absurd amount of astaxanthin in it. And I'm not recommending anyone do what I do, but I'm just sharing my practice of taking these things. You and me both, Mark, are big guys. What do you weigh, like 230. Okay. We actually weigh exactly the same amount. But you're like a foot shorter than me, right? Something like that.

I think two feet shorter, yeah.

What are you like? I'm six four. So you're probably like five' nine or something. I don't remember. But I don't see height at all because everyone's about the same height to me.

I'm like 5 11, something like that.

Because you're see, you're actually like just about the perfect six Feet taller, but okay, squats, you know, you're denser than me. We'll put it that way, in a good way. So we're the same body weight, so it's approximately the same amount. But most of the vision supplements out there, we are balancing. Look, are people really going to buy this? If I put as much as I want to put in there, Right. Versus I'm going to have enough that there's clinical results to do this, I know it's going to help people. Right. And it's not the case with all supplements that more is better. You know, you can overdo zinc and copper and minerals and B vitamins and stuff like that. So I don't want to tell you guys to go out there, but there are some really good arguments that having large, large amounts of astaxanthin are good for you. And Bilberry, we know, helps pilots from World War II, they figured it out that you can see better at night. So I think you want to do those because night vision means you can read under those red things, and it's going to help your eye strength. And I'm still grateful that I can go to the store, I can pick up the bottle of supplements, and they've got kind of a gray text on a green background in super fine print, and I can read it. I don't need glasses, but there are some days where I'm like, man, my vision is a little bit blurry today. And then I sit there and I do some exercises and I have learned to consciously focus my eyes. I can cover one eye and make the other eye, like, go in and out. I didn't have that skill before I trained it, and that usually clears things up. And if not, I take some charcoal and I get my toxins down. And funny enough, the next day I can see you again. So your. Your daily visual performance does vary. All right. You mentioned something at the beginning, getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning. There are studies that show getting ultraviolet light into your eyes helps with vision, although the study that I'm aware of most says that it helps with, with nearsightedness. I don't know if it helps with farsightedness, which is what you're dealing with, but it probably would. And this isn't a huge amount. It's 20 minutes sunrise, maybe even sunset. The reason you're doing that is there's some circadian timing that's good for you. It's why I recommend it. Normally, you don't need to stare right at the sun. In fact, A lot of people would tell you that's bad. I know a few sun gazers who swear it's good. It's generally safe to get some sun in your eyes in the morning. Glasses without contacts? I didn't ask. You're not wearing contacts or anything, right?

No.

Okay, good deal. So what's, what's going on there is that signal causes collagen synthesis, which is a really good thing you'd want to do. There's also something called Gabor patches. G A B O R. And these are weird images that stress your brain's visual perception area. That could help. So you can just do some research on that one. I haven't used them, but I'm familiar with them. Let's see, there's some other stuff going on here. There are apps that train your eyes that probably work. There's one that I'm intrigued by. It's called Glasses Off. But I actually, I don't use it because every time I turn it. I installed it like a couple years ago. Every time I turn it on, it turns my screen brightness up to 500%. And this phone is so bright. I don't want to stare at the phone and see little tiny things. It's like, come on, guys, if you're glasses up, let me control my screen brightness, you jerks. So I would do that training, but I wouldn't want to stare at the brightest possible iPhone setting to try and train my eyes to do small detailed work. But I think that works. And now I'm going to get something else irritating to some people. Video games might be good for your eyes. That is, if you're playing a video game with very, very tiny things on your phone, whether it's one of the brain training games or just some little dumb arcade game. As long as it's got very tiny things moving around and you have to distinguish between them. Well, the brain is very interested in video games because it feels like it's you. That's why they're so engaging. So if you're getting a little dopamine hits every time you focus properly on a tiny little thing. So playing a little arcade game on a screen can make a big difference. And there's dumb little ones like this. But like, here's one, it's called plasma something and you know it's a dumb little video game, but the point is tiny little dots moving around, screen as dim as you can get. Hey, brain, now here's something engaging to make your eyes do something. I think there's actually value for that Right. But make sure the screen is very dim when you do it. No, no one's ever told me that. I don't have a study for that. I just know that if you get the brain to be really interested in something up close, it's going to learn how to see it. And what you're dealing with there is. That's most of the story. The other One is Omega 6 fats. What do you do around the type and composition of fats that you eat?

I primarily eat like grass fed meat and eggs.

