Well, we're going to talk about stress, reducing stress and anxiety with great sleep. We're going to kick things off. Hello, everybody. We are live. I am James Swannick, the founder of Swannick. And today we are talking about optimized sleep. We're talking about how to get a great night's sleep, how to reduce stress, how to reduce anxiety. We're joined today by Dr. Kirk Parsley, also known as Doc Parsley. He's the founder and creator of a wonderful product named Sleep Remedy, which is an all-natural sleep supplement of choice for Navy SEALs, pro-athletes and city-level executives. Doc Parsley is a former Navy SEAL. And Doc's passion is to help his patients and clients achieve the highest quality of life possible and achieve all of their health performance and longevity goals. Doc Parsley and I have met on several occasions now in Austin, Texas, and I interviewed him on my show I think a few years ago. Maybe I think I was on your show also a few years ago. Doc Parsley, welcome. Great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. It's a pleasure to catch up with you. I've got a few more new glasses there, I see. Yeah, I'm wearing the daytime swanis, which don't have the as-orange lenses, the nighttime swanis. So the daytime swanis I use obviously in daytime, so it filters out the blue light and gives me energy and clarity and focus. And then at nighttime, I put on the orange glasses, so I'm blocking out that blue light that's responsible for messing with our melatonin production and therefore messing with our sleep. I know I don't need to explain all that to you. You're somewhat of a sleep expert, right? I hope so at this point. I mean, that's the rumor. I keep hearing that. Yeah, I guess after lecturing on it for about 11 or 12 years, I probably fall into that expert category in somebody, in some people's mind at least, legend in my own mind. If you're just joining us and you're watching us live on Facebook or YouTube, go ahead and type in a question for Kirk Parsley who would be happy to answer your questions. Hello, Elizabeth Starr. Elizabeth Starr says, love the swanic glasses. Thank you so much. We've got Ameth here who says lauda type diabetes. Let me just try and can't quite see that question there. We'll get to that as another question comes in. But if you do have a question, go ahead and post your sleep-related question, your navy seal-related question, your stress and anxiety-related question in the comments, and we will we will get to that. So how should I refer to you? Should I refer to you as Kirk, Doc? I'm happy. I'm happy with Kirk. That's the name my mama gave me. All right, Kirk. Well, Kirk, tell us a little bit about your story as an undersea medical officer at the Naval Sperter Warfare Group and how you then got into this life of optimized sleep and health and vitality. Just share a little bit of your story first and then we'll dig into a few practical tips that people can implement around sleep. Yeah. Well, I mean, it really started with me being a seal first. So I actually dropped out of high school and joined the navy. I wanted to go be a seal. I heard it was the toughest training in the world and I wanted to see if I could do it. That's about how much I knew about the seal teams at the time. And I was fortunate enough to make it through training, then went on to spend six years and the seal teams got out, went to college, and then I was commissioned as an officer in the navy when I started medical school, went to the military's medical school. And the way that navy works, they'll pay for all sorts of stuff, but you pay them back with time. So I got to, I had the benefit of being able to support my family when I went to medical school without my wife having to work. I was already married with kids and so they paid me to go to medical school, but then I had to give them eight years as a doctor, which of course they still paid me. So it's a great deal. And I figured I would get back to the seal teams and I did. And the seal teams are a lot like professional athletes or first responders even. The worst thing you can do is put them on the bench, take them out of their job. So they don't really trust anyone who has that capability. And of course doctors have that capability. They can say, oh, you're not medically qualified to do this. And so you have to sit out until we can qualify. So there really has been to share any real struggles.  And I pretty quickly realized that nothing I'd learned in medical school was going to help me. Because what I learned in medical school was how to recognize these diagnosed and treat disease. And no, no, these guys had any diseases. They just weren't performing to their metrics, which, you know, we're far outside of the normal range of what most people would consider acceptable performance ranges. I mean, these are the most performant men in the world. And so they have really high expectations of themselves and they couldn't figure out like why were they in a decline? Why was their memory declining? Why was their attention declining? Why was their mood becoming labile? Why were they having a harder time dealing with their stresses at home with their families? Why were they putting on body fat and losing muscle? Why were they getting weaker and slower?  It's all over from here. And, you know, there were, I just, I didn't really know the answer, obviously, like I said, I wasn't well prepared for that. So I just started testing everything I could possibly test. And I found that they essentially had metabolic syndrome, you know, right on the cusp of that they their labs looked like what you would expect from a, you know, 65 year old overweight prediabetic man and not a young ripped like the guy sitting in front of me is like muscular and ripped and, you know, strong and robust and capable. But they're all our anabolic hormones are really low, all the catabolic hormones are really high, their inflammatory markers are really high, their oxidation was really high, thyroid function was down cortisol was either through the roof or not or unmeasurable. And so I just, I just started trying to figure out like I just started calling experts and alternative and non traditional functional integrative medicine, whatever you want to call it, I'd read books, I'd call these experts and say, hey, I'm the doctor for the West Coast Seals, can I consult with you? Can I train with you? And they, and they were, they were all to a man, they were all like more than willing to, to train me to do what they do. So I got to learn really quick about really performance performance based medicine. And kind of the first thing that stuck out to me the most was that nearly every guy who came and complained to me was using Ambien. And so I thought, well, maybe that's, that's the problem, right? It's, it's this Ambien. Then I dig a little deeper and I found out, well, actually 85% of the entire seal command was on Ambien. I was like, well, that doesn't, like, and I'm a medical doctor. I don't know. I'm like, you know, I know what Ambien does. Like I know that, I know what the drug is called and it binds gabar receptors and like, how it ostensibly works, but I don't know anything about sleep. And I don't know if Ambien changes the kind of sleep that you get. And so I started digging in that, learning about all that.  And every single lab finding that I'm finding could be explained by inadequate sleep. I wasn't naive enough to think that it would solve everything. But I thought it would be a big piece of the puzzle.  But that's not the right thing to do.  So it wasn't the right thing to do. So I just, I learned a lot about sleep. I got a lot of these guys to try getting off of Ambien. That's where the sleep supplement came from is we just tried to come up with a concoction that would help them sleep while getting off of Ambien. Because a lot of them, almost all of them were dependent upon Ambien actually. And that led to, you know, me sharing the stage with guys like Rob Wolff and Chris Cressor and Sisson and Wellborn and like all those people who were in that health optimization, health and performance field and, you know, led me into private consulting and lecturing and working with sports teams and, you know, companies, you know, corporate America, all that stuff. And so that's how I got here. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm just going to go to a viewer question here. We have live from Ameth Gonzalez Orocha. Is there a link between sleep wakefulness, cycle disturbances and the development of autoimmune diseases, including diabetes? Yeah. I mean, I would be hard pressed to point to a specific piece of literature, but, you know, for let's say the, you know, the mechanism of action of that would be pretty clear. So one of the, I'm going to feed right into what we're going to talk about today. One of the major functions of sleep, well, let me say it this way, the major function of sleep, the reason we sleep, the reason we're going to sleep tonight is because our brain and body need to repair from today and get ready for tomorrow. And where our brain is going to use today as the most likely predictor of what tomorrow is going to be like. And that's how, and it's going to prepare us to do today, again, tomorrow. And one of the things, and, you know, there's a, there's myriad of things that are going on, anabolic processes, you know, flushing out toxins, you know, rebuilding, repairing things and heightened immune function or all of that stuff. And then, but one, like one of the, one of the sort of hallmarks of the fact that you're getting adequate sleep is that you don't need an alarm clock to wake up. So what wakes you up? If you're in a completely dark and quiet room and it's cold, why, why do you wake up? Well, you wake up because of stress hormones, right? Cortisol, like cortisol gets a bad name. It gets a bad rep that it's like this nebulous thing that's going, or not nebulous is what's the word I'm looking for, disastrous hormone that's going and wrecking our bodies. Well, cortisol is what keeps us alert and proportion to our environment. So if you're in a calm environment and you've just woken up and you're laying around on your couch and you're reading a book, you don't need a lot of cortisol. If you're in a fist fight or a car crash or, you know, something like that, you need a lot of cortisol and we call that fight or flight, right? You get in fight or flight. Well, one of the hallmarks of fight or flight, you know, there's a lot of things that go on and we could talk about it if you want to. There's, you know, dozens of things that change about our physiology to make sort of our body or anything. You can think of fight or flight as our immune system for what's outside of our body. It's protecting us from an external threat. It's going to make us superhuman to deal with that threat. You know, it's going to make us as fast and strong and enduring and, you know, everything that we can possibly be. But it's going to use, it's going to do that at the expense of using our own body as a fuel source and cutting off all the symptoms that aren't important, things like reproduction and digestion and immune function. So the opposite of fight or flight is deep sleep, cortisol-wise. So if you look at just stress hormones, maximum is fight or flight, slow wave sleep cycles stages three and four, theta, delta, whatever you want to call them, the deep sleep, that is the exact opposite of fight or flight. That's we have the lowest amount of cortisol and stress hormones. You also have the highest immune function during that. So if you are losing that component of sleep, then you are losing immune function, right?  