The read-aloud kit sits up top — an opening you can read as written, eight questions across three acts, and one honest line for the supplement question. The depth is underneath, for when you want it. Every claim carries a source; where something can't be stood up, it says so and asks you. An earlier pass at the same guest — run one — is kept in the room; the distance between the two runs is the engine, learning.
A rare thing: an optometrist who went back and studied medicine in his thirties, a visual neuroscientist with a first-author paper in Nature Medicine, and today the founder of My Performance Doctor — a membership preventative-medicine practice for high performers. One continuous, verifiable research identity: thirty-nine papers on PubMed, and the man who built Deakin's optometry program from nothing.
Underneath the CV sits the spine of the whole conversation. Crohn's at eighteen, two bowel resections, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at thirty-five, a hip replaced at thirty-nine, a coronary artery near-blocked at forty — then, by his own account, the healthiest fifteen years of his life, and a national masters cycling title at fifty. He has been the patient far more than most doctors ever will be, and he tells that story publicly.
Reactive medicine is the problem; prevention is the work. And here is the part worth savouring: his own essay describes a blocked artery as a slow, silent "chronic inflammatory repair process" — almost a paraphrase of your own line, that chronic inflammation is the common denominator, the body attacking itself. He is a sceptical clinician, not a hype merchant: in the last ninety days he publicly walked back his own enthusiasm for biological-age "clocks," calling them "far from settled." And like you, he discloses his commercial interests unprompted.
Same faith, opposite instruments. His prevention is biomarker panels, daily dashboards and a paid membership for busy executives; yours is simple, sustainable and universal — stress and lifestyle first, available to anyone. He is statins-first-line and apoB-forward, evidence-anchored and unbothered by wellness-world orthodoxy — your scepticism of pharma-first medicine meets a man who read the same literature and landed elsewhere. And he sells from inside the tent, with disclosure as the ethic, while you gave your membership away and watched nobody value it.
Archive bridge — quote-level, transcript is public. You once opened the Dr James Muecke episode (ophthalmic surgeon, 2020 Australian of the Year) by distinguishing ophthalmology from optometry, and said "so much of this is preventable." That is the door: same organ, same prevention thesis, a different seat at the table. Runner-up bridge: Dr Peter Brukner, the sports-medicine physician who reversed his own pre-diabetes and became a founder.
Every prior interviewer treats his optometry as biography, never as content. The eye is the one place a clinician looks straight at living blood vessels and nerves. His rarest credential is completely unmined.
Two decades in and out of hospital before he pivoted hard into prevention. Handle warmly — it is a doorway, not an ambush.
He co-founded his supplement venture with a fellow cancer survivor he'd medically mentored. Mentor-and-mentee-turned-partners is fresh ground no host has walked.
Written in your register, against your real episode openings. Read it verbatim, or bend it — it's yours.
We live in a world that waits. We wait for the crisis… the diagnosis… the moment the body finally raises its voice loud enough that we can't ignore it. But what if the signals were there the whole time… quiet, early, easy to miss? For me this has always been a question of balance — identify and minimise the stressors, build resilience — long before the crisis ever arrives. My guest today is a rare thing. An optometrist who became a physician. A visual neuroscientist who published in Nature Medicine. And a man who spent two decades in and out of hospital — Crohn's at eighteen, lymphoma at thirty-five — before he built the healthiest fifteen years of his life. Spoiler alert… the most interesting thing about him may not be the eyes, or the medicine… but what his own broken body taught him that no textbook ever could. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Professor Harrison Weisinger. Welcome to the show, Harry.
A quick note, for transparency… Harry co-founds and holds an interest in a supplement company, KURK, and in the platform his own practice uses to point patients toward products — he discloses that openly himself, and I think it's only fair you know it too.
The read-aloud kit ends here. What follows is the working dossier.