Transcript of Episode #56 Featuring Dr. Bryce Appelbaum! THE VISION EPISODE! The Screen Fit Program, Training our brains for better vision, Negative impact of screen time, Comprehensive Vision Care and more!

Hey, everyone. Dylan Jameli here today with an extremely exciting announcement. I am now on the Manect app as an expert. That is Patrick Bet David's app, so you can hire me today. You can ask me questions about hormones, peptides, neuroscience, cardiology, cellular health, finances, faith, religion, whatever it may be. I am there. You can book me for your podcast, and you can also apply to be on mine. But go over, download the Manect app, find at Dylan Jameli. I will answer either by audio, by text. You can get video responses. You can even book a phone call with me. I'm extremely excited to be available to work with all of you, and I thank you all for your support. So check me out on Manect today. Today, Today's episode is sponsored by my good friends at Timeline. Timeline is now offering the world's first ever longevity gummies powered by Mitapier. You've heard me talk about the importance of cellular health and our mitochondria, which is why I have Timeline as my favorite and most trusted sponsor. These are the only clinically proven Urolithin A gummies for strength and healthy aging. We may be living longer lifespans, but are we truly living better lives?

What if the key is not just adding years to your life, but life to your years? This all starts at the cellular level. As we age, our mitochondrial health starts to decline, and one of the keys to living longer and healthier is keeping our mitochondria healthy and strong, and might appear targets this for us. Take control of your health now and live the life that you not only desire, but you also deserve. As a gift to all my listeners, you can save 20% off today by going to timeline. Com/dylan to get started. That's Timeline dylan. Com/dylan. I assure you, your cells will thank you. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Dylan Jameli podcast, Live on Set. It is always so much fun to get to see my guests in person and have this face-off, one-on-one conversation. My guest today, I love my guest today so much, and you're going to see that in the interaction. As soon as I met this man, we We hit it off like this. I'm going to give him an intro. It is not going to do him justice, and you will see why as soon as we have this talk.

He's in town for a convention that, of course, he's speaking at because he's wanted. My guest today is a neuro optometrist, and he is extremely passionate about unlocking human potential through vision. He's the founder and CEO of My Vision First, and it's a leading practice specializing in diagnosing and treating functional vision problems across all ages. He's a trusted authority in functional vision, and he's the creator of vision performance training, which is a transformative approach that optimizes the eye-brain connection. It heals post-concussion vision issues, and it builds long long term visual resilience. So through his work with My Vision First and ScreenFit and neuro optometry, Dr. Bryce Applebaum has supported thousands of patients around the world to thrive in a heavy screen-used world. Because 20 Eyesight isn't the whole story. So we're going to get into that story. We're going to get into that story. We're going to get into everything that he specializes in. You're going to see extremely quickly why I love this man so much. So without further ado, Dr. Bryce Applebaum.

Dylan, such a pleasure to be here. Amazing freaking intro. Thank you for that.

Hey, man. I'm known for my intros. That's all I'm good at.

I'm psyched to be here, not just to leave the conference, but to connect with you and talk about what we can all do to unlock potential through vision.

I love it. I appreciate you taking the time. I know you're town. It's short. You're not here long. I know I get a little flustered when I have to go to events and it's like, I got to be here and there. You drove out of your way to come do this with me. It's greatly appreciated. I value your time, and more so than that, I value the friendship I've been building with you. So thank you, man. I appreciate it.

It's absolutely mutual, and I love what you're doing. Thank you. To be able to get vision in the conversation for your community, there's nothing better than that.

Well, look, dude. I mean, you see the glasses right here? What are these? Oh, man. I don't know much about it, to be honest with you, I'll give you a little backstory. When I got health insurance for me and my wife through our own business, she always goes to the optometrist or the vision. I don't even know what it's called. Anyway, I said, You know what? I think I should probably go. I went, and I couldn't tell you exactly what I had, but I knew my vision wasn't the greatest, and we did find some things. Now, we went to Costco, which isn't great. I figured they screwed up everything, and I was getting headaches. Anyway, I went to Lens Crafters. They fixed me up, and I've actually had to get one grade higher. I'm pretty low thickness, and I don't wear these often.

They were far away or for up close?

Yeah, further away. It's supposed to be. I'm on the computer all day. So when I do this and I take it off, I'm like, Whoa, what happened? And tanning bed, sun, time, wear, tear. But I think that vision is one of those things where when you're getting insurance, for instance, it's like, Well, that's It's the part of it. You don't think about it. I'm so thankful I went, and I never realized just how much it was affecting me. And then I start talking to you, and it's like you opened up this whole other spectrum of vision, how it affects health that I, honestly, as in-depth as I am in health never crossed my mind. I want to dig into all of this with you today, but I want to get into your background first. Where did you start? What was your background in college and your studies? Then what made you so passionate about vision?

Well, I mean, I'm a product of this work. As a kid, I was an absolute mess. I had these visual developmental delays. What that meant was I had trouble focusing my eyes. My eyes didn't work well together as a team. I had poor depth perception. I just felt so lost in space. On the soccer field, I had no idea what was going on. I would swing and miss every time in baseball. I was a reluctant reader. I struggled in school. I had interpersonal connection issues because my sense My sense of self in space was not developed yet. Fortunately, was able to access vision training at the time, which taught me how to close the gap between where vision development was and where it needed to be. I look at all my success in life, athletically, academically, even inter-personally, to what was done by optimizing this eye-brain connection. For me, there was a no-brainer. I was going down this path. I thought I wanted to do sports medicine, but decided I could actually do that through vision, which has been really fun. But now, I'm on an absolute mission to just raise awareness, to let people know there's so much more to vision than just 20/20 eyesight, but also to let people know what's possible when we can really unlock our potential through vision and through this eye brain connection and the training that can take place where any brain at any age can be enhanced and optimized in terms of vision.