Well, if you need, you know, the contract through millions of years of evolution is this body requires eight hours of sleep. So what happens if you only sleep six hours? Well, tomorrow still comes. How do you get through that? You secrete more cortisol, right?  Cortisol causes us to release our stored glycogen. So tomorrow still comes, but we use basically a catabolic pathway. We were actually breaking our body down and we're becoming weaker and our immune system is actually becoming weaker as well. And then when you're wreaking havoc with the immune system itself, you're just more likely because you're getting inappropriate immune responses because you're blunting immune system functioning during part of the day, you're not getting enough during the night. And, you know, really, autoimmunity is really just a confused immune system, right? It's just an immune system that's not quite sure what it's doing and what it should be attacking and what it should be nurturing. So I would say that that mechanism would make perfect sense to me, but I can't point you towards a book like that. That would be multiple readings to get to what I just said. Got it. We're talking to Dr. Kirk Parsley, also known as Doc Parsley, who is the founder and creator of Sleep Remedy. He's one of the, one of our long-term swanic friends and partners, and Sleep Remedy is an all-natural sleep supplement. I want to make sure I emphasize all natural sleep supplement as opposed to a prescription sleep pill such as Ambien or Xanax or something like that. I've got a question here from Bianca, or it's more of a statement, but maybe we could talk to this.  I'm lucky to get three hours of sleep in a day. Kirk, what are your thoughts on what may be happening to Bianca's body and her mind and her immune system as a result of being lucky to get three hours of sleep a day and being a night nurse? And so I would imagine her internal body clock, her circadian rhythm is probably out of whack also. Right. So, I mean, I think the most approachable metaphor that I usually use with this, like what I said a few minutes ago, through millions of years of evolution, we've evolved to need eight hours of sleep. You just can't get around that. It would be like saying, due to my body mass, my age, my activity level, I need 2,000 calories a day, but I only eat 700. Can I still be strong and healthy and muscular? And no, you can't. You're going to emaciate.  The same is true with sleep. And the metaphor that I give on that is just think about any piece of machinery. So think about a car. Most people have cars. Most people understand some basic stuff about cars that need to be maintained. Well, think of sleep as like pulling, you know, if this were a daily thing, sleep would be pulling your car into a mechanics garage every night. And for eight hours, the mechanics would fix the car. It'd fix everything that was wrong with it. And if you have a good mechanic, like you have a good team working for eight hours every night, that car will probably last you for the rest of your life, right? Like everything's going to be repaired every day. And every day you're going to essentially start with a brand new car, right? A car that's just as capable as it ever was. Well, if you take half of that time away from those mechanics, they're not going to get to everything. And things are going to start falling through the cracks and your car's going to dilapidate. And it's going to fall apart sooner. Now, how much sooner? I don't know what's going to break. I don't know. I mean, everything really, you know, it's not just, I don't just mean that as a glib. Oh, it just gets our body ready for tomorrow, our brain and body ready for tomorrow. There's literally repair, like there's literally flushing out toxins, building up nutrients, building up nutritional density inside of the cells and end the areas around the interstitium around the cells. It's repairing damaged tissues. It's digesting. It's your immune system functioning. It's creating the appropriate categorizations for emotional events. It's converting short-term memory into long-term memory. It's working with disparate information that you've learned throughout your life and learning how to connect those things. It's, you know, it's learning. It's getting, it's essentially anything you're trying to get better at or at least maintain is being maintained and improved while you're sleeping. So if you short that, there's nothing I can say, just like if you say, well, I'm only going to work on my car a third as much as I should to maintain it. I don't have a solution for that. I mean, it's like, and it's sad, I get it. I mean, it sounds like, you know, she's probably in a situation where she needs that job and she really has very few of any alternatives to that job. But the fact of the matter is she's not sleeping enough. It is going to predispose her, increase her risk of all diseases. It's going to increase her risk of dying early from any cause. Chronically sleep deprived people, chronic insomnia acts, people who chronically use sleeping aids, which is really the same thing as an insomnia act because you aren't really getting sleep. You're being drugged into unconsciousness. And shift workers all look very similar, like people who consistently work night shift and outside of their circadian clock. It's about 12 to 16 years less life. And that's just the statistical average. Not saying that's definitely the case for her, but I'm just saying if you're looking for the science of it, that's the category you're falling into. Is that for night shift people? Is that what you were suggesting? Or people who you said 16 years less life, that's for shift workers? That's for shift workers as well. It's for people who consistently work outside of their circadian rhythm. Because when you should be asleep when you're awake and vice versa, you aren't getting all the repair. It's like you're taking half of your repair crew out if you're sleeping during the day because you have organs that are functioning as though they're awake. So your whole body isn't doing its full repair. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Kirk. Is the natural circadian rhythm when the sun goes down and when the sun comes up? Is that the human being, natural circadian rhythm? Or can it actually be that we can get our circadian rhythm onto a schedule where we wake up late afternoon and we go to sleep late morning? So circadian rhythm, I mean, really doesn't, it's not a very discreet, well it is a discreet word, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot. It just means about a day, right? Circa, about dia, so circadian rhythm just means about a day rhythm. What most people don't know about that is that our circadian rhythm is completely independent of the sun. If you put human beings down into a cave and to the bowels of the earth where they have no sense of time, the male circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours and the female circadian rhythm is slightly shorter than 24 hours. And so over the course of about a week or two, you'll be completely out of phase. So what we're using the sun for is to entrain our circadian rhythm. Instead of being 24 hours and 36 minutes, we make it 24 hours or vice versa. Whether it's male or female, we're adjusting it to the photo period of the day. Of course, we are animals that don't see well at night. We aren't great predators, obviously, unless we work in groups and have a bunch of tools and weapons. So we evolved to be the safest time for us to exist during the day. We're hugely visually guided and our behaviors and understanding of the world is primarily visual. So we can't escape that. That's how this machine is designed and essentially, you can think about it. What we can do today is just what I said about putting people in a cave because I can put bright lights in my eyes. I can put these bright man-made lights that have plenty of blue light saturation. I can put that in my eyes at midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m. and I can go crawl into a really dark, cold space during the middle of the day. I can trick my circadian rhythm into not being aligned with the sun, but my circadian rhythm is essentially just free-flowing at that point. I'm going to circle around every couple of weeks, maybe every month, and be right on schedule. Then I'm going to cycle off again. I'm going to cycle back on again because my circadian rhythm is essentially in free-flow. Yeah. Let's go to a viewer question right now. We have Andrew who's watching us live on YouTube. Andrew says, well, I think Andrew's got a little bit of political talk in here, which we might skim over. He's saying, thank you for all you do and the videos through the fake epidemic, I mean pandemic, LOL. So we'll just skip over that. We don't want to make any commentary on that, but thank you for your comment, for that part of your comment. What is your opinion on dental devices for obstructive sleep apnea?  Yeah, I find no surprise everybody hates their CPAP machine. It's probably Mother Nature's best or the humankind's best birth control device. It really just seems kind of ludicrous on its face to say, well, here's somebody who's having difficulty sleeping. Let's put this mask on and strap this to their face and see how they sleep then. It can be lifesaving, obviously. It can have huge health benefits, but what I found in my practice over the course of, since I started working with the seals on sleep and back in 2009, what I found over and over again is that most people can get off of sleep, off of CPAPs, because the reason that they have sleep apnea is not necessarily anatomic or neurologic, it's physiologic.  That's largely controlled by hormones. So in optimizing your hormones, a lot of times you can create more resting tension and the muscles that are collapsing your airway. Body positioning, sleeping on your side, dental appliances, definitely. Just to keep your jaw out a little bit, keep your tongue out of the back, losing weight, not drinking alcohol. There's lots of things, increasing exercise, there's lots of things that you can do to get off of CPAPs. I think maybe I have one guy who we really tried to get off of CPAP and we couldn't, but I'm talking about like one out of 50 or 60. I think most people can get off. I'm going to take a quick break and turn my air conditioner on. Yeah, go for it. We're talking to Kirk Parsley. Let's announce a winner here. We actually do have a winner of a competition that we ran on Instagram. So we do have an Instagram giveaway winner here and we asked someone to post a comment and our Instagram winner is someone by the name of Jordan with the Instagram profile of atJFish and Jordan's comment was, I wish I could enter this contest with a funny caption, but I'm just thankful this stuff made its way into my life. I outed my lifelong sleep difficulties at a family party. My friend at KJ Garcia one dropped a few Doc Parsley packets in front of me and said I had to try it. I did not realize just how generous this gesture was.  