Man, it's like we've been hanging out. Yeah. Okay.

When I came up there we talked quite a bit about I've been ketogenic diet since like the mid-90s. You know I've been, they work keen to this stuff and, and been out of this stuff for a while. So I, I, you know, if there's some omega sixes in my diet, I think they're sliding in there some through.

Some phenomenal though you're not cheating with nachos and you know, whatever.

Occasionally I'll eat like whatever. Yeah. Occasionally I'll have like some pizza or some ice cream or something like that.

But it's pretty rare even, even those, I mean the pizza, if it's from a normal place, they're probably using canola or soybean or corn oil in the crust.

Right.

But you don't want to have much at all of that. It doesn't sound like you're having a high enough level for that to affect your vision. I think it does. Especially eating fried things can have the next day can have effects on vision because fried food is more inflammatory than smoking a cigarette. I mean people don't like to hear that. It makes them mad. But that whole thing about inflammation is what's behind it. And it doesn't sound like you're doing anything bad there. The diet you're eating is around 1.6 to 2% omega 6 fat. That's what you find in at least grass fed beef and pasture raised non vegan eggs are probably similar. They might have a little bit more. I don't want to just make it up. But they're still going to be mostly saturated in those egg yolks and they'll probably be enough arachidonic acid and other things. So I'm not going to worry about you. There's. I think it's mostly a polyphenol issue and astaxanthin and lutein and the other things like that. So look at the vision formulas out there. But you Might want to do several of them if the ingredients in them are, are appropriate. You also have to remember because we're just about identical body weight. We're not hundred pound people. And there are lots of these, you know, teenagers, plant based men or wannabe men who are inhibiting testosterone and bone development and, and things like that who maybe are not going to be as large as you are or as I am. But supplement manufacturers have to make a dose that is absolutely safe for the very low end. So you can have, you know, 90 pounds, 4 foot 11 woman and okay, this is the recommended dose. I double dose almost everything. In fact, I order two meals at restaurants because they're meant to satisfy 120 pound person and I'm like two of those. Right, you probably do the same thing. Absolutely. Okay. With your supplements though, you need to double and maybe triple because you also have way more percentage of muscle than the average kind of spongy person. So I think for anyone listening, if you're obese you might need more detoxing stuff. And the recommendations in Superhuman around calories like, well, you kind of subtract most of your fat weight and then that's your calorie need. And Dave is talking about calories. Well, Emily's talking about protein, not calories to be really clear. So that's your protein need. But you don't want to be eating extra, extra, extra calories. Just that that's not the biggest variable. So for you, I think we're not going to worry about your diet because you're pretty good. But are you taking any fish oil?

I do, yep. I take probably I've been doing this for like the last two months because I go on and off fish oil here and there. And I've been taking like, I think I take six of them twice a day.

Six big pills?

Yeah, yeah. Six big capsules. Yeah.

You might be overdosing it. And was this after your eyes went off?

Yeah, I've been doing. Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Okay.

I've been doing this more recently and.

