Kia ora e hoa,

I'm going to be honest. I was scared to bring this topic up. But I need your help.

To give you context, let me introduce you to Jack Steiner. Formerly, he was a banker, but I think now he resides in Vietnam married to his online business, Endmyopia. Endmyopia offers high ticket coaching courses to improve your eyesight through natural means.

He has his YouTube channel and blog at the top of his marketing funnel. His tagline is that he went from -5.00 to 20/20 without contacts, glasses, laser correction, or perhaps a sense of mind.

His content centres around generating mistrust towards optometrists, latching onto the fear of large corporations making huge profits, which is very accurate in the world of corporate optometry. He truly taps into individuals' pain points — wearing glasses, having short-sightedness, and seeing greedy sales-like optometrists.

Once you have been filtered through, at the bottom of the funnel is his series of online courses, BackTo20/20. His sales pages are so well crafted even Russell Brunson would be proud. His courses range from a carefully chosen value of 12 monthly payments of $99 all the way up to $4,299 for personal coaching. US dollars too.

He has genuinely hacked the online business, work from anywhere, high hourly rate, 4-hour workweek, entrepreneur lifestyle. I'm jealous.

Why am I scared of Jack Steiner?

I want to speak up in a future YouTube video. But his strongly devoted audience could destroy me. This man is a lot older, has more money, and has a larger team than me. With a click of his fingers, he would end me.

I want to speak up. Not in the sense of providing a detailed thesis scrutinising what Steiner is teaching. Doctor Eye Health has already done this — in a civil way.

But I want to speak up against the underlying issue Jack Steiner and other similar notions, flat Earth theory, anti-vaccination, insert 'woke' online group here, face. And that is trust or a profound lack of trust.

Corporate optometry isn't clean either. Glasses and eye exams are highly customised products and experiences, but they have been commoditised. Essentially, a commodity is a product or service that you can get cheaper elsewhere.

To combat commoditisation, corporates must focus on marketing, sales, and branding.

This isn't necessarily bad because all they are trying to do is highlight the value in their service or product, in this case, eye exams and glasses.

But it backfires when optometry and staff are incentivised to sell in the wrong way, which is often the case. As a result, staff turn from experts on eyewear and eyecare into poor quality salespeople.

People hate being sold to, but people love to buy.

Conversation rates, average order values, and add ons become the primary focus, which detracts from the actual value of optometry which is the knowledge on eye health, optics and trust.

When you are being sold too, mistrust festers.

That's addressing the problem with the corporatisation of optometry, but is what about Mr Jack Steiner?

He holds opinions, but they are dangerous. His material further degrades optometry as a profession. He encourages his audience to skip their optometry appointments. In this material, he does well to protect himself from legal action, stating his work is (misinterpreted) "science" and not "medical" advice.

But not only does he and his audience fail to see, they also fail to see that optometrists have extensive knowledge of eye health.

I recently shared a LinkedIn post that got over 50,000 views that shows all the possible things that can go wrong with the eye.

Routine exams are essential to pick up on pernicious eye problems. Glaucoma — the "silent thief of sight" — is only one example. Most forms of glaucoma are symptomless and result in permanent loss of vision. Unfortunately, the only way to detect this is through regular eye exams, which your local hospital or ophthalmologist don't have the capacity to provide.

But I'm afraid to speak.

My fear is the damage caused to the YouTube channel. The dislikes by thousands of Steiner supporters.

Arjuna faced the same problem when he didn't want to fight his cousins. He tried to run away from responsibility. What did Krishna say to him in a nutshell? Life is duty. My fear is the material loss of my YouTube channel. But Optometry is being misrepresented and people are put in harm's way. The duty is to send the message, to fight. And so I shall. What do you think?

Stay focused and talk soon.

Ngā mihi nui,

Shivan

PS: I turn 29 today!

Discoveries

1. Article Six healthcare problems I care about Chris Lovejoy provides us with a paradigm shift. Solve problems and not find solutions. It’s interesting what Chris brings up in healthcare and data protection. It seems GDPR does protect us against a lot of data misuse. But it’s nice we have clinicians also thinking about our health data.

2. Book The Vegetarian I’ve only started reading Han King’s excellent book. Recommended to me by a friend, its premise is about breaking the shackles of the conventional life script, which is very apt for the stage of my life that I’m currently in.

3. Book Invisible Women Another recommendation by a friend. This is an excellent book that I’ve only started reading. In a data drive world, Caroline Criado Pérez shows how misrepresented women are the numbers, leading the decisions that discriminate poorly against women.

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