Doc Parsley sleep remedy put me to sleep immediately when I wanted to sleep. I've always wanted to be an early riser, but always struggled to wake up after not falling asleep until the early hours of the morning. I've witnessed how this product can change my life. I've had many productive early mornings since using it. I might have to part with my gym membership to be able to fit it into my budget, but it would be worth it. So congratulations to our Instagram giveaway winner Jordan with Instagram profile at JFish. We will put Jordan in touch with sleep remedy. Congratulations Jordan. You will be getting your prize. So congratulations and thank you for entering. That's a great testimonial and I really appreciate that Jordan. So if Jordan can get on with Megan, M-E-G-A-N, Megan at docparsley.com. Not only did he win this contest, but we're just going to go ahead and give Jordan a year's supply. He can get it every month for free. So you don't have to cancel his gym membership. It's lovely. Thank you so much Kirk and congratulations to Jordan. Well played. There you go. Everyone's a winner. All right. So if you're watching live now, post a question down below if you have a specific sleep question that you have for docparsley here. Anything relating to sleep? How many hours sleep do you get? Why don't you go ahead and post that in the comments? What questions do you have regarding your sleep? Go ahead and post that in the comments. If you're watching on the replay later on, go ahead and post your sleep questions in the comments and either I will get to those later on and answer them or docparsley will answer them also. Dawn says nice. We've got a question here from JaRico on Facebook who asks, what causes sleep paralysis? Maybe you could just explain what you're familiar with, what you know about sleep paralysis and what causes that. Yeah. So sleep paralysis is actually supposed to happen, right? So obviously, it's just a really quick recap. The real definition of being asleep is that there's a barrier between you and your environment, meaning that you aren't paying attention to your environment.  Your body still works. Just why you can turn on the lights. Lights don't make noise like they do in the movies, right? You just turn on a light and somebody's in a dark room, you turn on a light and you can wake them up. Why? Because their eyes are still working. Their clothes, they can still see through that. They can hear an unfamiliar sound. Even if they live in a fairly noisy environment, they hear an unfamiliar sound. That's enough to trigger their, so you can wake up because all of your senses are still working. There's a period of sleep called REM sleep, which is by and large where most of the cognitive benefits of sleep. So things just like we were talking about earlier, your memories, your emotions, making durable pathways out of new information, comparing that to old information, just basically rebuilding the fuel sources of your brain for the next day. Really, your cognitive functioning, balancing neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, all that stuff is happening by and large during REM sleep. But what we know about REM sleep is that you are actually working with those thoughts and memories. So any experience that you've had, anything that you're thinking about, anything that you're combining new information with old information, that's all happening during REM sleep. And in order to prevent you from actually acting that out, which would be very dangerous and counterproductive to sleep, during REM sleep, you're actually paralyzed. It's in the lizard brain down, like barely above the brain stem.   Now when you have an imbalance of neuropeptides, when you have some anatomical shifts, when you have maybe some pharmaceuticals on board, when you have and keep in mind that sleep deprivation in itself can change your brain chemistry so much that you can start running into neurological disorders, essentially, which is what's going on with sleep paralysis is that people's awareness of their environment is coming back into play, right? They're becoming more aware of their environment again and maybe fully aware of their environment. But the brain stem still says, oh, you're in REM sleep, and so you can't move. And that's a very scary feeling for people. We know that when people are chronically sleep deprived, obviously, in SEAL training, we go weak without sleeping. Lots of military and things like that go through these really sustained sleep deprivation periods. And then, of course, there's things like chronic insomnia and narcolepsy and all this other stuff.   You can close your eyes. And before you even really think you're asleep, you're already having dreams. And sometimes you could be having terrifying dreams. And you're essentially in REM sleep and you're paralyzed already. And you've only closed your eyes like 10 seconds ago. And then you can have probably what this person's talking about is that you can actually wake up.  But that's a complex sleep disorder. And that's something that I would work with, like a board-certified sleep specialist for. I wouldn't necessarily encourage drugs as the first opportunity there. But there's so many questions to ask to figure out why is it specifically affecting you? Or can we figure out why it's specifically affecting you? But it basically all comes down to optimizing lifestyle. It really doesn't matter why things are happening to me or to happening to my clients. If I can figure out some aspect, either nutrition, exercise, stress mitigation, or sleep, if there's something in there that's glaringly off, that's the first thing to fix. And then let's see what's happening. Let me ask you a question about the impact of light at night on our sleep. And obviously, you're aware that we help people block artificial blue light at night with our Swanee's blue light blocking glasses. I'm representing here with this lovely lady wearing her Swanee's. How impactful or how compromising is artificial light at night, whether it's from a screen on your computer, whether it's from your smartphone, whether it's your microwave light, or the bathroom light, or the kitchen light, or the refrigerator light, or the speedometer light in your car, or Donald's golden arches along the freeway as you're driving along at night? How much of an impact does that light at night have either on our sleep duration or our sleep quality? I'll answer the question in a broad sense of the explanation of how it impacts it. What is the mechanism of it? To the degree that it affects the individual depends on the individual. It would be like saying, how much impact is there in eating an ice cream cone? Depends on who you are. How much impact is there to overtraining one day? It depends on a lot of things. I don't think we could quantify it and say, oh, this many minutes or that many minutes, but it's really important to realize, I think people have the general idea, but I think it's slightly misunderstood. The way we evolved to be on this planet is when the sun went down, 100% of the blue light went away. There is no place to get blue light because there's no sun.  That doesn't even make you secrete melatonin.  That gets information that, hey, the blue light's gone. Let's start getting ready for bed. Let's start getting ready to sleep. There are hundreds, if not thousands of neurochemical changes that are going on. One of the major ones is, of course, once the suprachiasmatic nucleus gets stimulated, it has a circuitous pathway back to the pineal gland and it starts secreting melatonin. Melatonin doesn't actually make you go to sleep. It's like the initiator of all of these chemical changes in your brain. It takes three to three and a half hours to get your brain ready to go to sleep. When we look at hunter-gatherers that live today that have never been exposed to electricity and you look at how they live, and if you've ever gone camping and not used a bunch of artificial lights or anything like this, most of us have experienced this ourselves, but when we look at tribal people who have never been exposed to electricity, they fall asleep three to three and a half hours after the sun goes down because that's how long it takes to get ready. Every time you put blue light in there, you're affecting those pathways. It doesn't matter where the blue light's coming from. Obviously, the more blue light, the more of the effects, the longer the blue light, the more of the effect. I don't think it's reasonable in today's day and age to say, I'm going to block 100% of blue light three to three and a half hours before I go to sleep, but things like your glasses and the programs you can put on your computers and your phones, these are all decreasing the blue lights. They're decreasing the impact. To the degree they're decreasing the impact, I can't say. I don't know that there's a way to measure that because we would have to sample people's brain chemistry and not a lot of people are going to volunteer to drills in their head to have their brain chemistry measured during these things, but it's critically important.  That's the effect of GABA. That's what the sleep drugs try to emulate is GABA. It slows down that neocortex. What we think of when we think of the human brain is that big wrinkly mess like that part that makes us the smartest animal in the world, that slows down and just quits paying attention to the environment, but it's the chemical changes from the blue light that releases the GABA that produces those pathways to make you quit paying attention to your environment.  