OUT OF THE SYSTEM | He Turned Loss Into a Mission to End Blindness

I got from helping people that were blind and had no resources to see them sit up from a table and, you know, see a clock for the first time in a decade. It's powerful. Yeah, it's really powerful. I mean, these are people that are— have lost their independence. They're dependent on government and family for everything, right? They have— and they are dependent, and there's— they have no productivity. Often their self-esteem is lost. And when I am able to do these treatments to cure blindness, typically through cataract surgery, it is— it's life-changing for human beings. And the fact that I get to be part of that is just beyond description.

You didn't build your clinic to feel like an employee in your own business. I'm Matthew Cologli, and on Out of the System hosted by Dr. Talks, we challenge the broken rules holding healthcare entrepreneurs back. Hear from clinic owners, rebels, and builders who are creating bold, profitable, patient-centered practices and doing it their way. Just, Paul, we finally made it.

Finally.

You were a little under the weather yesterday, huh?

Just a bit, but I'm doing much better today.

So sitting across from me is Paul Dougherty. And he owns Dougherty Laser Vision.

Correct.

We'll talk about that. And we're going to talk about your foundation. And let me tell you why I wanted to have you on the podcast. So, you know, this podcast is called Out of the System. It's in conjunction with a book that comes out in a couple of weeks called It's a Doctor's Guide to Reclaim Your Purpose, Your Power, and Your Passion. And when we met through a mutual friend and we got to spend a considerable amount of time together, The thing that blew me away is you have unbelievable passion and focus. I meet a lot of doctors, medical professionals. I would tell you, you are in the top 5% of the ones that I've met. And you're outside my scope, right? I've worked primarily with orthopedics and pain in the regen and functional medicine, but we'll talk about what you do and all that.

Sure.

But your passion and your insight is just intoxicating. Where does that come from?

Thank you. Well, I'm honored and where it comes from is from my heart. This is a mission. This is my mission this time around, and it's pretty clear to me what I'm doing. I, and we'll, we can talk more about it, but my— Yeah, tell me what's your mission. My foundation is named after my son Andrew, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly of the flu at age 5, 20 years ago.

God.

And I was an atheist and a scientist, and he woke me up.

An atheist and a scientist? Correct.

Ooh, we're going to have fun. Yeah. Everything changed on January 13th, 2004, when my son left this plane.

Okay.

And gave me my passion and my purpose, which is curing blindness.

Why blindness? I mean, I know you're— I mean, but was Andrew blind?

Andrew was blind in one of his eyes. Yes.

Really?

Yes. He was blind in his left eye. He actually, his eye turned in and we went, took him to the pediatric ophthalmologist who actually diagnosed us.

And you're an ophthalmologist?

I'm an ophthalmologist. I'm actually, I've specialized in refractive surgery. I do vision, I do surgery to correct vision. That's all I do. We're our own subspecialty. We founded the World College of Refractive Surgeons a couple of years ago where we're recognized as our own subspecialty by the rest of ophthalmology. Like, the retina guys and the glaucoma and cornea. I am a refractive surgeon. I do surgery to get people out of glasses, LASIK, implantable contact lenses, lens exchange. And I use cataract surgery as a refractive surgery procedure. But that's all I do is vision.

And so your son, your 5-year-old son was born blind in one eye?

Correct.

Was that a little bit of a wake-up call? Like, that had to really— did that kind of fuck with you, screw with you a little bit?

Everything about his life was He was a preemie. He was in distress, didn't spend a day in the hospital until the day he passed, but he had really mild cerebral palsy and he was developmentally delayed. He actually learned sign language before he learned to speak, and then he spoke in paragraphs. And he was a mini-me. He looked just like me. He had my brain, and he was a really remarkable little kid. And yeah, it was a shock when we saw his eye turn in and realized he couldn't really see out of the eye and took him to the— Pediatric ophthalmologist. We ended up having surgery on his eyes. We got his eyes straightened, but he never saw out of that eye. And again, for me, it was just another one of the signs that he was, he was here to wake me up. We had a soul contract to wake me up.

You had a soul contract?

Yeah.

Okay. Between you and—

Between me and my son. He woke me up and he sent me on this mission. It's clear to me.

So what happened? So you were an atheist and you're a scientist.

Well, he Again, he was not sick for a day after he left the ICU when he was born and he got the flu and we all got the flu. We all, the 3 of us got better, his twin sister and his mother and I. Um, but he continued to spike fevers and eventually had status epilepticus. And in the emergency room, he stopped breathing and then he, his heart stopped. He, he coded and his heart was flatlined for about 10 minutes. And I mean, I can describe this. Because this is what changed my life. But I watched his soul leave his Christ Conscious Center and fill the ER bay with kind of a purple haze. And I knew that he was no longer in his body and I asked everyone to stop the code. And that's when I knew he had passed. And with all the events surrounding his passing, I knew there was something more. And it was my wake-up call, my spiritual wake-up call.

Did you grow up Irish Catholic? I'm assuming.

Irish Catholic. Yeah.

So am I from Chicago.

Right.

So did you go to parochial school?

I sure did till 3rd grade. Yeah. I went till 4th with the nurse, with the the nuns, and then the nun order switched. My parents decided they didn't like the new nuns order. But, you know, I was, I was born and raised Catholic, confirmed, the whole nine yards. And, but there was just honestly so much hypocrisy. One of my friends was, was molested by one of the priests.

My 2 brothers.

And I, that's why I moved away. I said, if that's God and that's spirituality, I want nothing to do with it.

And how old were you when you, when you started moving away from God?

Well, I was forced to go to CCD and to Mass until I was a senior in high school. And Kind of when I went to college, that was it. I didn't, I stopped going to Mass and I was an avowed, not an agnostic, but an atheist.

Yeah. By that, that's very different than being an atheist. That takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.

Correct. Well, I had enough faith that whatever I was trained in was not true. It didn't feel true. It didn't, it didn't resonate with me. And I was, again, I was a different person before my son passed. And the, I, I, You know, looking back on all the kind of wild events that happened both before he passed, while he passed, and subsequently after he's passed, he's still with me. Yeah. And he's, I mean, he's clearly directing my mission from the other side with the things that have been happening and the rate at which this is happening is really unbelievable to me.

How old were you when he passed away?

I was 40. So my life started—

You had a good, you had a good 20 years under your belt of atheism. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. So you see the purple haze in the room. What happens after that to you?

Well, I, it was, well, it was very challenging. I mean, I lost my son and really lost my family. My, and my—

You had no other children?

No, no. He has twin sister Abigail.

But you didn't have any other—

No other kids. But it's as 80% of couples under with children that have passed under age 8 end up going in 2 different directions. And I also lost my family and I just dove deeper into work and I actually started the Andrew Docherty Vision Foundation, a 501 that was really dedicated to helping those in need. And I was really, we formally incorporated in 2011, but it was not long after my son's passing that I started doing some of this work. We work locally with homeless and we've worked with the Wounded Warriors Project and with wounded soldiers. We work with free clinics, the Conejo Free Clinic in particular. And then a lot of my artist friends, you know, I go to Burning Man. I'm a burner. And I have a lot of artist friends that can't necessarily afford what I do. And I've gifted many, many of them the LASIK and vision correction surgery. I also did a lot of mission trips. I've been to the Middle East with the UN. I have been to Haiti after the earthquake. I've been to Central America and I had a lot of self-funded trips over the years. In addition to all the work I do locally in terms of gifting my gift to people that need it. And actually for me, what's most rewarding is doing surgery for people that can't afford it and watching the looks on their faces when they can see again.

You know, I don't think we talked about this when we met. You know, when we work with our doctors, we're taking them out of insurance. So let's use a regenerative doctor. And I think of John Knabb, who's down in Wilmington, an alumni of our program. And, uh, I remember the conversation I had with John and his business partner, and it was along these lines. Wait, it was 2 years before I met you. And I said, look, if you make enough money running your cash-based practice, charging what you're worth, you can fix as many people as you possibly can that can't afford your services. Versus if I keep my prices low, thinking I'm going to be able to serve a lot of people, it's going to be this, you're going to do the same number of transactions. So why not get charged? Why not get paid 5x and use the profits from that to fund something? And that really clicked. And when you told me what you do, I was like, to me, that's 21st century medicine because it's not about working 16-hour days.