Excellent.

See, you talk to me about this, and I'm going to let you talk about it because it's certainly not my wheelhouse, but the different ways that vision affects our overall health and how it... Obviously, quality of life. I laughed because you brought up baseball, and I keep thinking about Major League with Rick Vawn, Wild Thing. But when he got the glasses, everything was fit. Everything changed.

I'm glad Let me bring that up because first of all, it's a great movie. It's the best. He's the man in that. But two, that's eyesight.

Yeah.

And eyesight's important, but eyesight is a symptom, and it's our ability to focus light clearly, our ability to see. I'm not anti-glasses. I wear contacts myself. But vision is so much more complex. What we're talking about is how the brain filters, organizes, stores, processes all the information coming in through the eyes, and then how the brain knows what to do with that information to drive meaning and then direct the appropriate action. From a vision perspective, vision is a direct reflection of brain function. Even hearing you talk about not even knowing why you're wearing these glasses and when you're wearing them, that's a problem. Yes, that probably sharpens things, but if we look at how your brain is then organizing that information, how your eyes are working together as a team, how all the eyes, brain, and body are integrated and using information coming in through the eyes for your benefit, that's really where the missing piece is for so many people.

Yeah, because I would prefer to wear those for the style and not for the need.

Do you feel like you want to take them off a lot of times?

Yeah. You see, I took them off. Now, I just wanted to make sure that I didn't I don't stumble upon anything when I was giving your intro, and I'm fine, but it does make it really sharp in the different setting and environment. But generally, I don't wear them that much.

There's 20 happy is where we should all be targeted rather than seeing the 20, 20 tiniest little letters because not everybody sees the same. We don't all have to see the same.

Well, and you brought up symptom. In what I do, it's always like, Well, let's address this beforehand and not treat, let's prevent.

Be proactive rather than really doing it.

Very proactive. Let's get into all of this. Then you've got the screen fit, you've got these different concepts that most people wouldn't know anything about. I mean, let's face facts. A lot of the things that I've learned over time is that things that seem obvious are not. Diet stuff, practical everyday things, people that ask me what's biohacking, and I'm like, man, it is not spending millions of dollars. It's get up, get outside, do these things, these basic things. So break down for me the things that we should all know and then the things that we don't and that you could understand like, Man, you wouldn't know this.

I gave a TEDx a week ago, and the title of it was Why Everything We Know About Vision is Wrong, which is literally this. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this, he heard you talking about vision, and we're thinking, Well, he's wearing glasses. Why is this even a problem? Most of eye care takes a complete reactive model. In Intervention of Eye disease, looking at structure. Here are glasses, lenses, contacts, whatever to get you to see tiny letters. But nobody's looking at the next steps there and what the brain does with that information. There's so much out there that's obvious in terms of, well, if you can't see stuff, you got to be able to see stuff. And driving, you got to be able to see a certain size letter to read a street sign. But what about depth perception and reaction time and peripheral awareness? And not just knowing where the car is, but being able to anticipate where it's going to be at high It leads from different directions. That's what we should be deciding, whether somebody is capable of driving or not, not whether they can see something tiny. I think a lot of the big things are, what's obvious is that everyone thinks vision just gets worse as we get older.

Yeah. I hate that.

I mean, that's like saying cognition has to drop when you get older. Yeah. Those are common. That happens, but that's not normal. Right. Glasses prescription is changing every year. They are changing because you've adapted to the lens you're in based off of the visual stress from your environment and not having the tools or foundation in place to support that. Then you're needing something stronger or different to maintain that same clarity. For an adult, for instance, if your glasses prescription for distance changes every year, the eye doctor There are warning signs that there's a functional vision problem there that's causing that. Very often, that's your focusing system, the inside muscles of the eyes. Like an old-school camera lens, we want them on autofocus. They're stuck on manual focus. You need help with lenses to They give you support there. As we age, in our 40s, most people realize their arms aren't long enough and they have to hold things far away. They need reading glasses. But that's like jumping into a wheelchair when you're spraying your knee. You stop using the system. You use it, you lose it. That happens for so much of our body and so much of health, but for vision as well.

We can prolong the need for reading glasses for anybody at any age, if it's caught early enough with the right exercises, with the right work, with the right motivation. Also, we can make it so we can do more with less for anybody at any age, based off of the setup that we're in.

When you were talking about the need to change lenses and stuff, my brain goes to that's like when you're taking medications and your body adapts, you need a little bit more, you need a little bit more. Before you know it, you need 20 ibuprofen for it to even work anymore because your body desensitizes to things, right?

Totally. I mean, you've done so much work in the metabolism space. You can have supplements, you can have medications, Patients to help that, but also you can train your body to be more metabolically flexible.

That's right.

Staying with vision. You can rely on higher powers, higher prescriptions, but also you can train your brain how to get your eyes to work together as a team.