Those are the only two things you need for sleep hygiene. You can override it by putting blue light in your eyes and you can override it by paying attention to your environment. If you get in a really stressful and you start banging out loud music or you start having a lot of fun or working out, you could be blocking 100% of blue light exercising like a madman and you've overridden the pathway that's slowing down your brain. Really all there is to do is just think about what would have happened 2000 years ago when the sun went down. Behave like that to the best of your ability. That's really what sleep hygiene is. You can parse that out into billion little sound bites and specifics, but that's really all there is to sleeping. I have suggested at times that the mass production of the light bulb in the early 1900s was one of many significant shifts in human beings' sleep patterns. The idea of being, of course, prior to that, we lived our time at night time by candlelight, by natural flame, which has been shown not to disturb our melatonin production, but then all of a sudden with the invention of artificial light, let's call it, human beings' behaviors have now changed. We're staying up later and we're now staring into something that does or has been shown to compromise our ability to get that three, three and a half hours' preparation for sleep each night. Is that a fair summary, do you think, that like with the invention of the light bulb in the early 1900s, we started to see a shift in human beings' sleep patterns? Not the light bulb, yes, but the real problem was rural electrification. Once everybody had light bulbs is when society became screwed. That, of course, coincided perfectly with the Industrial Revolution in which we then started having mechanized productions and people could work 24 hours a day.  And people, as for survival, since people weren't hunting and gathering as much and they were more using money to buy food and supplies, they needed to go make more money and how do you make more money? Will you work more? And there's not great, because sleep medicine itself is only like 70 or 80 years old. And for the first 20 years, it was really, I mean, it was really rudimentary. But what we can do is we can look back through journaling. And when you look at Victorian journaling right before the Industrial Revolution, just leading right up to that point, the average American spent nine and a half hours a night in bed. That was the average across the year. So it was probably a little more in the winter, a little less in the summer. But I mean, that was just normal because of the light saturation and the ability to engage in other things and lack of radios and television and all sorts of other stuff. And so people just naturally got sleepier. And after the, I don't know, it wasn't very long, six years, seven years, it's in that book Lights Out. They covered this story. But I want to say it was within like less than 10 years for sure, but maybe closer to five years after sort of the initiation of rural electrification, the average American went down to like 7.8 hours in bed. And that was in very, very short amount of time. And just since I've been geeking out on sleep in the last 11 or 12 years or whatever, the average sleep when I first started this, the average American was spending 6.8 hours a night in bed. And now that's down to 6.2. And that's time in bed. That's not time to sleep. Yeah. We're talking to Doc Parsley. And if you are just joining us, or you've been here a while, you can actually get 10% off with Doc's sleep remedy by using the code SWANIC, that's SWANWICK. And we're going to put up a link there in the comments that you can use. And if you would like to try or use Doc's sleep remedy, which is an all-natural sleep supplement, and you'd like to get 10% off, use the code SWANIC. And we'll put that link up on the page in just a second. We've got another question here. Got questions coming through on Facebook and on YouTube. Rod asks, what's the best way to deal with insomnia? And then Will on YouTube is asking, hey, Doc, serving in the military, sometimes working nights until 1 or 2 a.m. only to wake up a few hours later. How can I prevent or at least mitigate the effects of an inconsistent circadian rhythm? So yeah, the best way to deal with insomnia and how to prevent an inconsistent circadian rhythm. Well, fortunately, those two questions are highly related and the answer is pretty similar to both of them. So I'll make an assumption here. By far the most common form of insomnia is what we call psychophysiologic insomnia, which means that essentially that means that you can't sleep because you're worried that you might not be able to sleep. So it's actually stress hormones. And as we talked about earlier, fight or flight is the exact opposite of deep sleep. Nobody ever falls asleep during a car crash or a fist fight or like something that's stressing you maximum. You can't fall asleep because your stress hormones are super high. And as I said, when you're in deep sleep, that's the lowest your stress hormones will ever be. And they need to be that low for all of the normal physiological things to happen during deep sleep. And then over the course of the night, they gradually creep up and they get to a point where they're high enough to wake you up if you don't have an alarm clock. And then they creep up a little further until about midday and then they start dropping down again. And at some point they get lower than the level that wakes you up. And that's a level that allows you to be asleep. Now, what we what we run into with just stressful lifestyle and just a lot of the way society is designed today, I mean, just Jesus is watching the news is enough to stress anybody out, much less, you know, add in traffic and, you know, time schedules and homeschooling like all sorts of stuff that's getting to people these days. And we have an excess of stress hormones. Well, I just told you that there's a point in the day where your stress hormones are low enough to allow you to go to sleep. What if you don't ever get there? Right? What if you're just running like halfway towards fight or flight all the time?  Now, what usually happens with women is that they get in bed and they can't fall asleep at all because they lay in bed and it's kind of the first time they've allowed themselves to be with themselves and think about all the things in their life that that need to be thought about, or that they just feel like need to be thought about whether they do need to be thought about or not. And women have a difficult time falling asleep. Men tend to fall asleep quite easily and then wake up a few hours later. And the reason for this is because there's something that's called sleep pressure.   We've been up for too long. There's all this pressure. We're slowing down the brain. We're trying to get you to get ready to go to sleep.  Well, you didn't get any of that blue light, like all the stuff that we talked about, you didn't get any of that. So how did you fall asleep? Well, it's because you have so much adenosine built up in your brain. And adenosine is just simply the breakdown of ATP. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, that's the energy source every cell in our body uses. And men have more lean tissue in about the same size brain. So I'm 250 pounds. If I'm next to, you know, 125 pound woman, our brain size is maybe, maybe a small like two to 3% difference in brain volume, right? Like the brain sizes just aren't don't vary nearly as much as the mass. And so I produce way more adenosine than she does. And I have way more sleep pressure. So even if I'm stressed out of my mind, I have so much sleep pressure that I just fall asleep. And then I wake up a couple hours later. Because one of the first, one of the things that happens in your first sleep cycle is you flush all the toxins out of your brain, including adenosine. And you start repairing the adenosine and making the adenosine into ATP again, which is an energy source. And then you're completely able to be awake. So the way to deal with that. If you go to my website docparcy.com, there's I actually have a PDF, a free download on this. More detail than I would have time to go into.  The difference being your to worry list, there's nothing you can do about it, but you just want to make sure you don't forget to worry about it. So you put that on there and your to do list, take it out as far as makes sense to you. If you're somebody who plans six months in advance, then do it for six months. If you plan six minutes in advance and do it for six minutes, whatever to do list to worry list, make sure that everything that could possibly stress you out is on that sheet. Now when you get ready for bed, you make yourself this pact that the best I'm ever going to be at handling all the stressors on my on my list is when I met my physiologic peak and when am I at my physiologic peak after I've had a good night's sleep when I'm well nursed and well rested and I wake up in the morning and I get the cobwebs out of my brain. I'm the most capable I'm going to be for the next 24 hours. This is my peak. Why would you want to handle stressful things when you're not in your peak? If you have a choice, do it then. There's a few little other idiosyncrasies to that and that's why I'd recommend downloading the PDF and you get all the little details or stuff about your alarm clock and relaxation techniques. There's more to it, but just to keep this conversation short enough, that's the general, that's the gist of it.  We've got another question here from Dawn who's asking about intermittent fasting and sleep. But before we get to that question, I wanted to ask a question. If we are at our mental peak and presumably our physical peak first thing in the morning, how do you choose between exercising first thing in the morning, doing physical activity, and focusing on maybe work related things that you're wanting to overcome, those things that you drew up on your list before you went to sleep that are causing you stress? First hour, first two hours of the day, should be putting our mind to work on seemingly stressful things or should be putting our body to work and then move into the mental exercises. From the pure physiologic standpoint, do the mental activity early in the day. When I say you're at your peak for your list, that's when your prefrontal cortex is working as best as when your stress control is going to be as best, your creativity, your focus, your attention, all of that's going to be at its peak after you're well rested. Your physical peak as far as strength and endurance, that type of physical performance, that's actually later in the day. As I said, you wake up with some cortisol and it creeps up and the period of the day where it's at its peak right before it drops down, which is somewhere between 1.30 pm and 3.30 pm, that's actually where the majority of world records are set in athletic competitions because that's when you're physiologically at your peak. Of course, there's social things around exercising in the morning and there's disciplinary things around exercising in the morning and there's metabolic benefits to it.   