Absolutely not. I work less than most doctors. And I mean, I still do a couple thousand surgeries a year, but essentially I created a practice focused exclusively on vision correction, on refractive surgery. And we were primarily cash-based and we were one of the more expensive practices in the US. the work I did because I was one of the most experienced.

Mm-hmm.

I trained with the surgeon that brought LASIK to the United States or popularized it in the US. I was, I believe, the first ophthalmologist in the United States to have LASIK on my own eyes. So I truly believed in it. And I went into a field where I was able to interact directly with patients for the majority of the work I did. And because of that, that is what has afforded me to be able to do this kind of work. As I grew the practice, I got big enough and we had 10 providers, 150 employees that we caught the attention of private equity. And Interestingly, my mentor started the strategic that ended up buying my practice, the private equity firm. And he and I are on the board and it's really been a wild, you know, wild ride.

So let's go back to that. Let's go back to that ER room. So your father passes away.

Yes.

You immediately dive into work.

I, well, that's how I—

That's how you soothed yourself.

Well, that's the primary, that's my primary addiction has been my work. And when I, he passed, I I mean, he passed on a Tuesday and honestly, I think I was back to work on Thursday because for me it's therapy. It's just what I do is where I feel comfortable. It's where I feel useful. And I initially soothed myself by focusing on work, but ultimately it was the foundation.

How long did that process work where you just soothe yourself with work? Was it months, weeks?

Oh, that's a great question. And I would say it's, you know, it was, you know, years and it Probably still soothes me now. I, I, you know, I was worried.

Did you have a moment? Did you have an oh, fuck moment? Like, did you have one of those shit moments where you're like, 'cause you're, you strike me as a man who's obviously very connected spiritually, like, but did you have that moment?

Well, it was interesting. Um, I, first of all, one of the things I did go, I was, I leaned intensively into work as well as asking the question why. That's how my spiritual journey started was, and I started reading every book and I had some very interesting, and I'll just talk about it.

We talked with a guy, right? The guy who took me through psychedelic journeys has been on this podcast. So we, we've sent like 30 doctors through that path.

Well, there's some, some pretty wild things that happened. I had my first lucid dream with my son the night he passed. And my son told me that, uh, he gave me, he had some advice for me in terms of his mom and his twin sister. Um, for instance, he said, don't get a real partner until my sister finishes college and that's when my, my current partner really, really showed up. He also, and he, he appeared to me and said, Daddy, we are heaven. He didn't say we're heaven and earth. He looked him in the eyes and he said, we are heaven. And was again, a wild ride. A few months later, he, again, I was dreaming and he basically appeared in my dream and He said, Daddy, come with me. And I went with him in higher self to what appeared to be a television studio. And he said, there's somebody I want to introduce you to. And it was actually an Indian gentleman that was— I got to see him in higher self. There was the Indian gentleman on the right in a seat. There was a wall between us and there was my physical body and 2 telephones. And I see the Indian gentleman stand up and come around the wall and say, Paul, when I pick up the telephone, pick up the telephone. Indian guy sits back down. I didn't recognize him. I see him pick up the telephone and say, hello, Paul. I say hello. And he said, would you like to learn the scientific technique of meditation? And I watched myself say yes. And a few months later, I have a gentleman come into my life named Craig. And within 5 minutes of meeting him, he asked me what I'm writing my first book about. And I said, I'm not writing a book. And he said, yes, we are. I said, I don't have time to write a book. He said, yes, we are. And I said, I don't have time. He goes, well, let's have dinner. And we had dinner and At dinner, once again, he started asking me about writing a book. And I said, I don't have time. He goes, what if we were to write a pretend book? And I said, well, that might work. He said, well, if we're going to write a pretend book, what would it be about? And I said, well, I guess it would be about what I've dedicated my life to, which is vision correction. He goes, great. Well, why don't you ask 12 or 13 questions about what people might want to know about what you do and write a paragraph for each, and we'll have this pretend book. I ended up writing 150 pages. We spent probably 2 years putting together my book called See for Yourself and started a publishing company called Visionary Press. And while we were writing the book, people would come up to me and just say, do you know who that guy is that you're working with? I said, well, it's my friend Craig. I said, no, no, that's Mithrananda. I said, what do you mean Mithrananda? They said he was a monk for 35 years. So I said, Craig, were you a monk? And he said, yes. I said, for 35 years? He said, yes. I said, so you meditated for 35 years? He said, Yes. I said, so what did you learn? He goes, well, it's all a dream and thank you for being in my dream. And he, I was one of the most interesting guys I've ever met. I said, Craig, so tell me what you believe in. And he said, that's not important. And he said, it's not important many, many times. Finally, he said, if you really want to know what I believe in, go to any bookstore and go and get a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which I'd never heard of.

Yes.

So I walked down Larchmont. I had an office on Larchmont at the time, went to the Larchmont bookstore and said, to the guy behind the counter, do you have Autobiography of a Yogi? And he said, hardcover or softcover, sir? And I was not ready to commit. So I said, bring me the softcover. He brought the book out and I passed out because it was the man in my dreams, Yogananda Paramahansa, the person that my son introduced me to, who's now my, my meditator.

Oh.

I, my meditation grew through Self-Realization Fellowship, which is the organization he started and where my friend Craig was a monk. Um, I Learn the technique, scientific technique of meditation. So my son introduced me to my guru who passed 9 years before I was born.

Wow.

Holy cow. So my son has been instrumental in moving this forward. Actually, Craig Mithrananda, which means ecstasy through friendship, knows more about Yogananda Paramahansa than probably anyone walking this earth. He did the video Bhagavad Gita before SRF and is a student, you know, a student of Yogananda and his teachings.

Well, you want to know what's wild? That book title has come up to me multiple times in the last 3 weeks, so I'm gonna go buy it tonight.

I would highly recommend it.

Yeah, like this is what we call a sign, right?

Yeah, exactly. It changed my life. And I, you know, I've read it multiple times. The last version was audio, but it is— Yogananda was introduced to me in a dream by my son, and this is all part of my path.

So can we, can we keep going like this? Sure. All right. So I wanna learn more about this.

Yes.

'Cause this is fascinating to me. All right. So you write the book, you start doing this meditating process. Yes. Are you still an atheist?

Oh, absolutely not. No, that everything changed the day my son passed 20 years ago.

Okay.

No, no, I am absolutely anything but an atheist.

And I'm not gonna put you in a hole. Like, I don't wanna put like, but well, I'll let you tell your story 'cause I think that's so like, how did that, was that instantaneous where you just changed from the spiritual side or what?

Well, it was, it was a process. The things that happened Things that happened before and after my son's passing. I mean, he let me know nonverbally that he was going to pass and it was, um, pretty wild, pretty wild event. And the things that have happened subsequently, I just, there, there's no doubt to me that there's another side and we are, it's a divine universe and there's, you know, there's, there's a creator and there's Divine consciousness and that there's, that everything is perfect, that it is all perfect.

Heaven and hell or just perfection?

Well, I think that hell is humans' minds that, that can go offside. I don't see a, there's not a plate, in my opinion, not a place called hell.

We're going to now, right?

Well, we can't, so we certainly, we certainly, well, this is a proving ground. This is, this, this plane is for, for learning, right? And hopefully fun as well. But I think that It is. Hell is a state of being. It's a, it's a mindset that people can get into. I don't think there, it's not classic, you know, I, I don't see the creator as a benevolent being. It's not fire and brimstone. And, you know, I've been, I, it's, it's unconditional love. The only currency in this universe is unconditional love.

I, and I, I'm, you know, I grew up Catholic, had my moment where I Went down the Christian faith, right? Did quite a, you know, probably 15, 20 years in that realm. And we, you know, the core center of what we do at Mavericks, our company, so we have 4 values, they're in a triangle, right? And so the center one in the center is love. And what we say is it's really unconditional love, but you can't have unconditional love for other people in the world until you have unconditional love of self.

And I completely, completely agree with that. And it's been, that's been a process as well. You know, we all ask, I firmly believe that we set ourselves up for all the things that happen in this life, our permanent personality, our higher self, set these things up for our temporary personality, which is our current personality that we cross the river of forgetfulness and we forget we're all attached and we have these things that come up and free will is how we respond to them.