That's what I'm looking for. That's what I want to get into., because when I first met you and you started getting into this, I'm like, huh? I mean, it makes sense the way that you're explaining it, but on the surface, an everyday person, you assume, well, my vision is just going bad. My hearing is just getting a little weaker. That's just the assumption. That's what everybody throws your way. That's why internally, I was eating up when you said about the common thought while you're getting older, it's just inevitable. I hate that. I hate that because you can stop it, you can prevent it. Let's talk about that in terms of vision.

Also the attention piece. We talked a lot about how ADD and ADHD often aren't that. They're often functional vision problems causing the exact same symptoms. I mean, so much of this, if you can't control your and their ability to focus, you can't control your mind and its ability to focus. As simple as that sounds, we are in a society where we're slapping labels on behaviors rather than looking at the root cause. To get back to your point, so much can be done to train the brain. We can develop better synergy between the inside and outside muscles of the eyes. We can develop better eye-hand coordination. We can develop better ability to take in an entire room. When you walk into a new environment, like a lecture hall or a mall or grocery store, there's all this sensory input coming at you. You've had a head injury, or if you have functional vision problems, it can feel like an overload. But we can train the brain to process central input and peripheral input at the same time. You can feel safe and feel like you're confident in space regardless of what's coming at you.

Wow. It's wild. You don't really think, once again, commonly thought, that you could train your eyes or train the muscles in your eye. That just resonate.

It's even more so, it's training the brain. It's using the eyes to rewire the brain to change how you're using vision by working on the eyes. Really? There's certain... I mean, we have protocols. We rely heavily on tech and low tech, but take an augmented reality setup or virtual reality setup. We can make it so that the world appears different and your eyes have to converge or diverge or adjust the brightness, the contrast of the layer, and then teach your brain how to control these systems with better self-regulation, better self-monitoring. We work with elite-level athletes and SWAT snipers and Navy Seals who already are at the top of their level. But small percentage points in certain areas can have a cumulative effect to lead to massive shifts.

Yeah. You've got people that come to you that aren't necessarily suffering, they're enhancing.

Absolutely. Most people I see have problems, but absolutely, we do a lot of it, sports vision enhancement. We do a lot of biohacking vision where Somebody says, You know what? I've gone this far without glasses or in this current setup, I want to be able to go even farther, go my whole life without needing that. There's work. You got to do the work. Just like to get in the good shape, you got to do the right work and keep it up. If you stop going to the gym, you're not going to be in the shape you are in. Exactly. But a couple of minutes a day can have a massive impact.

That's why I always say Michael Jordan didn't stop shooting shots, man. He didn't stay the best because he stopped. He got good. Yeah, it's a daily thing. I read every day. That's the only way to stay up on current information. But just think how rare that is, though.

Do you know how many people don't read anymore? They're all in audiobooks because it's so much easier to digest with their ears than their eyes.

Yeah, I can't do that. I can't do that. I try. The only thing I do is Bible in the year, but I'm still watching it and listening. The words are popping up on the screen so I can read it. I can't just listen. I need to see stuff visually, and then I absorb that way.

That's what it's supposed to be. Vision is our dominant sensory system. It should be guiding and leading. But honestly, in this screen-heavy world that we're all in, where screen time is a new pandemic, so many people are avoiding reading and avoiding using their eyes because there's just an overload that's hard to understand.

If you gave me personally the option 100 out of 100 times, I would take the hardcopy book and read it as opposed to anything else.

So much better for your visual system. So much better for the eye-brain connection.

I find it easier to absorb the information. I'm wondering, now that we're talking about that, I didn't have this plan, but is there a correlation of the ability to take in information, reading it on a screen that is negatively affecting you, or from, like I say, a hard copy or whatever. Is there a correlation there? Absolutely.

There's very different visual skills needed to read on a book versus on a screen. On the screen, there's the glare, the brightness, the contrast, but there's also more eye movements. They're more sporadic, they're less organized. You're not going methodically across the page in a linear fashion. Their your eyes are darting around that much more. Yeah. Your focusing system, your eye teaming systems are doing very different work on an artificial 2D device that's blasting high energy light at you for hours on end versus tactily holding a book. By holding the book, your brain gets proprioceptive feedback to know where this is. Yeah. It's easier for your eyes to know, okay, I need to point, align, and focus on these words that methodically go across the page. I would imagine if you tried reading for X amount of time on a book versus X amount of time on the screen, it's not even close to the fatigue and the productivity that is that much more enhanced with paper.

When I have to go through studies and they're all on the screen. I just find my... I either get lost. It's not because it's difficult. It's not because I can't comprehend it.

This is so tangible for most people. If you were to make a fist and squeeze your hands as tightly as you can, after a few seconds, your hand starts to hurt. But if you were to let go and back and take breaks or not squeeze your fist, you can hold tension for longer. When we're on the screen, our focusing muscles, which are behind our pupil, are locked up, and they're literally under tension over time. Unless you're trying to get super buff, tension over time is not what you want on your visualization. That's what causes headaches, eye strain, fatigue, dryness, irritation. I mean, all of these things that are the symptoms that are choices now that we can avoid if we know better so we can do better.

It's It's almost as though you're not just doing sight, vision, but it's like a correlation of brain training.

Absolutely. I mean, neuroplasticity we know exists for any brain at any age. We are tapping into new pathways. We're creating new pathways, but we're literally rewiring the software with the right protocols and the right type of work to allow for our brain to function differently. When you think about just the normal stress response, when the autonomic nervous system goes into fight or flight. From a vision perspective, our pupils widen and we get this tunnel vision effect. That's literally how we're operating on a screen. You're under stress on a screen, which changes your thinking, changes your attention, changes your visual function, and then your brain starts operating differently. That can impact so many aspects of life, even patients after a long work day, coming home and being with your family. You have a short fuse because you've literally been in fight or flight for most of the day. There's so many buckets that are so crucial, but even just happiness and mental health.