That's the messy answer to that. Certainly, just to use me as an example here, if I look at yesterday, for example, I actually got a lot of work done in about a one hour to 75-minute stretch late at night, which ordinarily I don't do, but it was a Sunday night where I am. People in my home had gone to sleep. It was deathly quiet. Then I went on to my to-do list. I'm talking about, I started probably about 9.15 at night and I went through to about 10.30. I got more work done in that 75 minutes than I had in, say, the four hours that I had done where I was thinking about work or being interrupted and having some things happen earlier on in the day. That would seem to contradict this idea that the first thing, time in the morning, is the best. I know that I have had unbelievable concentration spurts late at night, which seems peculiar given that the first thing in the morning is when we know we're at the top of our clarity. Why would that be? Is there any kind of physical medical explanation for that, Kurt? Depends, again, on what type of work you're doing. The type of mental activity that requires creativity can actually be enhanced with a little mental fatigue because you get rid of some of the left brain logical strict stuff and you start allowing better communications between the hemispheres of your brain, the more fatigued you get. Something like that could be there, but you also have to remember that there's also- I'm answering this from a physiologic, geeky scientist, pipettes and needles kind of answer, but there's all sorts of social issues in that. If you wake up in the morning and that's the most stressful time of your day, if you're under 15 time constraints for the first four hours of your day and you have to get up, you have to do this by that time, get to the gym, do that, get your kids to school, get to work, do this. You're better able to handle stress during that period of the day, but you're also under more stress at that point of the day. Then if you're somebody who winds down and calms down throughout the day and then the last few hours of your day, you could actually be at a really low stress state relative to where you are during the day. Being in a low stress state enhances your cognitive performance. If all things were equal, if there were no time of day that's definitely going to stress you out more, then your lowest stress in the day would be immediately upon waking and then you would gradually build up stress through the day. Of course, that's not necessarily the case. You could have a lifestyle where the vast majority of your stress is in the morning, in the morning hours. That doesn't change the fact that that's still when you're the most capable of handling that stress. Thank you. We're coming up to the end of our time together here. Let's race through a quick fire round of these three remaining questions. Dawn asks, do you have any research on direct correlation between A1C fasting glucose levels and hours of sleep? I would have to go back through my files to pull that out. You could go to PubMed and look up fasting blood glucose, insomnia, pre-diabetes, insomnia, diabetes, insomnia. It's a really simple concept. The only animal on the planet that sleep deprives itself on purpose is humans. No other animal does this. Other animals sleep as long as they need to be sleep. The only time they will be sleep-deprived is not by choice, is when they're starving or being preyed upon. If they're being pursued, they will wake up earlier, stay awake later to try to get further away from their predator. If they're starving, meaning they don't have access to as much food, they need to travel further to find more food. They will, again, wake up earlier, they will go to sleep later. Also, when they're sleep-deprived, just like when we're sleep-deprived, one of the side effects of sleep deprivation is a loss of the prefrontal cortex, the simulating machine, the social gait for us, but for other animals, it's like they stay away from things that could be dangerous, things that are novel that they're not quite sure of. But if they're starving, they become more impulsive, just like we become more impulsive if we're starving. And so we know scientifically that when the cue for these animals sleep-deprived themselves, and the same thing for humans when they're nutritionally deprived, it's actually a change and it's the rate of blood glucose change in the brain.  You could be diabetic and it could be going from 400 to 300, but if it goes super fast, that's perceived as starvation and that will trigger evolutionary pathways in your brain to behave as though you're starving. And then that spikes your stress hormones and that makes you wake up. And if it doesn't make you come all the way awake, it puts you at a lot lighter level of sleep because your stress hormones are higher throughout the entire night. Nicole Fonaro on YouTube asks, is the dosage for sleep remedy one size fits all? No, nothing really is right. It is probably 85% solution for 85% of the people. The ratios of nutrients and the concentration of nutrients that I put in there, I developed over working with the seals and just trial and error, just like, let's take more of this, less of that, and we just figured it out over the course of a year. If you're a lot bigger or if you have a more nutritional deficiencies, you might need more. I've seen really petite women, especially if they're 50 plus and they're really petite. I've seen a lot of those women do just fine on half a serving. One of the guys I work out with is a 275 pound former NFL player. He uses two packs every night and that's just how much he needs. For most people, for 85% of the people, it's 85% of optimal for 85% of the people. I totally made those numbers up, but that's ballpark. Final question here, Kirk. We have Valentin Gentile. Apologies if I mispronounce your name. I'm not sure if it's Valentine or Valentin Gentile or Gentile as a Facebook user. How to stop taking what I think is a stress relief drug? I'm not going to pronounce this correctly. I'm sure Zangsyletic. A friend of mine has been taking it since 8 years old, is afraid to have huge health troubles if she suddenly stops. My impression of that question is maybe someone's taking an anti-depressant or an anti-anxiety pill. Yeah, that's an anxiolytic. It's usually a benzodiazepine. It's usually something like Xanax. How to stop taking that is basically you have to get rid of the daytime stress. Obviously, getting good sleep at night makes you have fewer stress hormones during the day. That will improve your overall stress the next day, but then you need to really focus on stress mitigating tools. Again, like that PDF that I talked about on my website, that talks about things you can do to decrease your stress around bedtime and while you're in bed and if you wake up in the middle of the night, all that. The same things that we all know. One is nutrition is key to keeping stress hormones in play. Some exercise or activity, if you're not an athlete, it doesn't have to be exercise, but you need to be active. Mow your own lawn, wash your own car, like that type of active, take the stairs instead of the elevator. That stuff definitely weighs into it. There's no getting around that fact, but then of course there's meditation, there's mindfulness, there's breath work, there's Tai Chi, there's yoga, there's float tanks, there's heart math, there's all sorts of devices and gadgets you can use, but driving down the daytime stress is how you get rid of the anxiolytics, but also getting better sleep means you're going to have less stress hormones. The unfortunate reality is that when your stress hormones are high, you sleep poorly. When you sleep poorly, you have high stress hormones the next day and so it's a self-propagating downward spiral. I would focus on getting the sleep down first. That's going to give you a lower basal level of stress hormones during the day and then really figure out what stress mitigating tool is best for you. Yeah, and I'll leave it with that. Yeah. Dr. Kirk Parsley, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your amazing questions on YouTube and Facebook, for all those people who did post a question. If you're watching this on the replay many days from now or many weeks or even months from now, please do continue to post your questions and we will endeavor to get your sleep-related questions answered as soon as possible. Just a reminder that if you would like to use the discount code and get 10% off with your sleep remedy, which is Dr. Parsley's own all-natural sleep supplement, then you can use the code SWANNIC for 10% off and we'll put it a link down below in the comments for you there. Dr. Parsley, Kirk, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you and your guidance here today. All right, man. I always enjoy catching up with you, man. It's a good time. Thank you for having me on. Of course. Great to catch up with you too.


All right, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Director General Gurry, Member States of the First Marrakesh General Assembly, and all other Member States guests and distinguished delegates to this historic occasion. I have the honor of wearing many hats. A couple of those involved the World Blind Union as part of the National Association of Blind Lawyers of the United States, and also I have the honor and privilege of serving as the WBU's representative on the board of the Accessible Books Consortium. In addition to that though, I am a member of the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association, the world's largest organization of lawyers with over 400,000 members, which in 2014 passed a resolution urging the United States and all countries of the world to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty. For me, this is extremely personal. I went blind at age 10 due to a childhood virus. One of my favorite things to do was to read. That was taken away. I thought permanently, but I got that ability back by learning Braille and using other alternative techniques, but I had access to such few works. Later on, when I was in college, I wanted to become a major in Spanish to get my degree in the Spanish language and go into international business management. I could not, and the reason I could not is I was unable to gain access to works in Spanish that I needed to complete my degree. If we had ratified Marrakesh over 25 years ago and put it into place, perhaps I wouldn't be a lawyer. Perhaps I'd be in international business, who knows. But my story is not unique. These are the barriers that blind people and other people with this print disability's face, and that is why we must gain ratification of Marrakesh throughout the world. You heard earlier today about the first exchange between contracting parties, and that was between Canada and Australia as facilitated by the Accessible Books Consortium. You should also know on that very same day books were exchanged in Latin America through the leadership of Tifero Libros, Pablo Lacona from Argentina. They exchanged some books with other contracting parties of Marrakesh. And these two acts are emblematic of precisely what needs to happen in the world. We need to have broad cooperation through WIPO's leadership and other organizational leadership to make sure that these books start flowing.  So what do I hope for at the second Marrakesh General Assembly? I hope for 200,000 or 2 million exchanges of accessible books across international borders. Not just the two that we have had under the treaty. And finally, what I hope for on a personal note is that in 2017, the United States of America is not only a member to the General Assemblies of WIPO, but also a member of this Marrakesh Union. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.