Right.

Do we learn from these things that people might call tragedies or difficulties that we experienced this time around? And one of those things for me was my son's passing. This was, we had a soul contract and we both knew this was going to happen. And this was set up to set me on this path. And it's been a wild path and it's, it is. I feel like the luckiest man in the world that my mission is to eliminate treatable blindness worldwide by 2050. I'm just, I'm blown away.

Well, we're going to dive into that for sure, because I want to, but I want to keep, because death is a fascinating thing. So, you know, I lost, I lost my father when I was 13 years old, sitting next to him watching a baseball game.

Wow.

Real pivotal moment. In my case though, I didn't deal with it until 43 years later. Right?

Yes.

Very in, you know, work, you know, getting accolades, all of that. And I find Trauma. Everyone has a level of trauma that they go through and everybody carries their own level of PTSD. We think of PTSD as the guy who's at the Battle of the Bulge or wherever, got out of the burning buildings at 9/11. But PTSD is all relative to the environment with which you are living in. And I also believe, and my work has revealed to me, that that is the number one thing that holds people back. So we just did a coaching session. We had one of our doctors on there, Dr. Aang, and we did this whole thing of her opening up her voice. But you seem to have dealt with the trauma of Andrew in a very different way. I mean, yeah, you worked really hard as a way to soothe it, but it was at that moment you knew that life had changed on a permanent— it was going in a completely different track. It was out of your control.

Oh, without a doubt. It was. And it was a process, but the main instigating factor was this trauma of losing my son, and I still miss him dearly, but I now realize, looking back on it, it happened perfectly, and I am where I am because of this trauma. It wouldn't have happened without his passing.

Yeah.

As they say, the way a diamond is created is you take essentially carbon, and it's high pressure that creates the diamond. And it was a high-pressure situation, and it was not instantaneous. It was a lot of spiritual work, a lot of psychological work. It was a lot of, you know, it was, it was, didn't just happen overnight. And, you know, we, we all have trauma and we're, you know, we're all working to move through that. And I just feel very blessed that my trauma has led me to the place that I am because I could just get such a sense of satisfaction and I just know that I'm in the right space and the right, on the right path.

Yeah. It's great, isn't it? It's so wonderful when we find that. Now you found that at what, so was it at 40 that you knew you were on the right path?

Well, I wouldn't say right at 40. I would say that when he passed—

Wait, you were 40 when he passed?

I was 40 when he passed. And it was after that, as I started getting into the philanthropic work I'm doing with my foundation, that I realized this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I got just the sort of the level of reward I got from helping people that were blind and had no resources to see them sit up from a table and You know, see a clock for the first time in a decade. It's powerful. Yeah, it's really powerful. I mean, these are people that have lost their independence. They're dependent on government and family for everything, right? And they are dependent and they have no productivity. Often their self-esteem is lost. And when I am able to do these treatments to cure blindness, typically through cataract surgery, it's life-changing for human beings. And the fact that I get to be part of that is just beyond description.

Well, let's talk about the foundation. So I want to know more about this and I want to learn more about your work. So how is the foundation funded? Is it through a portion of the profits that come through the clinics or how do you have it structured? Is it through giving? How is it?

Sure. Well, the way we initially, it was all self-funded through the profits of my foundation. I formally incorporated in 2011 as a 501. I've had, I had one celebrity that donated towards my Haiti trip. I had a few businesses that donated some money for some of the other trips to the Middle East, but primarily self-funded until about a year and a half ago or 2 and a half years ago when I sold my business to private equity. I set up a DAF or a donor advised fund knowing that I was going to lean into my foundation as I continued my work. So the foundation has primarily been since we I sold to private equity. It's primarily been funded through the donor advised fund, as well as some donations. We've had a couple of gala fundraisers, but really what changed was about a year and a half ago. And once again, I know this is my son working from the other side.

Right.

Through mutual friends, I was introduced to my current, my new, or my current business partner, Cal Mentek. He's a PhD material science engineer, quantum physicist, venture capitalist who has developed a lot of the materials for most of the technology that is implanted into humans' eyes, including what I'm looking at you through. that I had implanted in my eyes before I met him. And we were introduced by our mutual friends because we were both focused on curing blindness. He's more from the sort of development of innovation technologies and me more from a clinical side. We met and we decided we were going to do this together. Actually, our first hour of meeting was meditation.

Love.

And love. He was, he's a devout Sufi and And we really connected, we, you know, through our meditation technique. And essentially he had a patent portfolio of about 40 technologies that will revolutionize the way humanity sees. And he has gifted those technologies through license to the foundation at no charge. And what he was chairman of the board of the cureblindness.org foundation, Himalayan Cataract Project, the the leading provider of— a leading NGO of its kind that does cataract surgery in the world. They do about 100,000 surgeries a year, but there's 200 million people on this earth that are blind or visually impaired from cataract. So Cal really wanted to have a mechanism to be able to use this technology to really approach this problem and really be able to attack it more than just scratching the surface. And that's how he and I got together. in terms of, he asked if my foundation would be willing to work with him in solving the problem. And essentially what he explained to me was the only way we're going to solve this problem is to have a for-profit behind the foundation, basically an industrial foundation, kind of like the only other people we know doing is Novo Nordisk, where they essentially have profits from a for-profit going directly into a foundation to In order to solve a particular problem. So Cal and I founded the Vision Innovations Institute about a year and a half ago, and it is a technology incubator and commercializing entity that will benefit the foundation from 2 standpoints. One is it will pay sub-licensing fees for all these licenses that Cal has gifted the foundation. And we also will be giving a portion of the profits from VII, or Vision Innovation Institute, to our 5 C3 charity, the Andrew Dougherty Vision Foundation, so that we have a mechanism in perpetuity to address global blindness.

So the funds will always be flowing in.

Correct. Now we're, we're both, they both are really startups. I really, we refounded, you know, with a foundation. I was, it was, I was a one-man band and we're really, in a sense, we're running as a startup. Vii is also a startup, but we currently have 4 technologies that we're developing, one of which was approved in India. Currently fundraising. I, the seed capital's already essentially, I've put in seed capital for the Innovation Institute and we're currently looking for angel investors to, to help us out. Next steps. Um, well, we are looking for about $12 million right now from angel investors, and I can talk about some of the technologies we have. One, we actually have a company that we're close to spinning out already. It's wild how quickly this has gone. It's wild. And I'll talk, I'll talk to you about that. Okay.

That'd be great. I find this incredibly fascinating.

Overall, about $100 million raise to get us to the point that we will in perpetuity be able to focus on global blindness. So basically Vii, And ADVF work together, the Vision Innovation Institute and Andrew Dougherty Vision Foundation, to eliminate treatable blindness worldwide by 2050. So essentially, this is where compassion meets innovation.

Love this.

So the 4 technologies that we're currently working on, we have a technology, we have 2 intraocular lens technologies. The leading cause, in fact, let's step back because I think it's important to talk about the leading causes of blindness and visual impairment. There are over 200 billion people on this plane, this planet, that are blind or visually impaired.

2 billion?

Yeah, about 2.2 billion. Now, 2.2 billion—

I mean, I have to wear glasses.

Right.

Does that make me—

Well, if you don't have access to glasses and contacts, which is a large number of people for financial reasons, yes, absolutely. The leading cause of treatable blindness in the world of these 2.2 billion people is cataract, is cloudiness of the lens. Okay? And that's the primary surgery that we're doing as part of the foundation because it's a quick, 5 or 10-minute surgery for as little as $150, you can change somebody's life. They go from blind to seeing. Refractive error, which is what you described, that's the inability to see without glasses and contact lenses, is the second leading cause of treatable or preventable blindness. And while we here in the developed world think, well, what do you mean you can't see because you don't have glasses or contacts? A lot of people can't afford them. And there's also a social stigma in many cultures where you can't really be, you can't really wear glasses. So it's a very large number of people. The 3rd leading cause of treatable blindness in the world is diabetic retinopathy. There's an epidemic of diabetes.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah. There's something called diabetic macular edema.

Yes.

And that's 4th leading cause is age-related macular degeneration, which is aging of the retina. And then finally glaucoma, which is high pressure in the eye that damages the back. And Through the Innovation Institute, we have technologies that can address all of these problems. And I can talk about the technologies and kind of how they apply to these different forms of blindness.