There'S debate over the correct amount. And in the 90s, the anti aging group that I was running, if you. Oh, I'm just take three glugs. I'm just drinking it. But you can overdose on threes as well and then they become pro inflammatory. But if you've only been doing it for two months, it's not going to be an issue. I'm happy with 2 or 3 grams a day, but if you're doing 10 grams a day, it might be beneficial. It Might not. I think that there's great, there's great debate about it. We know it's good. Just because it's good doesn't mean more is better. Which is the exact opposite of what I just said before. Because while we're bigger, we need more. But it doesn't mean we need 10 times more. It only means we need two times more. So let's talk about one other thing that may be helpful. But I don't know for sure. You can do micro current tens around your eyes and this is. What does Trans 10 stand for? Transdermal electrical. What does the N stand for something anyway? The little thingies that you can buy for five bucks with little patches that make your muscle go squeak, squeak. Not like the electrical stim that you or I would use for physio or for putting on muscle, but those little things. There are devices meant specifically for macular degeneration that strengthen the acupuncture and acupressure points around the eyes. There's even a pair of glasses you can buy, or it's more like a face mask that has those electrodes built in. So you run this for 10 minutes a day to stimulate eye health. I would probably do that for a little while and see if you get a difference because it's unlikely to hurt and it's probably gonna help. Final thing is you could look at doing red and infrared light therapy over closed eyes. So you wanna stare right into things. Even, Even the colored LEDs that can be beneficial for you. I think that there's, there's evidence for doing that for generalized eye health. You'll see. For instance, at, you know, at Upgrade labs we have a thing that, that's there for the face to be super healthy so it helps you look better. It's one of the, one of the lights that, let's see that true light makes. So it's made by one of my companies. It's not for the eyes specifically, it's for the face. Right. For the skin, for collagen. But there is connective tissue and other synovial fluid in the eyes and it's got infra red in it. So is something like that going to be good for general eye health? Most likely. But I, I, and I can tell you there are studies of just generalized red light therapy and eyes that say it's good. So I would want to get more therapeutic red light and potential infrared light on my face, around my eyes, with my eyes closed. But like I'm just thinking, okay, the things I'm doing, I do Sit there. And I use that at least every couple days on my face. So my eyes are getting a dose of that as well. So I'm trying to transmit to you. Here's all the weird stuff that probably made a difference, and that's the difference in biohacking is that I wanted something to work, so I did everything in my work and then I start peeling off things to see, but then I'd never know for sure. And then in Western medicine, what they're going to say is, well, it must be just one thing. Therefore I'm going to throw away everything and only test things one at a time. And these are the kind of scientists who can't make bread because they baked the water, they baked the yeast, they baked the flour. There is no bread. So then you have to combine things. And you know this because you are a power lifter. You don't do just one thing to become strong. It's dumb.

What about like a stem cell? Like they had. Does anybody have advancements for the eyeballs?

Let's get super, super nerdy on this one. Thank you for the reminder. There is. There is a treatment that I have done with Harry Adelson and the team who works with Harry in Park City at Docerre. They can do regular stem cells or they'll pull stem cells from your marrow or from other places. And the regulations change. I'm not sure what they're doing right now, but I helped Harry do the six hands whole body stem cell makeover with Dr. Marcella Madera and Amy Killen. So I had three doctors working on me. One doing joints, one doing cosmetic and one cosmetic and reproductive, and then one doing neurological, which was Marcella. And there is part of that now is called V cells, which is a part of the stem cell universe, but they come from blood. So there are also people who will inject stem cells in your eyes, but that's usually for advanced macular degeneration. Like. Like, I don't think you need to do that anymore on. But one of the techniques you can use, particularly with V cells, is you can put them inside the nose where they go in very quickly. You can do with regular stem cells too, but they go in. I have noticed stupid improvements in my vision from doing that. Like, I think I haven't measured it formally, but I would guess if normal people see 2020, which means, you know, that you can see what the average person can see at 20ft. And I'm normally 2015, which means I can see it at 20ft and you can see it at 15ft. Feet. But I had to be like 28 or like you'd have to be 8ft away. I could see it 20ft away. I had superhero vision for a couple of days. The two times I did that. Literally a mile away I could see a speed trap, but just things that weren't normal. And it lasted for a week or so afterwards. So I think there's something to be said. And those were just intravenous. You can do intravenous cells that way and Dr. Harry is definitely my go to guy for that, but he doesn't do eye treatments specifically. But an intravenous thing is going to go to your eyes any anyway.

Right.

So I would suggest IV stem cells, but after you've exhausted the other stuff and if you're going to do stem cells, V cells are very hard to find these days. But that would probably be where I'd want to go for vision. Awesome, Mark. Well, was that a useful intervention for you? Do you feel like you have a path forward?

Yeah, absolutely. That was fantastic. I'm going to start to implement a lot of these things today to get working on it so I can. So I can see if I could see better.

I think there's a great chance. And look, there may come a time in life where you say, I would like to have readers. And when that happens, you use the weakest ones you can and you make your eyes work. And if there's anyone on earth who knows how to work hard at improving themselves, I think a world champion powerlifter qualifies. Right. So it's just a question of knowing that it's possible and then knowing the right technique and then knowing the right hacks so that. But you don't have to work as hard as you would otherwise. And the prime example there is the Slingshot. Makes it easier to do a bench press. So I don't know if you can say you're not working as hard, but at least you're doing it better than you would without it. So it's a tool that just improves things. I want you to have that for your eyes as well. And I kind of gave you the big download there. Well, thank you for sharing your work on your vision and I want to hear what happens with it. It.

Yeah. Thank you so much. This is great information.

All right, thanks, Mark. Catch you later, man.

All right, take care.

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