Hello everybody hooded cober commander 788 here, and this is the first PO box unboxing of 2022 I have here everything I got in my PO box up to the end of last month So I'm gonna open all of this and we'll see what everybody sent in It's been a long time since we've done one of these we used to do these every month But I'd like to get back to it I'm going to put the PO box address on the screen right now if you'd like to send something in maybe something to Help me with a review or just anything you feel like send it to that address I will open it on camera in one of these unboxing videos I will show my appreciation for what you sent in and we'll show everyone what we got as usual I have cut the boxes and one envelope open, but I have not looked inside so we will all be surprised at what's here Let's start with this letter and I do have my professor grandpa glasses to read it This is from Brandon Knight. Brandon's a long time supporter of the channel. We very much appreciate Brandon And let's see what Brandon sent here This is a card Let me make sure there's nothing too personal inside. I don't want to give anyone's personal information So let me read through this real quick. This does have a little bit of personal information So I won't read it word for word, but I will say Congratulations Brandon first of all, I hope that is still working out for you and thank you very much for your long support of the channel Thank you for thinking of me Also, I want to remind everyone that if you include a letter or any writing with whatever you send in I do have a folder that I keep all of those in and I do keep those forever none of those get thrown away now Brandon sent this and Brandon also sent this so this is from the same person And I'm going to check this out. Let's see what Brandon sent in addition to the letter and we have Some bubble wrap I can always use more bubble wrap very useful and we have What looks like another envelope let's This is this is a cute one. It has a little puppy dog that says miss you so much. Let me see Okay, there is some more writing on the inside again, I will read this to myself before I read it on the air I don't want to divulge anyone's personal information So let me read this for a moment and then we'll move on and see what's in the box There's a little bit of personal information in here not too bad, but I will say Brandon Congratulations on completing 1984 storm shadow and 1985 snake eyes and 1983 scarlet well done I hope the job is going well And you mentioned here the possibility of meeting at a GI Joe convention That is also something that I'm trying to do this year In fact, I would like to go to Joe Fest in Augusta, Georgia this year to do that. I need your help I do have a go fund me for that I will include the link for that here as well inside the box we have I can see right away We have some Valor versus Venom some valid Valor versus Venom cards It looks like Duke and Cobra commander And inside it looks like we have Duke and Cobra commander now I've got to admit this is new to me. This is a bit of a blind spot in my Collecting I don't think I have any Valor versus Venom. I try to focus on vintage GI Joe I've got some modern figures like 25th anniversary and up But this is fascinating to me because I don't really know very much about it So thank you Brandon. This is an opportunity for me to Explore a bit of GI Joe that I am less familiar with so that's two cards from Brandon that I will keep forever I may be buried with them. I don't know so let's move to the next one and this one is from Marcus R. Sweeney. This is Ryan Sweeney, right? If I recall your name correctly So mr. Sweeney sends this and I am opening the box for it right now and Inside the box there are I can tell This is classified items GI Joe classified series and number one we have awesome We have the special mission Cobra Island beach head this guy all of these Cobra Island set GI Joe classified figures were exclusive to targets and a real pain to find at the time They were released there were so difficult to find that I really did not have very much fun Searching for them. So the fact that somebody who was thoughtful enough to send one Means that somebody did go through the trouble of searching for one of these and actually picked one up and Sent it to me. So that is so awesome. Thank you very much, and we've got one more and this one is Yeah This one this is a view This is our tan This is a great figure. This is a really nice figure. I love it And I'm a fan of Zartan going all the way back to 1984 So these are beautiful. I thank you very much Ryan and thank you for your long support It's been noticed and very much appreciated. This one is from the same person. This is also from so we're doubling up here We got two from Brandon and we got two from Ryan And we have a letter. We have a letter from Ryan It says happy holidays. Happy new year. Nice GI Joe logo there beautiful cool sticker That's really awesome. Now as with Brandon's Letter is card. I will read through this real quick Make sure there isn't any personal information on here before reading it out loud. Thank you Ryan for this letter It doesn't really have personal information, but it does spoil what's in the box and I want you guys to be surprised I know what it is now. So thank you Ryan Thank you for this and thank you again for your long support You've been around for a long time and I really appreciate you being here So thank you for that and thank you for this I'm going to Apparently fling this across the room and you're gonna love this it. Yes, it is another classified item But it's it's a beaut look at this Yeah, that that is snake eyes with timber what are we calling this the snake eyes in timber alpha commandos This is one that I was wanting to get my hands on I'm very curious how well they did timber looks like we have two heads for the wolf and Lots of weapons for snake eyes including his signature Uzi submachine gun Really nice really nice. I am very eager to open this up and take a close look at it I'm not gonna open up yet. I'm gonna I'm gonna savor this But thank you so much Ryan and thank you for just being you and thank you for being here I am going to go with this one next and oh, I Apparently didn't cut this one the one I forgot to cut. Let's let's carefully Cut into that and try not to cut whatever is inside. This is a heavy box. This one is from James Thompson Thank you very much James There we go. All right And inside the box. We have a brief letter. Let me again Reveal this real quick. Okay. No personal information and no real spoilers in here So I'll just say I'll read this aloud. It says ACC 788 first welcome back second I wanted to send these to you when you said you were going through issues. Hope you hope they cheer you up Last god bless Merry Christmas. Happy New Year James Thompson PS a few issues are missing. Sorry. Well, it's fine. You do you don't have to apologize for anything You're sending me stuff. I I'm extremely grateful for you know, everything that you do and I can tell and this is why it was Heavy is it's comic books. It's comic books. Oh, look at this. Okay, not only is this comic books this is This is the IDW GI Joe series I have I think pretty much a complete run of the Marvel comics GI Joe series, but I had not anywhere close to caught up with the IDW series and These are these are these are the two sixties and Yeah, there's more. Oh, there's like huge stacks of them. Hold on. I Don't want to mess these up Yeah Silent option Looks like a four issue mini series and Let's fly this out of the way and we've got another bag that seems to have more in them This is exciting. This is exciting. This is exactly why I should be wearing my my professor grandpa glasses So I can actually see and read what's what's on these covers. Oh Nice nice nice nice. This is that's a really cool cover For issue number 273 Nice team shot there Ah, yes. Yes. Yes. So these are in the 270s And I don't know if you know you might know the GI Joe Marvel comics series ended on issue number 155 but Larry Hama the writer picked up that series again and has been doing it for IDW and The here are the early 200s some more early 200s and And some 220s 230s 240s Yeah, I'm I understand maybe there are some issues missing but holy moly, you know what this means It means This it means I have some reading to do I am I am not familiar I am not caught up at all with the IDW series and one of the reasons that I hadn't got it caught up is One thing some of the comics are difficult to find locally and you know ordering them would be Expensive, but here we go. It may not be the complete series, but it's a whole lot more complete than I had so James all I can say is my deepest thanks for these. I Will be reading these a lot. I want to get caught up I want to get caught up on all on the fun I want to get caught up on the party that everybody else has been having without me because I didn't have the issues Well now I got issues. Thank you very much James And the last box is for another longtime supporter of the channel and friend Byron Kellogg And thank you for this Byron Byron you've already done so much for me So the fact that you thought about me and sent something to me I'm just very grateful. So thank you very much and I hope things are going well with you I sincerely do But let's see what Byron sent. I did have to kind of cut around it the tape goes around so this bar comes off So let's open this up and I can tell by looking at this that it is a classified Series thing and I don't know what it is Yes, let me make sure That's clear and it is this beauty Breaker and the Ram motorcycle. I love this This is a cool thing. Can you believe That we are getting Breaker and a Ram motorcycle in the six inch scale How crazy is that? What kind of crazy world do we live in? This is awesome. Thank you Byron, but not only thank you for this Thank you for your long support and thank you for being a friend. It's been a very difficult year But you helped you helped a lot and this is just This I'm gonna keep this. I'm going to keep it sealed. This is not something that I'm gonna open It's just too special. So thank you very much and thanks for all you do. That's everything. Thank you so much Everyone who sent stuff in this is overwhelming. We haven't done this for quite a while But I love this and I deeply appreciate it Nobody has to send anything in or the fact that people think of me and actually, you know send stuff in That's extremely thoughtful. I am not in a position right now to purchase new Vintage figures and vehicles. I just can't do it right now Fortunately, I have quite a few that I still have to review So we've got we've got plenty, but I can't bring anything else in right now So the fact that you guys are helping this is helping in a really tangible way this is helping in a way that seriously helps the channel and It just I can only be grateful I thank you all so much if you would like to send something in to be in a video like this I will put the PO box address on the screen again right now That's the address to send it to and I will check again at the end of this month Which is January 2022 and anything that I get in before the end of this month I will put it in another video like this at the beginning of next month Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already you can find me on Facebook and Twitter and I have a website HCC788.com I also have a patreon you should see the names of the patrons on the screen probably right about now I'm very grateful to everyone who supports the channel on patreon I literally could not get by without it You are keeping me going and you are keeping this channel going so thank you to all the people on the screen And if you'd like to be one of those people just check out patreon The link will be in the description of this video thanks to all of these people and thanks to all of you people And I'll be back soon with a vintage or classified GI Joe toy review very soon I'll see you then and until then remember only GI Joe is GI Joe