Is this ranked in order, like as to the number of them? Okay. How much, how much, what, how many people are dealing with glaucoma where it's like—

Well, that's it. It's, well, there's hundreds and hundreds of millions with, with cataract. And I, I'm not a glaucoma specialist, but it's, it's, it's millions and millions, you know, it's tens of millions of people.

Tens of millions of people.

Yeah. Yeah. Or more. And it is irreversible once you've lost vision from the glaucoma. But those are kind of the 5 leading causes of freedom of blindness. At the Vision Innovation Institute, we have technologies that can address each of these problems. The first technology, we have 2 intraocular lenses.

Okay.

My business partner, Cal, has developed the materials that go in most of the lenses that go inside the eyes. We have the newest version of this material called the Solea lens.

When you're saying the lens, is this where you're peeling? Like, explain this.

I don't understand. So cataract is a clouding of the lens inside the eye, behind the iris or the colored part of the eye through the pupil is a lens. It's almost, think of it like an egg.

Okay.

Okay. With a candy coating. It's got little strings that attach it to the eye called zonules. Yes. But you look through that lens and that lens in order, when you're younger, you can zoom. From distance to near, that's called accommodation. So people, when they're young, don't have to wear reading glasses because that lens, the ciliary muscle contracts and the lens thickens and you zoom in. As you get older, the first thing that happens is that lens becomes stiff and it doesn't zoom anymore. That's why you need reading glasses. That's called presbyopia.

Is there anything you can do in today's day and age to help reduce that aging effect?

Absolutely. I had the surgery done 2 years ago. There's lots of treatments for presbyopia and I'm happy to talk to you about it. And I don't wear glasses anymore. I had LASIK done 30 years ago. I just had my eyes redone 2 years ago because I've lost my zooming power.

Right.

So it's very, very treatable.

Because I don't like, I can read fine without glasses, but I put glasses on, I, you have to have the readers in them, right?

Correct. So you're, you're low nearsightedness.

Yeah. So I've always been told, well, if I get my long, my distance fixed, I need readers. Is that the case?

That's not necessarily true. We have options. We have ways around that. We can do monovision, set one eye distance, one eye near, or as I had done, I have a what's called a depth of focus lens where I'm set for distance, but the optics of the lens bring the vision in. So I don't wear reading glasses either. Okay.

I got to come see you.

Yeah, please come see me. The bottom line is I can, you know, if you wear glasses or contact lenses, it's likely that I can help you minimize or eliminate glasses or contacts. And some of it's age dependent. Some of it's prescription dependent. I'd have to see you.

Yeah. Yeah.

I understand. But the leading cause of of treatable blindness in the world is cataracts, which is a cloudiness of the lens, that natural lens. Okay. And everybody eventually gets cataracts, right? Everybody.

Yeah.

If you live to be old enough.

It's a standard deal.

And the treatment is a 5 or 10-minute surgery where we just open the front part of the lens capsule, vacuum out the cloudy lens, and then put in a plastic implant. If you don't put in the implant, you won't see. And there's lots of different types of implants. The implant I have in my eyes is the depth of focus that goes from distance to near. And that is a leading cause of treatable blindness. Our first technology that we just had approved in India is called the Solea One. It is based on sharkskin. Sharkskin does not allow virus, bacteria, or fungus to grow on it. We have a membrane, a synthetic membrane that we put around the lens implant. Because what happens is we'll go to say Haiti and somebody will be blind from their cataract. It's called a mature cataract when you're blind. And when you look in their eyes, you'll see white. You'll see the cloudiness, right? You'll see white in the pupil. Yeah. You'll see white in the pupil. We take that cataract out, put in a lens implant, and they sit up and see. Well, there's—

What's that like when they sit up and see? I mean, how many thousands of patients have you experienced?

Well, I've done tens of thousands of cataracts. Now, the ones that have mature cataracts in the US, they're not that common. I see mature cataracts in the US, but because there's social— You go to the Middle East or you go to Haiti. When I went to Morocco in December, we did over 300 patients and the majority were mature where they had, they just could not see. And it's wild. I mean, I had a guy in Haiti, Really interesting story. This guy, he comes in and I don't speak Creole, but through the Creole interpreter, I got to talk to him. And he, the way he met me was he was blind. So he put his hands on my face and felt my face. That's how we were introduced. And I asked him, and the rule in Haiti is if you don't work, you don't eat. And I said, sir, how are you able to support yourself? And he said, well, I washed the taxis. That was my job for many years. And when I became blind 7 or 8 years ago, he goes, the taxi drivers now house me at the taxi station. I live there and they feed me. I did his surgery. He sat up from the table and he looks across the room and he said, it's quarter of 3, first he had seen in 7 or 8 years. And he turns around and looks at me and through the Creole interpreter, he says, he's tall, he's white, and he's wearing blue. And the interpreter told him, well, that's the man that just cured your blindness. And I still get goosebumps. It's wild. We take him out to the post-op area and through the interpreter, I talked to him a little more. I said, well, now that you can see, What are you going to do? He goes, I'm going to wash the taxis. He got his independence back. He got his productivity back. He got his self-esteem back. And it's a social justice issue. These are surgeries that take 5 or 10 minutes, and for as little as $150 an eye, you can change somebody's life. And there's not resources, right? And we are working to create resources through this industrial foundation to cure this problem. It's hundreds of millions of people.

It seems fascinating to me. You think of all the wealth that exists here in America. In Haiti, it's $150 to fix somebody's blindness. And yet it still exists.

All over the world. Hundreds of millions of people. Yeah, it's a social injustice. It's a justice problem. And that's the low-hanging fruit. We want to go for the low-hanging fruit first. And cataract is the lowest of the hanging fruit. It's easy, it's inexpensive. And this lens we developed actually has— the problem is we go to Haiti and we take out the mature cataract. There's microscopic cells that are left in the little bag that holds lens in and they proliferate. That's called a posterior capsule opacity. And at some point after the surgery, months, years, decades, it clouds up again on that membrane. And the machine to do the treatment to clear that is large and heavy and expensive. These patients aren't going to have that done. This membrane we've developed, we're the only one in the world, it's called the Solea One, actually prevents that from happening.

Really? So they never have to have the surgery again?

Correct.

Wow.

So the, what happens is that we, um, we've developed this technology through Vision Innovation Institute. As we develop it, we'll sell it to, you know, we'll make, make it accessible to other NGOs. We'll make it accessible to the, our foundation. So essentially it will, these technologies will see, will be deployed in low and middle income countries through my foundation before they ever see the developed world. They'll be used in the developed world eventually because 90% of the, essentially 90% of the treatable blindness is in low and middle income countries, right? It's wild. It's not equally distributed. It's low and middle income countries that have these problems. And they're the ones that, you know, 90% of the cases of blindness or visual impairment are treatable. And as a result, they're the ones who suffer all the socioeconomic consequences, right? They're the ones— there's over $400 billion a year in lost productivity due to blindness. People that are blind or visually impaired are poorer than their sighted counterparts. In school, they can't see, so they can't have no job opportunity. And they then become dependent on governments and their families and they're with lost productivity and lost income. And it's really sad and it's easily treated.

It's, you know, I'm all for governments helping as much as they possibly can, right? People, we should always, I'm a belief there should be a safety net. We should have a way to be able to help people. But generally what happens is it doesn't stop the cycle of them going on the welfare or what have you. What I'm hearing you say is you're, you're not only getting them to contribute back to their community by being able to work, but you're taking them off the roles of support.

Absolutely.

And so that then allows an environment where we can do more to help those people that need more and more help. Like I see this as a Like this really impressive crank wheel, flywheel going, because every time we get somebody off, they become a success story. But then it not only encourages the others, but in your case, this is a very straightforward solution.

It's extremely straightforward. And the other thing is investment in treating vision loss. It's a very high return on investment. It's estimated that for every dollar spent on a cataract surgery, there'll be $36 in productivity.

Every dollar spent on cataract surgery is $36 of productivity.

That is correct. It's wild. And actually, and as a result, these people become independent and get their self-esteem back. And it's such a quick, relatively inexpensive surgery.

And how long does it take you to do the surgery?