That's where I was going.

The amount of patients that we'll share that literally the work that we did with them saved their life because they were driving over a bridge and all of a sudden they were aware of what they weren't aware of and they got locked in even more centrally and they got into this panic attack and started not trusting what they were seeing. Or somebody who is planning meetings earlier and earlier in the day because afternoon or in the afternoon, they hit that afternoon slump and there's brain fog and there's fatigue and there's just loss of happiness with the work and what they're doing because literally their brain's operating differently than it was previously. I mean, that piece is huge We see a lot of people with anxiety, with ADD or ADHD, with even much more substantial mental health challenges. Notice a curtain has gotten lifted after their eyes start working well together and their brain starts listening to that information. I think that's one big piece. Sleep. I mean, sleep is the most important thing we can be doing for our bodies.

Not lying. Yeah.

People that are blasting their tablets and their phones before bedtime. It's throwing off circadian rhythms. It's throwing off melatonin secretion. It's also getting them into this hyper aroused state where it's really hard to shut off your mind many times throughout the day, especially when you're laying in bed at night.

Yeah. You know how many years I have been doing that? I always told myself, That's not why you sleep like shit. In reality, and I don't do it anymore, I'm like playing Mike Tyson punch out on regular Nintendo TV before I go to bed now. But you know what? I'm sleeping way better, and I believe it's through prayer and lack of- If you are on the screen, the bigger the screen, the farther away.

This gives everyone listening an excuse to go buy the biggest TV you can buy. Just put it out on the wall as far as you can away from you.

That's what I did. Seriously. It's actually made a significant difference. I can't believe how much of a difference. I used to sit, do all my fantasy sports at night, the stuff that I just don't have time to do during the day. But then it's just like, I'm not a big day scroller. That's when I was doing that, which one, clearly bad for your sleep and your eyes, but two, just not good for you in general. It's just not good things to even worry or care about. I stopped doing that. One, the obvious you brought up, but two, it doesn't convolute your mind with a bunch of BS That's too. There's a lot that goes into it, right?

But you are educated. You are educated, you are proactive, your health is important to you. Even with that, you have these struggles, right? I mean, the vast majority of people have no clue what we're even talking about. They don't even have a file on this stuff.

Yeah, it's tough, man. I mean, it's tough for everybody. That's why I like to humanize everything I do so people know. Just because I teach it or live it doesn't mean it's easy.

I'm not anti-tech. I'm very pro-tech, but it's tough, man. It's tough for everybody. That's why I like to humanize everything I do so people know. Just because I teach it or live, it doesn't mean it's easy. I'm not anti-tech. I'm very pro-tech, but it's tough. Screens are everywhere, and especially for kids who don't have the brain development and the vision development to support even this, we're creating massive problems for people.

Well, that's just it. They're brought up on it, so they don't know any different. For a lot of these kids, you can't even fault them because they've never held books. One of the things when I was doing online classes and everything, and your textbooks are all ebooks and stuff, I hate that. I despise it. I actually would buy extra the textbooks because in the tuition, it's like you get the ebooks. Well, I don't want the ebooks, so I'd actually go out of pocket and go buy the regular book, even if I barely used it.

I mean, there's studies that clearly show better retention with handwritten information and with flipping through pages and using tactile feedback as well as multi-sensory integration to learn, process, and then store versus just being spoon-fed or blasted information. That it's hard to have a meaningful experience with that.

Well, and that's part of writing stuff down. It's part of reading it and not just taking a voice note and listening to it or whatever. It's all about seeing it and training like you're talking about. Now I understand so much why you do what you do and the broader spectrum impact that it has. That's what I wanted to highlight here. When something that we're doing is changing lives and it's building health and it's enhancing quality of life and longevity, yeah, I want to listen.

I tell every patient we work with in office, if we are not completely changing your life, one of us is doing something wrong here. That's the potential this work has. That can be true with our online programs as well. But in office, it's customized and it's high level, and it's really intense work, but work that creates lasting changes that are yours to keep when you're done with it.

Well, let's get into that because I want to give a full, broad explanation of everything that one can to go through your program in person and online.

Let me first say, so vision performance training. It's like physical therapy for the eyes, but really for the brain through the eyes. Okay. With the intention of raising to somebody's awareness what their eyes are doing, how they're taking in space, how the brain is processing information so they can learn how to self-correct, self-monitor, and reroute what is not functioning the way it's supposed to be. We rely on tech, we rely on low tech, we rely on incorporating movement and balance and cognition and vestibular input. It's a really holistic approach because vision doesn't operate in isolation of these systems. But it's also allowing development to take place that maybe has been bypassed. No one is born with the ability to read, no one's born with the ability to read. No one's born with the ability to use their eyes to track, to converge, to focus, or even to see in 3D. It's all developed through our life experiences. It's either learned appropriately through the right sequencing of milestones or learned poorly, and that leads to these imbalances. Pretty much every functional Mental vision problem is either a maladaptation, a bad habit, or it's using your brain a different way that it's wired and then going down that rabbit hole of feeding the symptom.

Got it. Okay. It's a great break down. Very factual. I love it.

Cool.

Okay, so we've got this program, My Vision First.