dad said that you're gonna turn your garage into a soccer field. Yeah but when he said it we all just like freaked out we didn't know. I personally didn't know where like the idea came from but like I was really excited that we had like a place-to-place soccer because when it's winter time there's always snow and ice outside so it's good to have a certain place to play and stuff. For the younger players I think just makes it a little bit more exciting to train at home. We're training loads of players online and a lot of players they make do they train in their garage or basement their room whatever it is but throw a bit of turf down there with this much quality I think it just makes a little bit more exciting. We looked around at quite a few places prices were at least 30 percent higher maybe 50 percent higher than in what this is and the quality wasn't as good so this was a great simple straightforward and a cost effective solution. We did a little bit of research but it was important for us to have like a sport quality kind of turf and one that was you know designed for soccer so it's you know a little bit of investment for sure but well worth it. Before we were doing zoom calls and training and doing extra little things in our basement and I remember I hit a lamp once and it shattered a screen. She hit the TV screen and so now that we're actually in a space where we can like actually you know have our own space and train and stuff like it just is a hundred times better. Honestly I was blown away I thought this was gonna be like a five six hour installation and I think total from start to finish I think it was 90 minutes which I thought it was important to say to everyone that was just thinking about adding turf to their basement garage or room or whatever it is it was like in and out in 90 minutes but I was really surprised at and I feel like that'd be a reason where people might not make that move is because I think the insulation is like some crazy thing but just cut it placed it made it flat like I said in about 90 minutes I think it was so that for me was was massive really convenient in and out. The amount of practice time that we get in because of it is just crazy. I think we could have gone and kept going with the idea of just playing on the cement and that's okay but I do think that this is closer to a turf setting or a grass setting a little bit more of a natural bounce I guess off of this than off the cement so it gives a chance to train or do more training at home with no barriers. Especially this year with you know we have kids at home doing school so they're using it for recess for lunch after school for their online practices for everything so it's been invaluable really so far. It feels like I'm in an indoor soccer arena so this is fine. It feels like a real facility except just a mini version. Like I said I just think for players it's so motivating to even just see green and have turf I think it's fantastic for them and I think it'll just motivate them to train more on it to have mini games whatever their space is and what it's designed for I think it's a no-brainer and you get to wear your cleats at home. Yeah like I don't have to wear endorses at all now anymore. They were quick like as soon as I made my decision it was less than a week to get it get the install done really from pricing all the way to the finish and install. Like with an endanger is actually from not even so much as like a turf rash really from skidding around on it so it's been it's it's soft enough for sure and we haven't raked any of the sand into it or anything it's just came it's just as is as it was installed and it's still held up to cleats and these guys ripping on it so it's been good. My touches have improved a lot and my dribbling because it's such a small space but it's like you know it's actual turf and I call my actual cleats and practice for an actual game but it's a smaller space so I get more touches on the ball and I get to work on my dribbling more. We used to go to this one field and then we don't go because of COVID now and it feels exactly like that turf except for I like how there's not rubber bits in it. I'm really glad my mom and dad got this turf for us. It improves your game it's fun for free time it can fit like a lot of people at the same time it's good. I like turf. I like turf. It's very good. It's very good. I highly recommend yeah purchasing it. Same. Like I said before detail-oriented they've they've made it look really nice not just be functional so it's I'm quite pleased. Working with Lance has been a breeze he was really great upfront told us what we needed to do to get the space ready had it installed really quickly for us because we were worried at the time that it was going to snow so the sooner the better and no he was great so I highly recommend it. I would recommend it 100% it's my first hour on it and already I can see the quality and of course I'll give it another recommendation once I've put out trying it out but like we said having it motivate your players that the customer service in and out in 90 minutes that blew me away the quality of it the fact that just how the ball is on it like just how the ball rolls and how the ball bounces is very realistic to very good turf and the fact that I'm inside of a bedroom right now is and having turf is crazy so definitely would recommend it to anybody


I am an analyst developer at Moodle HQ, and in this presentation we are going to look at what's new in Moodle 3.4. Some of the important aspects because we have many things in there, we cannot cover everything. So we'll look at the few important ones here. Yes, for this presentation we have divided, I have divided the features in four different contexts. First we'll look at the side administration improvements followed by the course administration improvement and then we'll see what do we have new for all Moodle users and we are going to skip the mobile app because Sara already mentioned the improvements to the mobile app. So the first thing in the side administration is we have a new capability called manage all tokens. So this is given to admins by default and if you have this capability you can see a report something like this for all your web service tokens. So here you can see the tokens that you have created. You won't be able to see the token itself for other users because that's a security risk but as an admin you would be able to delete tokens created by other users using this report. As you can see for the second entry the admin is not able to see the token itself in the first column whereas in the first entry the token is visible because that was created by the admin itself. So you might be familiar with the user tools which is a way to get users familiar with the Moodle interface. We introduced that I think in 3.2 I think. So as of 3.4 we have added more filters to it. Now using this user tools you can target a specific category. You can target a specific course. You can target a specific course format as well. So you can decide how you want to deliver your tools to which specific audience you want to deliver it to, your tool to. So the next thing that everybody is talking about that you must register your site. Martin mentioned it. Sara mentioned it. We have made some improvements to the site registration form. I think somebody was asking how to do the registration so if you go to your site administration menu you will find a link there which will take you to this form. It's being simplified and it's being made easier to register your site now and it also explains what are the benefits of doing this registration which you have heard many times during the last two days. So the next thing we are going to look at is the STTPS changes that we have did. So previously in 3.2 and 3.3 an earlier version we had a setting called login STTPS which allowed you to have only the login page on STTPS and your rest of the site could be on the STTPS protocol which didn't really make much sense. So as of 3.4 this setting is removed. So now you have to move your entire site to STTPS or you keep your entire site in STTPS. So whichever you prefer. To help you with the transfer process we have also integrated a tool which you can access as an admin. In Moodle 3.4 it will identify all your links which is present in your site and it will see if they have an STTPS alternative or not and it will give you a report about the status of which links are possible to be converted to STTPS and which are not and what are the issues that you might face. And it will also help you with the conversion process. I think Sara also presented about OAuth providers as well. So we have an option there now whether you want to trust the email of OAuth provider or not. So if you want them to still go and do a manual verification you can request that and if you say you trust their email and then there would be no verification required. So over the last few releases we have also done significant improvements to the messaging interfaces. If you have used 3.3 you would have already seen that the messaging interfaces has been improved a lot. And now the messaging icon is already present in the navigation toolbar. So this is an old screenshot of 3.3 where we used to have a messaging block. So it's no longer required because everything is already present in your home page in your screenshot. So it's been deprecated and it's been removed from core. But if for some reason you still want it it's available in the plugins repository on GitHub. Next major improvement is the analytics engine. You might be hearing about the project inspire that we have been working on. As of 3.4 the project inspire is being integrated in modal core. It's still in very beginner phase so we would love your feedback and comments on it. And I'll just show you a screenshot. So we have included some models by default in core as well. So there is a model which is able to identify whether students are at risk of dropping out from the course or not. And you can see that this particular model in this test course has predicted that the first three students are at a risk of dropping out from the course. And it lets you take various actions based on what you want to do with that. You can send them a message and you can also just say that it's a false positive and you don't want to do anything. So this whole engine is based on AI and we are still working on it and we are trying to improve it more. So if you have feedback and suggestions we would really like you to use this feature and let us know what you think about it. I think that concludes the section on site administration. We should now move on to course administration. So the first thing is how the course restore behaves. We have changed that a little in 3.4. So before 3.4 what happened is when you restore a course, a old course to a later date, when all your data was moved, every single date was moved as well. So this was not ideal because say somebody made a forum post and that was specific to that given date. It doesn't really make sense to, that forum post doesn't really make sense if the date is moved. So what we decided is any configuration dates such as deadlines and due dates, those would be moved whereas any user created data and dates related to them will not be moved. For example, forum posts, database entries or whatever is created by users, dates related to that will not be moved when you are doing a course restore since 3.4. I think Martin also showed this in his keynote. So we have merged the enrollment and participants page and you can see it here. It's much more smooth and it's much more clean. On top left corner there are a lot of filters which are really helpful, which I find myself a lot of using a lot. And here you can do various actions. You can do bulk and roll and send them messages and all that thing. And the status is also present which is color encoded. So all the information that was distributed in two different pages which were kind of identical the enrollment and participants page, they have been merged together in 3.4. So another feature that we introduced is the easier activity navigation. So as a student if you are trying to just complete your courses and then you are jumping from one activity to another activity, doing one quiz after another or doing one assignment after another, it's just easier to do that navigation now. I'll enlarge the screenshot. Yes, so as you can see here, if you go to an activity, you can see now both previous and next activity link on either side of the page. So you can easily navigate to the next activity which is present in the course. And in addition to that, there is also a dropdown at the center which will just let you to navigate to any specific activity that you want to go to in your