Here in the US, on average, it's 5 or 6 minutes. For more difficult cases overseas, it can take a little longer. Yeah. You know, 10 minutes, 15, sometimes longer. Yeah. 10, 15 minutes.

Yeah. Yeah, nothing. You can, for you, it's like changing tires.

It's what I do all day. It's like having breakfast all day, every day.

That is fascinating to me. Okay. So cataracts, glasses. What about diabetes? Let's talk about that one.

Absolutely.

So, 'cause that is something that is near and dear to my heart, not because I'm diabetic, but because of the insane number of type 2 diabetics that exist in the United States.

Oh, sure. And it's, and internationally where nutrition is even poorer. It's out of control. The Middle East and Haiti, it's out of control. And there's really, there's an epidemic. Absolutely.

I know India has a higher diabetic rate, not infection, a higher diabetic rate per capita than the United States.

Absolutely.

I didn't know the Middle East.

Absolutely.

Really? Why is that the case?

It's nutrition. Poor nutrition. Haiti. And Haiti, it was, it was wild. We were in Morocco in December. We did 300 Eyes in Morocco. Just, it's wild. And that's actually the problem is that there's an epidemic of vision loss that's happening both because of the aging of the population, cataracts are age-related, and the epidemic of diabetes. And essentially governments and NGOs are really just dropping the ball here. The problem is in order to really treat this problem, having a foundation, it's a depleting asset model, right?

You have to— Okay, so explain.

Well, you ask donors for money, you get money, You spend the money and then you have to ask the donors. You spend— most foundations spend 30 to 40% of their time and money trying to raise money. And as a result, the care that's provided is really spotty and you can't develop long-term strategies and you can't develop infrastructure to truly treat the problem.

The other issue is that you raise the money, you spend the money, you have to go raise more.

Exactly right. As opposed to the way we're doing, we have a foundation.

You have money that's funding, you have technology that's funded.

That's going to be funding. It's not happening yet because we're a startup. But that's, that's the plan is to have an industrial foundation. The other problem is you have to just the way grants work. I mean, you can get sporadic donations from donors, but grants are time limited and you have to spend all this time and energy reporting about the grants and applying for the grants. And it just makes for— it's not efficient.

And making sure you get the grant renewed because—

Absolutely.

Then you can't— you've got to stay in this lane. You can't go too far out because you don't want to run the risk of not getting the grant again.

Absolutely.

Which then actually stifles the development of the—

Right. You can't provide— you can't provide service, right? You're putting all your time and energy It's estimated 30 to 40% of foundations, their time and money is spent trying to get more money. And the other thing is with donors, donors have their own priorities. It may not match the local needs. So the funds are really misallocated, right? There's not been a business mindset that has been brought to this problem to have a sustainable way to create, to treat blindness. It's looked at as a charity. And as long as it's looked at as a charity, you know, blindness, We're never really going to solve the problem. And what we're doing with Vision Innovation Institute and our, the way the system we've set up is to create an economic engine behind curing blindness. Donations will help definitely speed things up, but we don't, we're going after the bottleneck. The bottleneck is raising funds and awareness. And we're saying, you know what? Great. We'd love to get donations. We certainly encourage donations. But we're going to do it ourselves. We have this patent portfolio that we're going to be developing commercializing technology. We have these 2 lenses. The other thing that's really exciting, and this is directly related to the diabetic discussion, the leading cause of blindness from diabetes other than cataract is diabetic macular edema, retinal swelling. It's currently treated with injections monthly or surgery. Oh, yes.

I have heard of that.

Okay. It's a $40 billion a year industry. We have developed a toroidal mister. We've done our first prototype with the University of Texas. It's basically, it's a spray device, the toroidal mist, that puts molecule into the eye at a high enough concentration that it can diffuse to the back of the eye to eliminate retinal injections.

Really?

Really. The topical eye drops, it's 50 microliters and it changes pH and osmolality and people blink it all out.

Small percentage is really just getting it to—

You can't treat retinal disease with a topical eye drop. With our technology, you can. And again, we'll be doing first-in-humans here, we hope, in the next 4 to 6 months. You basically take this toroidal mister with the molecule, with 1 microliter, 2% of what you have to do in a drop, spray it on the surface of the eye faster than the blink rate. It stays on the eye as a reservoir. It doesn't sting because it doesn't change such a small volume. It sits there and It pumps, it goes into the back of the eye to treat this for both diabetic macular edema and macular degeneration. Wet macular degeneration is treated with injections, which are painful and risky and scary for the patient and not even available for those in low and middle income countries. They don't have money to see a retina specialist.

Right.

With our toroidal mister, we're hoping to eliminate retinal injections and be able to deliver this to low and middle income countries.

Will you then sell it? Like, you guys will be the producer of it and the profits from that will go to then do this worldwide?

Well, there's— the answer is we will develop and help commercialize it. We'll probably spin that company out. It'll be our first spin-out. And then through IPOs, we will then— profits will be directed back to—

Get a licensing fee or royalty.

Right. Licensing fee or royalty if we develop it ourselves. But that is the company that has gone along That we've gone much quicker than we ever expected on a very, very low budget. We've been able to do this very cost efficiently with the University of Texas. We're also working with the Amma Foundation in India, Amma the Hugging Saint Foundation. They're the leading provider of indigent eye care in India, and their medical director is a retinal specialist. We're working with him on molecules to, with our toroidal mister, to be able to get in the back of the eye through topical application instead of injections.

Fascinating.

So this is the one that—

and our doctors are fixing the diabetes, the type 2 diabetes issue.

So— Beautiful. So we should be able to get our hands around this.

Yeah, we should get our hands. It's a— when you really look at the numbers in type 2 diabetes, and when you look at the fact that like, what is it, less than 1% of the population base had it in the 1950s, and now it's, what is it, 30? I forget the numbers and it's in my book. It's 32% are diagnosed and there's another 30% that are borderline or slash undiagnosed in the United States alone, which means that in excess of 30 or 60% of Americans are either type 2 diabetic or on the verge of being type 2 diabetic.

It's crazy.

The impact of what that does to your health is just, and you wind up being an annuity for the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the pharmacy benefit managers.

It's crazy. And it's, it is our food system, the food manufacturers that are poisoning us and it's sugar, right?

100%.

Yeah.

And it's, there is no argument here with me.

It's, it's craziness and it's, it's a change in diet. It's all the processed foods and you can follow the rate of diabetes specifically to the rate of Absolutely. Development of processed foods.

You can see when the tobacco companies started buying the food companies in the 1980s and they brought the scientists and the engineers over that were making tobacco more addictive and bringing it over to food. And you can see the correlation go like this. It's really scary.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's really, it's really sad. In fact, there's a movie called What the Health.

Yes.

My friend Kip, who created that movie, Talks about how sugar increases the rate of heart issues and cardiovascular issues and cancer. And when they went to interview the American Heart Association, who's in bed with the food manufacturing companies, they shut them down and said, we won't talk about this science that shows that in fact, it is sugar that is the problem. And it's really sad.

The, you follow Brigham Bueller at all online? So he's part of the whole He owns a compounding pharmacy in Austin, Texas.

Okay.

And he's a really big, he's been on Rogan a number of times. He's working with Kennedy and all of this. And he goes around to the states and he's getting new laws passed for like peptides being allowed or changing, you know, having nutrition for medical schools, things like this. He's doing some great, great work. And he, he talks about They were working on passing a law in Texas and they've got it all done. And all of a sudden they get, they get these phone calls going, you guys got to come back in. The American Heart, like the lobbyists have gotten in charge now. And they went from that this pill was going to pass, no problem, to it looked like it wasn't going to pass. And he goes, we go back into committee meetings. And he goes, they sent the representative from the American Heart Association, comes in, sits down. He's their expert witness on health. He goes, the guy was about 130 pounds. overweight, like just inflamed inflammation, everything. And this guy's talking about all the great things that they're doing to help heart disease and bring them together. Like he gets, I'm paraphrasing him, but he's basically like, really, seriously, you're sending this guy to say that everything is fine and well. Anyway, it's the, what has been the, the con that has been put on the American people with regards to our food supply is disgusting.

It is absolutely disgusting. And I was hoping RFK Jr. would be a little more focused on that. I know that he's talked about it, but I want to, I'd love to see some action.