Yeah, so My Vision First is the practice. We have real busy local practice, but we do these vision performance training boot camps or intensive programs. Where literally every week, we have people from all around the world flying in. It's 12 hours of work of active training with really thorough evaluations beginning and end of the week. That's the reboot. But then we put you on a really, really badass home program with a customized virtual reality platform where we give you a headset, you go in, you're wherever the game is, chopping fruit, popping balloons, but we're adjusting the ocular, so you're having to converge your eyes or diverge or adjusting the brightness or the contrast, the glow, whatever it may be. We then get your data and your answers, adjust it on the back end, you go back in next time you're playing a new game, but it's at a whole new higher level of demand. We're chipping away at the work that needs to be done from a virtual setup, along with also a three-dimensional setup where you're relying on cards and strings and other things where we're teaching you certain exercises and sequences throughout that to keep making things more involved and more integrated.

Then at the end of that time, many people, they We just need the week in office, the home program, and they're good to go. Then we have others with really complex cases like eye turns, lazy eyes, massive head injuries, strokes, where oftentimes they need more than that, but then we just have them come for multiple weeks.

Do you have success rate percentages on people that come through?

I do. This is going to sound aggressive, but it's 100% success. Really? The reason I say that is we're just very picky with who we work with. We do see people with guarded prognosis, but we together determine what like success. What are our goals? Why are we doing this? If somebody's saying, I'm in a minus 10 prescription, and I have terrible headaches, and I get motion sick all the time, and I'm tripping over my feet and not trusting what I see when I'm going up and downstairs, Out of that, we figure out what is attainable. With enough work, a lot of that's attainable, but the glasses prescription is probably not going to change. But everything else, like how you then function in life, that changes dramatically. Since switching to this intensive a call, we have flipped my profession upside down.

Really?

The amount of targets on us of, Oh, my God, you're saying that you can get people out of reading glasses? Five years ago, I would have said, That's impossible. Now, we're at 95% of our adults after the intensive, either have a weaker reading prescription, no reading prescription, or can do more with less. That's something that we never even pushed the envelope to see what was possible up until COVID when everything changed.

You have, like I see here, people come on the site, they take a quiz that you have on there, and then that determines to you if you could help them or what extent you can help them to, and you have maybe a consultation with them pre to figure out.

We have our operations really dialed in. Yeah, which is amazing. Sure. The quiz brings us to who are you talking to on our team? Okay. You start off with what we call a discovery call, but more like, what are you looking for? Where are the pain points? Where are the opportunities for improvement? Then depending on the path, every single patient we see, even local patients, we do a virtual consult first to make sure you're in the right place, there for the right reasons that we can help. Then the testing piece, that's the one piece that really has to be done in person just because it's so thorough and so dialed in, but we determine what's the right step. For many people, I just want to start the cross. I want to cross the start line. I want to get going on my journey to a vision improvement. Then others, it's like, I've had terrible migraines my whole life, and I can't leave my house without feeling like the world's closing in on me. For those people, it's a very different setup where, let's take baby steps, but let's get you to a place where you can live happily and unlock so much of what's been holding you back through this eye-brain connection.

Okay, so let's just make an example, create an example, use myself. Somebody like me, I don't know the number here, but I know it's one of the lightest numbers that you have here. They upped me one. I want to say they had like a... Oh, it starts as an S, maybe.

It takes things from being blurry to HD.

Yeah, and I don't want to say something in my- Stigmatism? Stigmatism, that's it. Somebody like me, would you be able to get me out of these?

Definitely, maybe. Okay. It depends.

But it's possible.

In many cases, yes. Okay. We would be able to do testing to know for sure. Yeah, of course. But if these are, I mean, rarely wearing these and having it be a mild prescription. Astigmatism, for instance, by definition means the eye shape more like a football than a basketball. But there are aspects to astigmatism that are not based off of structure. They're based off of function or that focusing muscle we talked about behind the pupil that is maybe saying, Oh, it's easier to focus this way, but not as easy to focus this way. Yeah. In those cases, oftentimes, astigmatism can decrease or even be eliminated. But if anything, we can make it so your prescription is not going to increase or that you don't need these as often. I mean, that's pretty much a guarantee just based off of this setup and what you've shared that using them.

Somebody that's had glasses for 30 years, they shouldn't go in with the expectation, I'm not going to have to have glasses.

I think this type of work is so much more than just not needing glasses. It's not using reading as a sleeping pill, getting rid of your motion sickness, being able to know where the ball is so you can play with your kids, being able to not bump into walls or knock things over because you're reaching for a glass, but the glass knocks over because you think it's in the wrong place. Or as crazy as it sounds, people who misplace their keys. That is a vision problem. That's looking for the keys here, here, and here, but not looking at them or them here. Or when you're talking to somebody, looking at your left eye, your right eye, your nose, but you can't see the whole face in one picture. To me, that's vision.

Let's talk then the kinds of different expectations that you see people have that come in. Because I'm sure there's a lot of broad expectations. I'm appealing to everybody out there listening. It's really not just one particular problem. There's a slew of different issues that you help with that you address that is inviting to so many people. Because I want to give the spectrum of the audience of if somebody's listening to this like, Oh, maybe I don't fit into that. Well, maybe you do, and you just don't realize it.