course. Another feature requested to us was that teachers should be able to mark activities as completed for students, so which you can do as of 3.4. So there is a capability called override completion. So if you have that capability, then as a teacher, you can mark any activity as completed for students. And it is displayed differently than if a student himself has completed the activity so that you can know actually what is happening. As you can see in the screenshot, this is the teacher's view. And the first one is marked as completed by a teacher. The other one is done by the student himself. And the same thing happens in a student's view. An activity which was completed by teacher is shown differently to an activity that was completed by student himself. So when you're creating an assignment or say you are writing a workshop and then you want to specify what file types the student should submit. You want to just allow PDF or you want to just allow all the doc file types, like doc.x, PDF, text files and all that. Previously, what you could do is you have to specify all the extension, which was a bit tedious and not optimal. But as of 3.4, you can have this file chooser and it will give you a pop up where you can just select what file types you want. You can just select document files which will, by default, select all the type of document files or you can be specific and you can say that you want to just have PDF files or text files like that. So it makes it easier for a teacher to create activities and define the file restrictions on that. The next feature is tagging database entries. So recently, we have been doing some improvements with tagging as well. In 3.3, as of 3.3, you have many more tagging options. Like you can tag book chapters, you can tag forum posts and a lot of other things. As of 3.4, we added that support to the database entries as well. So it has to be enabled by your admin in the settings. So if it is enabled, then as of 3.4, you can also tag various database entries. So as you can see, there is a tag added in this particular screenshot. Oceans for all to a database entry. Okay, I think that's it for the course administration improvements. Now, let's look at the improvements for all users. Okay, so the first improvement, which is pretty obvious in 3.4, is the calendar improvement, which was funded by Moodle Users Association. So we have made a significant redesign in the calendar interface in 3.4. It's like a really modern interface now where you can do everything in a pop-up. There is no need to reload the page. You can create, edit, you can drag and drop. And you can almost like whatever you want to do, it's possible in that just one single page now. So the first thing is, if you remember, these filters were present before as well. So it's not very visible in the screenshot. But there is an option to hide and show various events, global events or course-related events and things like that. It used to reload the page and it was bit tedious. Now, when you click on that, it's instantaneous. There is no page reload and it happens like you can see the changes right in your screen. Next thing is, we have added support for category events now. So previously it was just user group, course and site. Now you can create category-based calendar events as well. The other thing to note is when you are creating a new event, you can just do it in pop-up. So you just click on a date and this pop-up comes in and you can just create the event right there. You don't have to go to a different page. You don't have to move around. You don't have to do multiple clicks. Just one click and you can create a new event now. The same thing goes with editing. So if you click on an existing event, this pop-up comes up with the details and you can click on the edit button and it will show you a pop-up to edit the details of that particular event and then you can do it right there. The next thing is you can drag and drop events now. Say that you have an event on 11th of what is that month, October and you want to drag that to 20th of October. You can just drag it in the calendar and it automatically moves the event. And the good thing about that is say the event is about the deadline of an assignment or the due date of an assignment. And if you drag that, then the due date is automatically updated in the assignment itself as well. So you don't have to do that. Go and do it manually again. And next is the improvements to file area. So as you might know, there is a limitation which is usually set by admin how much space you want to allow users to have in their private file area. And now there is a small notification when you go to your file area saying what is your total allowed limit and how much actually are you using out of it. So in this screenshot it says 15 KB out of 100 MB is being used. So you are aware of what is the status of the disk space that you are using and what is left for you. This doesn't allow, this is not related, like this doesn't affect the admins because they do not have any such limits. The other thing is the improved global search. If you have seen 3.3, we have already support global search with solar extension. We have improved it in 3.4. So now you have access to HTML block contents as well. So if you're searching for something, I'll show you the next screenshot. And if that particular string is present in an HTML block content, if you look at the bottom of the screenshot, it will still show up, which this particular area, we were not searching that before in 3.3. So it's now possible in 3.4. The other thing is now you can also search non-enrolled courses. So if a student is not enrolled in a given course, but he has, say, guest access, or if the course is open to everyone, something like that, in 3.3 the global search was not searching those courses. It was searching only the courses in which the student was enrolled. But now they can, so based on this setting, which you can set it as an admin, they would be able to access all courses, the search across all courses. And obviously, there is security limits there, so it means all courses that the user can see. If he cannot see a particular course, then obviously nothing would be written for that course. I think that's about it. Yeah, that's all the improvements we have. Mobile app we have already covered. So do you have time for questions? Any questions? While you go for a registration tab, there are two questions, basically. How to register through Intranet, which is a web server on Intranet. And second is if it is not HTTPS, it is not allowing to register. OK, I don't think you can register aside without internet access because it needs to connect to model.net to post the data. So you need to have at least internet access on that site. Internet access is there, but it is not given to the public gateway IP. Yeah, so it's a two-way communication, so the server needs to be able to talk back to your server. Sorry, in HTTPS, since you brought it up, everybody should have HTTPS now, like get it. It's the way the web is now for security. Get a certificate on your website. You can get them for free. It's a completely free thing. Just do it. You will protect yourself. Otherwise, any student can sit there, look at the traffic, and find passwords of other students, or teachers, or administrators, and get into your site. This is a web security problem. So I've noticed a lot of sites do not have HTTPS, and you should, so I'm just stressing it just for your own safety. OK, I want a small information about upgradation of model 2 to 3.4. So to upgrade to model 3.4, it is asking for some parameters like PHP should be seven, seven version or above. And it is asking about some database structure. So can you elaborate on that? Well, PHP requirement has been increased to seven since 3.2, I think. Yes. But I'm not sure what database structure is asking you. It is asking about some database name I could not remember, actually. It comes with something with B. Yeah, yeah. If you're using, are you using? So you might have to install the PHP extension if you don't have it, but you should already have it because you're running model 3.4. Yeah, PHP is not a problem. Database, I can't. So you need the MySQL, PHP extension, or Postgres, whatever you are using it. So can I use the previous database what I have used for the new model 3.4? No, the database upgrade needs to happen as well because the database structure has changed. So you cannot use the same DB structure what you had in 3.0 and 3.2 because we have added new features that needs new columns and new tables. So you need to upgrade your database as well alongside. It should happen automatically when you're upgrading model. It should upgrade your database on its own. Okay, okay. Isn't there some requirements about different storage engines on MySQL as well? We recommend InnoDB, but I don't think there is any hard-coded requirement. For Unicode, for nothing. For Unicode, I think we recommend InnoDB as far as I remember. But there is no check there to say it's not post. Okay. In general, we are very conservative with forcing people onto new databases, new PHP, new everything. But if we're saying it's required, it's because we really think it's required and there's security reasons or the versions we're asking for are actually themselves, four or five years old or something. So upgrading everything is a good idea. The PHP 7 will have a serious impact. I mean, I think a lot of people will delay their upgrade like I have delayed because if I have to switch to PHP 7, I also have to change my OS on the server. But it's a valid thing, but the benefit is worth it. So if you install PHP 7 personally, I've seen it's much faster than PHP 5 and there is also added security concerns in PHP 5. And PHP itself is not supporting the older versions now, I think. So, well, you have to upgrade. Yeah. And it's been a while, I think, we made it required for 3.2. Yeah, that's why we are still on 3.1. No, I think it's required in 3.4, required, but it's recommended. Recommended in 3.2? Yeah, okay. If you can't upgrade PHP, you have bigger problems probably. And if you really, really can't, then you have to stay on older versions of Mooder as well and stay on the old world. It's unfortunate, but it is much faster. How we can upload a calendar from our Excel academic calendar to our Moodle calendar? Not in one click. From Excel, I'm not sure it's possible, but you can. There's a file format at .ICS. I can. We have to convert Excel into .ICS, then we can upload. Yeah, so there is the Ical format, which is .ICS. We support importing from that. So that is the standard for exporting and importing calendar events. So I don't think right now it's not supported to export from Excel files. So for now you have to... So because if you have the calendar events created in Google Calendar or even the calendar of your operating system, when you export it, it exports as an ICS file, not an Excel file. So that's what we are supporting right now. Okay. Okay. Any other... Is there one more question? One more. The back. Is there a microphone down there? Any further questions? We have the Dr. Moodle session later, so we can ask them there. Is there any difference in the installation because on the Moodle page of the installation, when we are installing Moodle on website, it shows that you have to create different databases and then the installation proceeds. However, the hosting website, actually from which I have taken, he has the Softaculous app installer embedded inside the control panel. So just within the click, that all of the Moodle gets installed. But the thing is currently I'm getting invalid JSON error or certain undefined errors there. So does it makes the difference that the installation through that Softaculous one that my hosting provider offers is giving the error or how it is? So if you're getting an error, it's most likely the script that your hosting provider is using is broken because, well, we are installing Moodle every day. I did a live demo yesterday of installing Moodle as well. So there is no issues in installation of Moodle. So I guess you're using C-Panel or something like that. Yes, yes, yes. So they have their own scripts which does everything for you, the installation process. So maybe something is broken in their script. Okay, okay. Thank you. All right, thanks, Ankit. Thank you. Good. Let's cover that.