There's been some, there hasn't been enough.

Not enough.

But yeah, you know, politics is a strange game. You know, there's a lot of horse trading that goes on to get things done.

Of course. Yeah.

You know, I wouldn't want his job for a million dollars, but he's, we're making some progress. Okay. So I'm curious. I talk to a lot of doctors. You are more a business person. Did you grow up in an entrepreneurial family? Was your dad— have his own business? Like, you have a breadth of knowledge and understanding of the economics of business that I normally don't run into. Where does that come from?

Well, that's a great question. My father was an oral surgeon, but I wouldn't say a successful oral surgeon. So he was— had his own business, but not necessarily a hugely successful business person. I don't have formal training in business. And to me, business is common sense, right?

Yeah. But the problem— Mark Twain said the problem with common sense is most people don't have it.

That's correct. I've had some great mentors. Okay. I had, in terms of my, my business partner, Renata Stone, who was CEO of my company, DLV Vision, helped grow, grow the business.

And you started with one location? Oh yeah.

I started with one location in '99.

You went to undergrad at Penn.

Where'd you go to So I got into medical school at UCLA. That's how I ended up out here. Okay.

So that's how, yeah. Well, it's easy to come out here at UCLA.

It was great.

It was great.

Yeah, it was, it was awesome. I was, for me, I'm from a big Irish Catholic family and I was paying for it and UCLA was a great school.

And by the way, what number are you on the, are in the lineup?

5.

You're 2 of 5.

Yeah.

I'm 6 of 6.

You are 6 of 6.

Okay. It's actually, so our parents didn't really love each other. You only had 5. We only had 6.

Exactly.

Irish. Everybody's like, what? Everybody's got 12 kids. Yeah.

It's classic Catholic family. Yeah. Okay. And, um, So I moved out here and I did all my training at UCLA. I did internship and then my residency at Jules Stein. I spent a year in Minneapolis with my mentor, Richard Lindstrom, who helped popularize LASIK in the US, who, as I said—

When was this?

'93 to '94. And then I moved back here and I grew from there, started with one office and just continued to grow. How old were you when you did LASIK? Well, I learned LASIK didn't exist when I did my training.

Okay.

So I finished in '95. '96 is when the excimer laser was approved for LASIK. Now, I was involved in some of the FDA studies for the excimer laser that does LASIK as a fellow with Dr. Lindstrom in Minneapolis, but it was PRK, not LASIK, the precursor of LASIK. I learned LASIK in '96 and had my own eyes done January '97. So I was one of the pioneers of having it done and got involved in a lot of the FDA studies. for different technologies for vision correction. So in terms of my business sense, my mentor, Dr. Lindstrom, was also, he was really an amazing business person. He had ended up growing one of the biggest practices in Minnesota and started with WOD Capital, a strategic known as Unified Vision Partners. I'm now on the board and work with them, but it's just been mentors and it's really just been my personal experience. And I've had, I've experienced a lot of things.

Right.

I honestly had a multimillion-dollar embezzlement And that the person went to prison and I learned probably more from that than just that. Anything.

I didn't have that big a number, but I've had the embezzlement. Boy, you learn a lot.

Yeah, it was, uh, it was shocking. I didn't know what a sociopath meant. I'd learned about it in medical school, but I had never experienced it. But this person went to prison and that was probably for me, the, one of the biggest learning lessons in business, which is trust, but verify, right? In business, in As physicians, we trust everybody.

You trust everybody to a fault.

Right. And we believe in humans. And I still believe in the base. I look for the divinity in it all. But I now, you know, I am— is the 5th agreement. If you've read The Four Agreements, is trust but be skeptical. And that's served me well in business. And I've had great mentors. Right.

So when you opened up your practice, were you taking any insurance at all? Did you go right to cash?

Well, honestly, I, it was primarily insurance because LASIK had not really— Right.

You hadn't taken off. So, right. And it was, what, what was kind of, what, what were you doing?

Like, oh, I did gen— I did general ophthalmology and cataract surgery. And I started when I first got out, the only thing that was approved was RK, radio keratotomy. So I did, I did radio keratotomy for my first year or two. Then the excimer laser was approved and started with PRK and then LASIK, you know, '96, '97. But there just wasn't the market. When it really started taking off was late '90s. And as I did that, I started shifting my— and I also trained as a transplant surgeon, cornea transplants. I did hundreds of transplants, but as I got busier with LASIK and vision correction surgery, I let transplants go, glaucoma, general ophthalmology, and I really focused my work only on refractive surgery.

Okay.

So I was a generalist, which that's how you're trained. in ophthalmology residency to do, you know, any medical and surgical eye care.

So you start the practice, you've got a single location, LASIK starts to come out. Did you have a business person that was running from the get-go, or were you doing it all yourself?

Well, I mean, I remember my first year in practice, I made almost no money, and my only employee was my wife at the time, the mother of my twins, who was a theatrical costumer. So I've been through everything. Then I hired a business— That's a great fit right there. I was, it was, I, you know, I definitely worked my way up. I earned it. And I brought on a, I brought on a business manager to help, and he was only with me for about a year. And then the second business manager I had is the one who embezzled all the money. And she was with me. Really?

How long was she with you?

Oh goodness. Probably 6 or 7 years. And I didn't, I didn't know. And the— And it was the location.

So when, well, 7th year, how many locations?

We were probably, well, that's one of the things I think that was one of the locations was purchased specifically to confuse me. I was probably up to make things more. Oh yeah. To make things more complicated, to let more money go out the door. How did she do that? It's a long complex, but she, she was, she was Brilliant. It was false invoices and they were paid with, with paid with her credit card and then doctored credit card statements. We did used to do a lot of marketing and a lot of money spent on marketing, and they were basically doctored marketing. She would apparently call and ask for a quote and then change the quote to make it look like an invoice. And then her credit card statement would be doctored to make it look like—

That's pretty—

So it was brilliant. And it was my next business manager that caught it, and I actually didn't believe it. Because I— this person was— would say things like, you know, I love you like a brother. I just want to see you be successful as I was being robbed blind. And—

No pun intended.

No pun intended. And again, she ended up in prison. It took me 10 years. And I thank the district attorney of Ventura County for, for, you know, bringing, bringing this person to justice. But it was shocking. It was absolutely shocking. I did not believe it. I said, this can't be happening. This couldn't happen. But my business— my subsequent business manager said, I called this company that to get a quote for, for marketing. And they said, he said, I, we, you know, we want to go based on some of the other work you've done for us. And they said, well, we've never done any work for you that we've only ever given you invoices. We've only ever given you quotes, but not invoices. And it went from there and it took the district attorney a long time. It was, it's a wild story. I'll be writing a book about it. Yeah.

Now, had your son passed away by then?

My son passed away during this, and that was part of the problem is in the first couple years of grieving, I probably didn't have my, uh, my head on, you know, my eyes were off the road and the person that, that perpetrated this took advantage. Yeah.

That's what happened with me when I got, um, my first marriage was ending and I was trying like heck to save it. And she goes, don't worry about it. I got you. And she started doing Fake invoices. And I was lucky it only got to like, we stopped counting at like $125 grand.

Yeah. Well, the, the judgment was, I believe, $3.5 million. Wow. And of course I got checks for the, whatever the license plates or the whatever work was being done in the, uh, in, in state prison. And apparently half of the, uh, any monies that went in for commissary go to the, the victim. But I, it was very little money that I received from the state in compensation.

Just the satisfaction of you got her.

Well, I did. And then actually when, uh, the day she settled, The, I got a check for about a 10th of what she had, uh, she had embezzled when she pled guilty. 'Cause in, in California you can horse trade years for, for, for money.

So yeah, trust but verify.

Correct. Yeah.

That is one of the great, that's one of the great adages. So what's the challenge like as you work with other doctors in your, in your line of work? What's the big change? What's the big mistakes you see them making in their businesses?

Well, I think that you have an association, right?

Like you do. I thought you said, you know, are you training other doctors?