Totally. The low-hanging fruit is reading. Somebody who's losing their place with reading, skipping words, skipping lines, not remembering what they're reading. They're thinking about what's for dinner rather than what they're reading, having to go back and reread. Somebody who's been mislabeled or labeled with dyslexia. Dyslexia often is not dyslexia. It's a hidden functional vision problem impacting the ability to read. If you look up dyslexia in the dictionary, it says difficulty reading words. I had somebody in two weeks ago who is an adult woman. She has two kids. She's homeschooled them. She never learned how to read and has identified as dyslexic her entire life. That's who she is. It defines her. There's a lot of emotions tied to that. By the end of the week, she was reading.

Really?

And day one, we measure her eye movements with an eye tracker on a screen and on a book, measuring exactly what her eyes are. Her eyes are dancing all over the place. You can't read if you can't organize your eyes to be able to decode and process appropriately. So I would say I've never met somebody where we couldn't improve their reading ability. That's out of tens of thousands of patients. I think the one piece that this can really help, this type of work can help for everybody is reading.

I could be way out in the field here, but I don't think I am based upon what you say. I'm careful because I don't like to ever categorize everyone because I think that's not fair. It's just not. But I think that a lot of times diagnosis, and I'll compare it to putting everybody on a statin, for example, because their cholesterol is X increased on what your perceived level it's supposed to be, which... Anyway, I'll relate it to that by me saying with ADD or stress-related issues. I feel like that they're so quick to throw you on 20 different pills that you got to stay on forever, that turn you into a zombie or a robot, never actually fix anything, and may fix one thing but give you 20 other problems. Like a stat. Do you feel that there's a high-end misdiagnosis of ADD? It's just a simple thing to slap on everybody, almost like a built-in excuse is what I would call it. Do you feel like what you do with brain exercise guys, vision aid, do you think there's a correlation there with ADD?

This is not a do I think. I deeply know. There's not a blood test that says you have ADD or ADHD.

Show me.

It's based off of symptoms and Research just came out that shows 15 of the 18 symptoms associated with ADHD have a visual component that's treatable.

Really?

The amount of kids we see who they're doing poorly in school, they've got ants in their pants in the classroom, they're not reading, they're not learning, and they're on like, One med didn't work, must have been the wrong one. Let's try another one. Let's add, let's increase the dose. Yet we're not even lifting up the hood to see what's causing that dysfunction. Now, there are some people who do have ADD or the HD, but even still, our ability to focus our mind is so intimately related to our ability to focus our eyes. If you cannot control your eyes, you cannot control your mind. From that standpoint, visual attention is so important for everything in life. It's not a coincidence that the prevalence of ADD and the HD is drastically increasing. Also, so too is the visual stress from life drastically increasing. Screen time is being introduced at early and early ages for kids. Now, taking over all aspects of life. As humans, our visual system is intended to guide movement and to focus in the distance far away, a natural light scanning the horizon for the sabre-tooth tiger coming at you. Now we're taking those same skills and blasting them up close for hours on end.

Our visual system that evolved, that was created for back in the caveman days, is now clashing against these modern day demands that we're all under. At a minimum, those are complete diagnosis until you've ruled out functional vision problems that cause the exact same shit.

How many people would you say... I feel like I'm an attorney asking questions here, too. How many people would you say, go to a doctor, go in and say, I'm all over the place, I can't focus, and have a doctor bring up anything that you're saying.

I mean, it's almost nobody. There's so few of us who do this. My specialty is We're not taught any of this in school. It's extra training, extra residency, extra fellowship. But then even with that, even if you're board-certified in this space, diagnostically, you know exactly whether vision is interfering or whether it's where it needs to be. But then how do you close the gap in the treatment that's needed? This isn't like PT for a sprained MCL where you're getting a dozen sessions for Grade 1, two dozen for grade two, and anyone you go to in town, it's the same work. There's not consistency yet on what vision training looks like. This is something at a minimum, everyone listening needs to just know we need to be putting our vision first and at least looking into vision as having a relationship with all of these other challenges.

My goal when I do this is to enlighten people so that they understand when they go do something, there's always way more to it than what you're led to believe or told. The goal here that I have that I feel I was put here to do is it's not promote Dylan. It's promote everybody that I know that can give this message to people and help them to see everything from a broader perspective and to not just accept things.

To question what the specialists or the doctors are telling them. Doctors are so myopic in terms of the specific symptom they're chasing or what they know, but not looking at the whole person.

That's why people like you are so important that I love to give as much spotlight or talk to as I can, because the more that I can put it out there to let people see, then they can understand what they're missing and why whenever they're told there's not an answer, there is.

I so love that and so appreciate that because I look at my purpose as changing how the world is looking at vision. To avoid unnecessary struggling because of these hidden functional vision problems. When you know what to look for, they're not hidden. They're right in front of your face.

You say that, and it's like, that's what you're doing in two ways, metaphorically and actually physically. I think letting people see that and understand it is so important to know that there are people like you exist because you get into a lot of these situations and you feel hopeless.

We should be realizing we all have so much potential in so many areas. What's happened to us, as hopefully, can make us stronger. We can learn and grow from it, but then there's so much more possible when we're listening to our intuition and finding doctors who are partners, not just somebody who's telling you what to do and you have to listen to them, to be making decisions together with all of that.

I don't even fault a lot of them because it's what they're taught now. Totally. It's up to every single person to look into everything and figure it out and find it. That's why there's so many different people to listen to and to follow. That's why it's important that we work together and get this information out there so people know that- So grateful for that. If I wasn't in this space, I'm still a researcher and I would look, but somebody like you, I wouldn't know that there was a practice or even that that was a thing. When you break it down, it makes so much sense, and it correlates with so many different things, and I'm like, Wow. I think what you're doing is beyond incredible, actually, because it seems like an impossibility. How possible is this for people? What does it take? What do they have to do? How can we make this a reality that people can go and do it? Because I want everybody to know about it.

I'm very realistic that most people listening to this are not going to be able to fly to Maryland and spend a week with us because it's a heavy lift. It's it, right? That's where that Screen fit program comes in. I created that during COVID when I saw firsthand what screens were doing to my young kids at the time, realizing, Oh, my God, this is a problem for them, but also for mankind. If you don't get ahead of this, we are doomed. Screen fit is literally the way to just get started. It's like doing body weight work at home instead of going to the gym. You're going to get better shape, better results, faster if you're at a gym with a trainer, with all the equipment. But not everybody has a gym across the street. Exactly. So ScreenFit is there's two different courses. Each course has 30 lessons. Each lesson is 10 to 15 minutes to do. It's one lesson a day. If you did it five days a week, that'll be six weeks. You get it and use it as long as you like. There's no expiration date on there. Really? You can buy it once for your family, and the whole family can go through it.

But it's all meant to be vision exercises that don't require equipment, that you're watching a video of what to do, but then you're putting the screen down. It's not more screen time to treat screen time. Then you're doing these exercises, whether at a stop light, in the bathroom, at the dinner table, when you wake up, whatever it is. We've had thousands of people go through it with 100% of people who've finished the program seeing a reduction in symptoms, 100%. Now, if you don't finish it, that's not going to be you. But we've had as young as five as old as 89. It's really designed to teach the visual skills needed for reading or screen engagement for driving, for life at a level that can be a one-size-fits-all approach for everybody. More complicated stuff needs more than that, but it is something that has blown my mind in terms of how successful it's been for people just eliminating unnecessary struggling.

When you only get into it what you put. You're going to get out of it what you put into it.

I always say that the people who say like, exercise doesn't or says vision exercises don't work, those are the same people saying exercise doesn't work. You got to do it. You got to know what to do.

Call me crazy, but you got to put the effort in. If somebody comes in person, do they also get this opportunity to do the screen fit online?

That comes with you. We say it's like a six-month program with us when you in person. It's the week in office, three months of dialed in home exercises with regular calls with our team, and then we put you in a screen fit, which can extend at least another three months, but longer. But we put everybody in then. It's a great maintenance program. We have a lot of pro athletes who use certain exercises from that program as their pregame ritual. We have others who make this just part of the school day for their kids. It's simple stuff. It's eye pushups, it's eye stretches, it's going on walks, but actually intentionally opening up your periphery while you're on a walk. You cannot just see the mailbox here and the house here, but you can see them both simultaneously. You can learn how to look soft and open up your side vision.

Somebody wants to come do the whole damn thing, come to Maryland, to you. It's a five-day program? Five-day program. What's the expectation on that daily and what are they?

Evaluation is Monday morning, about two-hour evaluation. Then a follow-up evaluation on Friday, going over all the same test with a ton of objective data where we can actually show all the wins. Then 12 hours of work during the week. It's usually- Three hours a day, something like that. About three hours a day. That's where the reboot is. That's where the heavy lifting is. But then you're continuing that beyond, and we're holding you accountable, and we're making sure that you're doing the work. We're even getting your data from the VR platform to know, Dylan, you said you were doing this every day. You haven't been in since three weeks ago. What are we doing here? It's a little bit of handholding there as well and accountability, which is important.

Do you do the teaching yourself or is it somebody else?

I'm blessed with an incredible team. We have a bunch of doctors, a bunch of therapists. I used to do it all myself and then realized, man-Not possible. Not even not possible. It's better when we have everybody involved with all the care. We put a lot into the intensives. High touch points, VIP treatment, but also you're working with a doctor one-on-one the entire time, and it's completely customized. So your first session we plan based off of the testing, and then how hard we push you, what we do, the paths we take, The lunges we're making into new networks, that's based off of your responses, is adjusted in real-time.

So at the end of the week, you're going to get an evaluation, you're going to know.

I mean, yes, you'll know earlier in the week. Depending on the case, we can predict, All right, by Wednesday, here's what you're going to notice. By Friday, here's what you're going to notice. But it's not uncommon for people to not only be improving outer vision, but then also really tapping into inner vision. We've partnered with an amazing energetics coach. We've partnered with an amazing confidence coach, health coach, where for certain people, we're unpacking it all together because vision health is brain health, and brain health is body health, and body health is influencing everything. Somebody with terrible systemic inflammation that they know or don't know about, or somebody with really bad brain fog. We're incorporating supplements and nutrition protocols and lifestyle modifications Because without addressing those, you're leaving so much healing still on the table.

I love that, man. You're really digging in and you're addressing everything. Absolutely. That's one of those things I always tell people, and I'll relate it to what I do. It's like you can come in and I can put you on every diet plan and supplement in the world. But if we're not hormonally optimized and mentally stable, there's a lot of things that I have to look at first to ensure that you're going to get what you need because otherwise, you're just spinning your wheels.

I'm sure you see so many clients who are like, Give me all the supplements and all the red light panels. But you realize, okay, you're eating trash, you're not sleeping, and you have stress everywhere in your life. You can't get the outcomes you deserve without hitting those, too.

If I had a penny for everybody that said, How do I lose weight? Or, How do I do this? And once that quick answer, I would never have to work again for 20 lifetimes.