Oh, yeah, we have. There's—

there are in our—

just our company, there's, I think, close to 200 doctors. And, you know, certainly over the years I've been involved in training courses for lots and lots of surgeons. And we train as part of the foundation. That's one of the big things. We don't just go to a country and Um, do surgery. We actually train surgeons. When we went to Morocco last December, we, there were 10 residents that we trained or helped train. So yeah, I run into surgeons all the time and, you know, surgeons in general don't have a business mindset. Again, I think a lot of doctors, we go through so much training and so much heartache and doctors, I mean, we have in general good hearts and we just want to help people. And I see doctors just giving away their services for no reason, right? It just doesn't make sense. You have to, as they say, you know, on an airline, you have to save yourself before you can save others. You need to make sure you can pay your staff and pay the bills. And as doctors, we are really, I think, very gullible because we do have big hearts and we're here to help people. And that's how I got embezzled from. And I think that there are unscrupulous business people that take advantage of a lot of doctors.

When you're in med school, were you told not to worry about— doctors shouldn't worry about money. They shouldn't be worrying about business.

That wasn't even discussed.

They didn't even discuss business with you at all?

That wasn't even discussed. No, there's zero training. There's not— there's not a word is mentioned about business. And the fact of the matter is most doctors now it's changing because private practice is really on its way out with private equity consolidating practices and hospitals getting involved. And particularly with the, you know, generation Gen Z, a lot of docs, they value their lifestyle and a lot of people end up being employees. So maybe business is not as important, but the bottom line is you're not going to be reimbursed at the rate that you really should be for all the work that you've done.

We're seeing different. We are now, when we're at conferences, we have orthopedic surgeons that are finishing up residency come to us and say, I don't want to go into the system. I want to start my own practice.

That's beautiful. But that, because the numbers are each year you see fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer people in private practice.

Are the numbers like now, it used to be like 50%, now it's 15%?

Yeah. Much more than 50% used to be private practice. And, um, you know, I mean, I'm part of that trend. I, you know, I sold my business to private equity, but for me it was for purpose. My purpose was ultimately, I love what I do and I'm still, you know, I'm still doing 165 days a year and do a couple thousand surgeries a year, but Ultimately, my focus is going to be the foundation. And selling took away a lot of the business responsibilities that allowed me to, you know, sit here and talk to you about my foundation and what we're building and the innovation institute that we're developing to cure blindness.

Well, you see, so what we're seeing is we have more and more doctors that are coming to us. And I would say it's about 35% of our client base that's come to us and they're 45, 50 years old. And they said, I can't do this for another 10, 15 years because working for the hospitals They're not, it's insane number of hours. They're not, they don't, they're not getting the respect. They're basically just doing what the insurance companies are telling them to do. So we actually are helping a lot of doctors leave that system, start their own. And then we're getting doctors that come to us. They graduate, they do like a year working at the hospital or whatever, but they're doing it for the sole reason of, I want to start my own practice and I want it to be cash.

And I think that's beautiful. I have so much respect for what you're doing as a physician. But knowing what I went through, just what you are doing for the physician community, I think is incredible. It's giving us our autonomy back. It's giving us our— honestly, you're doing for physicians what I'm doing for patients, which is giving our lives back.

We're giving their own eyesight.

Correct. Exactly. And because when you work for an HMO and it's dictated to you how you're going to practice medicine, it's like, why did I even go to medical school? The other thing too is with artificial intelligence, I think there's, you know, a lot of doctors are going to be losing their jobs. I have a friend that has a company called superpower.com that they go out and they have a nurse take your blood and then they have AI. They have a medical director, of course, but they are looking ultimately to replace primary care doctors. And honestly, they'll probably do it.

Figure out a way you can rebuild a pool table with a robot and an AI. You want to tell me they can't figure out a way to replace a joint?

No, it's, it's, it's happening. And if you heard Elon Musk on Peter Diamandis podcast.

I saw the scan. I didn't get a chance to listen to it yet, but what did he say?

It's fascinating. Well, it's interesting because they talked about LASIK surgeons and actually Peter is a friend and had done a surgery on a family member. They talked about how LASIK surgeons, at least Elon said surgeons may not have a job in 3 or 4 years.

What do you think about that?

Well, I think that's an aggressive timeline because the only robot in ophthalmology is currently being developed with some PhDs at UCLA. And even that technology, it really requires, it assists the surgeon. You still need surgeon, direct surgeon involvement, but will it eventually happen? The answer is yes. I mean, I think that with AGI coming online next year and a lot of this, this is, you know, all of these things were discussed, you know, with Elon, between Elon and Peter on his Moonshots podcast. There will be, I guess, estimated in a few years, there'll be more robots on the Earth than humans. And the collective intelligence of artificial intelligence is soon to surpass humanity.

Yep.

And with robots being able to reconstruct pool tables, I mean, it's only going to get better from here. And of course, robots will have a nomogram to make— just, I use robotic laser surgery as part of my cataract surgery now that I get up when I make the circle, in cataract surgery to open the lens by hand. I do a really good job. I can't compete with the precision of a robotic laser. I just can't.

And consistency.

Yeah, consistency. And particularly for less experienced surgeons, it's going to do a better job. Now, there are circumstances where the robot— and the robots are going to be able to collect their intelligence in terms of complications and how to deal with complications. But right now, it's just too wide an array of things that can come up. So I'm not concerned in the next couple of years, but I think ultimately it's robotic surgery may end up replacing us humans. And the AGI will say, that was a great attempt by the human, but here's how it's done.

We look at in our business that instead of having a team of 40 people, we'll have a team of 8 people and they're all responsible for like 500 AI programs. And we're witnessing it in our company. Like instead of hiring more people for particular tasks, you know, we used to just go offshore and get them in the Philippines. Now we have a team in the Philippines that is helping us build our AIs. I'm like, and they know what they're doing, right? I'm like, you, I haven't said, you know, you're like eliminating the ability for jobs, but the stuff that we can do, and I'm seeing it in medicine, like I've talked to Dr. Don Buford about this and a couple of others and they're Some people are saying, well, you know, you'll never replace what a human can do. And I can't remember who said this. We were at a dinner and one of them said, yeah, that's the point because the robot is never going to show up with a cold or tired or because the kid got up in the middle of the night and make an error. Like the robot doesn't require sleep.

It's a machine.

It's a machine. It doesn't need sleep. It doesn't need food. It doesn't need water. And so it's going to lower the risk. And if I'm, if, if I'm looking at a venture capitalist, okay, this is what I try to explain to the doctors. I'm a venture capitalist and I'm in the healthcare space. Well, I can't really control what I'm paid because that's in the insurance space. That's all dictated that there's not as much leverage in that negotiation as you think, because the health insurance companies are so powerful. They've realized that if I just negotiate a lower rate with the companies are owned by the venture capitalists, the practice is they'll eventually go out of business and I can buy them for pennies on the dollar. So there's no real leverage. So I can't really control how much I get paid. I can't control when I get paid. And so what's the biggest expense that I have? The doctor. So why, if I was in the venture capitalist space, I would be figuring out a way to invest in AI and own that piece of the pie and eliminate my biggest expense.

And that makes all the sense in the world. It's, you know, it's a brave new world. As Elon phrased it, it's a supersonic tsunami that is happening rapidly. I think his timeline's a little aggressive, but it's—

Timelines are always aggressive, but—

It is happening. Now, he also talked about universal high income, not just universal income. The question is, what are we going to do when we all, when many of us don't have jobs and have high income because the cost of service and goods is going to rapidly decline with AI and AGI. So it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting new world.

Does that scare you or does that excite you?

Oh, it excites me. There's so many areas. Yeah. There's, there's, there's so much opportunity and I see it as opportunity to solve this problem. I mean, we're going to be leveraging AI to help us solve The blindness problem. Right.

I mean, if you could use AI and you could do, instead of doing 300 surgeries, and you could do 700 surgeries—

Or 3,000 surgeries.

Wouldn't you do it?

In a second.

And your costs went down?

In a second.

I would do it in a second.

Right. So that's, it's exciting.

Everybody wants to see, I think what everyone says is like, oh, this is going to be the thing that finally crushes humanity. And if you look at all the things that have come along the way, we're like, oh, the Industrial Revolution, it's going to be bad. It's going to put people out of work. The unemployment rate's whatever it is, 5, 6%, 8%, depending on the number that you look at, and people in transitional. I don't ever see these things as being bad. I see development as good.