So the losing weight is the eyesight improving?

Yes.

You do all the stuff to find health, and then your weight's going to drop. Yes. You do all the stuff to optimize the eye-brain connection, then your eyesight's going to improve if we have it all lined up the way that it's supposed to be.

Every problem has a solution, but it takes an effort. It takes work. It doesn't solve itself. It doesn't correct itself. There's no such thing as a genie in the bottle or a magic wand that I can wave that's going to fix it. I always tell people, I'll give you all the tools, I'll give you all the understanding, I will give it all to you, but it's ultimately up to you.

People want the quick fix. There for sure are big wins and incremental changes day to day that we can identify with vision, you can identify with just overall health. As As long as that can be the carrot that you put in front of yourself to dangle, to say, Okay, this is working. I'm staying motivated. When you start seeing results, it's pretty hard not to just be even more all in to what you're doing.

Small daily habits and fixes and corrections, they accumulate into heavy big wins. You're going to have big days, you're going to have shit days, you're going to have common days. But if you just try to figure out one thing every day that positively changes, dude, you go back and look like two months back and go, holy shit. It's like you look at yourself in the mirror every day, you can't really see. But if you take a couple of pictures and you look and you're like, whoa. I was just shopping for new wheels on my truck and looking at it and I'm like, I don't know if that looks really cool. Then we did a side-by-side picture. I'm like, Let's do it. But that's the The reality of things is when you look at things every single day and you don't look at the broad perspective of things, you miss it and you don't see it. I think the old adage, it's a marathon, not a sprint. It goes with everything in life.

Absolutely. From my perspective, screens, they're not going anywhere. No. We can absolutely develop a foundation to thrive in this digital world, but for most people, you need outside work to make it happen. Right.

It's 100%. It's only going to get more prevalently used and depended and relied upon.

Let's thrive in that world rather than just figure out how to manage it.

It goes back to the, do we have to just accept that? Or do we say, This is what it is. This is what we got to work with, so let's fix it and adapt to it. So awesome. All right, so I have a coupon that you've graced my audience with that they want to take advantage of this.

A huge, huge-I was going to say, isn't it pretty significant? Right now, if you look at ScreenFit on screenfit. Com, it's at 497. Because you're the man, and several times talking, I've just Felt so connected to you, we're going to drop at $200. Really? It's 297 for anybody if they use your code.

Code is Dylan. I would recommend taking my man up on that offer because even at the price point that he's got it at, you're getting way more than you would ever dream of getting by going to the optometrist or doctor to put you in a pair of these where you got... I mean, this pair alone, I want to say it was five or $600. Now, granted, you don't have to buy an Armani pair, but I'm for the sell.

Yeah, we're good, though.

I mean, but you go in there, you buy a couple of pairs. In case something happens, you're over 1,200 in.

One of the coolest things is people, we ask everybody for just sharing their experience after going through screen fit. The amount of people who say, Oh, my God, I haven't bought a new a pair of glasses in X amount of years. Do you know how much that saved me? That alone is pretty cool.

Like I said, I would love to just go buy some frames that are dope like this that look- Which is plain loathings. Plane glasses with nothing in them. That would be my ideal thing. Save me a lot of money.

Or not need to change or buff that up because you're functioning well through that set up.

That's just it. I'm joking here a little bit, but in reality, I don't like wearing those, man. I don't like having to put those on to sharpen what I'm seeing. I'm I'm working on spreadsheets a lot because I'm doing a lot of things for different companies I work with, and I do a lot of numbers, and I'm looking, and I'm like, Man, I'm going to screw this up because I can't see the numbers. I'm looking off screen, and it sucks. I don't want to do that.

Even missing numbers. That can be a massive problem. Yes. Then for you, when we increase accuracy, we're going to slow down the eye movements, but then hit the gas with speed, and then your brain and your eyes start functioning at the same speed. Then it's like you can scan across, take in more space with each eye movement, but not have to go backtrack and not have to think, Oh, my God, I need to get my mind focused because it's so taxing just to use your eyes.

Well, I'll leave it with this. With everybody is once I do this, we'll go back through it, and the conversation is going to be about what I went through and what I did.

Let's film this at that point. Round two.

We'll do it, and we'll see Just what I went through, how it changed, and then people can get an even more in-depth thing of what to expect and get an idea of it. But I would urge you, after listening to this, seeing the importance, getting that huge of a discount, take advantage of it what you can. I would urge that. My brother, tell everybody where to follow you. I'm going to link everything. My code will do all of that, but just so listeners that are listening to can- Appreciate it, man.

Myvisionfirst. Com, that's our website. Everything's housed under that. Then Instagram, Dr. Bryce Applebaum, but we spell Applebaum, E-L, not L-E, because my ancestors wanted to make things hard for us. It's on there. You'll find it quickly. It didn't sound as nice as Applebaum, but this has been such a pleasure. Your passion and your desire to help people just came through the first second I met you. I appreciate it, man. On steroids here today. I just really appreciate what you're putting out there for the world.

Dude, anytime. I'm just glad we got to talk in person and do this live. I already knew it was going to be awesome, but superseded expectations. Thanks for taking the time because I know it's not easy and going here and there and having to go back and speak and do everything. So I appreciate it, brother.

Really. My pleasure. Great to meet you and thank you for the opportunity. You got it.

All right, everybody. Stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Jameli and Dr. Bryce Applebaum signing off.