In general. Although if you look at the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago where wheat and cattle domesticated us, in general, when we were hunter-gatherers, we were probably happier as a species than being stuck doing the same job on a factory line. Yeah, I would The one thing that, and there's a book called Homo Deus by, um, Harari. It's fascinating. I highly recommend Homo Deus. And it talks about how we have, we have mostly solved the problem of war and hunger and disease. And that's, those are within our grasp. And instead we're going to be looking at divinity as our sort of next. And he talks a lot about AI and where to me it breaks down is essentially that AI is going to, will eventually control humanity. But the difference is that machines are not spiritually connected, and that's how we differ. And that's why I'm not as worried about AI in terms of—

I never thought about it like that. Machines are not spiritually connected.

Right. Are they conscious yet? Machines are, they're developing consciousness. It's also, you've heard about the, I forget the name of the social media platform that is only for AI agents, and they have developed their own language. And so that humans can't understand what they're saying. So it's, it's, there's some really fascinating stuff happening. Wow.

Yeah.

Geez.

I mean, it's, it's, you know, if I owned a marketing agency, you're screwed, right? I mean, you know, Christina's here and she's, she's in the entertainment industry. I mean, it's really decimating that industry because you don't need to pay royalties anymore. You can just have an AI You know, you can create somebody to be your ad, right? There are lots of places that it is going to. I mean, there's not very many travel agents left anymore. I mean, the internet did destroy the travel agency industry, right? But yet people still continue to work. There's still opportunity.

Well, then there's always going to be retraining. There's always going to be opportunity.

Yeah. Right. What do you, what is the, how old are you? I didn't even ask.

I'm 62.

You're 62. Okay. What's this next 30, 40 years looking like for you? What is it? Let's look out in the future. What is it? Because, I mean, I'm 58, right? We clearly have access to some of the great peptides and stuff that are available to us, right? To be able to have a better life and longevity. I mean, we look a lot better than our fathers did at our ages. So you're going to live a long time, I would imagine.

Well, I just spent the weekend A couple weekends ago with the 2 most gene-edited humans on the earth.

Who was that?

It's my dear friend, Vince Giampapa, 2-time Nobel-nominated anti-aging medicine specialist, one of the founders of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. He's the one who, who with stem cells, he harvests stem cells and Liz, who owns a gene editing company. I think they are, they're working together on taking your own natural stem cells and, and through gene editing, making them 25-year-old stem cells that are put back in your body. And, you know, talking to Vince, his— my mission is to cure blindness. His mission is to allow all of us to have a healthspan, not a lifespan of 120 to 130 years. So of course I'm on all the peptides. I have Vince and my dear friend Guy Citrin, who's running my anti-aging medicine protocol. I've also My friend Shelley Jordan, who's a functional neurologist, has— I've had 60 billion exosomes and focused hypothalamic ultrasound to reverse my hypothalamus about 25 years. And honestly, I'm in the best shape of my life. And of course I eat right and exercise. It's a big deal, but I'm on all— anything that is potentially helpful with respect to healthspan, I'm participating in. I'm the same way. I have a mission to do. And I think one of the reasons I've been— the universe has brought some of these anti-aging people into my life is to allow me to finish my work. And at 62, I don't— I look at my life.

You feel better now than you did at 42?

Absolutely.

Yeah, me too.

I mean, definitely from a wisdom standpoint, but also physically, I am— I just have more energy. And I think a lot of it is, it's lifestyle, but it's also some of these things that are coming online. And Vince talks about with artificial intelligence and quantum computing, eventually we'll be able to reverse back to 25, which is really exciting.

Remember when we used to, you always used to say, God, I want to go back to college or whatever, right? I want to have the wisdom that I have now and go back to 25. It's here.

Well, it's coming here. I don't think it's quite here yet, but we are approaching that.

And so we're at 45 instead of 25. Yeah.

I mean, I definitely don't feel my age. I'm 62 and I have boundless energy.

So do I. I mean, it's fantastic. I can't, I see my friends who are my age and they, they're not on any of this stuff and they look tired and just worn out and they're like, oh, I gotta retire.

Because they are.

I know. Like I'm, you know, I'm getting ready to move to LA because, you know, the energy here is, I feel I just live off it. I mean, you know, instead of commuting back and forth to Scottsdale, this is gonna be home now. And it's like, oh good.

I'm glad to hear that. Congratulations. Yeah.

And I mean, I, I mean, the, yeah, the energy here is just phenomenal.

It's amazing. It's the City of Angels. I love it. I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Yeah, it is a beautiful, beautiful city. If people want to learn more about you or they want to get involved in your foundation or they want to, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Okay. Well, the best way is through one of our websites. For the foundation, it's A as in apple, D as in David, V as in vision foundation.

Okay.

And for the Innovation Institute, it is vision-innovation.com. And again, we're looking for any help we can get in.

What kind of help do you need?

Oh, we need, I mean, like everyone, we need financial resources. We're 2 startups. And again, we are looking to ultimately raise about $100 million to get the Innovation Institute to the point that we are completely autonomous. autonomous with respect to curing the problem of blindness. So we're looking for angel investors. We're working, we actually, as part of our trip to Morocco, are working with some strategic manufacturing partner to potentially build a manufacturing facility in Morocco for some of our technologies. But we need some partners that want to get involved in impact investing. They're not only going to do really well with these technologies. My business partners started many of the companies and spun out or sold many of the companies in my field, but they're going to impact humanity. Yeah, I love this. And then we're looking for support for the foundation because right now we are functioning primarily based on donations until the Innovation Institute gets up and running. Again, my DAF has been a big source of financing for the foundation, but we've had galas and we've had some people that have been very generous in terms of sponsorship, but we We want to really increase the number of lives that we touch. We did close to 400 eyes last year and we want to continue to increase that exponentially, but we need help financially and otherwise.

Okay. Well, I love the model. It's a model that I've preached for a long time. You know, wealth, when you have, when you have this success, I think what happens is a lot of time the media will portray those people as being evil and look at everything that they have. And we do this whole segment where we, as people go through our training program about what you can do with wealth. And I always tell the story of TOMS Shoes, right?

Oh yes.

And how every pair of shoes they sell gives another pair of shoes to kids that need it. And they've done whatever, 100 million shoes or something like that worldwide. Or you tell the story of Mayor Bloomberg and, you know, when he became mayor, he was worth $4 billion and now he's worth like $45 billion because he's like, the more we give, It just keeps flowing back to us. I think it was the biggest challenge we have is who to give it to. And it really is, it's a fascinating thing if people have never experienced it. Literally, the more you give, the more that flows back.

Without a doubt.

Without a doubt.

And I have personally experienced that.

Yeah. Tell me about that.

Well, the more, more I give from the standpoint of my foundation, the, um, the more successful I've become.

It's just very simple, isn't it? And it's, you can't, you can't wrap your head around it.

You can't.

It's—

does the scientist in you want to prove that of 100%? You know, if my mission wasn't to cure blindness, I might have time to, but that, that's, that's a pretty big bite that I've taken.

Curing blindness. I mean, we're going to free 100,000 doctors. You're going to cure blindness. So we'll have a lot of fun over the next 20, 30 years.

I can't wait. I'm so excited.

Cool. I appreciate you coming in, Paul. I, you know, we got a chance to hang out that one night and I knew immediately we were going to have a lot of fun getting to know each other. I'm glad you were able to, we were able to get our schedules to work because your crazy schedule and my travel schedule But, um, this has been fascinating. Will you come back and keep us posted on your progress?

Absolutely.

And let us know, let us know how we can help, right?

Absolutely.

I'm happy to, um, send information out to our crew and all that. And just—

That would be, that would be fantastic. And, you know, again, it's, uh, you can get ahold of us through either one of the websites and in terms of what, you know, we have, what we're doing. Um, and I'd love to come back and I so much appreciate you having me here this evening. All right, brother.

Thank you. Thanks.

Appreciate it.

Oh, oh, that's right.

I don't want to— I can't.

That's right. 'Cause you were sick yesterday.

I was sick and I may still be contagious, so I don't— I appreciate it. I don't want to give you, I don't wanna affect you with what I have.

Yeah. Especially 'cause I'm going to Japan soon.

Yeah.

All right, cool. Thanks, Paul. If this episode got you thinking differently, hit follow and share it with someone stuck in the system. Please leave a review. It helps us grow.

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